JE Smyth: Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood
Well, that was interesting/inspiring/depressing. All those great women doing amazing things and so many of them overlooked by history and only recoverable by really dedicated trawling through contemporary sources. (She's really looking at the 30s and 40s and a bit about how things went to pot after that.)
It was clearly A Moment when things were possible for women in a particular situation, and while, no doubt, there were certain things to do with its being the post-suffrage era and increased entry of women into education and careers and so on, it did seem to me to replicate in certain ways the phenomenon I've seen before, where there is a phase in a movement/discipline/industry when there are no set patterns and if somebody can do something that's needed at the time, the fact that they can tends to be greeted with glad cries, or at least, a minimum of gatekeeping..
And, okay, there were particular things going on with the collapse of the Hollywood studio system which had favoured a certain style of collaborative working and which had enabled certain kinds of networking, and the rise of post-war anti-communism, which had a particular negative impact on women's careers in the film industry, but I suspect that even so, structures would have been created, 'women's work' considered less, etc.
There's also, as the author points out, the way that historians have failed to register that the women were even there and what they were doing, partly from a bias towards a 'great man' (in this version, visionary director) view of the history of whatever it is they're writing the history of, and partly because of assumptions about what was important and creative work, and partly about the survival of records.Which is a thing I have seen in so many other spheres, sigh.
I do see that this is a history of women and work, but when the author made such a point of this being a time and a place when married women and mothers were able to have high-powered careers, if they were just that good, it's a bit coy about the women who were not married women and mothers... (I can't help thinking that there were networks there that go unmentioned) This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2821428.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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