Zeisler refers to The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, also known as the Hays Code, as “a program of self-regulation.” It helped Hollywood sidestep potential government intervention in the film industry. At the time the Code was introduced, America was closely following a rape/manslaughter case involving an actor and young actress named Virginia Rappe. The actor was acquitted, but Hollywood’s penchant for crime and sensation became the topic of the day. What followed were 35 years of strict Hays Code enforcement, which came at the expense of women in film:

“There’s no question that the rules laid out in the Code -- among them, that “impure love…must not be presented in such a way to arouse passion or morbid curiosity on the part of the audience” -- had much broader implications for representations of women than they did for men… In his 2001 book Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, film critic Mick LaSalle noted that the Hays Code was especially preoccupied with the lives of women on-screen, seeing portrayals of fulfilling careers, sexual hungers, and lives that didn’t depend on one man as unnatural and -- that word again -- 'impure.’ It wasn’t immorality so much as it was gender equality that put the Code’s authors and administrators in a lather.” (We Were Feminists Once)

From 1934-1968, the Code functioned like a film censor. With a devout religious man named Joseph Breen in charge of applying Hays Code guidelines to new productions, the Code effectively erased birth control, divorce, and shared beds from movie theatre screens. Sexism on-screen grew and grew, and by the time the Hays Code was lifted, America’s imagination had changed:

“The handprints of the Hays Code were all over the plots of women’s pictures: where women had been the architects of their own lives, now they were the victims of them. The chief themes were abjection and self-sacrifice in the pursuit of love and motherhood, often to the point of sickness and madness; and the screen pulsed with a moralism that pitted women against one another, often in the form of doppelgangers.” (We Were Feminists Once)

So began the era of women depicted as devoted wives and caring mothers, enamored with the “traditional family values” that politicians still invoke. Zeisler lists three 1930s/40s “women’s films” that neatly obeyed Hays Code mandates and gained tremendous popularity: Stella Dallas; Now, Voyager; and Mildred Pierce. All three releases reinforced motherhood as a woman’s highest calling. Other women's films followed suit, and according to Zeisler, only the rise of indie movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s brought back the full-fledged, independent, morally complicated woman protagonist.

It's both gratifying and frustrating to find such an obvious culprit behind inequality. Of course, the Hays Code isn’t the only cause of sexism in the entertainment industry (the men who wrote and enforced the Code clearly had sexist beliefs to begin with, and America has been equating morality with motherhood and marriage since long before 1930). At the very least, you can always cite The Motion Picture Production Code as proof that the rise of June Cleaver-esque characters who stood for America’s good old “traditional family values” were 100% contrived.

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