Formative Performances: Keri Russell in “Felicity”

[Women’s History Month, Day 21]

This next performance affected me even though it was from a show I did not regularly watch.

I’ve been sort-of feminist since I was a little girl, but my understanding of feminism was shallow. I detested signs of weakness in girls and women (even though I was often teased for being a crybaby). As a young teen, I thought girls who wasted their time mooning after boys were stupid and shallow, because boys were stupid and not worth it, obviously.

I was still in this “boys are stupid and I hate them all (except for that really cute smart guy in my class who plays guitar and likes Monty Python)” phase when Felicity first aired. I was thirteen years old, and my babysitter was a college student who worked with an autistic child (my brother), and I thought she was a really cool person. She wanted to watch Felicity on a night where she was looking after my brother.

The whole premise of Felicity was one I should have hated – a really smart girl gives up her future so she can follow some guy to college. Boys were stupid and school was cool and any girl who threw her dreams away to follow some stupid boy was an idiot!

Except I didn’t feel that way about Felicity. I didn’t see a stupid girl who threw her life away over a boy. I saw a smart and lovable girl who made a questionable decision and had to find her way out of it.

Did it help that the babysitter I admired had very similar curly hair as Felicity? Yes, it probably did. But Keri Russell’s warmth and intelligence also contributed to my sudden empathy with the character. She made me think that, perhaps, a girl who made a bad choice about a boy wasn’t worth writing off. Maybe girls who made stupid choices about boys were still smart girls, and one decision didn’t define them for life.