Mildred Pierce and His Girl Friday:Portrait of Working Women in the Pre- and Post-World War Period

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Mildred Pierce and His Girl Friday: Portrait of Working Women in the Pre- and Post-World War Period

His Girl Friday and Mildred Pierce are two films from the 1940's that deal with the position of women within the workforce in the time prior to America's involvement in the war, and after the tide turned in the Allies' favor respectively. This has a great deal to do with the ways in which these women--Hildy and Mildred--are portrayed. The two films are of drastically different genres and plots, and this in addition to the social milieu in the two drastically different times that they were made shows the changes in attitudes towards women in the workforce over the course of the war. His Girl Friday is a screwball romantic comedy that creates a fantasy world and a fantasy woman who navigates this world with great ease. She finds love at every turn, and succeeds in earning her heart's desire, which is both a career and a man who loves her, who, with every underhanded trick, proves the power of love. Mildred Pierce on the other hand, was made in a combination of the film noir and melodramatic styles, showing a woman's struggles for both success and love, and within the diagetic space of the film, she is constantly frustrated.

Mildred, at the beginning of the film's timeline, has the life that Hildy Johnson, throughout His Girl Friday, claims that she wants--a nice suburban existence with a nice family and a nice house with a metaphorical white picket fence. But a darker picture quickly reveals itself, and this life is not as perfect as it seems. To support herself and her family, Mildred begins to work for a living, soon realizing that with her ambition and intelligence, she can prosper. She wants to give her daughters the life ...

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...ountry that shouts freedom from oppression from the rooftops must be insidious when it comes to restricting those freedoms. Mildred Pierce is a fable that gives a picture of what women's lives would be like if they did not let men do their wage earning, if they did not embrace their traditional role, if they did not learn their lesson and stay at home. Mildred had no choice but to search out employment, relying on only herself to support her family, like many women in the war-time period. But she did not keep to her place. She did more than just earn a living, she prospered, and to let that image remain with American women could have been disastrous to the American economy. She could not be allowed to succeed, because she was trying to play too many roles, to achieve in every aspect of her life, and that, according to the American way, from a woman, is not allowed.

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