Looking back on her career in 1977, Bette Davis remembered with
pride, "Women owned Hollywood for twenty years." She had a point.
Between 1930 and 1950, over 40% of film industry employees were
women, 25% of all screenwriters were female, two women supervised
all studio feature output and could order retakes on any director's
work, one woman ran MGM behind the scenes, over a dozen women
worked as producers, a woman headed the Screen Writers Guild three
times, and press claimed Hollywood was a generation or two ahead of
the rest of the country in terms of gender equality and employment.
But historians, critics, and the public have largely forgotten this
era and persist in seeing studio-era Hollywood as a place where the
only career open to a woman was as a passive, pretty face on screen
or an underpaid, anonymous secretary. J. E. Smyth tells another
story of a "golden age" for women's employment in the film industry
and of Hollywood's ranks of powerful organization women. The first
comprehensive history of Hollywood's high-flying career women
during the studio era (1924-1956), Nobody's Girl Friday covers the
impact of the executives, producers, editors, writers, agents,
designers, directors, and actresses who shaped Hollywood film
production and style, led their unions, climbed to the top during
the war, and fought the blacklist. It focuses on women who called
the shots at various levels of film production and articulated
shifting attitudes toward gender, work, power, and politics,
including executive Anita Colby, chief story editor Eve Ettinger,
story editor and agent Kay Brown, secretary Ida Koverman, editor
Barbara McLean, producers Harriet Parsons, Constance Bennett, and
Virginia Van Upp, screenwriter and Screen Writers Guild President
Mary C. McCall Jr., columnists Hedda Hopper, designer Dorothy
Jeakins, agent Mary Baker, and President of the Hollywood Canteen
and actor, Bette Davis. Many of the women featured in this book
were influential during their lifetimes, politically active,
heading committees in their professional guilds, and giving
numerous PR interviews to syndicated journalists, and publicly
supporting other women regardless of political affiliation.
However, they were subsequently cut from mainstream academic and
popular histories of the industry, or, as in Hopper's case, labeled
as career-destroying, anti-communist viragos. Based on a decade of
archival research, Smyth uncovers a formidable generation working
within the American film industry and brings their voices back into
the history of Hollywood. Their achievements, struggles, and
perspectives fundamentally challenge popular ideas about
director-based auteurism, male dominance, and female disempowerment
in the years between First and Second Wave Feminism. Nobody's Girl
Friday is a revisionist history, but it's also a deeply personal,
collective account of hundreds of working women, the studios they
worked for, and the films they helped to make. For many years,
historians and critics have insisted that both American feminism
and the power of women in Hollywood declined and virtually
disappeared from the 1920s through the 1960s. But Smyth vindicates
Bette Davis's claim. The story of the women who called the shots in
studio-era Hollywood has never fully been told-until now.
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