• 1 Susan King, “Strong Medicine: Prairie Drama Builds A Big Audience After a Hesitant Start on CBS”, L (...)

3Seymour, a former Bond girl and frequent star of TV movies, was conventionally attractive and non-threateningly feminine, but there were dissonant notes. She was 43 at the time, thrice married, recently divorced, and she openly admitted to having debts, saying she took the role because she loved the script but also because she needed the money1. Her red hair was then—as it still is now—spectacularly long.

• 2 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, London, Routledge, 2004, p. 7.

5The casting of Jane Seymour in the title role was undoubtedly critical to the show’s success as was her biography, as communicated through promotional interviews and press coverage. As Richard Dyer has argued, “A star image consists both of what we normally refer to as his or her ‘image’, made up of screen roles and obviously stage-managed appearances, and also of images of the manufacture of that ‘image’ and of the real person who is the site or occasion of it2.” As I will argue, Seymour’s own biography and her personal decade-long discursive connections to heterosexual romance, bolstered by her contemporary public comments, worked within the show to reenforce Dr. Quinn’s heterosexuality and render both her feminism and her gender deviance more palatable. Having established herself as an authority on romance throughout the 1980s, in the promotion for Dr. Quinn, Seymour repeatedly evoked her personal life—her new boyfriend, her love of romance, her love of love. The portrait that emerged from the early promotional profiles aligned neatly with her existing image, while also working to support her portrayal of Dr. Quinn as a tough, progressive, feminist woman, who, despite being sexually inexperienced (a frequent plot point), was nonetheless deeply romantic and (safely) heterosexual. Jane Seymour’s publicly expressed love of love—and, specifically, heteronormative romance—bolstered the show’s “family values” credentials while also neutralizing its portrayals of gender deviance.

• 3 Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality, New York, Har (...)
• 4 Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media, New York, Three River (...)

9Allison Yarrow’s 90s Bitch provides a useful overview of the American attitudes towards women, documenting the stories that I was encountering on a regular basis through TV news coverage and entertainment, and demonstrating how “the decade was marked by a shocking, accelerating effort to subordinate them” through “gruesome sexual fantasies and misogynist stereotypes”, all of which was internalized by the women and girls watching.3 This is the same culture that Susan J. Douglas critiqued in the epilogue of Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media, when she worried that her four-year-old daughter was coming of age in “an entire system, buttressed by media imagery, that urges young girls to learn how to mute themselves”.4 The tensions between that muting and the anticipation of backlash against feminist thought are both evident in my diary entry. They are also, not coincidentally, ideas against which Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman—through its plots and Jane’s Seymour’s performance—repeatedly pushed back.

• 5 The medieval scholar Beth Allison Barr, who was raised Southern Baptist, explains this view as a wo (...)

10Against this cultural backdrop, Jane Seymour somehow rendered Dr. Quinn’s obvious feminism less threatening than the feminism of the prevailing American cultural narratives. The coexistence of those seemingly opposed aspects—feminist and romantic heroine— within the character, as embodied by Seymour, reveals how Seymour’s biography and white heterosexuality functioned to soften the character of Dr. Quinn. This worked to such a degree that the show could find a home with evangelical audiences who might otherwise take issue with its progressive content—most especially, its depictions of gender equality, which came in direct contrast to the theological view of complementarianism that many evangelicals espoused5.

• 6 S. Elizabeth Bird, “Not My Fantasy: The Persistence of Indian Imagery in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” (...)

11The blending of traditionalism and progressivism within Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman is so pronounced that, in combination with Jane Seymour’s commentary, it provides an especially vivid example of the porousness that exists between star and show. Given space limitations, the analysis here will be brisk and necessarily narrow. For further information regarding the show’s representation of indigenous people, S. Elizabeth Bird’s excellent essay, entitled “Not My Fantasy: The Persistence of Indian Imagery in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” (1996), provides a robust analysis of the show’s depiction of Cheyenne characters and the reception of that portrayal among white and indigenous viewers.6

• 7 Bird, p. 246 [p. 245-261].
• 8 Bird, p. 248.
• 9 Ibid.
• 10 Bird, p. 249.

