The Woman's Picture in the Trade Press of Classical Hollywood

ABSTRACT:The 1940s has been considered the heyday of the woman's film by film scholars, but more films were marked in one way or another as a woman's picture by the film industry during the interwar years than in the post–World War II period. The early promotion of women-centered films was, in part, an attempt to attract the middle classes to movie theaters. Commercial considerations and the industry's understandings of what appealed to women, as revealed by advertisements, trade reviews, and reports by exhibitors, determined which women-centered films were tagged as women's pictures.