March 31, 2021 • 26 mins
It's the last day of women's history month, and it's our last special Sunday episode celebrating women's contributions to society. Today, we welcome Professor Nora Gilbert, who speaks with me about the ways Motion Picture Production Code censorship wasn't all bad for women's expression and portrayals in film. / On this day in 1878, heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson was born.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, y'all, Eves here. We're doubling up today with two
events in history on with the show. Welcome to this
day in History class. I'm Eves. And it's the last
day of March, which means it's also the last day
of Women's History Month. And this month we've brought on
a lot of special guests to celebrate Women's History Month,
and today we'll be doing the same. We'll be talking
(00:21):
about the Motion Picture Production Code, which is also known
as the Hayes Code, and that was ratified on March
thirty one, nineteen thirty The Hayes Code was this set
of guidelines that subjected American films to moral censorship. And
you might be thinking, what does that have to do
with the celebration of women's history, But our guest today,
(00:43):
Dr Nora Gilbert, has shown that censorship did have benefits
for women. Hi, Norah, how are you. I'm good? How
are you doing? I'm good? Good. So, Um, I'm really
really excited to talk to you today. I honestly never thought,
never thought about this angle to the Hayes Code or
two censorship in general until I saw your work. So
(01:03):
I'm just really so if you could just start off
by briefly breaking down what exactly the motion picture Production
Code is and what it did. M okay, So a
lot of people talk about pre code Hollywood and postcode
Hollywood and what they usually are meeting by that is
a breaking point that happened in nineteen thirty four when
(01:25):
a guy named Joseph Breen came and took over what
had already been in place for four years by that point,
which was the production code UM and he was the
one who really enforced it in a new way, and
a lot of people think of that as the time
was the code really got its teeth. But originally, back
in nineteen thirty this is something that came about because
the motion picture industry did not want to have to
(01:47):
deal with legal censorship, so censorship at the state and
local levels, where people could just watch a movie and
say we're not going to screen it, we we censor it.
We're going to take out this scene, we're gonna take
out these words, and legally people could do that pretty
easily in nineteen thirty because motion pictures were not considered
to be covered under the First Amendment, because they have
been ruled in nineteen fifteen that Hollywood is just a
(02:08):
big business and it's not really art, so we don't
have to protect it in the same way that other
kinds of artists were protected, so they could sensor anything
they wanted. So the Hollywood producers and filmmakers said, what
are we gonna do to avoid this, because there are
a lot of protest groups that were complaining, especially in
the nineteen twenties during the kind of scandalous flapper era,
(02:29):
kind of you know, Prohibition era, but when things are
kind of silent, pictures were getting kind of uh, you know,
their naked bodies on screen. There was a lot of
illifit sex going on in the screen and a lot
of drinking, and they didn't like that during Prohibition. So
they wanted to um find a way for the movies
to be made more socially acceptable and more financially lucrative.
Because another thing to point out is that the stock
(02:51):
market crash, of course, happens in nine and it's right
after that that the first production code UM is composed
and put into place, because they're really try trying to
appease their New York Wall Street backers and say we're
going to make movies as financially recruitive as possible, because
we'll make them so they're safe for everyone, so everyone
could go see these movies. So in nineteen thirty, this
(03:12):
group of a few Catholic men got together and they said,
we're going to make this list. And it's a very
comprehensive list. It has a bunch of for you know,
it has its general principles, and then it's particular applications
and then just pages and pages of kind of defending
why they are objecting to the things they are and
it's very you know, broad ranging and get very specific
(03:34):
about certain things, but then also just talks some mofty
terms about how they're going to save movies for America.
And so that's kind of how it got started, and
it really there were there are different audiences that it
wanted to protect. It very specifically said it wanted to
protect the young, so it was very afraid that young
movie goers would go and they would see these objectionable things.
(03:55):
It was very explicitly said that it cared about protecting
people from small all communities as opposed to big cities.
So back then they were very sure that the rural
folks would get more corrupted by things than people who
are in urban centers who are more sophisticated, and it
doesn't say anything about wanting to protect women explicitly, but
(04:15):
my argument is that that's really underpinning a lot of
what they're doing in the code. They're very worried that women.
