The Hepburn Alma Mater: Bryn Mawr College

"In a 1973 visit to the College, Hepburn told Bryn Mawr undergraduates, "Bryn Mawr isn't plastic, it isn't nylon, it's pure gold... I came here by the skin of my teeth; I got in and by the skin of my teeth I stayed. It was the best thing I ever did. Bryn Mawr was my springboard into adult life. I discovered that you can do anything if you work hard enough. I feel that I was enormously lucky to come here. I am very proud when I see the name, very proud." In 1977, Hepburn was awarded Bryn Mawr's Highest honor, the M. Carey Thomas Award." (Bryn Mawr)

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in ADAM'S RIB (1949)

Katharine Hepburn’s brand of feminism can be traced back to the philosophies and practices of Bryn Mawr College, one of the Seven Sisters Colleges of the East. Both Hepburn and her mother attended the college which was seen by many to embody the feminist ideals of its first dean and second president, M. Carey Thomas, the nation’s leader in the fight for higher education for women. Hepburn’s connections to the college, both directly through her own experience as a student, and more significantly through the indirect connection with her mother’s generation of Bryn Mawrters, lead to a specific brand of feminism, identifiable as unique to the Bryn Mawr experience.

Wearing My Feminism on My Sleeve

I apologize, dear reader, for taking this autobiographical sidetrack from classic movies. It is not my habit to use this blog to discuss my personal views. That said, I was led this morning to write this article about feminism. I do not mean to offend anybody with my views and this is not a political rant, by any means. It is simply a metacognitive look at how I became a feminist. It is kind of Katharine Hepburn's fault, so I have allowed myself to publish it here. I am not offended if you are not in the least bit interested. Staye tuned for more posts about classic film history after this!

Although I consider myself a feminist now, I have not always done so. I was raised in a fairly respectable middle class family; my parents are conservative and they raised my brother and me to share their views, without actually forcing them upon us. Bill Clinton was always referred to as “Slick Willy” at our dinner table, and after 9/11 we put up our American flag and supported George Bush 100%. But then the United States invaded Iraq I thought, “Now, wait a minute. Where are you going with this one, W.?” At college two professors in particular had a profound effect on my political education. One was liberal and one was conservative, and I am so grateful to both of them for being such just, fair, open-minded individuals as they encouraged me to cultivate my own political views.

When I read Katharine Hepburn’s autobiography (Me, 1996) in my sophomore year in college, I found myself as interested in her progressive upbringing as in her film career. Hepburn’s mother, Katharine Houghton Hepburn, was orphaned at sixteen, yet still managed to put herself and her younger sisters through Bryn Mawr College. Both she and her sister Edith threw themselves into progressive reform work after graduation and marriage. They worked tirelessly for woman suffrage and birth control, taking what they had learned at Bryn Mawr to help raise the standard of women’s rights.

 

As I began studying Progressive Reform Era feminism (1^st wave feminism), I felt myself becoming more sympathetic with the feminist, gender, and sexuality issues of my own time. Frankly, I am not terribly interested in politics, as such; the mud-slinging, back-stabbing, and corruption that goes on in government bores the brains out of me. But I am a compassionate individual who likes to make informed decisions based on my highest sense of right. Sometimes this means I support the liberals, sometimes the conservatives. But I will always support the women’s movement.

The Most Radically Feminist Films of Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Hepburn has been called a feminist film persona and a 20^th century feminist icon, but few have really delved into the sources and manifestations of the term “feminist” as it relates to this great star. Is she called a feminist because she insisted on wearing pants in a time when most women were expected to wear skirts and high heels? We all know the story about the time the studio, in an effort to force her into dresses and skirts, stole the trousers from her trailer and Hepburn paraded around the studio in her underwear until her slacks were returned. Her feminism was also manifested in her choice of a career over marriage. Although these aspects of her life choices contribute to our image of the feminist, it is within her films themselves that the strength of her feminism is most prevalent.

M. Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr

Hepburn’s feminist choices and tendencies can be traced back to a couple different sources, but I believe that the major feminizing influence on Katharine Hepburn is Bryn Mawr College, one of the Seven Sister’s colleges on the East coast. Not only did Hepburn herself go there, but the major female influences of her childhood also attended, including her mother, her Aunt Edith, and her mother’s friends from college, “Aunts” Mary Towle and Bertha Rembaugh (prominent lawyers living in Greenwich Village). At Bryn Mawr, Hepburn’s mother’s generation adopted the feminist principles of the college’s president M. Carey Thomas. Katharine Hepburn was raised in the midst of the Bohemian society that these early feminist created for themselves - a female society of free thought, speech, and action. The Hepburn feminist persona is a product of the feminism she experienced first-hand as a child.

Although many of Hepburn's films contain themes of feminism, her most radically feminist films can be divided into three categories: those in which communities of women are central to the plot/story, those in which Hepburn portrays strong female characters from literature and history, and those films which directly address the "woman issue." 

Hepburn as Jo from
LITTLE WOMEN (1933)

In a previous post, I described the nature of films in which communities of women are featured the way in which such films break down stereotypes about female professionals. The Hepburn films that follow the "communities of women" structure are LITTLE WOMEN (1933), QUALITY STREET (1937), STAGE DOOR (1937), DESK SET (1957), THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT (1969), and THE TROJAN WOMEN (1971).

Hepburn plays women from literature and history a number of times: LITTLE WOMEN (1933), MARY OF SCOTLAND (1936), SONG OF LOVE (1947), and THE LION IN WINTER (1968). As you can see, these women are characteristically  independent and freethinking individuals. In two of these films, Hepburn is portraying women of power, women in leadership roles.

Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in
ADAM'S RIB (1949)

Only a couple of Hepburn's films directly address the question of woman's equality, or gender issues generally, but these films are the most significant because of the pertinence of their message: LITTLE WOMEN (1933), SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935), A WOMAN REBELS (1936), WOMAN OF THE YEAR (1942), ADAM'S RIB (1949), and ROOSTER COGBURN (1975). One could argue that a couple of these films don't meet the qualifications for the category, but the gender stereotypes are so central to the thrust of the story, I chose to include them in this group.


The films listed here make up more than 25% of the movies Katharine Hepburn made in her 60-year career. Even in those films that didn't qualify for these categories, Hepburn carries the standard of female autonomy high. LITTLE WOMEN is the only film that overlapped in these three divisions, which goes to show how significant the Jo March character is to the feminist ideal. M. Carey Thomas herself used to sign her diary as Jo when she was a girl. George Cukor, who directed Hepburn in that film and many others, often remarked that LITTLE WOMEN was Hepburn's seminal film because she actually was Jo, in more ways than one!

As Eleanor of Aquitaine in THE LION IN WINTER (1968)
(with Peter O'Toole)

If I were to compose a canon of Hepburn's most feminist films, I would choose only a couple from each of the groups listed above. Clearly, LITTLE WOMEN would make the top of the list, closely followed by ADAM'S RIB, in which Hepburn and Tracy play husband and wife lawyers on opposite sides of the courtroom - she defending the female position, he the male. The two films which best embody the manifestation of female autonomy are STAGE DOOR and DESK SET, not because the Hepburn character is radically feminist, but because the film text as a whole supports a feminist agenda. The last film I would add to the canon would be THE LION IN WINTER, because Eleanor of Aquitaine was a feminist in her own right long before there was a fancy word for it. Hepburn really did her research for that part and felt an immediate affinity for the queen who had lived hundreds of years before her. There is no doubt she deserved the Oscar she won for that role.


I hope you enjoy watching these films! I always love to hear what you think about Katharine Hepburn as a feminist persona. Do you agree with my list? What changes would you make? What films would you add or take away? Thanks for reading and happy viewing!

HOLIDAY (1938)

Yes, they did actually
make this film.

