Last week in my queer lit class we watched a film released in 1961 called The Children’s Hour, featuring Audrey Hepburn, James Garner and Shirley MacLaine, all looking like this:
Now, why am I talking about an old black-and-white film? Well, the premise of the film is that two teachers (Hepburn and MacLaine) start a school and one of the students accuses them of being lesbians. That’s right, I said it! The crazzzzzy 50s, full of those crazy lesbians. But seriously, it’s really no laughing matter. In fact, out of the late 50s and early 60s were the first notions of homosexuality being a pathology and perversion, thus why the three main characters’ lives are ruined by a little girl’s lie (Garner playing Hepburn’s fiancee). What else isn’t a laughing matter is that in the end… *spoiler alert* Shirley MacLaine hangs herself after coming out for the first time to Audrey. Yes, it’s a powerful film–and really quite controversial for its time. I would recommend it, but beware, you may have the urge to punch a pillow with a printed out face of the little girl that ruins their lives pinned to it. Do not beat children, that is awful.
As many feminists and non-feminists would argue, Audrey Hepburn was quite consistently a strong, beautiful and intelligent woman that seemed to express herself in a very feminist fashion. She spoke English, Dutch, Spanish, French and Italian and grew up in World War II’s nazi-occupied Holland. Many admire her for how thin she was, little do many know that she was malnourished as a child because of the war and did not gain weight because of this affect on her development. Despite all of her fame, she really had a very genuine outlook on the world as a whole. Just watch her handle this reporter interview her about how much better America is than Europe. He also hits on her, and watch the camera pan her body after he calls her “talented”. Talk about ya ethnocentrism and sexism:
In an article in the Guardian, author Rachel Moseley talks about Hepburn’s appeal:
If we think about her career in relation to the popular history of feminism – broadly the Fifties and early Sixties as ‘pre-feminist’, the late Sixties and Seventies as ‘feminist’, and the period since then ‘post-feminist’, it is revealing that as Hepburn’s popularity waned in the ‘feminist’ period and was revived in the ‘post-feminist’. What seems to appeal about Hepburn for young women today is not very different from what appealed in the Fifties. We yearn for a time of glamorous dressing up, but what is more important is the way in which, as a star, Hepburn seemed able to combine femininity and strength – in other words, to be ‘a strong, independent woman with a man’, as one interviewee described her. Furthermore she was ‘a woman’s star’. Never overtly constructed as ‘sexy’ like Bardot or Monroe: she was beautiful, but cerebral. The description of Hepburn which came up repeatedly was ‘classy, not sexy’.
I think I would agree, Audrey does certainly feel more like a modern-day feminist than a first, or even second wave one. What do you think?