Dueling Divas and Why Hepburn Isn't One

This post was written in conjunction with the Dueling Divas Blogathon hosted by Lara at Backlots.

Women in film are often represented as romantic rivals for a male character. Girlfriends and ex-girlfriends, wives and mothers, sisters and fiancées are perpetually warring with each other on the big screen. As the Bechdel test highlights, women are seldom shown as friends, and when they are shown as friends they are still obsessed with love and marriage. We are often exposed to an image of women as bitchy, witchy, and catty. There is no doubt that the media perpetuates this view of womanhood via advertising and news coverage. The current slew of "reality" TV shows is shameless about showcasing the very worst idea of womanhood.

However, there are instances throughout film history when the public has been exposed to alternative, more healthy examples of womanhood. Several of Katharine Hepburn's films include situations where one would expect a "dueling diva" type of scenario, yet in many cases, any semblance of a romantic rivalry is broken down by the ultimate unity, or at least tolerance, of the female characters in question. These examples can be broken down into three distinct categories: communities of professional women, female relatives, and friendships. Hepburn's persona, as a champion of women's equality, serves to bring women together, rather than alienate them from each other. Here are the various ways that the strength of the Hepburn persona as anti-rival is manifested in her films:

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!

Communities of Women: Katharine Hepburn Passes the Bechdel Test

The cast of The Women with director George Cukor

The Bechdel Test had a significant impact on helping film viewers become aware of the lack of realistic female relationships on screen. It points out that not only are individual women not accurately represented, but that the way women interact with one another as friends, mothers, daughters, sisters, is almost completely ignored. Groups of men are represented in a slew of westerns, military, and sports films in which their primary subject of interest is not women. Yet movies like chick flicks, which do show groups of women, are more often than not focused on a romantic relationship with a man. This was equally true in classic Hollywood, the most obvious example being George Cukor's fabulous all-female cast The Women (1939), in which all the characters ever talk about is men!

Scholar Andrew Britton argues that Hollywood films about female relatives show these characters “bound together in passionate, destructive resentment and animosity” which is invariably generated by the women being rivals for a man and/or, as in the twin-doubles films, by their embodiment of the ‘good’ (wifely, domesticated) and ‘bad’ (sexual) woman respectively." However, he recognizes the difference in Hepburn films. He calls the female bond in Hepburn films an “oppositional unity in contradiction to that of the patriarchal family”. These bonds are therefore, as in Little Women (1933, left) and many other films of this type, “destroyed by the intervention of men." It is Hepburn’s star persona which allies the audience with the female bonds, alienating, rather than sympathizing with, the male characters, and thus creating a new type of film about women.

Stage Door (1937) Hepburn second from left then
Ginger Rogers then, seated, Eve Arden

Hepburn epitomizes what her mother’s generation of feminists were striving for: an educated, opinionated, confident, independent, autonomous professional woman. First wave feminism provided the modern woman with the right to vote, as well as the right to better higher education and to birth control. What the first wave didn't establish was an equal footing with men in the workplace. Therefore, Katharine Hepburn’s generation inherited an incomplete feminism, which did not establish social equality with men. However, a few women of her generation were able to establish themselves as exceptions that could work and live as examples of what a more complete feminism could look like. Author Susan Ware points out that Hepburn “remained one of the few actresses who was ever allowed to sacrifice love for career” while yet maintaining her legitimacy as a truly female star with sex appeal.

Hepburn in
Christopher Strong (1933)

The presence of Katharine Hepburn’s star text (the mode in which the star persona, may be read within the context of the film) gives strength and legitimacy to the presentation of feminist ideology within the greater film text. The plots of these films center on the goals, cares, concerns of groups of women and how they address their personal issues with each other. These films are unique in that they ally the audience with these female groups rather than with a single male protagonist or a heterosexual romance. Katharine Hepburn’s persona emphasizes this alliance because she represents the bridging element between the traditional female roles, in which she plays the leading woman to a leading man, and the strengths and legitimacy of a female group. 

Little Women (1933): Jean Parker, Joan Bennet, Spring
Byington, Frances Dee, and Katharine Hepburn

In other words, it is only because Hepburn’s star text in the traditional film roles reads as a liberated feminist that the audience is tempered to the idea that whole groups of women may also express autonomy in the same way. During the 1930s she had made such films as Christopher Strong, Little Women, Alice Adams, Mary of Scotland, and A Woman Rebels, in which she portrayed autonomous and powerful women. Her particular brand of female independence had been accepted by the general public to the point that it became something attractive rather than repulsive. Therefore, the film text is therefore able to portray communities of women which highlight this new type of female empowerment because her star text has already proved its possibility and its potential.

Desk Set (1957): Dina Merrill, Sue Randall,
Katharine Hepburn, and Joan Blondell

Two films in particular, Stage Door (1937) and Desk Set (1957), prove that communities of autonomous women have a place in society when the star text of the central character makes them acceptable to that society by way of being exceptions. Hepburn’s popularity as an exception to traditional gender expectations supports the acceptance of these groups in a way that necessitates their existence. The presence of the familiar Hepburn persona prevents the audience from registering horror at the possibility of a group of autonomous women as the focus for a popular film. George Cukor, who directed Katharine Hepburn in ten films and was her dearest friend in Hollywood, once said, “Kate is the most eccentric person I know. And the most eccentric thing about her is she thinks she’s regular” (Chandler 11). Perhaps this is the reason for her energetic spirit and perhaps this is what all twentieth century women aspired to – the regularity of Hepburn’s eccentricity as an autonomous female.