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CHAPTER 2. THE EMERGENCE OF THE CAREER WOMAN
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I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career. — I do not believe there is such a thing as female writing. There is the hysteric’s voice which is the woman’s masculine language . . . talking about feminine experience. — , Psychoanalysis and Feminism1 CHAPTER 2 THE EMERGENCE OF THE CAREER WOMAN Unlike corporate career films, where men have traditionally dominated on-screen as in real life, there are, since , approximately as many business films about female as about male entrepreneurs. In the last three decades women corporate executive characters have also become increasingly prominent on-screen. Clearly, success in business careers has obviously not always meant the same thing for women as for men, particularly since the general expectation for women to work (discounting the years of World War II) did not become widespread until the s. By this time, national monetary inflation, marriage at a later age, and soaring divorce rates drove women in great numbers into higher education and the paid workforce. Young career women who also wanted to start a family had to find ways to accommodate the additional demands of motherhood in their success equation. While there has always been an expectation that men would develop and advance their business and career work, women have only in the last three decades found themselves pursuing careers with the increasingly accepted notion that their economic needs and career goals are as pressing as are men’s, particularly owing to their increasing roles as heads of households . Since the s, women in ever growing numbers have had to prove themselves worthy in a variety of business and career circumstances , and Hollywood films have traced their difficult but mostly successful attempts at ever higher levels of socioeconomic accomplishment . Hence, business success for women in films of the s and s 51 has different connotations than their understanding of success in films of the s and s. It is therefore useful, initially, to consider middleclass working women in cinema in relation to their historical era as well as their marital and maternal status. Also, because the woman’s speci fic marital and family status as an employee seems as important to her identity status as the exact nature of her career (at least from a historical perspective), I have expanded the business category in this chapter to include some women’s career pursuits beyond business per se. This status is important because Hollywood’s overall portraits of single and married working women (particularly if they are also mothers ) differ markedly. Certainly, American cinema’s mirroring of career women generally reflects deeply embedded assumptions about work and gender roles that do not begin to change noticeably until the s. As a starting point, therefore, I look first at classical films to determine how gainfully employed women are represented in relation to new social facts and tenacious cultural myths. The first section of this chapter focuses on the large number of studio-era films featuring the single working mother. It also extends into the s and includes the single or married childless woman who tries to balance her career with her romantic life or with her husband and his career. The next section takes up the sexual/gender revolution as represented in films of the s. It goes on to trace women’s rise into corporate managerial ranks in the s and s, and the plight of increasingly desperate married or single working mothers in this recent era. The third section goes beyond the film survey approach; it considers the significance of the usually marginalized and desperate working mother character from a psychological, ideological, and historical perspective. The social survey emphasis of sections one and two helps set the stage for the more intensive psychoanalytic reading of three films from three different eras in the third section that involve gainfully employed moms and their unhappy offspring. Since World War II, Hollywood films have represented middle-class working women as a troubled lot, tortured as much by their successes as by their failures. This is not to say that businesswomen characters are made to appear inadequate to their jobs, but rather that in films up through the s, their jobs are treated as compensatory or secondary to romance, marriage, and most of all, motherhood. It is a truism that women have ultimately been measured against the cultural priority of motherhood, while men have ultimately been measured against the cultural...