12Bird’s work situates Dr. Quinn within the broader context of “progressive” Westerns of the 1990s (Dances With Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, Thunderheart, Geronimo, etc.) and a popular culture wherein native peoples were increasingly romanticized7. In Dr. Quinn, Bird observes, the indigenous characters are often seen from afar, rather than in close-up, and they typically “function as plot devices to allow Michaela and Sully to make a point8”. This comes in contrast to “the townspeople” (the term the show uses internally to refer to colonial settlers), who are predominantly white and developed as fully complex characters. As Bird argues, Dr. Quinn’s portrayals of native people illustrate how “the Indian of popular culture is a White creation that meets White needs9,” such that even Cloud Dancing—the Cheyenne medicine man who remained a prominent character throughout the show’s run—fails to transcend “the Doomed Indian” stereotype of “a calm, noble person who never fights back and is grateful for the attentions of the heroic White individuals10.”

• 11 Bird, p. 247.
• 12 Ibid.

13In her essay, Bird notes the show’s “apparently successful yet uneasy mixture of liberal progressiveness with ‘traditional American values’11.” That mixture is what I interrogate here. In particular, as Bird observed, I examine how the show “demonstrates a fairly strong, if ambivalent, feminist sensibility12”, arguing that Jane Seymour’s biography and her promotion of implicitly white, explicitly heterosexual romance prove key, constitutive elements in the establishment of that sensibility. To do so, I will rely on critical analysis whilst also, occasionally, as above, incorporating personal experience as evidence. I do the latter making no claim to the universality of this experience—it is, after all, mine alone— but rather in order to capture and record powerful cultural impacts that often remain murky or even invisible within scholarship, precisely because they are deeply personal.

• 13 King, “Strong Medicine”, p. F4.
• 14 Lisa Schwarzbaum, “TV critics get ‘Dr. Quinn’ wrong”, Entertainment Weekly, 8 April 1994, https://e (...)

15Though Seymour was aware of gender inequality, she seems to have come to that awareness, by her own account, quite belatedly, telling the L.A. Times in August 1993, “It wasn’t until way late in my life I learned that women don’t have it as easy as men13.” Accordingly, Seymour’s comments throughout the 1980s often exposed a commitment to traditional gender roles and even her thoughts on love and marriage expressed during the show’s run were somewhat less ground-breaking than those Dr. Quinn expresses. Often, Seymour encouraged the notion of gender difference, a view that, while a-religious, still quite neatly aligned with the evangelical concept of complementarianism, wherein gender differences are divinely ordained. Despite Seymour’s more conservative gender views, which I will discuss further below, by the spring of 1994, as the show’s second season concluded, Entertainment Weekly suggested that the feminist character Seymour embodied “may have become the most influential woman on network television14.” Examining the show’s engagement with gender through the lens of Seymour’s biography yields insight into how that happened, as well as revealing how white, cis-het femininity functions to render a certain type of feminism more acceptable to audiences who might be disinclined to openly accept or espouse gender equality.

• 15 Mike Chopra-Gant, The Waltons: Nostalgia and Myth in Seventies America, New York, London, I.B. Taur (...)
• 16 Judith Stacey, In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age, Boston, B (...)

16Mike Chopra-Gant has convincingly argued that The Waltons (1972-1981), which focused on rural life in 1930s and 1940s America, provided an “anodyne15” to contemporary doubts about American greatness and the American dream. Similarly linked to 1990s culture, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman can be situated at the intersection of two of the prevailing moral panics—the anti-political correctness (PC) moral panic, which alleged an excessive policing and social sanctioning related to expressions of outdated terminology or ideas, and the family values moral panic, a reaction to changing familial structures that was characterized by nostalgia for traditional nuclear families and heterosexual, male-as-breadwinner/woman-in-the-kitchen relationships16. A quick examination of this broader cultural context establishes the discourses Seymour was engaging with in her comments during the show’s promotion. It also illuminates how she leveraged her own life story, not only to draw connections between herself and her character but also to firmly situate the show as family values programming.

