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From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies

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When I first read this book, I absolutely hated it. Haskell is a total joykiller: one of those critics who can find something politically "wrong" with almost any film, even feminist films like Lizzie Borden's _Working Girls_. I still don't agree with everything she says, but now I see that its irritating quality is what makes it so great. Whatever you do, don't read it before you go to bed: you'll lie awake obsessing upon the gender conundrums outlined in the book. I would even recommend it to those who do not know very much about film; it's one of the very best feminist texts I've read for its consideration of women as consumers of popular culture. The book also raises interesting questions about women's sexuality and its representation. And I'll never look at Doris Day the same way again!

I was in the 11th grade at the time and I was just getting immersed in my fascination with movies and film theory. I read every book I could find on film studies.

That is when I stumbled upon this book (first edition) in my school's library. After reading this book, I never looked at the history of films, film themes, etc. in quite the same way.

As the years went by, I had read other film theory books that dealt with femininity and feminist thought, but this one always remained my favorite. So when the opportunity presented itself where I could add this book to my personal film library I was more than glad to.

I think I like this book so much because it introduced me to a series of films that while important in the women's studies and cinema may have been forgotten in the annuls of overall film theory and criticism. One outstanding example is "Letter from an Unknown Woman." The depth with which Ms. Haskell discusses this film immediately made me want to go out and see the film; and indeed I did.

I highly recommend this book not just to read but as an addition to any film lovers' library.

--there is absolutely nothing polemical or fanatical about this book, which is for film lovers--not just feminists. It is one of the best books on FILM (not just women in film) I've ever read, up there with Stanley Cavell's "Pursuits of Happiness," but much more direct and down-to-earth. Haskell is a fiercely smart, wickedly funny, and casually erudite critic with many extremely sharp observations. She's arguably both a better belles lettresist and a better critic than her (I believe???) one-time husband Andrew Sarris, a better-known and more prolific film critic. It's also hard to argue with her basic thesis: that the portrayal of women in film was better, not worse, in the studio era and prior to the sexual revolution--although this stands received film and feminist history alike on their heads. Haskell is a rare marvel and model: a feminist aesthete who is able to put art before politics without denigrating the importance of the latter. Unlike, say, Camille Paglia, she neither denies nor quasi-celebrates the misogyny of great or simply entertaining films, yet neither does she make political correctness a criterion of artistic achievement or see misogyny where none exists. On the contrary, some of the best passages of the book are accounts of the strong and complex female characters of directors such as Josef von Sternberg, Karl-Theodor Dreyer, and Howard Hawks, among others. A totally engaging blend of classical liberalism and belles lettres/punchy journalism.

Molly Haskell describes herself in the introduction of FROM REVERENCE TO RAPE as a film critic first, and only secondly as a feminist. She even remarks negatively on an article about the movie HUSBANDS that Betty Friedan wrote for the New York Times in 1971, saying that Ms. Friedan just used the movie to extrapolate on her basic message in THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE. Having said that, she goes through the decades of film from the silent pictures through to the eighties, and concludes that the basic use of film towards women has been to keep them happily in their place: that is, married, and at home and out of the workplace. She organizes the book chronologically and details the evolution of women both in the industry as writers, actresses and directors. She surprises us with the news that in the beginning, there were many women directors, and only as the industry blossomed did men enter the business and push the women out. Women, however, have had more luck in the film industry than in any other, she maintains, since writing, editing, costume design and especially acting, could be done without sheer physical strength being required. The power denied most women, derived from high incomes, was given in abundance to Hollywood movie stars and successful screenwriters such as Francis Marion, who earned $150,000 per year in the 1930's! Actresses, who played the classic roles of compliant wives and mothers for the most part, had power in their real lives that cost them dearly in their personal relationships. Read the book to find out how the irony of real life personal power clashed with the image of womanhood portrayed on the screen, and how woman's place has changed and how films are changing along with them. Don't be afraid to keep your dictionary alongside; Ms. Haskell's vocabulary is formidable.

