Hollywood’s Women of Action: From The Perils of Pauline (1914) to Wonder Woman (2017)

By Philip Caudrey

The ‘action heroine’ has never been more popular than she is today, with the likes of The Hunger Games (2012), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Wonder Woman (2017) granting her a newfound prominence in Hollywood filmmaking. When most knowledgeable action fans think of the action heroine historically, however, they tend to do so through the prism of her most iconic characters: Emma Peel in the 1960s; Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman in the 1970s; Ripley and Sarah Connor in the 1980s; Xena Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the 1990s; and, of course, the likes of Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, Imperator Furiosa and Princess Diana in modern times.

Yet, the action heroine’s epic journey goes back much further than this. Indeed, it has its origins in the earliest days of cinema, amongst the serial-queens of the early silent-era, and the fleeting cowgirls, swordswomen, and jungle-girls of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. This book is about that epic journey. It traces the action heroine’s century-long struggle for legitimacy and respect, beginning with the silent-era serial, The Perils of Pauline (1914), and ending with the big-budget action-blockbusters of today.

This book asks why the action heroine’s path towards acceptability on mainstream film and television has proven such a long and tortuous one, why she is so hated by a vocal minority of male action fans, and how she has overcome the conservativism of the Hollywood system to at last forge a reputation for herself as a genuinely viable protagonist on both the big and small screens?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781398447196

Philip Caudrey

Philip Caudrey is a medieval historian at the University of Tasmania. He is the author of Military Society and the Court of Chivalry in the Age of the Hundred Years War. This is his first foray into film history. He has been a fan of the ‘action heroine’ sub-genre since he was a small child. He lives in Hobart, Tasmania.

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About the Author

Philip Caudrey is a medieval historian at the University of Tasmania. He is the author of Military Society and the Court of Chivalry in the Age of the Hundred Years War. This is his first foray into film history. He has been a fan of the ‘action heroine’ sub-genre since he was a small child. He lives in Hobart, Tasmania.

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Philip Caudrey 2024

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398447189 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398447196 (ePub e-book)

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First Published 2024

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my parents for supporting and encouraging me to take the plunge of writing a book so far removed from the area of history (medieval) in which I am trained. I would additionally like to thank my friend, Brody Walker, who helped to stimulate my thinking on the topic over the course of numerous Sunday-morning breakfasts. Finally, I would like to thank the team at Austin Macauley Publishers for their assistance in making this book.

Preface

The cartoons of my childhood—c. 1985-c. 1995—overflowed with an abundance of impressive female characters. There was Penny Gadget on Inspector Gadget (1983-86)—a mini Nancy Drew who solved her detective uncle’s crimes for him; Gadget Hackwrench on Chip N’ Dale Rescue Rangers (1988-90)—a mechanical genius, who, like some kind of Chipmunk MacGyver, enjoyed the uncanny knack of saving the day by constructing elaborate technology from random items of discarded trash; Storm and Rogue on X-Men: The Animated Series (1992-97)—whose mutant superpowers were matched only by their harrowing backstories; the elusive titular thief on Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? (1994-99)—who spent each episode absconding with the world’s most precious artefacts, always remaining one step ahead of the law; and, perhaps most memorably, She-Ra on She-Ra: Princess of Power (1985-87)—He-Man’s twin sister and the mightiest woman in the galaxy, whose astounding speed, agility and physical strength were perfectly complemented by her abundant self-confidence and warm heart.

Raised as I was on these cartoons, I naively assumed that such characters were just as prevalent in adult media. My naïve optimism was laid bare, however, at the age of six, when my parents provided me with my first taste of ‘grown-up’ cinema in the form of the classic medieval adventure film, Ivanhoe (1952)—a sword-wielding romp, chronicling the conflict between Normans and Saxons in twelfth-century England. My abiding memory of this experience was of a sense of utter confusion.

At around the halfway mark of the film, the entire cast of Saxon heroes were captured by their Norman adversaries and taken to their castle. Ivanhoe (played by Robert Taylor) and his male comrades were shackled in the dungeon awaiting torture. Meanwhile, leading ladies, Rowena (played by Joan Fontaine) and Rebecca (played by Elizabeth Taylor), were separately locked in palatial bedchambers overlooking the moat.

Based upon my cartoon experiences, I confidently opined that the villains had made a fatal mistake in not properly securing their female captives and that, at the first opportunity, our plucky heroines would surely dive into the moat and swim to safety, or perhaps pick the lock of their door and sneak down to the dungeon to rescue their menfolk. Words cannot adequately convey my sense of bewilderment as Rowena and Rebecca spent the next half-an-hour worriedly wringing their hands and pacing up and down in their gilded cages, causing me at one point to roar at the television in exasperation, ‘Do something!’

Rowena and Rebecca, of course, did nothing because their dual purpose was to act as love-interests and damsels-in-distress. Moreover—as I would subsequently discover—compared to most of their contemporaries, Rowena and Rebecca were in fact impressively nuanced characters who enjoyed considerable personal agency.

