Sequins, Songs, and Sisterhood
It was a frigid night my freshman year, the kind where your breath hangs in the air and the walk back from the theater feels endless. We’d just seen Twelfth Night at the University Theater, and somewhere between quoting Viola and complaining about the speakers, my close friend and I fell into an argument. About Mamma Mia!
Yes, the ABBA jukebox musical that’s dominated pop culture for decades, heightened by its movie musical release in 2008 with a star-studded cast. My friend called it fluffy, fun, but meaningless. I disagreed. In fact, I argued (a little too passionately, maybe) that Mamma Mia! is one of the most quietly revolutionary feminist films.
She laughed. I didn’t.
Because behind the sparkles, the sun and the spontaneous dance numbers, Mamma Mia! is a story about women: their messiness, their strength and their refusal to apologize for either. It’s a story written and directed by women, built on the shoulders of ABBA’s unapologetically emotional catalog. Songs that once soundtracked heartbreak and disco nights suddenly became hymns to womanhood. And before you want to rehash the same debate we had on East Campus Mall three years ago, hear me out.
When ABBA, the four-person Swedish pop group, released their glittering synthpop bangers from 1972 to 1982, they couldn’t have known they’d someday become the backbone of a story written and directed by women, celebrating found family, female friendship and the freedom to define your own life. But, that’s precisely what Mamma Mia! does—under all that disco and sun, it’s quietly radical.
At the heart of Mamma Mia! is Donna Sheridan, famously played by Meryl Streep, with her frizzy curls and dirty overalls. Donna, the tired mother, less-than-happy with her daughter Sophie’s choice to marry young and bewildered when her three former lovers show up for the wedding, isn’t labelled a “fallen woman” or a “saintly mother” or ashamed. She’s a single mom who built a life from scratch and raised a daughter on a Greek island (where everyone is somehow British or American), with nothing but hard work, heartbreak and a dream. She’s funny, complicated, and, most importantly, free. The movie, and its characters, never punish her for her past, not for sleeping with three men in one summer, not for not knowing who Sophie’s father is, not for doing it all her own way. The movie celebrates her and the relationship she built with Sophie. And when she sings “The Winner Takes It All,” it’s not about losing love—it’s about owning the story of your past, your mistakes and the strength it took to survive them.
And how does Donna survive and confront her past? Through female friendship, of course! Donna, Tanya and Rosie aren’t side characters orbiting a romance; they are the emotional core of the film. Their friendship is messy, loud and unconditional. They tease each other, pick each other up off bathroom floors and fly across continents to show up when one of them needs it. They are women who have built their own kind of family, one that doesn’t fit into any tidy box.
When “Dancing Queen” plays, the iconic scene where Donna and the Dynamos sprint through the Greek hills is not just coded in nostalgia. It’s liberation. Three middle-aged women, unapologetically joyful in bodies and lives that the world tells them should have quieted down by now. Their laughter and chaos scream: we deserve joy too. Their presence, hard truths and even harder drinking put women on screen holding each other up. It’s decades of heartbreak, laughter and shared history condensed into one glittering 2-hour moment. These aren’t women defined by the men who passed through their lives. They’re defined by the women who stayed.
It’s in this incubator of female friendship, motherhood and complex depictions of womanhood that Sophie, on paper, our main character and foil for the plot, undergoes the biggest transformation. Only twenty, she believes that love will give her freedom, that marriage is her ticket to the world. It’s the perfect generational mirror: Donna felt she needed no man to define her, and ran away to an island to live out that embodied experience; Sophie thinks she needs one to begin. But the film gently untangles that myth. Though “Honey, Honey” and “Lay All Your Love on Me” bubble with that eager, romantic certainty of youth, by the end, Sophie doesn’t say “I do.” She says, I need to find myself first—and how does she come to that decision? By realizing that Donna and the women around her have given her the tools for her self-discovery journey.
That’s the genius of Mamma Mia! It begins with a wedding and ends with a homecoming (and a wedding)—not solely marriage, but self-knowledge. Donna’s independence becomes Sophie’s inheritance. The show celebrates found family, friendships that outlast heartbreak and womanhood that isn’t neat, quiet or easy. By the time the credits roll and the cast bursts into one last chorus, you can feel it: the joy, the chaos, the freedom. That same night freshman year, after I’d finished my rant and we’d both stopped laughing, my friend shrugged and said, “Okay, fine. But it’s still ridiculous.” “Of course it is,” I told her. “That’s the point.”
There’s a reason why whenever “Dancing Queen” comes on at a party, the room shifts. Everyone sings. Everyone smiles. It’s muscle memory. Maybe it’s because, deep down, we all recognize the truth hidden in that shimmer: that joy, especially women’s joy, is its own kind of rebellion.