Along with Susan Douglas's work, Growing Up Female in the Mass Media, this book is one of the most honest and clearly organized arguments about the way women are depicted in film. For anyone who wants to see what women are screaming about...this book will wake you up. Haskell does a fascinating job of expressing (and cleverly) what has been done to women in the media...how they've been portrayed and how they've been made to be prostrate creatures in film. If you buy it, you'll obsessively begin to notice how true this stuff is on your television set, in your films...everywhere in our society!

From Reverence to Rape is the classic against which all books about women in film must be judged. It's beautifully written, passionately argued. It's the kind of book that can be read over and over and over . . . and it's as fresh as it was when it debuted, 25 years ago. It is truly one of a small handful of indispensable film books written in the last forty years.

Most books on film criticism are so muddled by the authors intense desire to seem smart. Molly Haskell is smart and her book is smart, too. It's an interesting look at women in film from the 20's to today and it really made me think about film in a new way

I needed this book for my women in film class and I have to say, its quite a feminist piece. Haskell has very strong opinions that she seems to blend with historical context. Great for the movie junkie who wants to go a step further timeperiod by timeperiod!

I heartily recommend it.

Haskell wrote this book in 1974, six or seven years after the women's liberation movement heated up and became controversial on a national level. The last chapter is about the sixties.

This review is about what Haskell says in her book. Male female relationships and movies have changed since she wrote it.

Haskell has several themes. One is that traditional attitudes that devalue women relative to men are based on men's fears of woman's greater survival and sexual powers. Women are superior, she seems to say, and men are afraid of female competition and scorn. So men devised separate spheres for the sexes and denoted the women's as inferior to the man's.

Haskell says that men or society have made women dependent on love and marriage for all their happiness in life while men had things besides that, work, war, sports. This narrow vision for women led to great unhappiness and despair according to Haskell and was reflected in all movies, especially the genre called the woman's picture. Haskell's main beef with old movies is that women are not allowed to work like men in the movies. They don't have the life of the mind but only of the affections. In general, movies are about the importance of love and marriage and she points out how in many movies, the working woman had to give up her career when she met the "right man." Movies that showed women concentrating on other objects were usually about historical figures, like Marie Curie. A woman who wanted to do something besides find a man had to be taught a lesson about what was really right for her. In some cases, the bold woman would die in the end. Yet even in the movie where the woman died, she would leave an impression of bravery and beauty. Haskell sees the limitations put on women by tradition but she also sees the glory of the tradition and the concomitant exaltation of the female. So in the end of Christopher Strong, Katherine Hepburn playing an aviator (aviatrix) must die for choosing flying over love. Her man begs her not to fly, but she insists and goes down. The effect in the end is sad, but not negative. She died bravely as a heroine, just like a man dies as a hero. And this duality marks most of the book.

Haskell emphasizes that old movies are not a mere compendium of sexist attitudes showing women as stupid, but complicated and reflecting reality and also fantasy and ideals. There is sexism, but also women are shown as human as men are, just different. Love is important to both men and women.

Haskell sees quite clearly that male attitudes are a compound of good and bad and that to the man, the woman is icon, art object, idol, beloved, and visual entity. Haskell sees that the fear of the woman and the adoration go together. She seeks equality between the sexes, while at the same time she knows that equality will do away with the adoration and also, she fears, heterosexual love. She sees equality as neither sex having any traits particular to itself. Then she sees equality as an acknowledgment and appreciation of differences between the sexes. She sees the drawbacks of old fashioned sex roles and sexual morality. But she sees the problems with liberation and the negative effects of the loss of the tradition. At times, Haskell says that the life of women in pre liberation days was one of unrelieved misery. Then at times, she acknowledges that was not so. This basic contradiction informs a great deal of the book.