• 17 John J. O’Connor, “Review/Television; It's Jane Seymour, M.D., In the Wild and Woolly West”, New Yo (...)
• 18 Mike Duffy, “‘Dr. Quinn’: a terminal case of goofy”, The Baltimore Sun, 1 January 1993, https://www (...)
• 19 Howard Rosenberg, “TV Review: ‘Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman”, L.A. Times, 1 January 1993, n.p., https: (...)
• 20 Rosenberg, n.p.
• 21 Frazier Moore, “‘Dr. Quinn mostly malpractice”, in The News-Messenger (Fremont, OH), 26 February 19 (...)

18In the New York Times, the television critic John J. O’Conner, perhaps in reference to a pie-baking scene in the pilot, wrote: “One recipe for a successful series: take a contrived concept, sprinkle with homespun truisms updated for political correctness and mix well with tired plot devices. Process and serve17.” “‘Turgid’ is about the most favorable description I can give the ‘Medicine Woman’ premiere,” Mike Duffy wrote in the Baltimore Sun, noting of this show about “a politically correct frontier feminist” that “This Doc is DOA.”18 In the L.A. Times, Howard Rosenberg called the series “excruciatingly awful19” and denounced it for “impos[ing] a 1990s social consciousness on the Old West” through “overcooked depictions of noble Native Americans and ruthless white soldiers20.” Frazier Moore of the Associated Press decried it as “a pacifist, multi-cultural, ecological, feminist contraption so sanctimonious it could chase a left-winger into Rush Limbaugh’s arms21.”

• 22 Rosenberg, n.p.
• 23 James Endrst, “Hokum Dooms ‘Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman’ To Be More Comedy than Drama”, Hartford Cour (...)

19Seymour herself also came under attack. “[M]onumental miscasting22,” Rosenberg wrote of her, while James Endrst observed in The Hartford Courant, “If you want some laughs, real, honest-to-goodness laughs, don’t miss the new CBS drama ‘Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman’”— a “silly concoction” of “primetime hokum” wherein “Politically correct and far too fashionable considering the circumstances, Seymour weaves in and out of credibility in the role23.”

• 25 Jonathan Storm, “‘Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman’ puts a superwoman in the 1800s”, The Philadelphia Inqu (...)

22That the show, as one critic framed it, “puts a superwoman in the 1800s25” is nothing exceptional. Popular culture depicting the past almost inevitably views and reproduces that past through the sensibilities of the present. In this case, the critiques seem partly a complaint of genre. Dr. Quinn is a western; American westerns, a historically conservative genre, have often worked to maintain the white, patriarchal status quo. But it’s also a complaint regarding the gender dynamics that characterize the show. The critics weren’t just rebuking an anachronistically progressive western; they were specifically protesting the progressive values espoused by a woman starring in a western.

• 26 Rosenberg, n.p.
• 27 Ibid.
• 28 Endrst, n.p.

23In the L.A. Times, Seymour’s looks were praised while she was condemned for “emoting like a frontierswoman26.” The reviewer recounts: “When a bartender orders her out of his saloon because she’s a ‘lady,’ the fetching Michaela Quinn (Seymour), replies, ‘I’m not a lady, I’m a doctor.’” He concludes: “She’d be just as convincing as a Martian27.” In The Hartford Courant, the show’s writers were scolded for “letting Quinn pontificate at length no matter how outlandishly anachronistic her point of view.”28 It wasn’t just the point of view they took issue with, but also the fact that a woman in a western should be allowed to talk so much.

• 29 Bird, p. 253.
• 30 Bird, p. 254.

24Significantly, the critics were almost exclusively men. And they seem to have overlooked the element that most directly contributed to the show’s success: the outspokenness and liberty of the female main character, as played by Jane Seymour. In the focus groups she conducted in her research on the show, S. Elizabeth Bird found that, while men disliked the show’s “sentimentality or the tendency toward male bashing29,” the portrayal of a bold, independent woman resonated with women of all ethnic backgrounds. “Where that doctor was telling her that she's not good enough because she's a woman, and I know how that feels,” one of the indigenous participants observed. “I think my daughter would really like it because it shows that women can do stuff30.”

