The Books of My Life: A Woman's View

Jeanine Basinger, in her book A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960 (Hanover: NH, Wesleyan University Press, 2013) rightly, in my opinion, sees the movies Hollywood made between 1930 and the early 1960s, particularly the movies aimed at women, as, at least in part, Durkheimian. Hollywood films, in other words, show those in the audience what they should and should not do. They hold up a mirror for women that reflects back to them images of how they should act and how they shouldn’t act. They also, as Basinger notes, allow women to have their cake and eat it too, for while watching women on the big screen doing what the films ultimately tell them they should not do, women in the audience were able to experience the vicarious thrill of liberation, if only briefly, from the social and cultural norms associated with the cult of domesticity.

There is a lot to admire in Basinger’s book. Basinger takes a sociological approach to Hollywood films and to women’s films rather than the psychoanalytic approach that is far too common in contemporary academic film studies these days and all the better, in my opinion, for it. Basinger foregrounds the fact that Hollywood films aimed at women were gender tales and moral cautionary tales, similar, in their own way, to the much critically reviled Socialist realist novels and films of the 20^th century. Hollywood films aimed at women, Basinger argues, showed American women in the audience that their lives should revolve around the cult of domesticity and showed them the dangers that awaited them should they not follow women’s natural path of men, marriage, and motherhood. Basinger’s analysis is grounded in a systematic and analytical analysis of hundreds if not thousands of women’s films with their recurring characters, settings, plots, dialogues, and techniques, rather than, as is far too common in contemporary academic film studies, the analysis of what are seen as classics largely in retrospect. Basinger’s study is sensitive to historical change. She argues, for example, that the cult of domesticity oriented women’s films Hollywood produced were undermined by the countercultural “revolution” and its sexual revolution.

I had a few qualms about Basinger’s analysis. Basinger admits that it is difficult to define the genre women’s films making one wonder whether Hollywood’s women’s films are best seen as a genre or as a theme or a tone. Basinger’s analysis is only limitedly quantitative raising questions about the representative nature of the case studies of women’s films she explores. Basinger’s study assumes certain things about audience reactions to Hollywood’s women’s films. Without quantitative or qualitative studies of how women in the women’s film audience actually reacted to such films, however, Basinger’s hypotheses about how the audience for women’s films reacted to the films remains, as she realises, tentative.
 
Despite these concerns I highly recommend Basinger’s book to anyone interested in gender studies, cultural studies, socialisation processes, and film studies. Unlike many of the scholarly analyses of films grounded in psychoanalytic methodologies and approaches, Basinger’s historical and cultural study of Hollywood movies is likely to prove useful to those interested in the intersections of gender, culture, films for some time.