This book has arisen from my lifelong frustration at the enduring mistreatment of female characters in the Hollywood action genre. It has arisen from watching an explicitly anti-feminist episode of Adam West’s Batman (1966-68), in which an insidious women’s rights activist (played by Barbara Rush) arranges to have the entire Gotham City police force replaced with women, before unleashing a plague of mice upon the city, allowing her to rob Gotham blind with every law-enforcement officer now standing hysterically atop the nearest piece of furniture.

It has arisen from watching Sonya Blade (played by Bridgette Wilson) in Mortal Kombat (1995) repeatedly demonstrate spectacular martial-arts skills, only to spend the film’s climax marginalised as the most objectified and helpless of damsels-in-distress. It has arisen from watching The Mask of Zorro (1998), in which the hero’s love-interest, Elena (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones), is portrayed as a master-swordswoman, purely for the sake of a single flirtatious introductory duel, which culminates in Zorro punctuating his victory by stripping her naked with a few precise flicks of his sword.

More recently, it has arisen from watching Hermione Granger (played by Emma Watson) in the Harry Potter franchise (2001-11) persistently take a backseat to the titular hero, as his specialness as ‘The Boy Who Lived’ constantly outweighs her very obvious superiority over him as both a sleuth and spellcaster. And, perhaps most disappointingly, it has arisen from waiting a full decade for Black Widow (played by Scarlett Johansson) to finally receive her own stand-alone superhero film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in the wake of a whopping twenty-three male-centric instalments.

In short, this book has arisen from my enduring frustration at the fact that not much, at a fundamental level, has changed for female characters in the action genre since the earliest days of film. The traditional leading lady with no fighting skills might now be cast as a distinguished white-collar professional instead of a Rowena/Rebecca-style princess, and she might now be granted something resembling an independent character-arc, but, with only rare exceptions, her primary purpose remains falling in love with the hero and, in the climax, acting as a passive (and usually imperilled) witness to his heroism.

Meanwhile, her warrior counterpart, the ‘action heroine’—here loosely defined as any female character with fighting skills, from cowgirls, swordswomen and jungle girls, to spies, police-officers/detectives, science-fiction heroines, witches/sorceresses, Amazon warriors, and costumed superheroines—has persistently struggled for visibility and legitimacy. Indeed, even today, she all too often finds herself portrayed: (1) as nothing more than a sexy cipher with an overconfident swagger and a paper-thin personality; (2) at the opposite extreme, as a physically/emotionally ‘battered and broken’ protagonist, seeking vengeance against her abusers; or (3) as a love-interest for the central male hero, in a narrative sense awkwardly filling the shoes of the traditional ingénue, despite possessing a skill-set entirely incompatible with this degree of passivity and helplessness.

Against this backdrop, this book asks why the action heroine’s path towards legitimacy and acceptance, across a century of Hollywood filmmaking, has proven such a long and tortuous one, beginning with the ‘serial queens’ of the early silent era and ending with the big-budget action blockbusters of today.

Introduction: Towards the ‘Action

Heroine’ – Women and the

Hollywood System

The ‘action heroine’ has never been more popular than she is today. For evidence of her impact, one need look no further than a pair of heart-warming YouTube videos: one, featuring the visceral reaction of a little girl cosplaying as Wonder Woman at Comic-Con, sobbing hysterically as she meets her idol, Gal Gadot; the other, revealing the moment when a different little girl can barely contain her spontaneous joy upon learning that Jodie Whittaker is about to become the first female Doctor Who. Painting a similar portrait, though on a far vaster canvas, a 2016 study into the role that entertainment-media plays in the sport of archery revealed that in the two years following the cinematic release of The Hunger Games (2012) and Brave (2012)—whose heroic protagonists, Katniss Everdeen and Princess Merida, were both master-archers—female participation in archery in the United States increased by an astonishing 105%, with growth-rates particularly marked amongst girls in the fourteen-to-sixteen age-bracket.

That this spike in participation was by no means coincidental was laid bare in the response of seven out of ten girls surveyed, who openly acknowledged that either Katniss or Merida had inspired them to take up the bow. Indeed, across all genders, Katniss lagged behind only Robin Hood—and well ahead of The Lord of the Rings’ Legolas and comic-book superheroes, Green Arrow and Hawkeye—as the most influential fictional role-model for young archers.¹

All of this makes plain, on the one hand, the natural yearning of girls and women to see heroic fictional representations of themselves on screen, yet, on the other, reveals just how infrequently these yearnings have been met. Hollywood, after all, was an industry founded in the early twentieth century by heterosexual white men, and it has largely dedicated itself to telling stories that heterosexual white men want to hear about themselves. Hence—according to UCLA’s Diversity Report into Hollywood’s treatment of women and minorities—even today, women comprise only 12.6% of film writers and directors, create only one-in-five television series and are the primary protagonists in only one-third of Hollywood films. That these figures represent a dramatic improvement upon the status quo of earlier generations reminds one of just how badly women have historically been constrained by the Hollywood system.