• 31 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, London, Routledge, 2004, p. 3.

25“Star images have histories,” Richard Dyer has argued;31 and while those histories may or may not be available to the audience in their entirety within a given moment, they nonetheless inform the reiteration of the star’s image in that moment. For example, I knew nothing about Jane Seymour’s connection to notions of heterosexual romance when I watched those early episodes of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman in 1993, and read the profiles in TV Guide and People, which I’ll discuss further here. That earlier history, however, nonetheless informed the production and writing of those profiles, and it would have informed the impressions of Seymour available to viewers older than me who were familiar with that discourse.

• 32 “Le Jardin de Max Factor with Jane Seymour commercial from 1984”, youtube.com, consulted July 15^th (...)

27During the 1980s, her brand is perhaps best described as aggressively romantic— an image likely rooted in her sexy role in the Bond film but then further bolstered by her endorsement of Le Jardin de Max Factor perfume (“the incurably romantic fragrance32”) and, a few years later, the book Jane Seymour’s Guide to Romantic Living (1986).

• 33 Ibid.

28In a Le Jardin commercial from 1984, we find Seymour in a hothouse, wearing a frilled, full-length gown, long hair riotous like someone from a John William Waterhouse painting. As she gathers flowers, a French balladeer croons the Le Jardin theme song. “They say romance is back in style… I say it never went out33,” she says, firmly, to the camera. As she unsnaps her bolero, the shoulder strap of her gown slides off her shoulder.

• 34 Ibid.

29The look is steamy (the setting is literally humid), and the commercial promotes an ultra-feminine version of heterosexual romance. But Seymour, despite her frills and curls and the retro setting, appears strikingly confident and in control. The perfume speaks of romance “subtly, softly,” she tells the viewer. “Because if you want romance to come on strong,” she says, lowering her voice, “you have to come on soft34.” Based on this commercial alone, her authority on this subject seems indisputable.

• 35 Jane Seymour, Jane Seymour’s Guide to Romantic Living, New York, Atheneum, 1986, p. 15.

30A few years later, Seymour shored up her credentials as the queen of romance by publishing a book entitled Jane Seymour’s Guide to Romantic Living (1986). An autobiographically based, self-help narrative studded with glamor shots of Seymour, Jane Seymour’s Guide to Romantic Living is, at its core, a celebration of gender differences and heterosexuality. “Women need men. And men need women,” Seymour writes in the first chapter. “I think a lot of people are beginning to realize that they were in danger of forgetting this, and that’s why romance is back35.”

• 36 Seymour, p. ix.
• 37 Seymour, p. 19.
• 38 Seymour, p.34.

31Here, romance is about being one’s best self. More specifically, it is about constructing a better version of one’s self and one’s life. “This is not about the lifelong partner or the marriage of convenience or the one-night stand,” Seymour writes. Rather, “It’s about approaching your life with the drama and mystery that some of us think exists only in books, TV, and movies36.” Seymour’s ethos is one wherein people (presumably women) are empowered to “Take your life in hand and be your own heroine37.” Hers is a world where “Nothing is impossible if you want it enough38.” Within the universe of the book, that often manifests as romance being something one can afford regardless of budget (for example, a velvet dress can be sewn if not afforded). However, more broadly, such a view clearly slots into neoliberal discourses of meritocracy and the power of the individual, suggesting the reader can manifest a more romantic life and, conversely, that failure to do so is the reader’s own fault.

• 39 Seymour, p.15.
• 40 Seymour, p. x.
• 41 Seymour, p. 19.
• 42 Ibid.
• 43 Ibid.

