Back in the 1930s rich, pampered women worried about keeping their girlish figures and their husbands. And then came the 2000s and rich pampered women worried about their bodies and if they were ever going to marry.

What’s the difference? At least that’s what you might ask if you watched Carrie and Miranda and Samantha and Charlotte in the movie “Sex and the City” and then followed it up with– Mary and Sylvia and Peggy and Edith – in the 1930s play “The Women.”

Not that most women can identify with New York socialites with open Tiffany accounts, anymore than we can with newspaper columnists who can afford $500 shoes. And it’s probably not fair to compare women of two different periods 70 years apart, based on a small, select breed. But it’s fun to try.

I think we’ve made some progress, even if these exaggerated fantasy characters are our sample models. Clare Boothe Luce wrote “The Women” in the 1930s, a play about what happens to a group of friends when one of them discovers her husband having an affair. Loyalties are tested. Backs are stabbed. Catfights ensue.

The play was a Broadway hit in 1936 and then a major Hollywood movie with Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer and Rosalind Russell (photo above) and every so often if you’re lucky you catch a live performance as I did, at Santa Rosa Junior College where it’s in the current lineup of Summer Repertory Theatre.

I think we’ve made some progress, even if these exaggerated, fantasy characters are our sample models.

“The Women” is a witty, satirical look at high society where idle women shop, play bridge and eat watercress sandwiches. Even though playwright Luce was a serious journalist and a member of Congress and, married to the publisher of Time magazine, knew her way around Park Avenue, her women characters are spoiled and insecure. They are known as Mrs. Stephen and Mrs. Harold Somebody, from which their lifestyle comes.

“Sex and the City” is about friends who, too, live the high life in Manhattan and are label-obsessed and are thrown into crisis when love runs amok. But they are independent women with careers that pay for their own feathered dresses and designer living rooms.

And they take better care of each other than the 1930s women. Clare Boothe Luce’s women didn’t much like their gender. They had little going for them but status and that was elusive and had to be protected even if it meant throwing a friend overboard.

The women in “The Women” poured scotch in their tea and wore fur scarves with dangling animal heads. The “Sex and the City” women drink Cosmos and talk about their favorite sexual gymnastics. The 1930s women talked about who ever just left the room.

So now Hollywood is remaking this classic period piece. A new model of “The Women,” with Meg Ryan and Annette Bening, due out this fall, will not be set in the 1930s but moved to the present. It will probably be very clever and hip but it will be now, not then. Those women will probably drink white wine and go to therapy. They’ll hug and feel each other’s pain, which is a terrible thing to do to a bunch of first rate… witches.

Listen to the audio version of “Sex and The Women” on the podcast page under Another Voice.

Photo courtesy of Greencine.com