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160 9 Judy Holliday’s Urban Working-Girl Characters in 1950s Hollywood Film judith smith A Jewish-created urban and cosmopolitan working-girl feminism persisted in the 1950s as a cultural alternative to the suburban, domestic consumerism soon eloquently critiqued by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. The film persona of Jewish, Academy Award–winning actress Judy Holliday embodied this workinggirl feminism. Audiences viewed her portrayals of popular-front working-girl heroines in three films, all written by the Jewish writer and director Garson Kanin (sometimes in association with his wife, the actress Ruth Gordon) and directed by the Jewish director George Cukor in the early 1950s: Born Yesterday (1950), The Marrying Kind (1952), and It Should Happen to You (1954). Holliday’s working-girl feminism conveyed women’s wage earning as ordinary and unexceptional , women workers as competent, spunky, active in their own behalf, and unwilling to back down in the face of authority. Significantly, this working-girl feminism assumed the necessity of male allies, and envisioned the possibility of male support and admiration for working women, enabling the requisite, heterosexual , romantic denouement.1 In the 1930s and 1940s, Jewish cultural producers, among others, enthusiastically participated in the creation of popular theatrical, musical, and film works that offered up images of sassy, sexy, and tough working women and their male counterparts, and of multiethnic and sexually sophisticated urban cosmopolitans .2 Images of working-girl feminism, shaped in the 1930s and 1940s, then made their way into 1950s popular culture underneath or interspersed with the more dominant celebration of consumerism, domesticity, and compulsory heterosexuality . At the same time, the prevalent anticommunism of the era led many who helped to create the images of working-girl feminism to camouflage these counterthemes , hoping to avoid right-wing scrutiny and protest. Anticommunist blacklisting closed off the public space for popular-front left-wing feminism, publicly silenced Holliday herself, and made it harder for subsequent audiences to recognize the traces of the independent, politically engaged woman at the center of her star power and distinctive persona. Judy Holliday’s Urban Working-Girl Characters 161 Jewish cultural producers were primarily responsible for making Holliday a star. From the point of view of current conceptions of Jewish identity, their willing merger of Jewish ethnicity into a kind of urban ethnic style, and the reframing of Jewish ethnicity as a more generic urbanity, might seem a form of passing that hid Jewish particularity. However, within the context of the 1930s and 1940s, when American Jews moved from immigrant provincial and parochial associations into new forms of community and collaboration (within the labor movement and on the progressive left), particularly at a time when challenging fascism’s externally imposed racial categorizations appeared urgent, the presence of Jewishness as part of urban cosmopolitanism seems less like a form of hiding and more like an explicit political choice.3 Women film critics of the 1970s such as Molly Haskell and Marjorie Rosen, influenced by the enthusiasms of women’s liberation, largely failed to recognize the traces of working-girl feminism in 1950s culture. From these critics’ perspective, films of the late 1940s and the 1950s that featured working-girl heroines did not look all that feminist, because most did not encourage female autonomy and because these films’ celebration of the heterosexual couple seemed to reinforce domestic retreat. Although these feminist critics could find compelling women characters in the anarchic screwball comedies and heroic women’s films of the 1930s and the war years, they found themselves disappointed by harsher forms of containment for women’s aspirations after the war and by romantic resolutions that compromised women’s independence. Brandon French was one of the few feminist critics to find some affinities between the rebellious female characters lionized by the women’s liberation movement and the women heroines in films of the 1950s. She identified Judy Holliday’s characterization of Florence Keefer in The Marrying Kind as an example of a transitional woman “on the verge of revolt,” as she titled her study.4 However, French’s text-based reading of the film paid no attention to the Popular Front backgrounds of the writers and director responsible for creating the rebellious film character whom Holliday would enact. Many of those who gravitated to the left in the 1930s and 1940s were in fact interested in some version of the “woman question” as a central dimension of the sexual modernity to which they aspired. The emergence of...

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