She values the movies where the woman rebelled, not in a self conscious way as I want to change the world (such movies hardly exist even today), but just struck out and refused to conform even if just for selfish reasons, like Bette Davis in so many movies. Bold, defiant, bad. But Haskell also likes it when Davis was the good girl, sacrificing for her man. Haskell appreciates that the emphasis on love in old movies was also an emphasis on the importance of women and the need for men and women to love each other. Haskell never makes the error of assuming as some feminists do, and she is a feminist, that in the past before liberation love did not exist or that it was not "real" love. As she says, it was not just about finding the right man, but also about the man finding the right woman. She points out that in the past women were important but in a different way, as in the movies of D.W. Griffith, which gave women emotional complexity and intensity, different from men but as important.

She looks at the disappearance of romance starting in the sixties based on people not knowing how to represent romance any more. The old style that emphasized finding the right man was gone, but no one knew what the new style was. She points out how the buddy films that emerged in the late sixties took the place of male female romance films, and how all the love and loyalty, yearning and spirituality, willingness to die for the other, eroticism sublimated in banter and action was no longer in male female romance movies, which were not being made any more, but in buddy films.

It was in the late fifties that women's roles began to change. During that time, female stars made hundreds of movies, yet most critical attention and accolades went to male actors, the method actors such as Brando and Dean and Newman and Clift, who supposedly embodied a new unfrivolous attitude towards acting and more reality in film. Glamor and the Hollywood dream and the love stories started to become passe. This in turn lead to a devaluation of women's part in the movies and fewer roles, at the same time that in life women were getting more jobs and education. In film, the emphasis became the young male's glorified estrangement from the culture and the fact that he was misunderstood. The woman represented society and civilization, what he was alienated from.

Movies used to show the sexes as needing each other and marriage as right and fitting for both. In the late fifties when things changed in the movies, the woman were portrayed as needing the man. He did not need the woman. Now, perhaps because of Freud's influence, single women were portrayed as sex starved, while the man could take it or leave it. In Picnic, the spinster teacher played by Rosalind Russell is bereft of all dignity and begs a man to marry her. The young beauty Kim Novak pants for William Holden in a way that Bette Davis or Doris Day never panted for anyone. Instead of the mutuality of wanting each other, the woman was put in an abject position needing the man more than he needed her.

Haskell finds that modern movies are no longer about men and women growing up and accepting responsibility but about staying a child forever, with an emphasis on weakness rather than strength, and a denial of adult agency. She acknowledges that what she likes in old movies is inextricably linked to old values. She feels that in the past the sex roles gave men and women more sexual confidence so that each could reverse roles for a spell and come back to themselves without damage to their psyches. For that to happen, there had to be something to come back to, of course. We less believe in things specifically masculine or feminine. Haskell regrets the passing of those norms.

Sexual freedom she points out has become oppressive, like a woman who flaunts hers by going braless and expects others not to notice. She points out that censorship beginning in the early thirties took women out of the boudoir and the negligee and into the office and suit. So it had some good effects in liberating women and in making American women active. On the other hand, censorship made movies lie about sex and promoted hypocrisy and labeled sexually active women as "bad" women. But yet again, Haskell points out that sexual emancipators see only part of the truth, they miss that puritanism and repression of sex result in civilization and achievement, and give rise to creativity and energy. The repressed sexual feelings comes out in other ways.

Haskell points out that the early censorship code that existed until the mid-sixties expressed and reinforced the American fear that without restraint civilization would collapse. Haskell decries this viewpoint but has no other code to put in its place. She points out that now that sex has been demystified, we don't know how to deal with it.

Haskell is very good on the "sex goddess" phenomenon, an American invention, that served the purpose of redeeming sex from itself, rescuing it from awkwardness and the odor of death, turning it into something ideal and eternally youthful. The French she tell us glory in the death aspect of sex. They don't need to clean it up. Haskell does not recommend the French attitude which is also sexist. Haskell implies that it is possible to have a "healthy" non conflicted view of sex. But what this would look like she does not give any indication.

