Evan's Blog. Meh.

With apologies to Leslie Knope, Maude, and other distinguished broads who stood up for their rights and refused to back down in the face of male oppression and shit, Lisa Simpson is television’s greatest and most enduring feminist in part because her mother represents such a tragicomic example of a smart, beautiful, passionate, and idealistic woman sacrificing her own needs to serve the needs of an oafish brute and his unappreciative brood. Marge stands as a harrowing cautionary warning of what happens when a remarkable woman accepts society’s retrograde notion of how a wife and mother should behave rather than pursuing her own passions.

Lisa’s personality is in many ways a reaction and a response to her mother’s smiling servility, her self-negating willingness to suffer so that her children and her husband never have to.