There was a conception at the time that women were
the main, uh bulk of movie goers and that they
were the ones who were watching this stuff and getting
corrupted by this stuff, and so a lot of the
these specific things that they forbid, there was nothing that
(04:37):
was specifically forbidden about men, but there were things like
they said, you know, dances with movement of the breasts
is forbidden to be seen on screen, or um the
sale of women or a woman selling her virtue is
to be forbidden. So it was clear and some of
the specific things they did that they were worried more
about how women were being portrayed and what female audiences
would be getting than they were worried about men. And
(04:59):
the one both that I jotted down that I think
is exemplify as what people were really thinking at the time,
even though it wasn't actually put into the code, is
there's this Chicago local film censor whose name is unbelievably
major medalist Lucillus Cicero funk Houser like such a mad
up name that this is his name and his quote,
(05:20):
as he said in the nineties seventeen, he says his
censorship policy is to eliminate sings that quote the male
sex could stand, but that might cause women to brood
and lose their reason. So he's worried that women will
just explode if they see this stuff on screen. And
a lot of people really were worried about that, even
though that's not really written in the production code in
(05:40):
the same way. So that was a very long answer,
but sure all things that led up to the code
being the way it was. Yeah, So there's a ton
of documentation out there about how that censorship kind of
stifled expression. And as you pointed out, the censor was
not necessarily the enemy of the r it is, but
they kind of work together with the artist to create
(06:02):
this subtext. So beyond that argument that the Hayes Code
restricted women's expression, what role did it play for you know,
the benefit of women in film? There? Maybe feminism, right, So,
I mean, one thing about feminism is that has all
these you know, different perspectives of course in different strands
and you can be a feminist with very different attitude
(06:24):
towards a sexuality. And so there's certainly some feminists would
say the more that you're trying to not show female
sexualities that stifling and that's you know, hindering um women's freedom,
which I can certainly see that standpoint as well. But
another standpoint is that women are very because they're so sexualized,
they're objectified on screen and so very famous. A piece
(06:46):
of film feminist film criticism by La Multi from the
nineteen seventies says that you know, the cinema is has
is all about the male gaze, and it's objectifying to women,
and women are just kind of, you know, these sexual
objects to be consumed by men. So in terms of
that strain of feminism, I would say that interestingly, censorship
it was not done in the name of making women
(07:07):
more empowered by any means. It was created by men,
I think four men. But what it did was it
kind of tried to stifle some of the overt objectification
and sexualization of women in terms of they're trying to
not just be a bunch of bodies on screen and
the stuff that you see in pre code Hollywood. I mean,
so much of it is wonderful and exciting and sexy
(07:28):
in many ways, but it also is like if you
think of like the buzzy Berkeley musicals, that are just
a bunch of like women's bodies just like disembodied, these
legs that looked like a kaleidoscope going around. And this
was during the years before the Code was enforced. Women
were so hyperbolically sexualized that I think that when the
Code came around, it had to make sex into something else,
(07:49):
and it didn't want to lose its sex appeal for
audiences because it still knew that sex sold. But what
it did and and the post code years, by which
I mean in post nineteen thirty four, is that we
then started having this genre of films that came about
where women's sexuality was expressed through their talking and their
witty banter, the screwball comedy, the romantic comedies of the age,
(08:11):
and women were kind of made to be very intelligent
and sexual in a way that was through there, you know,
they were desirable through um their brains, in their bodies,
you might be able to say. And so there was
a way in which the films that came directly after
the code um started to you know, expand what women's
purview was in terms of their you know, intellectual capacities
(08:33):
on screen, not that that hadn't always been I'm not
saying that when women were sexualized they were unintelligent, but
just that there was a different way that it was
the expression was happening. And so in general, my feeling
is that censorship forces the artists to be more subtle
and more subversive and get their points across in ways
that are specifically supposed to be sophisticated. I use that
(08:55):
we're in quotes because that's what the code administrators used
that term allot to say. We wanted to be sophisticated
material so that only some parts of the audience will
get it. And they thought that that meant adult versus children.
They thought that that meant men would get it and
women wouldn't. But the irony is that, you know, women
found a lot of pleasure in these movies, and obviously
(09:16):
women were getting a lot of the subtexts as well
and finding it very pleasurable to watch movies in that way,
I guess. And I would also say that, uh so,
one thing that the censorship worked very well at is
that it did a good job of squelching certain voices,
right um, trying to make more radicalized voices not be heard.
(09:36):
But in that same tone you could get people were
starting to um find ways to get around the way
that they were being officially told to to voice things. So,
for example, women directors, there were too many in the
classical Hollywood film are There was Lois Webber, who was
one of the most important film directors in the Silent era,
and I had Dorothy Arsner eventually had like Idle Lupino.
(09:57):
But there are a lot of women who were not
able to direct because was this kind of very male
playing field. But writing was a very different thing, and
women writers could get their voices in, often on uncredited
in ways. And so there are a lot of these
films that were that seemed like they're being completely produced
by men. They're directed by men, officially written by men,
sometimes um produced by men. But women's voices were able
(10:20):
to make their way in there. And the other way
was through the actresses themselves. And that's kind of the
project I'm working on right now, is thinking about how
the Hollywood actress herself as an icon as an idea
changed the way that women thought about themselves in um,
their own lives. So the fact that women were so
strong and successful and having these visible careers in a
(10:41):
way that had never really happened before the Hollywood actress.
