STAGE DOOR (1937): A Feminist Perspective

Because Katharine Hepburn’s star text in so many of her film roles reads as a liberated feminist, the audience becomes tempered to the idea of whole groups of women being autonomous. Before STAGE DOOR (1937), she had made such films as CHRISTOPHER STRONG (1933), LITTLE WOMEN (1933), ALICE ADAMS (1935), MARY OF SCOTLAND (1936), and A WOMAN REBELS (1936), all playing autonomous and powerful women. By 1937 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 able to portray communities which highlight this new type of empowerment because her star text has already proved its possibility and potential.

In the famous moth costume for CHRISTOPHER STRONG (1933)

These communities of women have a unique departmentalized position in relation to the society in which they function. In Gregory La Cava's STAGE DOOR (1937), the community is almost completely separate from the rest of society; the actresses, because of their choice of profession, are exceptions to the traditional gender roles of society, although they are not entirely exempt from the pressures of those societal expectations. By the 1930s, actresses had been accepted by society as commodities necessary for the continuation of a profession very important to that society: the field of entertainment. The romanticism of the stage had caught fire while audiences witnessed the blossoming of the Golden Age of Hollywood. 

Director Gregory La Cava works on a scene with Hepburn and Gingers Rogers

However, the women in STAGE DOOR have been departmentalized in that they are put into a community of their own rather than integrated into the traditional societal structure. The women cannot be wives and actresses at the same time. Nor can Hepburn’s character be a daughter and an actress. Their relationship to society is one of complete marginalization. Because they reject the traditional heterosexual relationship structure, they must find a substitute for what that structure fails to provide – professional support. This support is supplemented by the energies of the female group.

            STAGE DOOR presents the audience with a group of more liberated women. Like the rest of the country, the theatre district was hurt by the Depression and the women who had chosen a life independent of a husband and family instead struggle with the alternative. 1930s audiences connected to this film in a number of ways. Susan Ware notices that “the snappy tone of Stage Door is in keeping with the self-confidence of the screwball comedies which flourished in the 1930s, bringing comic relief to their Depression-weary audiences” (Ware 184). The rhetoric of the community of women both reflects and relieves the dominant emotions of the country at the time.

Rogers and Hepburn outwit Adolphe Menjou

The male characters in STAGE DOOR hold a rather ambivalent place within the film text. They are seen mostly as unnecessary necessities. Although the men hold the upper hand in the business, and though marriage seems to be a logical alternative to professionalism for many of the women, the men fail to manipulate this group of women who have chosen to excuse themselves from the expectations of patriarchy. The incredulity of the idea that Hepburn’s character could be manipulated by any male characters is promulgated by Hepburn’s star text. The audience reads her character as one who is independent of the pressures endured by the other members of the female group. Her character must be strongly independent in order to support and sustain the legitimacy of that group. If every member of the group is continually trapped, manipulated, and defeated by the patriarchal order, it has no reason for existing and the argument for female independence from men must disintegrate. The audience’s understanding of the Hepburn text as independent and autonomous substantiates the continuation of the group while simultaneously discrediting the patriarchal community of the film.

Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Ginger Rogers

STAGE DOOR is unique in that today’s audience is able to retrospectively apply reading of the star texts of other member of the cast besides Hepburn: “[the film] is also related, through the brilliant repartee of its dialogue, and the presence of an extraordinary array of distinguished female comic actors (Ginger Rogers, Eve Arden, Lucille Ball, Phyllis Kennedy), to ‘thirties comedy” (Britton 71). Two of these women, Eve Arden and Lucille Ball, eventually come to epitomize two forms of American womanhood in the twentieth century, particularly the 1950s. Eve Arden’s most starring role as Miss Brooks in the TV and radio program “Our Miss Brooks” (1949-1956) is the essence of the witty spinster-schoolteacher. More famously, Lucy Ricardo in “I Love Lucy” became the image of the American housewifery. STAGE DOOR seems almost prescient when one realizes that Eve Arden’s character has lines like “I’ll never put my trust in males again,” and Lucille Ball’s character is the only one of the female group who gets married.

Eve Arden's (far right) wit

These two personas provide the bridge of our understanding of star text between the 1930s and the 1950s. When the nation’s heroes returned from World War II, the women of America returned to hearth and home to take care of their families. However, as Eugenia Kaledin points out in her book Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s, “When Rosie the Riveter handed her goggles to the men who were returning from World War II, she did not rush to put on an apron.” Although women hoping to return to work faced open public hostility, many women who had had a taste of independence through careers were not so keen to spend the rest of their lives in the kitchen.

The research department in DESK SET (1957)

Katharine Hepburn, Joan Blondell, Sue Randall, and Dina Merrill

Because of the extreme gender departmentalization of the job market, “men rarely replaced women in the vacated jobs” (Ware 28). Women became respected for their unique skills, characterized by efficiency, meticulousness, and dexterity, thus forming an “important group of loyal and conscientious producers” (Kaledin 66-67). Just such a group is presented in DESK SET (1957). The women in the community of the research department at the Federal Broadcasting Company have certainly “identified with the heritage of alienation that ultimately enriches mainstream culture; they turned their frustrations into creative energy” (Kaledin iv). These women are so prodigious that they have become invaluable to the company and to the patriarchal society at large which has tried to segregate them into more conservative roles as wives and mothers. Stay tuned for a post about the community of women in DESK SET.

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.