Hollywood image that women are meant to be
like Claudette Colbert, sexy and alluring; and that
if they are attractive to men they quickly will be
married. But statistics show that during the 1930s
women were not marrying: "the marriage rate per
thousand population fell from 10.14 in 1929 to
7.87 in 1932"; the birthrate fell also. ²⁰ Despite the
movieland suggestion that women can have ev-
erything, the facts of the Depression indicated
otherwise. The average woman during the 1930s
was assaulted by contradictory messages from all
sides: on the one hand she was told not to work,
but on the other hand she was less likely to as-
sume the role of housewife and mother. And those
women who did work were often insulted and
called menaces to society.

Even more disconcerting than these incon-
gruities is the fact that movies were made with
women moviegoers in mind. As the Lynds dis-
covered in the 1930s, "Middletown is probably
representative of other localities in the fact that
adult females predominate heavily in the audi-
ence" and, as one producer remarked, "set the
type of picture that will 'go'." ²¹ As early as the
teens it was the American woman who told the
movie studios what type of movie would make a
profit. During the 1920s she went to the movies
to see her newly liberated working-girl self on
the screen. Habits formed, American women,
like the women in Reginald Marsh Paramount
Picture, went to the movies in the 1930s with the
same vicarious idealism in mind, but then they
were greeted by Hollywood falsehoods which
contradicted their rather dismal status in Ameri-
can society. Only in the soap-opera "woman's
film" genre, which started in the 1930s, and in
which ordinary, middle-class women were de-
picted as victims, did the Hollywood film begin
to approach the real experience of women in
American society. ²²

From The Woman's Art Journal. Reprinted by permis-
sion of the author.

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