Indeed, early Hollywood went out of its way to deliberately enforce patriarchy in all aspects of the filmmaking business. Men were the industry’s powerbrokers, the heads of its studios and studio departments, and the primary creative forces behind the camera. Their authority was augmented by the development of a vertically-integrated business model, in which eight studios—five major (Paramount; MGM; Warner Bros.; 20th Century Fox; RKO) and three minor (Universal; Columbia; United Artists)—dominated the industry, signing their stars to lucrative long-term contracts, whilst controlling all three branches of the filmmaking business: production, distribution and exhibition.

In this patriarchal climate, it is hardly surprising that a boys’ club mentality should have pervaded the Hollywood system, preventing women from attaining leadership positions, whilst leaving many of those wishing to write or direct side-lined in traditionally ‘feminine’ jobs in make-up and costume-design, as script-girls, or, away from the filmmaking process entirely, as secretarial staff.

Onscreen, meanwhile, the portrayal of female characters in early Hollywood came to reflect popular patriarchal assumptions about appropriate gender-roles and gender-appropriate behaviour. Many of the biggest-name leading ladies of the early silent era ended up making their reputations playing innocent young ingénues, doted over by their fathers and requiring the protection of their handsome male love-interests.

Female characters were consequently rarely active participants in most early Hollywood narratives. Even when they were the film’s central protagonist, events happened to them and, in the industry’s burgeoning action-adventure genres (foremost amongst them, the western and the swashbuckler), they usually became temporary victims of the antagonist and a romantic prize for the hero to win.

Hollywood’s filmmakers, in short, have always struggled to consistently tell compelling stories about women, choosing instead to focus upon stories about men, whilst at the same time developing an implicitly judgmental approach towards their female characters. Such attitudes underpinned the Hollywood system from the very beginning. Indeed, its powerbrokers during the silent era of the 1910s and 1920s stood at the forefront of a global conservative backlash against the various progressive social movements of the day, which they perceived as a fundamental threat to their patriarchal family values.

At the same time, however, as purveyors of popular entertainment, they could not afford to completely disregard the trends of the moment. What resulted was a schizophrenic response to the evolving social mores of the early twentieth century, not least the threat posed by first-wave feminism. Consequently, to cite but a single example, with the arrival of the so-called ‘Jazz Age’ in the aftermath of the First World War, producers and directors, on the one hand, reacted to changing times by openly embracing risqué female-centric sex-comedies as obvious money-makers, tapping into the freewheeling spirit of the age; yet, on the other, sought to reaffirm the benefits of patriarchy by scaring young women straight, through an array of films in which ‘party girls’ come to sticky ends as a direct result of having abandoned the traditional family values that had kept them safe.

This moralistic atmosphere, in turn, paved the way for the cinematic prominence of the notorious ‘femme fatale’, who essentially existed to illustrate that some women were inherently bad and thus deserving of a grisly fate. Of course, this superficial portrayal of female characters as either stereotypically ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (often labelled the ‘virgin/whore’ complex) long predated the invention of cinema. Nonetheless, once Hollywood began introducing its own modern ‘bad girl’ characters, it set a standard in filmmaking that persists today, in which a set of traditional feminine virtues (e.g., kindness, gentleness, obedience, generosity, innocence) are contrasted with those equally feminine vices (e.g., greed, egotism, duplicity, manipulation, seduction).

This judgmental ethos, moreover, was granted teeth via the implementation (in 1922) and full enforcement (from 1934 to 1968) of the infamously conservative Motion Picture Production Code (the Hays Code)—a tool of self-censorship—whose employees, amongst their various duties, were charged with cleaning up the content of Hollywood film by identifying and censoring any plot-point, scene or even line of dialogue, they found objectionable or obscene.

What emerged, as a result of all this moralising, was a tendency to narrowly define appropriate female behaviour and to valorise a set of supposedly feminine virtues, which patriarchal society found appealing, and which it was hoped would educate girls and young women in how to behave. Perhaps most obviously, the acquisition of a husband was upheld as the natural ‘happy ending’ for the majority of young female characters.

Hence, in classical Hollywood storytelling: (1) female protagonists often find themselves forced to choose between a man and their career, the clear message being that they cannot have both; (2) they become so preoccupied with their love-life that it ends up being almost all they talk about; (3) they usually end up as passive objects of their male suitor’s romantic ambitions, as the tale chronicles his efforts to win her heart; (4) the ‘virgin/whore’ complex is aggressively spotlighted: firstly, when depicting competitive relationships between women, in which the heroine and her rival are often upheld as simple mirror-images of one another, one virtuous, the other vice-ridden; and secondly, in films where the male hero finds himself forced to choose between the ‘good’ girl-next-door and the alluring beauty, who may very well prove to be ‘bad’; and (5) it is made abundantly clear that a woman’s primary purpose is to offer her man emotional and moral support, making his life easier and, if need be, ‘domesticating’ him (i.e., making him a better person by smoothing out his rough edges).

The peddling of these conservative ideals achieved its clearest expression in the so-called ‘woman’s films’ of the 1930s through 1960s: romantic/social melodramas, and some musicals, which enshrined the notion of women as romantic objects and supportive loved-ones, whose natural sphere was the home. Even more disappointingly, these tropes continue to heavily influence Hollywood’s portrayal of its female characters to this day, helping to explain the statistical lack of representation cited above.