During this time period and from the very beginning of Hollywood,
the actress reigned supreme. So Mary Pickford was the first
major Hollywood movie star in the nineteen and she really
was far more successful and visible and everyone obsessed over
her more than people like Charlie Applin, who you talked
more about today. Um. So, Hollywood itself was always dominated
(11:05):
by men, but the women were the ones who got
far more kind of pressed time, and people were more
obsessed with them. And I think it's because the idea
of a woman with that much, you know, visible power,
and she had, you know, she was disempowered in certain
ways because as a studio actress, she had to do
whatever her bosses told her to some extent. So many
women fought against that and became independent contract players. But
(11:27):
she also was the one that was, you know, on
all the movie magazine covers and was the one that
everyone talked about. And so the way that um, the
film's postcode, how that started to play out is that
that was the time period where more women, more female actresses.
They were starting to realize that the movie studios needed them,
And so you had actresses like Carol Lombard and conscious
(11:48):
that and not these people who were stepping away from
their contracts and saying, I want to run things the
way I wanted Bettie Davis fighting very hard. So the
coupling of the content of the movies shifting to make
female character stronger, and the actresses themselves starting to play
more and more of kind of a rebellious role in
um the kind of sexual political landscape of America that
(12:11):
those couple together meant that in the post code years,
that was one of some most exciting kind of developments
for uh, the intersection of Hollywood and feminism started to happen.
So I'm wondering was that something that movie goers recognized
at the time. Did they see that all these changes
were happening behind the scenes, or was that something that
people in the industry were kind of only in the
(12:34):
know of. Well, it was something that the movie industry
wanted very much to tout. They wanted to announce that
they were censoring things. They wanted to make it clear
that they were trying to purify these uh films to
make them safer for America because it actually I should
point out another role that women had in censorship is
that even though it was this small cohort of Catholic
(12:55):
men who did the writing of the production code, it
was really the women who were parts like these the
women's clubs, so we're called like the Federation of Women's Clubs,
and there are like thirty million members at the high
point of these clubs, and they were really some of
the people who were protesting the obscenity and the depravity
of films during the Ties. Some people thought that they
(13:16):
were doing this for the women, that they were trying
to protect the women. At the same time, um the
way there were articles written. There's one from up front
page of Variety that's called dirt Craze due to women,
where it talks to women loved her nothing shocks them.
The bat or the better women who make up the
bulk of the picture audiences are also the majority of
readers of the tabloid scandals, sheets, slashing magazines, and erotic books.
(13:40):
It is to cater to them. All the hot stuff
of the present day is turned out. So that's what
The perception was during the right as the code is
being implemented, So when it was implemented, they wanted to
say to everyone to make all those women's club members
who were protesting, they wanted to say, we are censoring
now and things are going to be different. But then
(14:00):
they also wanted to make all those women who they
thought were dirt crazed and wanted to watch sexy material.
They wanted to make them happy. So it was kind
of like, I think people were very aware that the
motion picture industry was trying to change in certain ways,
but then they'd go to the theaters and they would see,
certainly in the what we call the pre code years
between nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty four, they'd see that
(14:22):
things were getting all the more racy and exciting to them.
And then in the postport code years, I think that
they were going to the theaters and very aware like
what is being allowed to be shown to me and
what isn't and it forced them to come I think,
very savvy movie goers, so that people were always trying
to read sexual material into things that you know all
(14:43):
the more. This is kind of the uh for code
and concept. Michelle Faucode is French theorist who says that
I don't think of the Victorian eras this prudish era.
This was, in fact when people were obsessed with talking
about sex because it was forbidden. As soon as something
as forbidden, it's more exciting and then you want to
talk about it all the more. And I would say
the same thing happened after the Code is that these
(15:05):
movies came out and people were like thinking constantly where
is the sexuality? Where is the forbidden subtext in these films?
And it made them more pleasurable in certain ways. So
there's something that's just exciting about watching something that you
think you're getting that you shouldn't be getting, you know.
And I think that that's the kind of reading practices,
particularly for women, that emerged in the postcode era. Is
(15:28):
there any person, any woman are filmed that you can
point to that really illustrates how the Hayes Code era
censorship encouraged like innovation or expressiveness in cinema. Yeah, I mean,
I guess in general I would say the genre of um,
what we call now the screwball comedy, or more broadly,
the romantic comedy. The reason why I look to this
(15:48):
genre in particular is because it's the one where I mean,
there's some feminise critics that point out that in a
lot of these films women are strong and empowered for
most of the film, and then the very last few
minutes we have to kind of demobilize them in some
way or make them lose their voice. And I do
agree with that reading. But I also think that, you know,
one of the things the production code did is it
(16:09):
said what really matters is how the movie turns out,
Like you can do controversial stuff in the course of it,
but you have to wind up with a very kind
of conventional conservative message that the woman remains in the
home and things like that. But I also think that
everyone knew that at the time, going back to your
last question, that everybody was aware of the convention that
the ending had to feel a certain way. But if
(16:32):
you just you know, focused on the center of the
film or the majority of the film, then you could
get these messages that were much more subversive or um
kind of progressive. And so as a full genre, I
would say, if you look at the Screwball comedy, these
women characters in it, they are so much more kind
of agentive and active and they're the ones who are
controlling the plot, controlling the atmosphere. They're the ones who
(16:55):
are smarter than the men usually and they're outwitting them.