Haskell is very good on the woman's picture, a movie which gave all importance to the woman and her feelings. In those movies, the woman was the center of the world and the man and everyone else revolved around her. These movies were about the importance of love and marriage, dramatized to make the woman the heroine of her little world, often the self sacrificing heroine who was admired for her bravery and unselfishness. The female audience identified with the suffering heroine, who was simultaneously ennobled and degraded/dead. So in Dark Victory, Bette Davis dies, but in a brave way, giving no trouble to her beloved husband and woman friend. In Stella Dallas, Barbara Stanwyck abandons her daughter and goes off alone, but for her daughter's own good. Haskell says such fantasies expressed real life American women's misery, which I do not fully agree with. This was a way for women to feel appreciated, which they did not feel in real life. She says that men had their own version of male weepies, with the man giving all for his country or for the law or crime (as in gangster films) or honor. I don't think that meant men were particularly unhappy. Life everywhere is full of unhappiness and art expresses it and deals with it in some manner. I don't know if Americans were more unhappy than any other group of people at that time.

Haskell criticizes a movie in which Irene Dunne and Cary Grant play a married couple who want a child. She finds the intense desire for a child a sick desire. However, the desire seems to perfectly normal. Some people do intensely want children and are often made very unhappy when they can't have them.

Haskell points out that old movies dealt with things important to women which were often derided by male critics, such as the loss of virginity, marriage, the importance of children, and so on. These things were as crucial to women as law or war to men. The woman's picture is not given its due according to her because of a bias against the woman centeredness of it.

One aspect of old movies favorable to women that Haskell does not mention is the prevalence of older women, mothers, aunts, grandmothers. These women disappeared in the fifties.

Haskell is great when it comes to actresses, like Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Ida Lupino, Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Rosalind Russell. The part about His Gal Friday with Grant and Russell is very good. The movie shows how much Russell cares about her profession of reporter, as much as the men care, and she is as good as they are. But in the end, she cannot be as ruthless and unscrupulous as Grant, who is playing her editor and former husband.

Haskell is astute in recognizing the puritanism of Scarlett O'Hara and the smart women that Hepburn played, both afraid of losing self control and deriving their great strength from their control. Scarlett is afraid if she gives in one inch to Rhett, she will lose herself completely. Scarlett never does come to an agreement with Rhett. Hepburn, however, in her movies with Tracy, and Haskell does not discuss this enough, came to an agreement with the man. In fact, she submitted and sometimes he did too. Submission was no disgrace to her, with a man who appreciated her unique qualities. Their union, as expressed in the movies they made together, was based on equality to a point. In the end, it seems like he had the last word.

Haskell points out that Hepburn for several years was box office poison. She was odd even in her youthful beauty and not quite a crowd pleaser. Yet she endured because Americans learned to love her oddness. Hepburn analyzes the way that Hepburn was a great actress, yet always Hepburn (just as John Wayne, an under appreciated actor, was always himself).

Haskell is also great on Doris Day, unappreciated today and unfairly maligned as coy and frigid (as they used to say). In her movies, Day expressed an interest in and a desire to have sex when she liked a man. It was the movie conventions that prevented the act, as it would be discovered at the crucial moment that Rock Hudson had been lying to her all along. Then her dignity demanded that she leave him. In the fifties was when movies began to examine sex, asking should she or should she not before marriage?

Day, as Haskell says, is very like a real life American woman, in her lack of instinctive knowledge about womanhood and sex, in her intelligence and competence and optimism. In her movies, she could work at a job or career and raise kids and run a household equally well. Haskell contrasts her to Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, less anxious and more elegant than Day. Day worked hard to get her man or in the office or to raise her kids. She was not as graceful as these other actresses, and Haskell feels that despite Day's tremendous popularity and success, women did not want to be her as they wanted to be lovely and graceful like Hepburn and Kelly and not to have to strain for things.