32The book throbs with gender anxiety; as Seymour writes, it originated with her desire “to remind people not to lose all the old values, not to change roles overnight39.” The investment in maintaining traditional gender roles is evident. “Women, if they wish to, should allow themselves their femininity, their sense of motherhood, and their drive to accomplish,” she writes. “And men should continue to enjoy the chase, the image of the knight in shining armor. We should all celebrate our differences40.” Seymour isn’t arguing for conformity. “Don’t stride around in identical business clothes, like all the other women,” she writes, “be yourself41.” But, immediately after, she warns: “Don’t try to be a man42.” The creation of a whole new self seems to be the aim, as she concludes this paragraph: “Don’t accept—create43.” (This is a confusing rejection of templates in a book that is full of them.)

• 44 According to a March 1993 report in Ad Week, TV Guide ranked #3 with a circulation of 14,498,341 wh (...)

33The star image Seymour created here was one deeply invested in heterosexual romance, and this is borne out in her early publicity for Dr. Quinn. In February 1993, Seymour received cover profiles in both TV Guide and People, publications that were ranked 3^rd and 13^th, respectively, for circulation in the US.44

• 45 David Remnick, qtd. in Matthew Ricketson, Writing Feature Stories: How to Research and Write Newspa (...)
• 46 Katja Lee, “‘Boswellized From Mere Persons to Personages’: Arthur Stringer, Mary Pickford, and the (...)
• 47 Lee, p. 248.
• 48 Ibid.

34“[J]ournalism’s version of biography45,” the celebrity profile is necessarily truncated. As Katja Lee notes, it provides “a snapshot of a personality” 46rather than the whole life and it usually targets an audience that “is generally assumed to be familiar with, even knowledgeable about and interested in, the celebrity subject47.” Accordingly, there is often an element of in media res to celebrity profiles of established stars. There is also a certain flattening. Whereas Seymour’s autobiographical writing allowed for some, however ambivalent and ambiguous complexity (ie. “Don’t accept—create48”), the celebrity profile’s brevity means it is often also simplistic.

• 49 Susan Schindehette, Louis Armstrong, and Laura Sanderson Healy, “What’s Up, Doc?”, People, 15 Febru (...)
• 50 Schindehette, et al, p. 75.

35People put Seymour on the cover of their Valentine’s week edition in February 1993. By this point, Dr. Quinn was a hit, and People hails Seymour as “the physician’s daughter and onetime poster girl for the romantic lifestyle49” staring in “CBS’s family-oriented, set-on-the-frontier Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, a dark-horse mid-season replacement that, despite a drubbing by the critics has emerged as a resounding Nielson success50.” Given the promotional function of these interviews, the snapshot the profiles gives can be seen to be tilted towards the project being promoted. Thus, the repeated reminders that Seymour is a doctor’s daughter herself and the parallels established between Seymour and her character.

• 51 Ibid.
• 52 Schindehette, et al, p. 77.

37“The woman who wrote the book on romance,” People calls her on the cover while, inside, a friend asserts, “She is a romantic.”51 Seymour describes her relationship with soon-to-be-husband #4, James Keach, as “A very literate romance52.”

• 53 Schindehette, et al, p. 78.

38The profile situates Seymour within a family unit, and also establishes her as someone who would be believable in a role about a frontier doctor. There is, at once, a deglamorization of Seymour and a glow up of her family life. For example, “People think I’m glamorous, but this is me,” Seymour says in a photo caption which notes she is pictured “(with pet rats after a slumber party for [her daughter] Katie and her pals)53.”

• 54 Schindehette, et al, p. 80.
• 55 Ibid.

39There is also repeated emphasis on Seymour’s heterosexuality. In the profile, Seymour establishes herself as both heterosexual and monogamous. “I’ve made a million movies and I haven’t dated that many men54,” she says, responding to rumors of an affair with her Dr. Quinn co-star, Joe Lando. They dated briefly, she reveals, but are now just friends. “I am monogamous,” she declares, somewhat randomly.55

• 56 Ibid.

40Of Dr. Quinn, she observes, “This series shows that women can be productive without being victims or sex objects,” though she hints that the show will be a bit racier in future, acknowledging, “Dr. Quinn won’t always have to be a virgin.”56

• 57 I’ve been unable to locate these reports online and so remain unclear on the timing of them or the (...)

