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The strength and independence of the film's female characters, as well as the nonchalance with which the film deals with Donna's sexual history, have gained the attention of feminist writers, who see in the film a wonderfully subversive social critique as Sarah Seltzer explains:  

  

"It's hard to imagine a movie  that's come out recently that is, at its core, as offensive to the  right wing's so-called family values. The film's women -- including a mother  and daughter -- accept each other as sexual beings. Donna isn't punished  for her earlier promiscuity, and Amanda isn't forced to get married  despite her clear sexual maturity. The concept of three men revolving  around a matriarchal family core is celebrated."

While the power of the women in the film is indeed refreshing, I think what is more remarkable still is something larger: that these women have a community with whom to be empowered, and a physical setting that helps to make such empowerment possible.

what we see in the taverna and village on Kalokairi is to most North Americans quite foreign: an extremely dense social environment where families live in close proximity, where everyone knows each other, and the visual and auditory permeability of the village means that everyone also knows each other's business (which of course is being sung at full volume, but still).

But the essential element that lends such joie de vivre to the film is that it is ultimately about a community of people, one that nonjudgmentally accepts one another and is there to celebrate life's passages and transitions together.

  

The contrast to the urban loneliness in that other big "chick flick" of the summer, Sex and the City, is striking, as Jane Becker notes:    

  

"The women in 'SATC' are a good 20 years younger than their counterparts in 'Mama', but they seem infinitely less happy.  They sit around coffee shops and trendy restaurants discussing their unhappiness. The women in 'Mama' sing and dance. Christine Baranski kicks ass on the dance floor, Julie Walters chews through the scenery and Meryl…well, Meryl does a split in the air after bouncing off a bed.  When I grow up, I want to be them."

In 1980, Delores Hayden famously asked, "What Would a Non-Sexist City be Like?" and her proposals for Redesiging the American Dream share much in common with Kalokairi: closely-set multifamily housing sharing common facilities such as kitchens and child care, locally employed and equitably paid on-site staff to help out, attractive social gathering and play spaces, and a community of families to assist in looking after children.

The irony is that the conservative agenda behind the "family values" debate is promoting a "traditional" family model that is in fact an historical aberration. For the past half-century, through a combination of social policy and urban planning decisions guided more by myth than reality families have been forced into unprecedented, community-eroding isolation. As Hayden and other feminist architects, planners and geographers have been pointing out for years, these patterns have served the needs of women and families very poorly.