And this was something that was relatively knew, and that
the idea that women could be this much in control
of their own identities and their own sexuality and just
again going back to sex as a trope that really
gets treated differently in the postcode era in a way
that a lot of women found to be empowering to them,
(17:16):
so that uh, you know, actresses like Katherine Shepburn and
barbara's Sandwick and Carol Lombard and Irene Dune. These were
actresses where the reason they were so popular with female
audiences is because women felt like they were able to
achieve the things that they wanted to achieve in their
own lives. But through these stories that were often very
(17:36):
you know, kind of their slapstick comedy. There's a lot
of falling and silliness, but the message the undergirding messages
them is that you know, women really can and should
be in a more prominent place in the world. Do
you have any favorite scene or particular moment that just
really stands out to you that you've seen from that
era of films that you like, go back to when
(18:00):
you're thinking about censorship and how was the verdict um
not to put you on the spot or anything, but
only if you yeah. I mean one scene that highlights
the thing I was talking about, where where sexuality feels
more desirable because it's forbidden. I don't know if that's
(18:22):
quite the it's not the female empowerment thing, but we're
seeing that that I often think of that embodies what
a code censorship did is from It Happened One Night,
which there's Clark Gable and Clade Colbert. Which happened is
filmed right in at the moment that Joseph Green takes over,
so the code is now being formalized in a new way.
And the plot of it is is that they're on
(18:43):
the road together. They are not married, she's married someone else,
she's look with someone and he's the reporter who's going
to get a story about it. But of course they're
falling in love and there's a lot of witty banter
between them. But um there's a scene where they're both
staying in a hotel room together and there will be
very shocking for the time period. And so the way
that he makes this okay a is that he hangs
a blanket in the middle on a rope in the
(19:03):
middle of their room and he says, all right, now
I can't see anything, so you're fine. And so as
two starts like getting undressed, and then she just starts
throwing you know, her stockings and her clothes over at
the top of it to hang it as she's gonna
put on her pajamas, and he gets so he's like, well, now,
all I'm doing, of course, is imagine you on the
other side naked. And so the idea is that you
put up a wall, you put up a barrier, you
(19:25):
try to hide what's on the other side, and it
makes people think about it all the more but be
able to use their own imaginations in a way that
is you know, very stimulating and also requires more of
the viewer and it puts more of the sexuality into
your mind in ways that I mean, you could say
that that makes you more kind of pervy that you're
trying to think about what's over there, but also makes
it so that the sex is more about the viewer
(19:47):
instead of what's on the screen. And I think for
women in particularly that could feel like a way that
they could in this time when it was considered so
taboo for them to have overt sexual desires and opinions,
they could watch these movies and let it kind of
play out in their own imaginative bass in a way
that felt really good to them. That is really smart.
I wouldn't have thought of that scene like that. It's
(20:09):
like they were doing things that were meta before meta
was the huge thing to do in film. But it's
so cool to think of it this way because now
I'm going to go back and look at movies in
such a different light, because I guess I always think
of censorship as this kind of thing to rally around,
as a negative thing, as a bad thing, like there's
a shadowy cabal of like overlords who are telling you
(20:30):
what you can and what you can put in this,
and it's bad for me as an artist or for
that person as an artist. And yeah, this just really
puts things into a different light. So those are all
the questions that I have. But if you have anything
that you want to add, Bill free to I mean, yeah,
I know that what you were just saying is exactly
what I'm trying to get at is the idea that
I mean, both the sensors. Often we're not trying as
(20:52):
hard as we thought to block, and I think they
just wanted to make sure that it passed certain people's uster.
They were okay with movies talking to people in different ways.
But also the fact that artists are smart, and artists
censorship doesn't just welch people. I mean, of course, in
some ways censorship can when it's you know, legalized, and
people are you know, other voices are silence in very
(21:13):
real ways. But in places where we have you know,
foundational levels of freedom of speech, sometimes censorship instead work
to motivate the artists and inspire the artists in ways
that I think we don't think it's tough about. Yeah,
all right, thank you so much for talking about this today.
It's been a real pleasure. All Right, It's fun to
talk to you by. Thank you so much for listening
(21:39):
to this episode today. I hope you enjoyed it, and
I hope you enjoyed all of the interviews that we've
done for Women's History Month. You can let us know
how you felt about them at T D I h
C Podcast on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. We'll see you here.