41In the TV Guide profile, published two weeks later, Seymour is still promoting Dr. Quinn, but the tone provides a stark contrast to the profile in People. Whereas the People profile detailed a complicated albeit friendly family dynamics, the profile in TV Guide opens by referencing a wave of horrible divorce-related press in the UK and alludes to tabloid reports that Seymour was accused of abusing her children. In the TV Guide interview, Seymour responds to the allegations in the UK press and her ex-husband confirms her account.57

• 58 Stewart Weiner, TV Guide, February 20-26^th, 1993, p. 11 [p. 8-12].
• 59 Weiner, p. 12.
• 60 Ibid.
• 61 Ibid.

42Once that image management is dispensed with, the profile shifts into familiar territory. “There are parallels between the actress and this part,” TV Guide acknowledges. Seymour also draws the parallels. “My father never put any limitations on me as to what I could do with my life,” she says. “Neither did Michaela’s58.” Again, romance takes center-stage again, as TV Guide notes that, “Even now, after the sobering divorce, her name is still connected with romance”59: she maintains her “her image as queen of romance60” and, as a performer, has “carved out a niche as glamorous, exotic, and sexy61.”

• 62 Jeff Jarvis, “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” TV Guide, February 20-26^th, 1993, p. 7.
• 63 Jarvis, p. 7.

43Within the magazine, TV Guide’s profile is directly proceeded by a review of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. In the early denunciations, the critics were initially so preoccupied with the show’s PC-ness left unexplored the fact that this was family-friendly TV. In TV Guide’s column, however, Jeff Jarvis notes both these elements of the show. “This is the Politically Correct Western62,” Jarvis writes, observing that though he agreed with Dr. Mike’s stands, he found it “incongruous, overbearing, and even embarrassing to hear so much gooey-hearted, doctrinaire dialogue in a Western.” Nonetheless, Jarvis argued that Seymour herself deserves “all the credit” for the show’s success, “display[ing] so much warmth she glows,” demonstrating “she can act in anything” and displaying “her firm command of the camera, her grace, and her humanity.63”

• 64 TV Guide, cover, February 20-26^th, 1993.
• 65 Jarvis, p. 7.
• 66 Weiner, p. 8.

44Whereas the People profile emphasized family values through its portrayal of Seymour’s private life, TV Guide’s coverage places repeated, explicit emphasis on the family values angle through the language used in both the profile text and the paratext around it. The cover text exclaims, in part, “JANE’S BACK! … with a hit family series64.” “[A] sweet family hit65,” Jarvis calls the show in his review, and then, on the profile of Seymour, the subheading notes that “Jane Seymour’s surprise hit, the wholesome Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman [sic], carves out new family territory on TV66.”

• 67 Schwarzbaum, n.p.
• 68 Ibid.

45Jarvis’s review is the only one I’ve found that mentions both the show’s PC-ness and its family values. The phrase “family values” doesn’t appear in any of the early reviews I’ve seen, which is surprising given the cultural emphasis on “family values” TV at the time of the show’s debut—seven months out from Vice President Dan Quayle’s comments about CBS’s Murphy Brown—and also the fact that Dr. Quinn was appearing on the same channel. By April 1994, however, it was widely recognized that the show’s “family values” had played a tremendous role in its success. In an article entitled “TV Critics get ‘Dr. Quinn’ wrong,” Lisa Schwarzbaum analyzed the show’s critical reception. “With a sod-busting 22 million viewers a week, seeded heavily with young women67,” Schwarzbaum argued that Dr Quinn had proven quietly revolutionary in its resurrection of the hour-long family drama (á la The Waltons), its resuscitation of the Saturday evening timeslot on CBS, and its infusion of a “’90s feminist agenda” into the historically hyper-masculine western genre. “You wouldn’t believe the people that watch this show!” Seymour told her. “It’s about the only show that you can really sit down and watch with your entire family, male and female, old and young, and everybody gets something out of it68”.

