"We need to see men and women as equal partners, but it's hard to think of movies that do that. When I talk to people, they think of movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy!"
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Friedan’s jab lands because it’s half lament, half indictment: in a culture that sells itself as forward-moving, our go-to examples of gender partnership are basically museum pieces. By invoking Hepburn and Tracy, she’s not just praising a golden-age template of romantic equals; she’s exposing how thin the bench is. The laugh line is the timestamp. Forty-five years ago is doing the work of a slap: if your best evidence is sepia-toned banter from classic Hollywood, the problem isn’t imagination, it’s institutional.
The subtext is bigger than film criticism. Movies are Friedan’s proxy for the broader story a society tells itself about what men and women are allowed to be together. Partnership requires shared agency, conflict that isn’t resolved by one person shrinking, and a worldview where a woman’s competence isn’t treated as a cute plot twist. Hollywood, in her telling, can stage strong women, even iconic ones, but struggles to stage equality without turning it into either a battle of egos or a sentimental surrender.
Context matters: Friedan is speaking as a second-wave feminist who watched postwar America repackage domestic confinement as fulfillment, then watched mass media reinforce it. Her point isn’t that earlier films were perfect; it’s that we’ve failed to build a modern canon where equality feels normal instead of nostalgic. The sting is that progress is being measured by how far back you have to reach to pretend it already happened.
The subtext is bigger than film criticism. Movies are Friedan’s proxy for the broader story a society tells itself about what men and women are allowed to be together. Partnership requires shared agency, conflict that isn’t resolved by one person shrinking, and a worldview where a woman’s competence isn’t treated as a cute plot twist. Hollywood, in her telling, can stage strong women, even iconic ones, but struggles to stage equality without turning it into either a battle of egos or a sentimental surrender.
Context matters: Friedan is speaking as a second-wave feminist who watched postwar America repackage domestic confinement as fulfillment, then watched mass media reinforce it. Her point isn’t that earlier films were perfect; it’s that we’ve failed to build a modern canon where equality feels normal instead of nostalgic. The sting is that progress is being measured by how far back you have to reach to pretend it already happened.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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