Come on, fellas. Let's get it together.
It’s incredible how much women do behind the scenes. I know a realtor who relies strongly on his girlfriend’s charisma, beauty and personality to gain clients.
I’ve just been reading The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel, about the Harvard women who supported the bulk of astronomy research there over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While many of them did receive public and academic credit as well as pay - although the university always resisted making any of them faculty until the 1950s - almost all the male astronomers featured were married to accomplished women in their own right, many of them scientists, and you can bet their husbands weren’t putting them on all their papers.
Which has bled into the modern academic world, where many people are expected to do what was essentially a two-person job (filled by male academic + wife) by themselves, or while married to someone else trying to do the same thing. The lack of acknowledgement of women’s work fucks everybody over.
#people who want a return to the mythical prior era #when women did not work #do not want women to stop working #they want them to stop getting credit and pay for it
This reminds me of how early film history, it was always the male director’s wife who did the editing of the films, because the cutting and connecting of film strips was considered a lot like sewing. Of course, anyone who knows anything about film and editing can tell you it changes how good a movie is very easily.
Don’t believe me? Look at the differences between the famous Jaws as the public’s release of it (insisted upon by the female editor) and spielberg, the male director’s version of it (missing basic suspense methods, shows the phony shark too much, etc). Same goes for almost every tarantino film. Editing makes or breaks a film and even today, you can bet your socks editing “the invisible art” was pioneered and is still pushed by women.
^^^^^^ This is so true! And once film editing began to be recognized as an actual art form, women were shoved out of the editing room so that men could be artistic or whatever.
Also Tarantino referred to his favorite editor as being kind of like his mom or something and I swear to god the more I see of him, the less I like him.
The “female editor” for Jaws was Verna Hellman Fields, who cut many other notable films, including American Graffiti along with Marcia Lucas.
Tarantino’s “favorite editor” was Sally JoAnne Menke who edited all of Tarantino’s films until she died.
Because naming and credit is important, especially when you’re talking about women not getting credit and recognition of their work as named individuals.
If you want to know more about women in early filmmaking (emphasis American) and the sociology of how different roles were divided, gendered, and re-gendered in the first decades, I highly recommend Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood by Karen Ward Mahar.
There are a number of other books to follow that, but it’s 2am and I’m tired so hit me up later for them.
You know what happens when women type? They EDIT. It is a service they are expected to provide invisibly - not to let a mistake or imperfection show to their husband’s audience, but also not to intrude upon his sense that this is all his ideas and his labor. Wives are the unacknowledged story and script doctors, and often co-authors for so many supposedly male-authored works.
Also, I second Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Mahar was my history prof for three or four courses and she is incredibly knowledgeable and engaging.
It’s generally held that one of the reasons the Star Wars prequel movies are so frequently stilted and weird is because by the time he made them George Lucas had divorced his first wife, Marcia - a professional film editor who’s also worked with e.g. Martin Scorsese. She won an Oscar for her editing work on the first Star Wars movie. Do most Star Wars fans know her name? Ahaahaaaaha no.
(The other reason, of course, is that Lucas didn’t have Carrie Fisher around to tell him he can’t fucking write dialogue. Though for my first 15 years as a Star Wars fan I thought Harrison Ford had been the one to tell Lucas that, because he’s always mysteriously given credit for it.)
I know a husband-and-wife writing team, where the man (who is well known and respected in the field) writes his first drafts long-hand in fancy bound notebooks, then hands off to his wife to “type it out” - which they both acknowledge as including editing
he sells the original handwritten manuscripts to a private collector - often for as much as the publisher pays in advance for rights to the book! - with the agreement that this mysterious buyer won’t reveal what’s on the page until after the author (we assume that’s the husband - much of the content comes from his own experiences in war) dies
I’ve spoken with them both several times and known them for decades, and the woman half of this creative team prefers the arrangement like this, because she detests the spotlight. even so, pretty much every pro in the field who knows them assumes she’s a significant if not major force in creating the published versions of “his” books
one day in the not-too-distant future - when the private collector can reveal what’s on those handwritten pages - we’ll be able to learn just how much the woman who has guided this man’s career also served not only as editor but as a creative in their writing partnership
my theory includes the possibility that she is at least as much the creative force in many of the books (which only carry his name) as he is
For Mad Max: Fury Road, roughly 480 hours of footage were filmed, which took editor Margaret Sixel 3 months just to watch and must have been an overwhelming amount of work to put together into a coherent 120-minute movie. (Which I enjoyed! Which had a very overt feminist message. ‘We are not things.’ We’re not. And yet…)
Notably, she is married to director George Miller. I think many of these women are happy in their marriages and proud of their work, but wow is this a thing worth discussing.
This phenomenon is known as a ‘Secretary Wife’ and many of my female friends and I have had passionate discussions about how much we want one. Someone smart who loves us and loves our work and throws themselves into the labour of crafting and promoting it? OF COURSE it would make our lives hugely easier and our work better and our chances of success in our careers far higher. I’ve seen it do so for many male authors - who love and appreciate their wives but don’t see how much this is Not an Option for all but a very, very few women.
Women can of course have wives, and men can be Secretary Wives, but few women get Secretary Wives - women are socialised to be helpful to men and respectful of their work.
Someone else devoting their life to my dream? Honestly, I would feel bad about it, if it was actually an option. But it’s not.
Miller & Sixel are VERY upfront about this arrangement. Miller specifically wanted plenty of women involved in the story, as it’s centered around a woman protagonist in a sexist society. But he also fought the studio to get Sixel involved, as previously she was known in the US mostly for the Babe pig movies. (I mean, he fought with the studios on a lot of things to get that movie made, but this was one of them).
And ultimate, Sixel is the one who took home both the Oscar and the BAFTA for the film.
everything aabove is wonderful but i want to highlight another issue brought up by the op:
“[This] has bled into the modern academic world, where many people are expected to do what was essentially a two-person job (filled by male academic + wife) by themselves, or while married to someone else trying to do the same thing.”
Like, the system does not work without the significant amount of invisible and unpaid labor, but the system itself hasnt changed even as the workforce does.