• 69 John Carmody, “The TV Column”, Washington Post, December 17^th, 1993, n.p., consulted August 10, 202 (...)

46Eight months later, in a TV column in The Washington Post, John Carmody hailed the Dr. Quinn season 2 Christmas episode (“Mike’s Dream: A Christmas Tale”) as a family values feast, noting it was “just the kind of series broadcasters like to brag about in front of Congress69...”

• 70 “Dr. Quinn”, The Simpsons, YouTube.com, May 28^th, 2012, consulted January 20, 2022, https://www.you (...)
• 71 “Dr. Quinn, Morphine Woman,” Funny or Die, YouTube.com, December 6^th, 2014, consulted January 6, 20 (...)

47To be clear: this was a show with significant cultural reach. In the 1990s, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was a widely known— and, due to its earnestness, mocked— show. Jay Leno and David Letterman made fun of it and, in Season 5, episode 6, The Simpsons referenced it as a reason Homer and Marge couldn’t go out on Saturday night, their “special night” due to “a little show called Dr. Quinn.70” These references positioned the show as low-brow while also suggesting a certain cultural cache. In recent years, the show’s cast—Jane Seymour, Joe Lando, William Shockley, and Jim Knobeloch in particular—have made fun of themselves through satirical re-imaginings such as a Funny or Die spoof inspired by Breaking Bad and entitled “Dr. Quinn, Morphine Woman” (2014)71. So this wasn’t niche programming. It had a significant reach upon initial release, which was compounded through continued syndication in the years to come.

• 72 Associated Press, “Angela Lansbury’s ‘Murder, She Wrote’ KO’S ‘Superman’”, Democrat and Chronicle, (...)
• 73 Associated Press, n.p.
• 74 “Jane Seymour on CBS This Morning [1.13]”, youtube.com, consulted August 20^th, 2021,

48When it aired on September 25^th, 1993, the season two opener earned 13 points in the Nielsen TV ratings and the show ranked #20 for the week of September 20-26^th, 199372. With each point equating to 942,000 households, according to Nielsen, approximately 13.7 million of the nation’s 94.2 million TV homes tuned in to Dr. Quinn that night. (In contrast, 19.3 million homes watched the #1 rated 60 Minutes [CBS, 1968-present], 16.2 million homes watched Murder, She Wrote [CBS, 1984-1996], 10.5 million watched Married… With Children [Fox, 1987-1997], 10.4 million watched Beverly Hills, 90210 [Fox, 1990-2000], and 10.4 watched The Simpsons [Fox, 1989-present]73.) These were big numbers. In addition, by November 1994, as Seymour announced on Good Morning America, the show had been sold to 75 countries74.

• 75 “Jane Seymour on CBS This Morning [1.13].”

49“I love the idea of families getting together,” Seymour said then. “I think that’s what’s happening in the 90s, people care about the human condition, they care about other people, they have time now to care about, you know, their kids and their parents and their siblings, and that’s what our show is about. It’s about feeling good and dealing with real life, although it’s set back in the 1860s, every show has something that a family could sit down and talk about afterwards75.”

• 76 King, p. F4.
• 77 Bird, p. 253.

51The month before the show’s second season aired, the L.A. Times ran a short profile of Seymour that was syndicated in other newspapers across the US and also in Canada. In the interview, in her discussion of the show’s success, Seymour’s ideas on gender don’t sound all that different from those expressed in Jane Seymour’s Guide to Romantic Living nearly a decade before. “I love to think men love to see a woman who is still a woman,” Seymour says. “They say, ‘We want that kind of woman—a woman who loves men, a woman who isn’t against men just for the sake of it, but at the same time is strong and resourceful76.” It’s impossible to know how many Dr. Quinn viewers encountered this interview, but the profile and Seymour’s statement here does suggest the conservativism of Seymour’s own views on gender and how statements like this may have worked paratextually to neutralize the show’s seemingly more aggressive assertions of gender equality (what the men in Bird’s focus groups characterized as its “male bashing77.”)