Haskell points out the unfairness of how older women are viewed. Until the modern era, youth went with youth and age with age. Except among the very wealthy, a man could not be with a woman young enough to be his daughter. It was ridiculous. Liberation changed all that for even ordinary middle class men. In the movies, Haskell says, Cary Grant in the thirties was with Irene Dunne, in the forties with Katherine Hepburn or Myrna Loy, in the fifties with Sophia Loren, in the sixties with Audrey Hepburn. The women became younger as he became older. Such associations with a younger man was impossible for women. Haskell discusses All that Heaven Allows, where the older widow played by Jane Wyman marries Rock Hudson, at least a dozen years younger than herself, pointing out the unusual nature of the film, one of the few to portray such a relationship positively.

She points out that in the US the role of the mother, the woman as tamer and civilizer of the unruly man has been resented as constricting to the male. In Europe, the civilizing aspect was appreciated. However as Haskell points out, the European view is not more liberated in giving freedom to the woman. French movies have a positive take on the older woman younger man relationship. The older woman is not seen as grotesque and the relationship is approved of. However, it is not meant to be a permanent relationship. The young man gets his tutoring in love and culture from the knowledgeable older female and then moves on to a younger woman who is more his natural mate. The older woman serves as his teacher, whom he must leave when he matures.

The chapter on foreign movies is very instructive, given that we are accustomed to thinking that European movies are naturally superior to Hollywood products. Haskell compares US films and European films and finds that our national output shows to decided advantage. The movies that came here, what used to be called art house movies, and that were celebrated were the best, from Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini. The average American movie stands up very well compared to the average European movie, characterized by sexism and mediocrity. It is a rare American movie that is as smug as the average French movie, which as Haskell states, bathes everything French in a glow of self satisfaction.

Haskell says that in Europe women are more at ease with their bodies and sexuality, but more enslaved to traditional social values than Americans. Americans on the other hand have more anxiety over their bodies and what it means to be a woman, but have relative social freedom. The European films show women as superfemales with an instinctive knowledge of what it is to be a woman. Those movies are much more open about sex. But the women know their place and express themselves within their position and status, while in America, women rebel against the strictures. The great foreign directors have a very close connection to their female actresses, often that of wife/lover. The women reflect the director's view much more than in American movies. The American movie star connects to the audience, sometimes seeming to go behind the director's back and emit signals to the audience of which the director knows nothing and which even that the star herself cannot voice, while the European actress remains a creation of the male director and stands for Woman more than as a individual.

Haskell has a few trenchant remarks about Truffaut and the immaturity of his boyish leading men to whom women are sacrificed. Her views on Italian movies are amusing as she points out very correctly that the movies look fondly on national idiosyncracies including the childishness of the men without the least intent to change anything. The patriarchy is always upheld. She also discusses the grotesque women in Fellini films. She says that the best European movies, nonetheless, are less concerned with presenting happy endings and conforming to convention and thus are often more truthful than American movies regarding the sexual aspect of women's lives. They do not insist on a happy marriage in the end.

In her chapter on the sixties, she says that the roles for women dwindled into prostitutes and various kinds of kooks, that civilized narratives of love stories disappeared. As for the men, the old stars played grown up men, wore suits and did not have the luxury or burden of emotional and occupational freedom. Men in modern film are busy being sensitive and self regarding, and became so soft and sensitive they took over the woman's role. She also sees a new ugly hostility to women. The famous scene in which Cagney pushed a grapefruit into his mistresses' face is nowhere near as nasty as the hostile misogyny in a movie like Straw Dogs, which portrays the main actress as a nymphomaniac who asks to be raped and who despises her husband (portrayed sympathetically) for supposed weakness, for not being "man" enough. The end of censorship brought about pornography and obscenity and heretofore unseen insults to women in the popular culture.

The solution as she sees it is more jobs for woman, more professional advancement, to open up unions. She seeks for men a new definition of manhood that includes bravery in personal relationships, which presumably means that they should express their feelings more. She seems to say that perhaps if the sexes are really equal, then romance will return, or perhaps romance will not be necessary. In fact, Haskell does not know how to combine romance with liberation and equality.

Haskell should analyze the romantic comedies from 1990, as the genre is becoming more and more popular, to see how romance and liberation fare together. What would she make of Knocked Up and My Best Friend's Wedding?

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