Debunking 5 Myths About Femininity And Female Empowerment In Modern Movies

I see it everywhere in the movies these days: female characters prominently placed in the front of a poster, telling stories about independent young women who are battling against a group of bullish bad guys (all of whom are men). We’re supposed to be living in an age of better female representation on screen – and if you measure by the number of stand-alone female leads, that may be true.

I often can’t help feeling that the characters we see on screen are a mirage of real representation – narrative types regurgitated from one movie to the next to fill a quota of “empowered females” in the movies. At best, this type of movie lacks the subtlety of really great art. But this kind of female character often does more damage than that. More often than not, the female characters we see on screen affirm myths about what women want and need – and in the process, cause women to believe untruths about themselves.

Well, good news, ladies. There are movies out there that uphold your feminine instincts, that honor your feminine desires, that see the womanly struggles you face in real-time. There’s just one catch: Most of them were released before 1960. If we step inside the time machine of classic Hollywood movies, we see a different picture of women presented – one that’s both more nuanced and more in tune with our true feminine desires.

Myth #1: Sexy Women Are Always the Bad Guy

All you have to do is peruse the top nominated films of the Oscars every year to see this modern myth about women illustrated. Every year, most of the female characters our culture uplifts as “daring” and “original” and a “tour-de-force performance” are women caked in blood and dirt, with matted hair and bruises. Modern depictions of heroic women tend to be gritty and realistic, which, to be clear, isn’t inherently a bad thing. But sometimes I leave the movies, and I wonder: Where did the positive portrayals of sexy women go?

This problem isn’t a new one. As long as humans have been telling stories, less nuanced storytellers have categorized women into two groups: sexy women who go around stealing other people’s men and good-hearted but plain girls who you bring home to mama. And just because it’s an old story trope doesn’t mean people are done using it. It’s part of the core showdown between Cady Heron and Regina George in Mean Girls. After watching movie after movie where the sexy girl gets put in her place and the geeky girl gets the man, it’s easy to associate sexiness with meanness. 

Being sexy doesn’t make a girl the bad guy, though, and the 1940s gave us plenty of stories to prove it. Take Katharine “Sugerpuss” O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck), a nightclub dancer on the run from the police to protect her gangster boyfriend in Ball of Fire (1941). O’Shea hides out with a group of eight professors who are working on an encyclopedia, and she repeatedly uses her feminine wiles to hoodwink the youngest, Professor Potts (Gary Cooper) – until O’Shea slowly finds herself falling for the gentlemanly intellectual.

It’s hard to find a movie like Ball of Fire nowadays, which is somehow both sexy and innocent at the same time. Stanwyck navigates her showgirl’s change of heart with masterful subtlety, which never condemns her for being attractive, only for attracting the wrong kind of man. This story reminds us of an important truth: a woman’s beauty inspires the men in her life to action. It’s a vivifying element of our femininity, and stories like Ball of Fire remind us that it’s cool to be a little sexy.

Myth #2: Motherhood Is Inherently Unfulfilling

If you’ve ever been ashamed to admit that you want to be a mother, or you’ve been told that you talk about your kids too much, you already know about this myth. Modern stories about women specialize in negative portrayals of motherhood (we’ve got a whole list right here). In the world of female empowerment, motherhood is a drudgery. Only when a woman builds some kind of life “of her own” can she truly be fulfilled.

This myth leaves out the obvious fact that when a woman makes and raises her family, she is building a life of her own. There’s an incredible amount of strength and resilience and heroism that goes into being a mother – and that’s the truth we see in I Remember Mama (1948). Told from the perspective of oldest daughter Katrin (Barbara Bel Geddes), we watch a Norwegian immigrant family struggle for survival in San Francisco in the 1910s. Quiet, determined, and stubborn, Mama has a clear idea of the life she wants for her family and she won’t let anything get in her way of achieving it.

Though I Remember Mama is a reverential portrayal of a beloved mother, it never crosses the line into sentimentality. The determination and strength with which Mama cares for her family are revealed to us slowly, as we gradually learn to see Mama better through the eyes of her daughter. This culminates in the film’s big reveal (don’t worry, no spoilers), when it finally becomes clear what the children’s parents have done to create a safe and secure world for their children. It’s a simple portrait of heroism – not the kind you read about in newspapers, but the kind that forever alters a family’s conditions in life. I Remember Mama turns our eyes back on the little sacrifices that make up a mother’s vocation and the fulfillment that a woman will find in them.

Myth #3: The Fun Stops After You Get Married

It’s not just motherhood that gets a bad rap among the empowered females of cinema nowadays. More often than not, our modern heroines are avoiding marriage like the plague, and if some man finally manages to win their heart, then the story needs to end at happily ever after. Just look at Disenchanted, the long overdue Disney sequel to Enchanted, which shows life after ever after…and it turns out, it’s not so happy after all. After moving from one unhappy marriage to another, the subtle message we can conclude is that once happily ever after arrives, the fun of being a couple has kind of stopped. 

