ABSTRACT
Film historians are gradually coming to terms with the substantial number of women involved in the Hollywood film industry during the twentieth century, yet recent research has largely focused on “pioneers” of the silent era, such as director Lois Weber, star and United Artists’ co-founder Mary Pickford, serial star Pearl White, and screenwriter Frances Marion (Beauchamp 1998;Whitfield 2007; Gaines et al. 2013; Dahlquist 2013; Hallett 2013). Karen Ward Mahar (2008) and Mark Garrett Cooper (2010) have argued persuasively that masculine managerial business practices all but closed the directing profession to women by the mid-1920s, and this has led many to assume that women lost professional prominence in the industry. The scholarly consensus holds that by the end of the 1920s, the limitless frontiers of early Hollywood had closed, and many high-profile female filmmakers vanished from the industry. It certainly is tempting to use these mythical western metaphors to characterize the narrative of women’s presence in Hollywood during the first few decades of the twentieth century-reading these women as female pioneers in a wide-open cinematic frontier townbut this discourse, as well as the assumption that women were utterly disempowered and lost creative control during the 1930s and throughout the studio era, is problematic. While feminist historians of the silent era have turned to the archives and the industry
trade papers to reconstruct women’s widespread presence in the US film industry, I would argue that further study of the extant studio archival collections suggests continuity rather than change in women’s work in Hollywood during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Although overall numbers of female directors declined (with Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino the great exceptions), women remained active in the industry as producers, writers, script readers, researchers, actors, costume and make-up designers, set dressers, secretaries, publicists, agents, and editors. This chapter will consider the historiographic issues raised by the robust number of prominent female editors working in Hollywood between 1920 and 1960, and will focus on four editors-Barbara “Bobbie” McLean, Margaret Booth, Anne Bauchens, and Jane Loring. Although closely following the content of female editors’ careers in the studio era, this
chapter is also mindful of the discourse or form of early twenty-first-century women’s film historiography. Recently, borrowing from journalist Louella Parsons’ advertisement of
Hollywood as a new “West” for women, film historians have eagerly but rather naively appropriated the discourse of American frontier history, singling out great female filmmakers as “pioneers” to promote early Hollywood as a “free” space for modern women (Hallett 2013: 99; Gaines et al. 2013). Is it adequate or even appropriate to construct a women’s filmmaking canon using the same exclusionary language which erased women from active participation in earlier eras of US history? While some historians have argued that great women carved “pioneering” paths out of the wilderness, they tended to privilege the rare Annie Oakleys and ignore the scores of anonymous women of varied ethnic backgrounds who conceived of their experience through familial and community networks, kinships, and collaboration (Brown 1958; Riley 1988, 1993). In the same way, film historians schooled in conventional auteurism are committed to a hierarchy of work emphasizing directors as the definitive creative force in filmmaking (Sarris 1968; Robson and Kelly 2014). More recent feminist historians of the American West have offered a more complex framework for understanding women’s history and their subjects’ often ironic writings about the relative freedoms of the Wild West (Georgi Findlay 1996; Des Jardins 2003). Similarly, in their oral histories, memoirs, and professional writings, Hollywood’s top female studio editors were ambivalent about their exceptional status and how Second Wave feminist aims interpreted their careers and attitudes toward Hollywood. Film historians, invested in auteurs, the golden West of silent-era Hollywood, and misogynist corporate empires, have edited their voices from popular histories of Hollywood.
