50 fearless, confident, all around badass women on television

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Murphy Brown – Murphy Brown

Imagine being such a badass that the Vice President of the United States feels threatened by your very existence? Candace Bergen played the unrelenting female anchor on a very popular news network, FYI. She was successful, ambitious, and a counter to the Ally McBeal-style of fourth wave feminism. Murphy was no nonsense about her career and her life, and she made no apologies about how she chose to be a woman.

Murphy was a single woman living on her own, without a husband or spouse. She struck an exquisite work/life balance, and pretty much set the tone for what it meant to be a “working woman” in the ’90s. She eventually became a single mom. These facts alone made her a groundbreaking character, even at a moment in feminist history where things were changing very fast. Murphy’s single mom status surely wasn’t the first depicted on television, but it was unusual for a wealthy white woman to choose this “lifestyle.”

The writers chose to keep her single, and Vice President Dan Quayle found this repugnant enough to publicly condemn the show. Suggesting Murphy’s choice to parent her child without a father as an “attack on family values,” Quayle’s opposition helped to make Murphy a symbol for modern mothers everywhere.