Good Times for Florida and Black Feminism

Central to this examination is the impact of 1970s black feminist orga-nizing on the representation of African American women in the sitcom GoodTimes . With the advent of syndication and the proliferation of VHS and DVDsales of older television sitcoms, it becomes imperative to take up the questionof how black women contested assertions about black women's relationshipto feminism as an ideology and feminism as a lifestyle. How did the centralAfrican American female character, Florida Evans, respond to the women's li- beration movement that was at its height during the 1974-1979 run of Good Ti-mes ?Thisessayapproachesthatquestionthrougharchivalmaterialfrom Springer, Kimberly. « Good Times for Florida and Black Feminism », Cercles 8 (2003) : 122-135. © Cercles 2003. Toute reproduction, même partielle, par quelque procédé que ce soit, est in-terdite sans autorisation préalable (loi du 11 mars 1957, al. 1 de l'art. 40). ISSN : 1292-8968. Cercles 8 / 123 black feminist organizations, in particular the San Francisco/Bay Area-basedBlackWomenOrganizedforAction,oralhistoryinterviewswithblackwo-men active in black feminist organizations at the time, and analysis of threeepisodes of the sitcom Good Times .