In the same place tomorrow. A quick content warning before
(22:06):
we start the show. This episode contains mention of sex work.
Hey everyone, I'm Eves and welcome to This Day in
History Class, a show that brings you a little slice
of history every day. The day was March one, boxer
(22:32):
Jack Johnson was born. Johnson went on to become the
first African American world heavyweight boxing champion. Johnson was born
in Galveston, Texas. His parents, Henry and Tina Johnson, were
both formerly enslaved and had blue collar jobs. Jack was
the third of nine children, five of whom reached adulthood.
(22:55):
He grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood and went
through five years of school. After Jack left school, he
took a series of jobs. Throughout this time, he participated
in fights and built up his self defense skills. It
was in Dallas that Johnson was encouraged to train as
a boxer. Back in Galveston, he took on more jobs
(23:16):
and saved up enough money to buy a pair of
boxing gloves. He moved from street fights to taking part
in loosely organized boxing bouts. Johnson began traveling across the
country to fight in the late eighteen nineties, and it
was during this time that he became a professional boxer.
He gained a reputation as a formidable heavyweight and became
(23:38):
known as the Galveston Giant, but he was limited to
fighting on the black boxing circuit, which meant that he
got less money and could not fight in world championship matches.
Throughout his boxing career, he supplemented his income by taking
speaking engagements, as well as singing, dancing, and playing instruments
(23:59):
on the vaudeville sir get Johnson won his first title
when he beat Denver at Martin for the unofficial World
Colored Heavyweight Championship in nineteen oh three. The press urged
James Jeffries, the reigning white heavyweight champion, to take on Johnson,
but Jeffries refused to fight a black man. Once Jeffries retired,
(24:21):
Johnson pursued a fight with the new champion, Tommy Burns.
Burns agreed to the fight after he was offered thirty
thousand dollars to take it. In December of nineteen o eight,
Johnson and Burns went up against each other. The fight
lasted fourteen rounds before the police broke it up as
Johnson had beaten Burns badly. Johnson was declared the winner.
(24:44):
His win upset a lot of white America, and the
search for a white boxer who could beat Johnson began.
Novelist Jack London coined the term great White Hope to
describe the man who would fulfill this role. So in
nineteen ten, j Jeffries came out of retirement for the
fight he had previously refused. The press intensified tensions around
(25:06):
the fight by claiming that a Johnson win might lead
black people to riot. Johnson won in the fifteenth round
when Jeffreys threw in the towel before an inevitable knockout happened.
Race riots did erupt in cities across the US in
the aftermath of the match. Johnson continued to fight professionally
into the nineteen thirties and did exhibition matches after that,
(25:30):
but beyond his career, his personal life was also riddled
with controversy. He was married to and in relationships with
several white women at a time when interracial relationships were taboo.
He was charged with violating the Man Act after he
was accused of transporting a white sex worker across state lines.
He fled the US and lived in exile for several
(25:52):
years until he surrendered to U. S Marshals in ninety
He served ten months in prison. Johnson also faced allegations
of domestic violence. Johnson died in a car crash in
North Carolina. In the decades following his death, people began
to speak out on the racist motivations of the charges
(26:13):
that he faced. He was granted a presidential pardon in
I'm Eve cheff Cote and hopefully you know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. And if
you want to send us a note on social media,
you can do so on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at
t d I h C podcast. You can also send
(26:34):
us a note via email at this Day at I
heeart media dot com. Thanks again for listening to the
show and we'll see you again tomorrow. For more podcasts
(26:54):
for my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, y'all, Eves here. We're doubling up today with two
events in history on with the show. Welcome to this
day in History class. I'm Eves. And it's the last
day of March, which means it's also the last day
of Women's History Month. And this month we've brought on
a lot of special guests to celebrate Women's History Month,
and today we'll be doing the same. We'll be talking
(00:21):
about the Motion Picture Production Code, which is also known
as the Hayes Code, and that was ratified on March
thirty one, nineteen thirty The Hayes Code was this set
of guidelines that subjected American films to moral censorship. And
you might be thinking, what does that have to do
with the celebration of women's history, But our guest today,
(00:43):
Dr Nora Gilbert, has shown that censorship did have benefits
for women. Hi, Norah, how are you. I'm good? How
are you doing? I'm good? Good. So, Um, I'm really
really excited to talk to you today. I honestly never thought,
never thought about this angle to the Hayes Code or
two censorship in general until I saw your work. So
(01:03):
I'm just really so if you could just start off
by briefly breaking down what exactly the motion picture Production
Code is and what it did. M okay, So a
lot of people talk about pre code Hollywood and postcode
Hollywood and what they usually are meeting by that is
a breaking point that happened in nineteen thirty four when
(01:25):
a guy named Joseph Breen came and took over what
had already been in place for four years by that point,
which was the production code UM and he was the
one who really enforced it in a new way, and
a lot of people think of that as the time
was the code really got its teeth. But originally, back
in nineteen thirty this is something that came about because
the motion picture industry did not want to have to
(01:47):
deal with legal censorship, so censorship at the state and
local levels, where people could just watch a movie and
say we're not going to screen it, we we censor it.
