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.
Speaking anecdotally, there are a good number of rockstar PhD candidates in my program who are only able to put in the hours that they do because their wives function as personal assistants/editors/housekeepers/chefs while they finish up their degrees. I’m not knocking the folks who choose to do this, but the labor of their silent partner is rarely acknowledged and it’s just assumed that they’re preternaturally talented or dedicated. I’ve rarely (never) seen this dynamic reversed, and I’m in a field with a fairly equitable gender ratio.
So Apparently Male Authors Have Been Making Their Wives Do All The Typing
funeral-biscuit 