by Tara Bryan @Bryan_Amethyst
I’ve got no shame in saying it: I love Calamity Jane. Doris Day was my first heroine before I even knew what a heroine was, and even then I instinctively recognised in Ol’ Calam’ herself something that would often be a hallmark of the characters that Doris Day played in all of her films.
She would always seem to play a woman often confined by the expectations of her time, her place, her job, her society, but through sheer charm, force of personality and feminine wiles she would always manage to outfox and outwit the men around her, who would continually underestimate her.
Sure, she would always end up married, or with the guy in the end, but not before the audience knew that she would spend the rest of their lives together running rings around him and getting exactly what she wanted. A woman after my own heart! Even that song… ‘A Woman’s Touch’. On the surface a silly ditty about two women who decorate a log cabin with trinkets, knick-knacks and chintzy sprinkles, a song that seems so patronising and twee about what a woman can be… but I saw it differently. It was a song about self-sufficiency and how to live a life without needing a man to make all her decisions.
Yes, she ended up with the man who didn’t deserve her, but we knew after hearing that song that she was only doing it because she wanted to.