All the while, the physical beauty of Hollywood’s glamorous leading ladies has generally been prioritised over their depth of character: a preference captured visually through the camera’s lens via the ‘male gaze’—originally defined by film critic, Laura Mulvey, in the 1970s, as ‘the act of depicting women and the world from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer’.²

Classic examples of the adoption of the ‘male gaze’ include: flagrant voyeurism, in which male characters spy upon female characters in a state of undress (e.g., Rear Window (1954); Animal House (1978); American Pie (1999)); the worship of glamorous femininity, in which a dowdy-looking or shabbily-dressed female character wows her male love-interest after getting a makeover (e.g., Gigi (1958); Pretty Woman (1990); The Princess Diaries (2001)); and, most noticeably, the compartmentalisation of the female form into its most alluring body-parts (e.g., Baywatch (1989-2001); Transformers (2007; 2009); and, perhaps most overtly, in choreographer, Busby Berkeley’s, kaleidoscopic chorus-girl-filled musical-numbers of the 1930s (e.g., Footlight Parade (1933); Roman Scandals (1933); Dames (1934)).

What is abundantly clear from all this is that—throughout Hollywood’s classical studio era (c. 1930-c. 1960), when the foundations of its filmmaking style were laid—the margins within which female protagonists were permitted to operate, and the ways in which they were framed visually, were disappointingly narrow. In most genres, women were relegated to the roles of peripheral side-characters, love-interests there to be won, or ‘good’ or ‘bad’ women, who were essentially designed to act either as straightforward role-models or cautionary tales for female audiences.

Indeed, even when female characters were placed front-and-centre and permitted, to varying degrees, to drive forward the action, they were all too often forced to conform by film’s end to traditional patriarchal expectations of appropriate gender-roles. The Sixties Revolutions, and the widespread social changes that have since followed in its wake, have by no means redressed this imbalance, and—although matters have undeniably improved—stories about heroic heterosexual white men continue to predominate in Hollywood storytelling at the expense of every other type of character.

This state-of-affairs is fundamental to the dismissive treatment of the ‘action heroine’ across a century of Hollywood filmmaking. Quite simply, with notions of appropriate gender-behaviour so narrowly defined, the chances of a female character successfully usurping the role of that most iconic of Hollywood leading men—the ‘action hero’—were negligible during the classical studio era, and remain slim today. Indeed, so strongly is heroism equated with masculinity in traditional Hollywood storytelling, that terms like ‘women of action’ and ‘female action hero’ have come to represent the preferred descriptors for female characters with fighting skills, whilst the term ‘heroine’—the gendered equivalent of ‘hero’—is usually equated with pretty young ingénues, who end up, in the action genre, filling the uninspiring role of damsel-in-distress.

In defiance of this tendency, this book adopts the term ‘action heroine’—alluded to in the Preface—as a blanket descriptor for all types of martially-capable female characters: from cowgirls, swordswomen and jungle girls, to spies, police-officers/detectives, science-fiction heroines, witches/sorceresses, Amazon warriors and costumed superheroines.

Other national cinemas, it should be noted, have been far more open than Hollywood to the concept of the ‘action heroine’. As far back as the 1930s and 1940s, an Australian stuntwoman, Mary Evans, moved to India and, in the unlikeliest of circumstances, forged a lengthy career for herself as a Bollywood action star under the pseudonym, Fearless Nadia. In the Philippines, the superheroine, Darna—a national icon, loosely based upon Wonder Woman—headlined six feature-films during the 1950s and 1960s and has subsequently been the subject of a further nine films and four television series. Similarly, the Italian swashbucklers of the same era, unlike their Hollywood counterparts, intermittently flirted with female-driven material, most notably in a trio of pirate adventures—Queen of the Pirates (1960), Tigress of the Seven Seas (1962) and The Lion of St. Mark (1963)—starring the glamorous sword-wielding Italian movie star, Gianna Maria Canale.

Most obviously, Hong Kong martial-arts cinema has been actively cultivating female action-stars for over half a century, beginning with the trailblazing, Josephine Siao and Connie Chan, whose popularity paved the way for such martial-arts icons as Cheng Pei-pei, Angela Mao, Kara Hui, Cynthia Khan, Moon Lee, Michelle Yeoh and Maggie Q.

Against this backdrop, this book essentially asks why the ‘action heroine’ has been so poorly treated over the course of Hollywood history? Why did it take until the 1960s and 1970s for female-driven action fare to at last find an audience, in such eclectic television series as The Avengers (1961-69), Honey West (1965-66), Wonder Woman (1975-79) and Charlie’s Angels (1976-81)? Why did it take a further generation before Xena Warrior Princess (1995-2001) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) at last truly popularised the ‘action heroine’ and helped her become an everyday part of the small-screen landscape?

