Daily Inspiration Quote by Sharon Gless

There is a deliciously blunt showbiz pragmatism baked into Sharon Gless's question: you do not build a character like Christine Cagney - sharp-edged, ambitious, hungry for a life bigger than the room she's in - and then pretend she can be contained by polite limits. Framed as a rhetorical shrug, it doubles as a critique of the stories TV used to tell women: go ahead and make her competent, make her fearless, but don't let her want too much, and certainly don't let her get it.

The key word is "things". It's vague on purpose, a catch-all for the whole forbidden inventory: authority, pleasure, professional dominance, emotional messiness without punishment. Gless isn't arguing that Cagney should be sainted; she's arguing that Cagney should be allowed to be fully human, which includes appetite and consequence. The line pushes back on a long-running industry habit where "strong female character" really meant "strong until it threatens the audience's comfort."

Context matters because Cagney and Lacey landed in the early 1980s, when second-wave feminism was colliding with network television's need to keep everyone calm at 9 p.m. Cagney was the friction point: not just a woman with a job, but a woman with edges. Gless's intent reads like a dare to writers, executives, and viewers alike: if you invent a woman who wants, you don't get to scold her for wanting. You either let her have "things", or admit the system was never designed to.