Cristhian Villamar

Woman of The Year and Mildred Pierce:

The Triumph of Patriarchal Repression
During the Second World War, helped by the absence of many men who were fighting in Europe,
women started to play a more active role in society thanks to their massive incorporation to the
labour world in traditionally male jobs and to other fields from which they had been excluded until
then. When the war ended, some married women came back to the domestic labour and childcare
while others saw their opportunities expanded and remained in their positions of working women
(Women). For the patriarchy, this increasing emancipation of women meant a threat to the
established order in which women stayed at home and men made money and held the power as the
head of the family. From the point of view of different genres, both Woman of the Year (1942) and
Mildred Pierce (1945) clearly show this social change and the attempt to get the independent new
woman back to her traditional domestic realm.
The screwball comedy Woman of the Year shows the romantic relationship between a sport
writer Sam Craig and a working woman Tess Harding, a successful political columnist whose total
devotion to her job outside home will be comically criticized as a contemporary tendency that
threatens the conventional model of marriage. Thus, Tess is a brilliant journalist with a promising
future, smarter than her partner and with a more international background but she will be reshaped
according to Sam's conception of a woman.
Sam's first attempt is to contradict Tess' opinions about the relevance of sports in wartime, a
heated debate that culminates with a misogynistic Sam's colleague's line: Women should be kept
illiterate and clean, like canaries. Soon after, her first appearance on screen through a Sam's point
of view shot reinforces the idea of a woman shaped by the male gaze and valued only for her figure
and not for her professional achievements. This is followed by some failed romantic dates in which
she dominates the situation assuming a male role that confuses and intimidates Sam: she does all the
talking, choices the place, takes the initiative in a sexual relationship and appears as someone
intellectually superior to him. Despite this, Sam manages to tame her, but their sudden marriage
fails because she remains more interested in her professional reputation than in playing the role of a
wife and mother. The film also conveys the idea that motherhood is what defines a woman when
Tess unexpectedly brings home a Greek orphan but neglects the child after being named Woman of
The Year, provoking Sam's frustration and his significant assertion that is also the motto of the
film: the outstanding woman of the year isn't a woman at all. Therefore, avoiding her
responsibilities as a mother, Tess embodies a threat to Sam's masculinity, not taking him into

account for a speech in the ceremony and making him to take care of the child, who is ultimately
returned to the orphanage. Yet the stubborn feminist columnist takes her final step towards
submission when she learns from her equally successful but lonely aunt, who acts as a model of
real womanhood, how much joy a life devoted to home could offer: Success is no fun unless you
share it with someone. Im tired of winning prizes, theyre cold comfort. This time I want to be the
prize myself.
Consequently, instead of struggling to achieve a balance between her personal and
professional aspirations and her husband's, as many women do nowadays, Tess decides to leave her
job and become a wife 24/7. The independent and hard-working New Woman ends up making the
breakfast for her husband as a proof of submission and love as there is no room for her personal
development in marriage. While he watches from behind a newspaper in an attitude of disapproval,
it is suggested, in a comic scene that humiliates Tess, that her failure to make waffles and coffee
correctly is equal to her failure at being a woman. Despite of this, at the end, a merciful husband
grants her wife the preservation of her maiden name, a revolutionary decision for the time since
men could not do unthinkable sacrifices such as becoming a house husband.
Likewise, in the post-war film noir with touches of melodrama Mildred Pierce, the female
protagonist is a divorced woman who achieves labour success to give her greedy and rebel daughter
a privileged lifestyle. However, under the disguise of a crime investigation, the film seeks to show
that the figure of an economically and sexually independent woman actually embodies an error
since her liberation from the traditional roles for women ends up leading to murder and the
destruction of everything that surrounds her.
Since the very beginning, following the chronological order of the narrated events, Mildred
is depicted as a wrong woman who, against the husband's will, replaces him in the responsibility of
bringing money home, thus instilling into her elder daughter wrong values. Nevertheless, after
getting divorced, in her gradual incursion into business world, she is unable to get rid of male
dominance and her dependance on men to achieve any goal. The patriarchal voice of her husband is
always there to remind his wife of her obligations throughout the film: first, as a wife, her position
at home and the respect of his authority and then, as a mother, the right education of the children.
Similarly, if it had not been for his husband's friend Wally, whose sexual harassment is simply
fought with a submissive smile by Mildred, she would not have been able to prosper economically
and buy Veda's every expensive whim. It is also for Veda that Mildred marries a self-interested man,
who turns up to be a bum who lives off Mildred's money and a traitor. The protagonist's enjoy of her
sexuality is displayed in such a way that the audience is misled to disapprove her behaviour. After
sleeping with Monty, Mr. Pierce appears to remind the spectator that she is not a free woman yet
since he had not granted her the divorce and that her sexual affair has made her neglect her

daughter's health, an error punished with the girls's death. After a big argument with Veda, a
disappointed Mildred gives up her role as mother and acquires masculine habits and appearance that
matches those of her frivolous and eternally single girlfriend. The successful woman is in this way
reduced to a suffering figure who has not realized that her big mistake is to choose a life that entails
an invasion to the male order, away from her duties as a woman.
Mildred appears as suspected of committing the murder in the beginning of the film, the
typical man-killing femme fatale, but although her innocence is later proved, the film suggests a
sense of indirect guilt. After all, it was her inability to play the role of a responsible mother that
provoked her younger daughter's death and led the elder one to a criminal behaviour that could have
been prevented if Mildred had taken up her responsibilities as a woman. The character of Mildred is
divided since she is the victim of other's cruelty in a melodramatic story but she is also her own and
others' victimizer in a film noir. The last scene is remarkable because of its representation of the
protagonist's fate, consigned to domestic labour and faithful to her husband, through the insertion of
the ultimate figure of female submission: women cleaning the floor on their knees.
As seen in both films, the restoration of the traditional family model was a crucial issue for
American society during and after the war. Women's confinement into the domestic field was shown
as the right choice in films that were going to be consumed by women, ensuring thus its
assimilation among them. The War had meant a shocking change in the international political order
and women's independence was not convenient for the maintenance of the established patriarchal
system, something necessary for the hard years to come.
Sources:

Women and World War II. About.com - Women's History.

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/warwwii/Women_and_World_War_II.htm. Last
Modified: 2011

Woman of the Year

Mildred Pierce