Just as pertinently, why should the Alien (1979; 1986) and Terminator (1984; 1991) franchises, and, in rather different fashion, the original Star Wars trilogy (1977; 1980; 1983) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), stand out like oestrogen oases in a desert of testosterone, across a century of Hollywood action-blockbusters? And why has it only been in the past decade—with the likes of The Hunger Games (2012), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Sicario (2015), Rogue One (2016), Atomic Blonde (2017), Captain Marvel (2019), The Old Guard (2020), The Suicide Squad (2021), Black Widow (2021), The Woman King (2022), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) and, chief among them, Wonder Woman (2017)—that action heroines, remotely worthy of Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor, have at last begun acquiring genuine critical praise and commercial appeal?

These questions have rarely been addressed in the broader context of Hollywood history. Almost everything that has been published about the action heroine, aimed at a general readership, has been contemporary in focus, or else has tiptoed over the rare high watermarks of the past—Emma Peel and Honey West in the 1960s, Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels in the 1970s etc.—en route to a discussion of the present day. This book illustrates how Hollywood’s conservative treatment of the action heroine (and of female characters at large within the action genre) stems from the culture of early Hollywood itself.

The filmmaking practices and storytelling conceits implemented during the silent era of the 1910s and 1920s—which reflected contemporary sexist attitudes towards women—would come to cast the longest of shadows across, what we have chosen here to label, the ‘action heroine’ sub-genre, delaying its birth until the 1960s, and its maturation until the 1990s. What follows is a broadly chronological history of the Hollywood action heroine, aimed at any reader with a casual interest in the subject, beginning with the ‘serial queens’ of the early silent era and ending with the female-driven television series and action-blockbusters of the present day.

Structurally, the following chapters are divided into three sections. Section I explores the very earliest action heroines Hollywood produced—during its classical studio era (c. 1930-c. 1960)—surveying the character’s fleeting appearances in westerns, swashbucklers and jungle films. Section II turns to the intermediary period between c. 1960 and c. 2000, when action heroines of inconsistent quality gradually became commonplace on television, yet remained—with a bare few iconic exceptions—almost entirely invisible in feature-film, except as a source of cheap titillation for sleazy exploitation filmmakers. Section III explores the action heroine’s burgeoning popularity in the New Millennium, addressing the disappointing array of negative tropes that have become attached to her character, as well as the ways in which the best films and television series within the sub-genre have overcome them. Each Section will be complemented by a concluding case study, focusing upon a narrowly-specific theme.

Finally, as a means of tying everything together, Game of Thrones (2011-19)—the landmark television series of the modern age—will be adopted as a concluding chapter-length case study, since its epic sweep of characters and medieval-fantasy setting provide the perfect avenue for exploring the ways in which the action heroine has recently progressed as a character, as well as the ways in which the old prejudices surrounding her, dating back to the earliest days of film, continue to hold her back.

Case Study I: The Perils of Pauline (1914)

There is a good case to be made that Pearl White, the athletic star of the serialised adventures, The Perils of Pauline (1914), was Hollywood’s first globally recognised ‘action heroine’. This claim comes with a trio of caveats: firstly, the production company behind the series, The Eclectic Company, was an American subsidiary of the leading French studio, Pathé; secondly, the series was filmed on the east coast of the United States, with White purportedly never once visiting Hollywood in her entire life; and, thirdly, White was merely the most popular of an array of athletic young movie starlets—foremost amongst them, Mary Fuller, Kathlyn Williams, Helen Holmes, Helen Gibson and Ruth Roland—who rose to fame in their own action-packed adventures, which saw them collectively dubbed the ‘serial queens’.

White was born in New Jersey in 1889 and had been acting on stage since the age of six. As a thirteen-year-old, she had worked as a bareback rider in a circus, and her ability to perform her own stunts immeasurably enhanced her prospects when she tried her hand at film work, making her a natural choice to portray feisty adventuress, Pauline Marvin, in what turned out to be a twenty-episode serial. The series proved an immense hit and White was soon earning the exorbitant salary of $1,750 per week.

On the back of Pauline’s success, White began starring in a host of other popular serials, all in much the same vein, including: The Iron Claw (1916), Pearl of the Army (1916-17), The Fatal Ring (1917), The House of Hate (1918), The Lightening Raider (1919) and The Black Secret (1919-20). Her most successful franchise, however, was her three Elaine serials, immediately following Pauline: The Exploits of Elaine (1914-15), The New Exploits of Elaine (1915) and The Romance of Elaine (1915). Indeed, The Exploits of Elaine—her only work apart from Pauline for which footage survives—was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

In her later serials, White was forced to allow a stuntman to double for her, since the studio felt it was risking its financial future with every one of her stunts. Nonetheless, over the course of her Pauline and Elaine serials, White climbed ropes, raced cars, leapt from moving vehicles, dived into and swam across rivers, and escaped burning buildings, becoming the most iconic of Hollywood’s ‘serial queens’, whilst unequivocally demonstrating that women were just as capable as men of convincingly portraying the protagonist in these types of thrilling action-adventure shorts.

White’s stardom proved spectacular, but short-lived. After failing to make the transition from action serials to mainstream cinema, she retired in 1924. Unlike so many other movie stars, however, she invested her money wisely and died in possession of a considerable fortune. Sadly, a spinal injury—purportedly sustained performing a stunt on Pauline—dogged her for the rest of her days, causing her ongoing pain, which she attempted to quell with morphine and alcohol.