Tell that to Nick and Nora Charles, the crime-fighting socialites from New York. We meet Nick and Nora shortly after their marriage at the beginning of The Thin Man (1934). Nick has supposedly given up his work as a detective. But people keep trying to drag Nick back into his old line of work – first among them Nora, who wants to share the action with her husband. Playing cat and mouse with a killer may be dangerous, but for Nick and Nora, it’s a pretext for some marital flirtation. 

The picture The Thin Man gives us of marriage is the one that actually matches the facts. Statistics show that married couples are consistently happier than their single counterparts. It’s normal for married couples to want to share in each others’ interests, and even more, to take real joy in sharing all aspects of life. Marriage isn’t always fun, but sometimes it really is, even if the modern movies have forgotten.

Myth #4: Women Must Act Like Men to Succeed in the Workplace

If we’ve seen it once, we’ve seen it a hundred times since Working Girl (1988). Ever since women began working outside the home, it has become common to show women in the workplace acting like men. Backstabbing one another, aggressively pushing their own agendas – just look at Shiv Roy in Succession and you have the perfect picture of a woman in the workforce, but doing so in a masculine way.

It’s easy to jump from here to the myth, common in the movies now, that women can only be professionally successful if they participate in a masculine way. “Break the glass ceiling” really means “beat the men at their game,” and it becomes hard to imagine a different way for women to interact in the workforce.

This is the very question which His Girl Friday (1941) asks its audience. We meet Hildy Johnson (the magnificent Rosalind Russell), who has recently divorced Walter Burns (Cary Grant), the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Hildy has just resigned from. Hildy says she wants the real life of a woman and that she can’t do this married to Walter or working for his newspaper. But Walter concocts a scheme to convince Hildy to write one more article about an upcoming death row inmate – and hopefully change Hildy’s mind in the process. 

There aren’t very many movies that try to show what it means for a woman to excel in the workplace as a woman, but His Girl Friday is one of them. From the first scenes in the jailhouse, where Hildy interacts with her male colleagues, we can see that Hildy is a different reporter because her perspective is inherently feminine. When the hardened newsmen cruelly joke with a young woman involved with the inmate, Hildy casts a feminine judgment on the cruelty of her co-workers: “Gentlemen of the press.” It’s an indictment of the newsmen’s heartlessness and sarcasm, and we get a glimpse of why Walter couldn’t stand the thought of losing Hildy as a newspaperwoman. Her feminine heart gives her a unique perspective on the events of the world, and she has the courage to speak for what’s right and what’s wrong.

Will there be a happy ending for Hildy and Walter? You’ll have to watch to find out. But His Girl Friday illustrates an important aspect of a woman’s role in the workplace. Women aren’t meant to mimic men in their work. They’re meant to bring their feminine heart with them to whatever they do – to bring life and nurture it in whatever professional capacity they serve.

Myth #5: The Solution to Backstabbing Is Female Solidarity

We just can’t seem to get enough of mean girls. Whether it’s Tina Fey’s classic comedy of the same name, or just a subplot in a female-led drama, there’s something eternally fascinating about women who backstab and gossip and try to undermine the heroine. It’s the secret to the success of The Devil Wears Prada, amongst others – we love to watch a group of girls battle it out for Queen Bee status.

This kind of behavior isn’t a myth – just watch a group of middle school girls at recess. But the problem with the way this storyline is treated in most modern female-led movies is the way a resolution is presented. In movies like Mean Girls, the heroine must at some point urge her fellow women to stop the in-fighting in a spirit of sisterhood. The implication is clear: The solution to feminine backstabbing is sisterly solidarity, plain and simple.

All these movies could stand to learn a lesson from Margo Channing (Bette Davis) in All About Eve. A famous stage actress, Margo takes a young ingenue named Eve (Anne Baxter) under her wing. But then Margo slowly starts to lose her roles and friends to Eve, and what ensues is a cycle of mutual backstabbing and career assassination that Regina George would be in awe of.

All About Eve has some incredibly nuanced portraits of women, but among its most insightful plotlines is Margo’s eventual decision to step outside the cycle of backstabbing. Margo Channing realizes that the cycle won’t end and that, ultimately, it’s not Eve’s responsibility that she doesn’t feel fulfilled. “Funny business, a woman's career – the things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. That's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman,” Margo says late in the film. It’s a lesson modern heroines could stand to learn. You can’t wait for oaths of solidarity to relinquish unhealthy female relationships. Sometimes, you have to step completely outside the cycle by yourself and reclaim your femininity. That’s a success no other woman can take away from you.

Closing Thoughts

Back before women believed the lie that society was out to repress them, women gloried in their femininity – and the movies they watched reflect that pride. The examples I’ve listed above are just a taste of the wealth of stories that honor a woman’s beauty and her nurturing spirit, and honestly examine the solution to female rivalries. If you ever feel like you’ve lost sight of what positive femininity looks like, never fear. Just turn on an Old Hollywood classic.