• 78 “The Race”, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, S02E01, September 25^th, 1993.
• 79 Ibid.
• 80 Ibid.

52In the A plot of this episode, the Cheyenne (the group of indigenous people from whom “the townspeople”— ie. the white settlers— have stolen the land on which they’ve built Colorado Springs) have gifted Dr. Mike a horse. A small, female, the horse is repeatedly denigrated as “crazy,” “stubborn and ornery.78” “The men call her Crazy Lady,” Cloud Dancing’s wife, Snowbird, tells Dr. Mike. “They think she’s useless. But she runs for me, and she’ll run for you79.” This gift conveniently coincides with an upcoming horse race and, while Dr. Mike is eager to participate, she’s blocked at every turn. “Ladies ain’t allowed to ride,” the local shop owner informs her. “That’s the rules80.”

• 81 Ibid.

53While this is going on, the B plot unfolds… the youngest of Dr. Mike’s adopted children, Brian, wants to enter a pie baking contest. “Boys don’t do that,” his sister, Colleen, scolds him. However, as the Reverend reminds his fellow pie contest judges: “There's nothing in the rules that says a fella can't make a pie if he wants to81.”

• 83 Ibid.

58In this episode, Dr. Quinn experiences gender discrimination both professionally (as a doctor) and personally (as a potential participant in a horserace). It’s the professional discrimination that, ultimately, spurs her bending of the rules to participate in the race. This is made explicit through a line of dialogue that directly connects the two, when Quinn notes of the Doctor’s discrimination: “it's the same prejudice that keeps me from riding in the race83.” When she realizes that it’s not going to be possible to get the rules changed, she bends them.  

• 84 Ibid.

59Ultimately, Dr. Quinn decides to cross dress and race. Her adopted son Matthew and her friend Sully (he is clearly the primary love interest, but the pair are not yet dating at this point) offer her a crash course in male gender performance. A sort of masculinity 101, they encourage her to walk with her toes out and heels first, to “swagger84;” “don’t smile,” they suggest, packing a “big wad” of licorice into her cheek like chewing tobacco. She then participates in the horserace in masculine drag, winning the race. Afterwards, she reveals her identity—whereupon she’s immediately disqualified for having broken the unwritten rules.

• 85 Ibid.

60Earlier in the episode, after Sully tried to coax her out of the race, Dr. Quinn revealed her motivation for participating. “It’s not about proving something,” she says, “it’s about taking up a challenge, trying for excellence85.” This makes clear that the moral of the episode isn’t necessarily that women can do anything men can do and vice versa, but rather that all people should have the opportunity to try, in whatever endeavor they wish to pursue. The episode closes on a bittersweet note:

• 86 Ibid.

64The scene is acted straight but the comedic undertones are evident and the support of the male characters around her and the background music—a harmonica playing a generically familiar lazy, western twang— all work to situate these circumstances as entirely non-threatening. The men take her seriously, and they remain supportive of and unbothered by her gender play. Colleen—the one girl in the family— is notably absent from this scene. And, strikingly, this performance of masculinity ultimately silences Dr. Mike, a character notable for the free expression of her opinions and beliefs. “What about the voice86?” Matthew asks, to which Sully replies, “Don’t talk.” In playing a man, she loses her voice.

• 87 King, p. F4.
• 88 Ibid.

65This scene and the racing scene that follows work and, I would argue, the show is able to “get away with it,” because, to apply Seymour’s own comments on her character, viewers are assured that Dr. Quinn is “a woman who loves men87.” They can be confident that she’s “strong and resourceful” and she “isn’t against men just for the sake of it88.” Both due to the show’s portrayals but also Seymour’s comments and star history as a glamorous and romantic icon, Dr. Quinn’s heteronormativity and femininity are so securely established by this point that they can be played with and tested, without posing any threat. At the end of the episode, the viewer knows that Dr. Quinn, despite having dressed as a man, is still going to be a good, womanly woman; her sexual attractiveness has not been compromised.