Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

WOMEN, RELIGION, AND AMERICAN FILM

1010 l MULTIDENOMINATIONAL MOVEMENTS—MUSIC AND THE ARTS factories; publishers saw a market for women who wrote for women in a culture that had prosperity and the time to read. The need to turn exclusively to the church as an outlet for creativity or interest was no longer there. Eventually, the writing woman was a reality, and the type of fiction she wrote emphasized reality more than romance. It was more sensible and sensual than scriptural . By the 1940s, “women’s fiction” no longer fit the proscribed patterns of the past. There was no model that all must follow. Leaving the former paradigm, and its sentimental, Bible base behind, women novelists had truly become members of a profession, not scribblers with a hobby. SOURCES: Novels include Carolyn Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854, repr. 1970); Maria McIntosh’s The Lofty and the Lowly (1854); The Gates Ajar (1870), by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (repr. 1971); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1856, repr. 1991) and Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856); Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (repr. 1996); and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899, repr. 1981). Nonfiction sources for review include Caroline Gilman’s The Recollections of a Southern Matron (1838); Frances Milton Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832/1949); Richard VanDerBeets’s Held Captive by the Indians: Selected Narratives, 1642–1836 (repr. 1994); a sermon by Alexander McCaine from 1842 titled “Slavery defended from Scripture” and delivered to the General Conference of the Methodist Protestant Church; and an 1861 publication by Reverend Thornton Stringfellow, D.D., titled Slavery : Its Origins, Nature and History. See also Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (1977); Christie Ann Farnham’s The Education of the Southern Belle (repr. 1994); Samuel Hill, ed., Religion in the Southern States (1983); Barbara Welter’s Dimity Convictions (1976); Lyde Cullen Sizer’s The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850–1872 (2000); and Elizabeth Moss’s Domestic Novelists in the Old South (1992). Collections include American Women Writers: Diverse Voices in Prose since 1845, ed. Eileen Barrett and Mary Cullinan (1992); and Women’s Work: An Anthology of American Literature, ed. Barbara Perkins et al. (1994). WOMEN, RELIGION, AND AMERICAN FILM Judith Weisenfeld MOVIES HAVE BEEN a profoundly influential cultural force in America throughout the twentieth century, and although the nature and shape of that influence have not always been uniform, American film will certainly continue to have a powerful impact on the United States and the increasingly globalized culture in the twenty- first century. As an arena of imagination that often challenges viewers to extend themselves beyond the familiar, the movies have helped to shape American perceptions of and attitudes toward religion in general and toward women gender, and religion more specifically. This essay considers three sets of interaction between women, religion , and film over the course of the century, focusing on women as significant agents in movements to reform the content of motion pictures, thematic patterns in representations of women and religion in American film, and women’s contributions as filmmakers. Although American religious institutions have produced films (both fiction and nonfiction) for use by members in houses of worship and in religious schools, this essay instead surveys Hollywood’s portrayal of women’s religious experiences and expressions and women’s involvement in the production and regulation of these films. The narrative codes and standards that emerged from the precursors to the Hollywood system and from Hollywood itself have dominated American film form and provided the touchstone for both imitation of and resistance to its products. Because no short essay can address every American film in which women’s religious experiences are represented, this piece attempts to point to significant works and to larger themes evident in selected films. Social Reform and Censorship In 1917 Mary Gray Peck (1867?–1957), a leading figure in the predominantly white General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs, announced: Motion Pictures are going to save our civilization from the destruction which has successively overwhelmed every civilization of the past. They provide what every previous civilization has lacked— namely a means of relief, happiness, and mental inspiration to the people at the bottom. Without happiness and inspiration being accessible to those upon whom the social burden rests most heavily, there can be no stable...