She died in 1938 at the age of forty-nine from cirrhosis of the liver, almost a decade before being belatedly memorialised by Hollywood in the far-from-historically-accurate biopic, The Perils of Pauline (1947), starring Betty Hutton.

That Pearl White was a pioneering figure in the history of the Hollywood action heroine is not in doubt. Yet, The Perils of Pauline may prove equally instructive as an opening case study, since many of the serious issues that have bedevilled the portrayal of later action heroines were already present in this earliest of examples.

Pauline’s plot is simple enough: Pauline Marvin is a wealthy heiress, who lives with her elderly guardian (played by Edward José) and his son, Harry (played by Crane Wilbur). She and Harry are in love, and Harry’s father desperately wishes them to wed. Pauline, however, is determined that before she marries, she wants, in her own words, ‘to live a life full of excitement and adventure!’

The villain of the piece is her guardian’s trusted secretary, Mr Koerner (played by Paul Panzer), who is in fact a conman with a shady past. When her guardian dies, he entrusts Pauline’s fortune to Koerner, until such time as she marries Harry. Koerner consequently conspires to have Pauline killed, so that he can keep the fortune for himself, and each episode entails an entirely new scheme on his part, thus placing Pauline in perpetual peril.

Pauline, from the outset, is portrayed as a spirited young woman, and her idea of excitement impressively flies in the face of both Edwardian convention and contemporary notions of ladylike modesty. In one episode, she enters a car race; in another, a horse race; in a third, she goes in search of a pirate’s buried treasure. She also seeks to experience all kinds of other excitement, each adventure tapping into the modern technological marvels of the age.

As the series progresses, Pauline arranges for a stunt-pilot to take her up in his airplane; she convinces a naval officer to take her aboard his submarine; she organises to participate in a hot-air balloon ride; and, on Harry’s yacht, she begs him to allow her to operate his adjoining speedboat, before taking it out for a solo spin. On the downside, as Koerner plots her demise, she finds herself regularly abducted, whilst most of her adventures with horses, airplanes, submarines and the like, end in near-disaster, thanks to deliberate acts of sabotage.

Even viewed at a century’s distance, the series’ greatest strength—especially given the naively child-like portrayal of most heroines in the earliest days of cinema—lies in the fact that Pauline proves more than capable of handling herself physically and escaping her own predicaments, all the while displaying an impressively level-headed sense of pragmatism. When Koerner arranges for the hot-air balloon to fly away with only Pauline in the basket, rather than panicking or passively awaiting rescue, she instead calmly hoists the anchor over the side and shinnies down the rope to the ground (with Pearl White incidentally appearing a much more natural rope-climber than Crane Wilbur, the actor portraying Harry!).

When abducted and left bound-and-gagged in a sealed cavern, she not only unties herself, but locates an escape-route, digging her way to freedom, whilst shifting the heavy rocks barring her path. When the submarine on which she is a guest is sabotaged, as the only person aboard small enough to fit, Pauline courageously squeezes herself through the torpedo tube and swims to the surface to get help. In the horse-race episode, Pauline is well in contention to win the steeplechase, before being thrown from her mount as a result of Koerner’s treachery. And when out alone on the ocean in Harry’s speedboat, she keeps a level head when the boat begins taking on water, switching to a pair of oars and rowing for shore, reaching her destination, with a boat resembling a bathtub, perched atop the rim of the vessel, using a single oar to complete the last stages of her voyage.

Pauline even manages to remain fierce and defiant when in captivity: on one occasion, attempting to flee upon the nearest horse the moment her captors’ backs are turned; and, on another, when left unguarded in a tent, making a desperate uphill dash for freedom at the first opportunity.

In other respects, however, Pauline is a sadly inconsistent character. Most noticeably, her ability to look after herself inexplicably vanishes whenever her fiancée, Harry, is around. In the hot air balloon episode, having calmly rescued herself from her high-flying predicament, she reaches Harry and instantly becomes faint, insisting he will have to carry her the rest of the way. When kidnapped and stowed in a burning attic, aware that Harry is charging to her rescue, she writhes helplessly, despite the array of sharp objects in the room with which she could easily have cut her bonds. Later, when she and Harry are locked in a basement filling with water, Pauline becomes entirely preoccupied cowering from the surrounding rats and makes absolutely no contribution to their escape.

Moreover, Harry—as the protective husband-in-waiting—consistently seeks to scuttle Pauline’s adventures, fearing she will hurt herself, and clearly wishing that she would just settle down and marry him. When Pauline signs up for the motor-race, for example, he consents, but only on the condition that he drives, thus leaving her as nothing more than a glorified passenger. He similarly attempts to talk her out of the steeplechase she enters, and when she expresses her desire to take a trip in an airplane, Harry goes to inordinate lengths to stop her, sabotaging the gears on both of his cars to make sure she misses her flight.

