page_title: Women in film
section_title: Women's films
hierarchical_section_title: Women in film / Women's films
caption_attribution_description: Cropped screenshot of Henry Fonda and Bette Davis from the trailer for the film Jezebel.
context_page_description: Women are involved in the film industry in all roles, including as film directors, actresses, cinematographers, film producers, film critics, and other film industry professions, though women have been underrepresented in creative positions.
  Most English-language academic study and media coverage focus on the issue in the US film industry, although inequalities also exist in other countries. This underrepresentation has been called the "celluloid ceiling", a variant on the employment discrimination term "glass ceiling".
  Women have always had a presence in film acting, but have consistently been underrepresented, and on average significantly less well paid. On the other hand, many key roles in filmmaking were for many decades done almost entirely by men, such as directors and cinematographers. In more recent times, women have made inroads and made contributions to many of these fields.
context_section_description: A woman's film is a film genre which includes women-centered narratives, female protagonists and is designed to appeal to a female audience. Woman's films usually portray "women's concerns" such as problems revolving around domestic life, the family, motherhood, self-sacrifice, and romance. These films were produced from the silent era through the 1950s and early 1960s, but were most popular in the 1930s and 1940s, reaching their zenith during World War II. Although Hollywood continued to make films characterized by some of the elements of the traditional woman's film in the second half of the 20th century, the term itself largely disappeared in the 1960s.
  The work of directors George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls, and Josef von Sternberg has been associated with the woman's film genre. Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck were some of the genre's most prolific stars. The beginnings of the genre can be traced back to D. W. Griffith's silent films. Film historians and critics defined the genre and canon in retrospect. Before the woman's film became an established genre in the 1980s, many of the classic woman's films were referred to as melodramas. Anne Fontaine directed Coco Before Chanel and The Innocents, Fontaine established herself as a very progressive filmmaker of her time when saying this, establishing that ‘women’s cinema’ should be based on the filmmaker's perspective rather than their gender. This also suggests that classifying and interpreting films in the category of ‘women’s cinema’ is creating bias and exclusivity among the genre in itself, when it should be a network of creation and empowerment, as Fontaine always intended. While knowing that the movement of ‘women’s cinema’ worked as a counter to the classical Hollywood system, Fontaine didn't like to identify with this. During an interview in 1998 with Eve-Laure Moros, she stated: I think that to be a filmmaker, as far as sexuality, it's something that's really de-sexualizing. That is, you become a bizarre thing, when you're directing a film---during the shooting, you're neither a man nor a woman, you're really something strange and very ambivalent.
caption: Bette Davis and Henry Fonda in Jezebel (1938), one of the quintessential woman's films. Davis plays a Southern belle who loses her fiancé (Fonda) and her social standing when she defies conventions. She redeems herself by self-sacrifice.[22]
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