by Erin Hill

There’s a myth in Hollywood that women did not participate in much of film history except as actors or, more rarely, as screenwriters, because they were pushed out from behind the camera in the early years of filmmaking, managing to return decades later only amid nationwide equal rights activism.

This oral history was recounted to me when I entered the film industry as a producer’s assistant in 1999, and was repeated by the casting directors I began interviewing about their work in 2004. The same narrative framed many of the industry-authored “Women in Hollywood” books or special issues of Variety or Vanity Fair published in the 2000s and early 2010s, referencing this bleak past only to dismiss it with a statement about women’s progress along the lines of “Today women are working in every area of media production.”

Like many myths, this one is based in fact. With very few exceptions, women did not direct or produce films for major studios from the 1920s, when previous advances in elite creative fields were halted, until the 1970s, when a handful fought their way back to directors’ chairs, often under the banner of the women’s movement. And, to be sure, the powerful women who survived in the studio system — writers like Frances Marion and stars like Bette Davis — were powerful in spite of the structural inequities that undermined them throughout their careers. These female movie makers are important, but their achievements aren’t the sum total of women’s contributions to the first century of filmmaking in the United States. And, for better and worse, theirs isn’t the only professional line from which the generation of women currently at work in Hollywood descends.

When the earliest American films were produced in the mid-1890s, it was women — the wives of Thomas Edison’s male employees — who hand-colored them, frame by frame. By the 1910s, the Selig Polyscope Company employed “hundreds and hundreds” of “deft-fingered girls” in its Chicago laboratory to cut apart negatives and to patch, retouch, tint, and splice film. This practice was common at the film companies that were, by the 1920s, emerging as major studios in Los Angeles — such as Famous Players–Lasky (which would become Paramount Pictures) — where “girl operators” inspected prints and patched films. Other women’s sectors that sprang up at film studios followed a similar pattern of growth — with dozens or hundreds in dedicated departments populated almost exclusively by women and often managed by men.

By the 1930s, an entire floor of the MGM costuming department was reportedly devoted to hand embroidery and beading alone and was populated largely by immigrant women, much like factories in the garment industry at the time. In the 1930s, it was women who made it possible for Walt Disney to produce “Snow White” on reasonable schedule and budget. He hired female workers for all of the film’s inking and painting — the stage of cel animation in which animators’ pencil sketches are inked onto transparent celluloid and then filled in with paint.

Women worked in service professions all over studio lots in the 1930s and 1940s. They served meals at studio commissaries, were maids to studio personnel, taught child actors in studio schools, and provided medical care in studio infirmaries. A predominantly female workforce typed and distributed every treatment, outline, and draft of every film in production, as well the notes, memos, and purchase orders that circulated around them. Women administered studio offices as secretaries and looked after the personal lives and emotional needs of major creative personnel. They also filled many of the lower ranks of planning departments: researching productions in studio reference libraries; reading incoming books and plays in story departments; typing actor lists in casting departments; and answering fan mail in publicity departments. Through their collective efforts, these women were the fuel of Hollywood’s large-scale, industrial production process.

In the 1950s and 1960s, studios downsized planning departments by transforming executive-level positions to freelance, middle management jobs. Predictably, men abandoned these fields, and women streamed in to fill the void. And so, by the 1970s and 1980s, while women like Amy Heckerling, Paula Weinstein, and Sherry Lansing were (re)paving the way to elite creative fields, women who had begun as negative cutters, secretaries, “script girls,” and casting assistants were fighting their way into mid-level jobs as junior story executives, production coordinators, editors, and casting directors.

However, the low pay and gender stigma associated with their former sectors followed them into these new fields, where they faced the same implicit gender-related expectations that on top of their official responsibilities, they add value by “giving good phone,” socializing with clients and framing their own contributions with acts of conspicuous femininity so as not to be perceived as bossy, mannish, or bitchy — the worst possible sins for a woman. If they succeeded, credit for their contributions was often assigned elsewhere. This was the price of entry into male-dominated positions, paid in exchange for tolerance of women’s presence in a workplace that men understood (and often still do) as theirs.

Women were never absent from film history; they often simply weren’t documented as part of it because they did “women’s work,” which was — by definition — insignificant, tedious, low status, and noncreative. In the golden age of Hollywood, women could be found in nearly every department of every studio, minding the details that might otherwise get in the way of more important, prestigious, or creative work (a.k.a. men’s work).

Examining these roles helps frame an understanding of contemporary Hollywood, where the same de facto occupational segregation still links women to certain types of media production work (e.g. casting, script supervision, publicity) and effectively dissociates them from others, thereby perpetuating male domination in fields with the greatest prestige and power, the most creative status, and the highest incomes. The stakes — pay, credit, workplace identity, and so forth — are too high to leave the past in the past. And anyway, for women, the past is always present — a reality reflected in every chapter of this book.

(Adapted from “Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production.” New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Erin Hill. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.)

Find purchasing links and more information about “Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production” here.

Erin Hill is a professor of media studies. She teaches courses on film and television history and contemporary Hollywood at UCLA and Santa Monica College. Hill also freelances in film and TV development.