Kicking Off Women's History Month

I wanted to share a really cool article VideoMaker wrote about several important women filmmakers that history forgot. While I love the article on the whole, there is ONE sentence that I have a tremendous beef with.

Read the article here: https://www.videomaker.com/how-to/directing/film-history/womens-history-month-celebrating-women-in-film/

The one offending sentence is... "The many contributions of women in the industry are influential, but are often overlooked and less recognized than their male counterparts.", which is way too soft a representation of what actually happened. This euphemistic phrasing subtly implies that while women were indeed around during the formative years of film, it's a harmless fluke that made history forget them.

That is patently FALSE.

Women weren't just "influential", they were FOUNDATIONAL in the silent film era. 

And their contributions weren't "often overlooked and less recognized", they were either deliberately downplayed, forcibly erased, or downright stolen. 

Women back then led massive productions, owned successful production studios, developed technology and camera tricks, and earned disgusting amounts of money in those days. Mary Pickford was the first millionaire EVER in Hollywood by 1916. Not "first female". First EVER. (What a genius business brain. You can read about Mary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Pickford)

Women's films sold out theaters and filled tomes of newspaper articles, until "Big Business" caught wind and spent the subsequent decades pushing forward male names to take up more space and drown female artists out, in some cases, straight up taking credit for their work.

Remember, moving pictures were invented and heavily utilized before both World Wars, and before the aggressive propaganda movement to reassert gender roles and push women out of jobs men wanted. In fact, in great part, films made by men in the 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond were VEHICLES to repeat repeat repeat that sexist messaging in as many different ways as possible.

So for this paragraph to subliminally imply that women were around more as an incidental curiosity, instead of as the foundational powerhouses that they actually were, is a perfect and toxic example of subliminal gender bias that still exists in the film world today.

But despite my gripe with the beginning of the article, the history and meat of the piece is good, and the conclusion really sticks the landing:

"Ultimately, it is important that we persist in advocating for women’s voices and stories in all industries. The high focus film industry, in particular, should strive to lead in this movement. The industry must look at its discrepancies of the past and work to improve the future."

I couldn't agree more. 

Happy Women's History Month.