by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
I just watched Woman of the Year (1942, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) and hated it so much and for so many reasons that a) I wanted to share and b) am currently not capable of articulating anything beyond quoting directly from the film’s third act and giving my own summary of its final scenes.
MAIDEN AUNT: “You can’t live alone in this world, Tess, it’s no good. Success is no fun unless you share it with someone. I’m tired of winning prizes, they’re cold comfort. This time I want to be the prize myself.”
Climactic scene: feminist political commentator quietly cries as she learns the true meaning of marriage vows.
SPENCER TRACY: “You mean you’re going to live here with me and kiss me goodbye in the morning and wait for me to come home at night loaded down with pipes and slippers and stories about what you and the girls did all day?”
KATHARINE HEPBURN: “Yes, Sam!”
TRACY: “Gonna run up little curtains and sew buttons on my underwear?”
HEPBURN: “Yes!”
TRACY: “Cook and sew and put on your rubber gloves and wash the dishes on the maid’s day out?”
HEPBURN: “Yes, darling!”
Final scenes:
HEPBURN: “But Sam, you don’t understand! I’m going to give up my job.”
TRACY: “What are you going to do, run for president?”
HEPBURN: “I’m going to be your wife.”
Goes to make husband breakfast as proof of obedience and love. Husband smirks and watches from behind paper. Failure to make waffles correctly is tacitly equated to failure at womanhood. HILARITY. Husband and wife agree that wife can keep maiden name as surname, despite dangerous emasculation that this implies.
This movie sounds like the *Reefer Madness* of feminism.
Actual one-liner from the film: “Women should be kept illiterate and clean, like canaries.”
Flora, I haven’t seen “Woman of the Year,” so I can’t say much. But are you sure that this movie isn’t meant to be taken with a touch of winking irony? Tracy and Hepburn (a real-life couple) were known for their witty banter and battle-of-the-sexes sparring, with many subtle undertones.
For what it’s worth, IMDB says the movie was originally supposed to end with Hepburn’s character reasserting her independence, but that largely-female 1942 audiences didn’t like it:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035567/
Apparently, though, this was their first film together, so the banter may not have been quite so subtle or sophisticated.
I haven’t seen it either, but from my brief Wikipedia research, it sounds confusing. Katharine Hepburn impulsively adopts a Greek refugee child…?
Remember, as far removed as 1942 America may seem, it was not tribal Waziristan. Women had been voters for 22 years. They had been educated in public high schools for 50. They participated in the workforce, albeit with significant restrictions. And women probably constituted more than 50% of the people paying to see this movie.
So the chauvinism in a line like “Women should be kept illiterate and clean, like canaries” is hyperbolic to the point of absurdity–even in 1942.
And the emphasis on the least pleasant aspects of wifedom–housework, dealing with a drunk husband, sewing buttons on underwear–makes marriage look like a bore and a chore. This is patently ironic, but the irony may have been garbled by the bawdlerizing of the ending.
Believe me, Tommy D, I’m familiar with the Tracy-Hepburn canon, and I unreservedly love most of it – that’s why I reacted so badly when I was let down by Woman of the Year. I did refer to the “clean and illiterate” line as a one-liner, which it is, but with an uncomfortable ring of realism. Most of what Tracy’s character says to Hepburn’s regarding women’s place is shockingly serious. The film’s greatest sincerity comes in its assertion that, as Hepburn’s character’s aunt says, “Success is no fun unless you share it with someone. ” Hepburn’s character also gets told that she’s “no woman” because she doesn’t stay home with the aforementioned Greek orphan instead of going to a banquet in her honor.
All this aside, the film is equally troubling for being a snapshot of American parochialism during WWII. Hepburn’s character is a globetrotting political commentator, and at one point she shelters a Yugoslavian intellectual just escaped from a “concentration camp.” Spencer Tracy’s character gets angry because he wants to be alone with Hepburn in their apartment, and so he makes the intellectual (and said intellectual’s bodyguards) leave. Clearly at this point in the war people had no concept of what was actually happening in concentration camps, but its gleeful celebration of insularity is frankly disturbing in retrospect.