Pauline’s adventures thus witnessed her operating in a bizarre sort of no-man’s-land. On the one hand, her writers were clearly intent upon utilising Pearl White’s athletic prowess to maximum effect. On the other, they were hampered both by the traditional male-centric story-structures of early Hollywood and by their own sense of Edwardian propriety. For Harry to shine as the natural hero, Pauline had to become nonsensically ineffectual whenever in his company.

Moreover, Pauline’s adventurous spirit and athleticism would have been considered entirely unladylike in its day, and thus, as much to uphold her character’s dignity as anything else, she remains, despite her eclectic skill-set, a modest heiress, obedient to her fiancée’s wishes and in need of his protection. Pauline essentially maintained her dignity by keeping in step with the classical child-like heroines of the period, albeit with a significant dose of spunk.

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better!

I. The Western

The western is Hollywood’s oldest and arguably its most iconic genre.³ It speaks to an idealisation of America’s past, in which the conquest of the West, over the course of the nineteenth century, is justified as a victory of civilisation over barbarism. Consequently, in the classical western, the moral tables are turned, and Mexicans are portrayed as greasy ethnic stereotypes, whilst Native Americans are transformed from victims into villains, their raids upon White homesteaders depicted not as desperate acts of a people under siege, but as the vicious depredations of a primitive race.

In stark contrast, White-American cowboys and cavalry officers are valorised as legendary heroes. The western, though, is about more than a patriotic reimagining of history. It champions a set of myths about the strength and purity of the American character, which enabled its pioneers to tame the wilderness and conquer their supposedly uncivilised foes, and, in so doing, decade-by-decade, from the silent era to the 1970s, it forced contemporary American cinemagoers to grapple with their sense of national identity, whilst setting a standard for American masculinity—through the likes of John Wayne, Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood—that few men could match.

Yet, it is more than a little ironic that this hyper-masculine environment should simultaneously have given rise to Hollywood’s first identifiable ‘action heroine’: the gun-slinging cowgirl. As a worthy starting point, then, let us begin by exploring the traditional roles played by women in the classical western, before asking how the cowgirl fleetingly found a home for herself in the genre, from as early as the 1930s, despite—by the very nature of her skill-set—implicitly calling into question traditional notions of acceptable gender-roles and gender-appropriate behaviour.

1) Women in Traditional Westerns

The legends of the Old West were already deeply ingrained in American popular culture long before they were vividly brought to life on the silver-screen. Contemporary folk ballads commemorated the deeds, and whitewashed the sins, of generations of sheriffs, outlaws and cavalry officers. Native Americans were widely portrayed as ‘noble savages’, their defeat at the hands of the White Man made to appear a tragic inevitability. Meanwhile, the Wild West Show—offering easy money to cowboys and ‘Indians’ alike—brought an action-packed, idealised West to east-coast Americans, and ultimately to European audiences, whilst making the fortunes of entrepreneurs like ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody.

Perhaps most significantly, the western became an easily exploitable genre for the authors of pulp-romance novels, not merely in the United States, but as far away as Austria, where a young Adolf Hitler grew up on the German-language cowboy tales of novelist, Karl May.

Thus, by the time the first recognisable cinematic western—Edwin S. Porter’s smash-hit, The Great Train Robbery—appeared in 1903, American and European audiences were already well-accustomed to the western’s basic formula. Within a decade, the western had established itself (alongside the slapstick-comedy) as Hollywood’s first truly distinctive genre, containing a set of common tropes and a recognisable stable of stars. The latter included, at the low-brow end of things, real-life cowboys, like Tom Mix, who essentially brought their pre-existing talents with horse and gun to the movie business.

At the opposite extreme, more serious westerns—notably those starring the classically-trained stage actor, William S. Hart—began to appear, in which action, although ever-present, was secondary to character-development, and in which the protagonist was often portrayed as a deeply flawed, and in many respects, highly unlikeable individual, struggling to decide whether or not to do the right thing.

Increasingly, though, as Hollywood entered the sound era, the western moved inextricably away from its potential as a historical drama. It was now firmly the genre of the pulp-romance novel, comprising White Hats and Black Hats, sheriffs and outlaws, homesteaders and schoolmarms, saloonkeepers and saloon-girls, and, of course, cowboys and Indians. Consequently, the western gradually became, not a means of seriously exploring America’s expansionist past, but rather an attempt to examine the attitudes and values of contemporary American society. This development was made possible by the western’s relegation to B-Picture status during the 1930s, allowing its basic action-adventure formula to be honed and polished until it became almost self-referential.

What prevented the western from going the way of the jungle film (see Case Study III) was its dramatic rebirth as an A-List genre over the course of the 1939 and 1940 seasons. John Ford’s early masterpiece, Stagecoach (1939), led the charge, followed in short order by such classics as Jesse James (1939), Destry Rides Again (1939), Sante Fe Trail (1940), The Westerner (1940), The Return of Frank James (1940) and When the Daltons Rode (1940). These were comparatively serious works that leaned more toward the westerns of William S. Hart than those of Tom Mix, and it was these types of films that set the parameters of the A-List western’s formula, sculpted its message, and essentially became the standard against which later revisionist westerns carved out their own new messages about the meaning of the Old West.

