4. Sexist behavior wasn’t solely the purview of men during Hollywood’s Golden Age
Dorothy Arzner is a name all but unknown to casual film fans today, but during the silent film era and the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s she was well-known in the film industry, and for sixteen years (1927-43) held the distinction of being Hollywood’s only working female director. It was Arzner who first directed Clara Bow in a talking motion picture, The Wild Party, which also featured the first leading role of Fredric March. In the film, Arzner depicted college coeds as hard-drinking predators in pursuit of their male professors. Her films gradually developed a recurrent theme; conventional marriage was repressive for women, and she had several of her female characters rejecting their relationships with men to start new ones with each other. She dressed in masculine-style clothing, had affairs with several female stars of the era (including Joan Crawford, Billie Burke, and Katherine Hepburn, according to biographers), and maintained a forty-year relationship with her paramour, dancer Marion Morgan.
Arzner’s sexist attitudes were reflected in her films and her depiction of men, especially married heterosexual men, as repressive, almost tyrannical figures. She depicted the American housewife as being entirely the property of her husband, which led her to be a servant uninterested in a personal relationship. Arzner depicted heterosexual relationships to be unfailingly repressive for women, and in her films, her female characters escaped suffocating partnerships to find new relationships to explore with other women. Her sexist attitudes led to her finding a decreasing audience for her work by the early 1940s, though she continued to work in the industry through conducting film classes and in the theater and radio.