We're going to take out this scene, we're gonna take
out these words, and legally people could do that pretty
easily in nineteen thirty because motion pictures were not considered
to be covered under the First Amendment, because they have
been ruled in nineteen fifteen that Hollywood is just a
(02:08):
big business and it's not really art, so we don't
have to protect it in the same way that other
kinds of artists were protected, so they could sensor anything
they wanted. So the Hollywood producers and filmmakers said, what
are we gonna do to avoid this, because there are
a lot of protest groups that were complaining, especially in
the nineteen twenties during the kind of scandalous flapper era,
(02:29):
kind of you know, Prohibition era, but when things are
kind of silent, pictures were getting kind of uh, you know,
their naked bodies on screen. There was a lot of
illifit sex going on in the screen and a lot
of drinking, and they didn't like that during Prohibition. So
they wanted to um find a way for the movies
to be made more socially acceptable and more financially lucrative.
Because another thing to point out is that the stock
(02:51):
market crash, of course, happens in nine and it's right
after that that the first production code UM is composed
and put into place, because they're really try trying to
appease their New York Wall Street backers and say we're
going to make movies as financially recruitive as possible, because
we'll make them so they're safe for everyone, so everyone
could go see these movies. So in nineteen thirty, this
(03:12):
group of a few Catholic men got together and they said,
we're going to make this list. And it's a very
comprehensive list. It has a bunch of for you know,
it has its general principles, and then it's particular applications
and then just pages and pages of kind of defending
why they are objecting to the things they are and
it's very you know, broad ranging and get very specific
(03:34):
about certain things, but then also just talks some mofty
terms about how they're going to save movies for America.
And so that's kind of how it got started, and
it really there were there are different audiences that it
wanted to protect. It very specifically said it wanted to
protect the young, so it was very afraid that young
movie goers would go and they would see these objectionable things.
(03:55):
It was very explicitly said that it cared about protecting
people from small all communities as opposed to big cities.
So back then they were very sure that the rural
folks would get more corrupted by things than people who
are in urban centers who are more sophisticated, and it
doesn't say anything about wanting to protect women explicitly, but
(04:15):
my argument is that that's really underpinning a lot of
what they're doing in the code. They're very worried that women.
There was a conception at the time that women were
the main, uh bulk of movie goers and that they
were the ones who were watching this stuff and getting
corrupted by this stuff, and so a lot of the
these specific things that they forbid, there was nothing that
(04:37):
was specifically forbidden about men, but there were things like
they said, you know, dances with movement of the breasts
is forbidden to be seen on screen, or um the
sale of women or a woman selling her virtue is
to be forbidden. So it was clear and some of
the specific things they did that they were worried more
about how women were being portrayed and what female audiences
would be getting than they were worried about men. And
(04:59):
the one both that I jotted down that I think
is exemplify as what people were really thinking at the time,
even though it wasn't actually put into the code, is
there's this Chicago local film censor whose name is unbelievably
major medalist Lucillus Cicero funk Houser like such a mad
up name that this is his name and his quote,
(05:20):
as he said in the nineties seventeen, he says his
censorship policy is to eliminate sings that quote the male
sex could stand, but that might cause women to brood
and lose their reason. So he's worried that women will
just explode if they see this stuff on screen. And
a lot of people really were worried about that, even
though that's not really written in the production code in
(05:40):
the same way. So that was a very long answer,
but sure all things that led up to the code
being the way it was. Yeah, So there's a ton
of documentation out there about how that censorship kind of
stifled expression. And as you pointed out, the censor was
not necessarily the enemy of the r it is, but
they kind of work together with the artist to create
(06:02):
this subtext. So beyond that argument that the Hayes Code
restricted women's expression, what role did it play for you know,
the benefit of women in film? There? Maybe feminism, right, So,
I mean, one thing about feminism is that has all
these you know, different perspectives of course in different strands
and you can be a feminist with very different attitude
(06:24):
towards a sexuality. And so there's certainly some feminists would
say the more that you're trying to not show female
sexualities that stifling and that's you know, hindering um women's freedom,
which I can certainly see that standpoint as well. But
another standpoint is that women are very because they're so sexualized,
they're objectified on screen and so very famous. A piece
(06:46):
of film feminist film criticism by La Multi from the
nineteen seventies says that you know, the cinema is has
is all about the male gaze, and it's objectifying to women,
and women are just kind of, you know, these sexual
objects to be consumed by men. So in terms of
that strain of feminism, I would say that interestingly, censorship
it was not done in the name of making women
(07:07):
