Women's Role In Pro-Feminist Films

Introduction

Before 1965 women were nothing more than a man’s doting subordinate, hiding behind the identity of her male counterpart. When the feminist movement began in the 1970’s we saw a significant shift to pro-feminist women’s roles in film that we had not seen in decades before (Rothman, Powers, Rothman, 1993). This change occurred because of the relaxation of the movie industry self-censorship allowed for more sexually explicit material. The introduction to more sexual content was the most sensational change since 1965 in the movie industry. Before this films condemned women who had sex outside of marriage, they considered them morally reprehensible and nearly every character who engaged in these acts was punished (Rothman, Powers,

The oversexualized and non leadership roles women are generally pushed into perpetuation these power imbalances and when films like Grease come along it helps to attack those stereotypes. “Women are often only associated with their male counterparts, they are rarely recognized for their own accomplishments” (UWIRE, 2014). This is another example of Grease representing feminist aspects because the film recognizes not only Sandy for her own liberation but Rizzo for her recognition that how she acts isn’t really that bad, that there are worse things she could do. When films don’t recognize women with their own personalities and strength it leads to the normalization of a ‘lesser gender’ and with the media’s amount of influence it is imperative that films like Grease showcase gender equality. Feminist films in the 70’s, like Grease, used something called the “images of women” approach when making films. “This was supposed to restructure the representation of women in film so there would be more positive ‘role models’ for young girls to look up too. (Chaudhuri, 2006)” (Sutherland, Feltey, 2016). Making films that put out more positive images truly change the way women in real life see themselves. “These effects shape the personal identity of women given that people naturally adopt traits of the representations that they see of themselves,” (Trujillo, Sim,