The Rise of Women’s Pictures on Television

To be the center of a women’s picture means the characters had to be strong, transfixing, and willing to traverse social boundaries, even if just for a little while. They could be mercurial, selfish, unlikable, and sometimes even cruel. The genre provided a home to women on the fringes: surrogate mothers, spinster aunts, femme fatales, and single women on the make. In essence, it concentrated on women who were human, who embodied the full breadth of womanhood, and who misbehave in ways unlike anything you’ll see with such regularity in modern films. (Men were at times well-developed secondary characters, but for the most part they functioned as sidepieces.) Read More…