more empowered by any means. It was created by men,
I think four men. But what it did was it
kind of tried to stifle some of the overt objectification
and sexualization of women in terms of they're trying to
not just be a bunch of bodies on screen and
the stuff that you see in pre code Hollywood. I mean,
so much of it is wonderful and exciting and sexy
(07:28):
in many ways, but it also is like if you
think of like the buzzy Berkeley musicals, that are just
a bunch of like women's bodies just like disembodied, these
legs that looked like a kaleidoscope going around. And this
was during the years before the Code was enforced. Women
were so hyperbolically sexualized that I think that when the
Code came around, it had to make sex into something else,
(07:49):
and it didn't want to lose its sex appeal for
audiences because it still knew that sex sold. But what
it did and and the post code years, by which
I mean in post nineteen thirty four, is that we
then started having this genre of films that came about
where women's sexuality was expressed through their talking and their
witty banter, the screwball comedy, the romantic comedies of the age,
(08:11):
and women were kind of made to be very intelligent
and sexual in a way that was through there, you know,
they were desirable through um their brains, in their bodies,
you might be able to say. And so there was
a way in which the films that came directly after
the code um started to you know, expand what women's
purview was in terms of their you know, intellectual capacities
(08:33):
on screen, not that that hadn't always been I'm not
saying that when women were sexualized they were unintelligent, but
just that there was a different way that it was
the expression was happening. And so in general, my feeling
is that censorship forces the artists to be more subtle
and more subversive and get their points across in ways
that are specifically supposed to be sophisticated. I use that
(08:55):
we're in quotes because that's what the code administrators used
that term allot to say. We wanted to be sophisticated
material so that only some parts of the audience will
get it. And they thought that that meant adult versus children.
They thought that that meant men would get it and
women wouldn't. But the irony is that, you know, women
found a lot of pleasure in these movies, and obviously
(09:16):
women were getting a lot of the subtexts as well
and finding it very pleasurable to watch movies in that way,
I guess. And I would also say that, uh so,
one thing that the censorship worked very well at is
that it did a good job of squelching certain voices,
right um, trying to make more radicalized voices not be heard.
(09:36):
But in that same tone you could get people were
starting to um find ways to get around the way
that they were being officially told to to voice things. So,
for example, women directors, there were too many in the
classical Hollywood film are There was Lois Webber, who was
one of the most important film directors in the Silent era,
and I had Dorothy Arsner eventually had like Idle Lupino.
(09:57):
But there are a lot of women who were not
able to direct because was this kind of very male
playing field. But writing was a very different thing, and
women writers could get their voices in, often on uncredited
in ways. And so there are a lot of these
films that were that seemed like they're being completely produced
by men. They're directed by men, officially written by men,
sometimes um produced by men. But women's voices were able
(10:20):
to make their way in there. And the other way
was through the actresses themselves. And that's kind of the
project I'm working on right now, is thinking about how
the Hollywood actress herself as an icon as an idea
changed the way that women thought about themselves in um,
their own lives. So the fact that women were so
strong and successful and having these visible careers in a
(10:41):
way that had never really happened before the Hollywood actress.
During this time period and from the very beginning of Hollywood,
the actress reigned supreme. So Mary Pickford was the first
major Hollywood movie star in the nineteen and she really
was far more successful and visible and everyone obsessed over
her more than people like Charlie Applin, who you talked
more about today. Um. So, Hollywood itself was always dominated
(11:05):
by men, but the women were the ones who got
far more kind of pressed time, and people were more
obsessed with them. And I think it's because the idea
of a woman with that much, you know, visible power,
and she had, you know, she was disempowered in certain
ways because as a studio actress, she had to do
whatever her bosses told her to some extent. So many
women fought against that and became independent contract players. But
(11:27):
she also was the one that was, you know, on
all the movie magazine covers and was the one that
everyone talked about. And so the way that um, the
film's postcode, how that started to play out is that
that was the time period where more women, more female actresses.
They were starting to realize that the movie studios needed them,
And so you had actresses like Carol Lombard and conscious
(11:48):
that and not these people who were stepping away from
their contracts and saying, I want to run things the
way I wanted Bettie Davis fighting very hard. So the
coupling of the content of the movies shifting to make
female character stronger, and the actresses themselves starting to play
more and more of kind of a rebellious role in
um the kind of sexual political landscape of America that
(12:11):
those couple together meant that in the post code years,
that was one of some most exciting kind of developments
for uh, the intersection of Hollywood and feminism started to happen.