By the end of the 1930s it had appeared that Katharine Hepburn's star had already risen and fallen. Due to a string of commercial failures (BREAK OF HEARTS, SYLVIA SCARLETT, A WOMAN REBELS, QUALITY STREET, to name a few), the independent movie theatres had labelled Hepburn "box office poison." This bad press made it difficult for even her good films of the period (ALICE ADAMS, STAGE DOOR, BRINGING UP BABY) to turn a profit for the studio. When RKO Radio Pictures offered Katharine Hepburn a part in a film entitled MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS, she knew it was time for her to quit that studio and move on to greener pastures. She paid RKO $75,000 to loan her out to Columbia for HOLIDAY (for which she was paid a handsome $150,000).

Hope Williams
as Linda Seton

This wasn't the first time Hepburn had seen this material. After her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1928, she got a job as understudy to Hope Williams who was playing the lead in Philip Barry's play Holiday on Broadway (it was while working as Williams' understudy that she married her beau from college days, Ludlow Ogden Smith, and moved to New York City). However, when Hepburn remembers this early opportunity in show business, she says "I soon realized that Hope was a very healthy girl. It wasn't that I wished her anything bad. She was very talented and very nice. But I understood that being an understudy was almost worse than not being in the theatre at all, if you understudied someone who never missed a performance" (Chandler, 122). When Williams offered to stay home for a matinee and allow Hepburn perform in her stead, Hepburn turned her down. "An excess of pride," explains Hepburn. "It was what I suffered from." Hepburn would later use material from Holiday for her first ever screen test, which is how she caught the eye of director and long-time friend George Cukor.

Linda and Johnny perform an
acrobatic stunt in HOLIDAY

HOLIDAY is a very thoughtful story, bordering on the philosophical. Johnny Case (Cary Grant) is engaged to Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) only ten days after meeting her on vacation at Lake Placid. When he comes home to meet the family, he confides in Julia's older sister Linda (Hepburn) about his plans for the future. His dream is to quickly make enough money to quit work and take an extended holiday so that he can take time to think and discover what it is he is working for. Although he and Linda understand the grand potential of his scheme, he has a harder time convincing his fiancee and their father the viability of the plan. Linda and Johnny are both taken aback by Julia's reluctance to stray from the severe conventionality of the patriarchal way of life exhibited by other members of their social class. Linda, like Johnny, has always despised wealth and the lifestyle it forces upon its subjects. Julia and her father, on the other hand, aspire to expand the family's fortune and respectability as far as possible and are unsympathetic towards Johnny's attempt to excuse himself from the cycle of acquiring wealth and privilege. Johnny is conflicted between his love from Julia and his desire to follow his dreams. Linda is conflicted by her love for her sister, and her sister's potential happiness with Johnny, and her own romantic feelings for him and the life he wants to pursue. (NOTE: In a future post on this blog, I intend to pursue a feminist reading of HOLIDAY, examining the role of the Hepburn character in the narrative of the story, as well as the more subtle nuances concerning the representation of women in the film text as a whole.)

"Don't you say a word about Leopold! He's very sensitive!"
"Your's?"
"Uh-huh - Looks like me."

Although critics praised HOLIDAY, and Katharine Hepburn's performance in it, depression-era audiences did not enjoy some of the inherent themes. While 30s movie-goers loved to observe "the privileged class enjoying its privileges" (THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)), they were not sympathetic to the Johnny character who wanted to chuck a good job out the window so that he could have the freedom to think. America was looking for pragmatism and optimism during the 1930s, and Johnny's happy-go-lucky scheme to quit work and philosophize about life was too impractical to be attractive.

Katharine Hepburn did not linger long in Hollywood after the release of HOLIDAY. Selznick was tempted to cast her as Scarlett in GONE WITH THE WIND, but she withdrew her name from that contest. Though she must have been aware of what such a role would mean for her dwindling career, Hepburn never felt that the part was right for her. When Vivien Leigh was discovered, Hepburn returned East for a year or so of self-imposed exile from Hollywood. She would not be in Hollywood for all of 1939, universally acknowledged to be the biggest year in cinema history, but she would return in 1940 in a big way with THE PHILADELPHIA STORY.