The darker turn taken by the western during the 1940s, and especially during the pessimistic post-war climate of the 1950s, reinforced that it was not a period-drama, but rather an ongoing statement about the character of contemporary American society, and especially, the virtues and vices of the American male. Indeed, its tone became darker still—pathos-ridden and even nostalgic—during the genre’s twilight during the 1960s and 1970s, in films which often chronicled the final battles of aging gunslingers, out of step with changing times.

All of this leads us to our central question: in this hyper-masculine world of gunslingers and outlaws, with its predominant focus upon the virtues and vices of the American male filtered through a contemporary lens, what role did women play in the classical western, and how did the cowgirl arise as an identifiable (albeit, only occasional) action heroine? The best place to start might be by examining the roles played by women in a handful of those classical westerns that are now considered masterpieces of the genre: Stagecoach (1939), The Westerner (1940), My Darling Clementine (1946), High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953). What one finds is that despite on occasion producing female characters of considerable substance, most women in these films ultimately succumb to one or more of a range of narrow stereotypes.

Most obviously, the moral world of the western provides the perfect setting for playing out the ‘good/bad’ woman dichotomy (or ‘virgin/whore’ complex) (see Introduction). The quintessential images of women in classical westerns are as schoolmarms, demure ingénues, and devoted rural housewives, on the one hand, and as outlaw’s molls, prostitutes, and low-born (and often mixed-race) anti-heroines on the other. The cast of most westerns is overwhelmingly male, and thus it is not uncommon to encounter a mere two female protagonists, one representing a stereotypically ‘good’ and the other a stereotypically ‘bad’ woman.

This was the case in Stagecoach, where only two of the coach’s passengers are female: one a well-bred and heavily pregnant easterner (played by Louise Platt), the other a prostitute, recently run out of town (played by Claire Trevor). Similarly, in My Darling Clementine, the titular heroine (played by Cathy Downs), sweet and pure, has travelled from Boston to Tombstone, where she falls in love with Sheriff Wyatt Earp (played by Henry Fonda), whilst her darker reflection is a low-born saloon-girl, named Chihuahua (played by Linda Darnell).

Because Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine are superior examples of the genre, these ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women are permitted to develop into fully fleshed out characters with their own backstories and motivations. Yet, they nonetheless carry on their backs the simplistic moral agenda that separates female characters into these easy twin handles.

Clementine remains side-lined from the real action, involving cattle rustlers and the murder of Earp’s younger brother. She stands aside whilst he seeks vengeance, and he ultimately ‘rides off into the sunset’ with no guarantee that he will ever return to her. Chihuahua, meanwhile, dies on Doc Holliday’s (played by Victor Mature) operating table, thus adding her name to the long list of morally improper women who are ‘punished’ by their screenwriters with death.

By contrast, in Stagecoach, Dallas, the prostitute, manages to redeem herself by tending to her heavily pregnant fellow passenger and caring for mother and baby when she is forced to give birth en route. It is almost as an implicit reward for turning the moral corner that her character is granted a moderately happy ending, permitted by the benevolent sheriff to escape across the border to Mexico with John Wayne’s wanted-fugitive protagonist.

A second well-worn stereotype surrounding female characters in the western was their pigeonholing in the role of the ‘woman as domesticator’—one of classical Hollywood’s favourite idealisations of womanhood (see Introduction). This trope, though, was treated rather differently in the western than in most other genres. When played out in a contemporary urban setting—in everything from gangster films, to romantic-comedies, to social-melodramas and musicals—the domestication of the male protagonist is generally perceived in a positive light.

In the popular MGM musical, Me and My Gal (1942), for example, Gene Kelly’s roguish, womanising anti-hero is enticed by Judy Garland’s virtuous heroine to give up his immoral ways and settle down with her. In the western, the pretty young homesteader offers essentially the same allure to the hard-bitten gunslinger. Yet, the key difference lies in the fact that the gunslinger’s chief characteristics as the ‘strong, silent type’ are considered admirable, whereas characters like Kelly’s protagonist in Me and My Gal are essentially just smooth-talking heels. Hence, Kelly’s domestication is perceived as a good thing, raising him up from an ugly world of easy lies and empty promises.

By contrast, there is no more pathetic figure than the domesticated gunslinger. The untameable man has allowed a mere woman to tame him and now he does chores around the homestead, where once he gunned down outlaws in the name of justice.

This was the fate of Cole Hardin (played by Gary Cooper) in The Westerner. Having arrived in a small rural community divided between pious homesteaders and black-hatted cattlemen, he is the only one capable of moving in both of their worlds. He thus finds himself forced to choose between the hyper-masculine world of the cattlemen and the domesticated world of the homesteaders, where he has become romantically involved with a pure young farmer’s daughter, Jane-Ellen (played by Doris Davenport).

Eventually, he sides with the homesteaders, vanquishes the town’s corrupt judge (played by Walter Brennan) and settles down with his lady-love. Unlike Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine, Hardin chooses domestic bliss, and we are left with the unmistakable impression that he has in the process abandoned those heroic virtues which made him a man among men.

It was, indeed, partly to illustrate that the rugged gunslinger cannot be so easily domesticated that led to the