Feminism and women's film criticism in post-war Britain, 1945–1959

Abstract

Feminist film criticism is widely thought to have started in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the “Images of Woman” debate associated with critics such as Marjorie Rosen provided the foundation for later developments in feminist film theory. Antonia Lant has recently claimed the immediate post-1950 period to be a barren time for female-authored publications on film and cinema. This article argues that, contrary to received wisdom, the post-war period (1945–1959) in Britain was a time when women's film criticism flourished, with writers such as Dilys Powell, C.A. Lejeune, Catherine de la Roche and E. Arnot Robertson enjoying high-profile careers. Moving beyond a simple recovery of women's “hidden histories,” this article highlights the points of connection between the post-war period and later film criticism informed by second wave feminism. Through a case study of de la Roche and Robertson this article explores how women critics in this period were similarly preoccupied with screen representations of women and women's roles within the film industry, anticipating the later concerns of Rosen and others. I argue that a cross-media focus is a productive method for generating insights into women's critical agency at this time, and conclude that women's film criticism demonstrates something of the wider shifts taking place in gender relations in British society.

Keywords:

• film criticism
• feminism
• gender
• post-war Britain
• women's magazines and radio
• women critics

Acknowledgement

This research was enabled by a grant awarded from the Arts and Humanities Research Council under its Research Leave Scheme (2008/9) and I gratefully acknowledge their support of the project.

Notes

 1. Notable exceptions include work by Lant (2006) and Haidee Wasson on Iris Barry (2006).

 2. It is usual to distinguish between film reviews and film criticism as two related yet separate activities. Meaghan Morris argues that reviewing is based on the assumption that the reader hasn't seen the film, which produces a text that is open and incomplete (the reviewer can't reveal the ending, for example) whilst criticism deals with a film that is closed and can locate that film in relation to broader arguments about a director's artistic development or a genre's evolution, for example (1988, pp. 117–118). Some writers are primarily reviewers (Hedda Hopper, Freda Bruce Lockhart) whilst some reviewers (Pauline Kael, Catherine de la Roche for example) produce film criticism, reflecting on a director's work and relating that to the development of the film medium.

 3. See Dupin (2006) for more detail on the BFIs programme. Although de la Roche is not mentioned in Dupin's article, my research at the BBC's Written Archives at Caversham and the National Library of New Zealand confirms de la Roche's involvement in this programme.

 4. See Melanie Bell (2010). Melanie Williams has similarly problematised understandings of 1950s British film as inherently conservative, pointing to the emergence of the “new woman” in unlikely places such as the war genre (2009, pp. 95–108).

 5. Haskell refuses a conspiracy theory approach which sees film production as only male fantasy as this denies women's own “rearguard fantasies of rape, sadism, submission, liberation, and anonymous sex” (see Thornham 1997, pp. 16–17).

 6. The reason for this might be attributed to their age as both, born around 1900, came of age during the women's suffrage movement and had perhaps more in common with activists like Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby than later figures such as the politician Shirley Williams who, Elizabeth Wilson argues, typified the “modern” woman of the 1950s and 1960s and refused the label “feminist” which she associated with her mother's generation (Wilson 1980, p. 185).

 7. E. Arnot Robertson's 1949 article for Good Housekeeping, “If you were directing a film,” offers a similar educative approach, outlining the component parts of filmmaking and what they involve before concluding with a personal address, “perhaps the job [of film director] is waiting for you”.

 8. As a point of comparison Good Housekeeping's sales were respectable but somewhat small-scale compared to the weekly-published market leader Woman which recorded sales of just over one million in 1946 (White 1970, Appendix IV and V).

 9. In 1948 de la Roche had attempted unsuccessfully to interest Woman's Hour in broadcasting similar topics in a proposed six-programme series entitled “Women and film” (see Bell 2010, pp. 149–171 for further discussion ).

10. Mark Glancy and others have demonstrated how middle-class respondents couched their enjoyment of film in ways that worked to distance them from a film's populist elements. For example middle-class respondents to popular melodramas like Now Voyager (1945) focused on their “appreciation” of Bette Davis's acting ability rather than the film's genre elements of romance, high emotional temperature and dramatic music (2009, p. 60).

11. Whilst Bowlby's study was of children in institutions, it was taken as a general report of maternal deprivation and its findings widely applied (Birmingham Feminist History Group 1979, p. 55).