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Vital conversations are happening today about equity and inclusion in the entertainment industry. But these discussions have often been framed without a consideration of history, as if we are witnessing the first generation of women to work behind the scenes in Hollywood, the first to push for gender equity, the first to assume positions of creative control, or the first with hopes of transforming gender norms through images onscreen. This is not the case, but the narrative is no accident. As J. E. Smyth reminds us in her book Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood, winner of the Special Jury Prize from the Theatre Library Association, “the image of studio power” that dominates the popular imagination “is emphatically and obnoxiously male” (89). A cadre of feminist film historians has been steadily and methodically dismantling this fiction over the past three decades; this body of scholarship reaches an exciting new level of intervention with a recent collection of award-winning volumes.
Much of the pioneering work in feminist film history focused on the early years of moviemaking, the so-called silent era before films had prerecorded soundtracks, when women occupied prominent positions of creative control as directors, screenwriters, and producers, and when female audiences were paramount.1 Books by Smyth, Emily Carman, Erin Hill, and Maya Montañez Smukler take the tools pioneered by scholars of silent cinema and apply them to studies of later eras of Hollywood production, while Jane Gaines’s book offers a fresh perspective on the silent era itself. Many of these scholars draw on methodologies honed in production studies, a subfield that seeks to understand the complex conditions in which film and media products are created. Alongside Smyth’s study of the “women who ran Hollywood” during the height of the studio era, Emily Carman documents how actresses pushed against restrictive studio contracts in the 1930s to assert greater control over their careers in Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System, which was a finalist for the Theatre Library Association’s Richard Wall Memorial Award. In Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production, winner of the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Erin Hill shows us that women have always...