So I'm wondering was that something that movie goers recognized
at the time. Did they see that all these changes
were happening behind the scenes, or was that something that
people in the industry were kind of only in the
(12:34):
know of. Well, it was something that the movie industry
wanted very much to tout. They wanted to announce that
they were censoring things. They wanted to make it clear
that they were trying to purify these uh films to
make them safer for America because it actually I should
point out another role that women had in censorship is
that even though it was this small cohort of Catholic
(12:55):
men who did the writing of the production code, it
was really the women who were parts like these the
women's clubs, so we're called like the Federation of Women's Clubs,
and there are like thirty million members at the high
point of these clubs, and they were really some of
the people who were protesting the obscenity and the depravity
of films during the Ties. Some people thought that they
(13:16):
were doing this for the women, that they were trying
to protect the women. At the same time, um the
way there were articles written. There's one from up front
page of Variety that's called dirt Craze due to women,
where it talks to women loved her nothing shocks them.
The bat or the better women who make up the
bulk of the picture audiences are also the majority of
readers of the tabloid scandals, sheets, slashing magazines, and erotic books.
(13:40):
It is to cater to them. All the hot stuff
of the present day is turned out. So that's what
The perception was during the right as the code is
being implemented, So when it was implemented, they wanted to
say to everyone to make all those women's club members
who were protesting, they wanted to say, we are censoring
now and things are going to be different. But then
(14:00):
they also wanted to make all those women who they
thought were dirt crazed and wanted to watch sexy material.
They wanted to make them happy. So it was kind
of like, I think people were very aware that the
motion picture industry was trying to change in certain ways,
but then they'd go to the theaters and they would see,
certainly in the what we call the pre code years
between nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty four, they'd see that
(14:22):
things were getting all the more racy and exciting to them.
And then in the postport code years, I think that
they were going to the theaters and very aware like
what is being allowed to be shown to me and
what isn't and it forced them to come I think,
very savvy movie goers, so that people were always trying
to read sexual material into things that you know all
(14:43):
the more. This is kind of the uh for code
and concept. Michelle Faucode is French theorist who says that
I don't think of the Victorian eras this prudish era.
This was, in fact when people were obsessed with talking
about sex because it was forbidden. As soon as something
as forbidden, it's more exciting and then you want to
talk about it all the more. And I would say
the same thing happened after the Code is that these
(15:05):
movies came out and people were like thinking constantly where
is the sexuality? Where is the forbidden subtext in these films?
And it made them more pleasurable in certain ways. So
there's something that's just exciting about watching something that you
think you're getting that you shouldn't be getting, you know.
And I think that that's the kind of reading practices,
particularly for women, that emerged in the postcode era. Is
(15:28):
there any person, any woman are filmed that you can
point to that really illustrates how the Hayes Code era
censorship encouraged like innovation or expressiveness in cinema. Yeah, I mean,
I guess in general I would say the genre of um,
what we call now the screwball comedy, or more broadly,
the romantic comedy. The reason why I look to this
(15:48):
genre in particular is because it's the one where I mean,
there's some feminise critics that point out that in a
lot of these films women are strong and empowered for
most of the film, and then the very last few
minutes we have to kind of demobilize them in some
way or make them lose their voice. And I do
agree with that reading. But I also think that, you know,
one of the things the production code did is it
(16:09):
said what really matters is how the movie turns out,
Like you can do controversial stuff in the course of it,
but you have to wind up with a very kind
of conventional conservative message that the woman remains in the
home and things like that. But I also think that
everyone knew that at the time, going back to your
last question, that everybody was aware of the convention that
the ending had to feel a certain way. But if
(16:32):
you just you know, focused on the center of the
film or the majority of the film, then you could
get these messages that were much more subversive or um
kind of progressive. And so as a full genre, I
would say, if you look at the Screwball comedy, these
women characters in it, they are so much more kind
of agentive and active and they're the ones who are
controlling the plot, controlling the atmosphere. They're the ones who
(16:55):
are smarter than the men usually and they're outwitting them.
And this was something that was relatively knew, and that
the idea that women could be this much in control
of their own identities and their own sexuality and just
again going back to sex as a trope that really
gets treated differently in the postcode era in a way
that a lot of women found to be empowering to them,
(17:16):
so that uh, you know, actresses like Katherine Shepburn and
barbara's Sandwick and Carol Lombard and Irene Dune. These were
actresses where the reason they were so popular with female
audiences is because women felt like they were able to
achieve the things that they wanted to achieve in their
own lives. But through these stories that were often very
(17:36):
you know, kind of their slapstick comedy. There's a lot
of falling and silliness, but the message the undergirding messages
them is that you know, women really can and should
be in a more prominent place in the world. Do
you have any favorite scene or particular moment that just
really stands out to you that you've seen from that
era of films that you like, go back to when
(18:00):
you're thinking about censorship and how was the verdict um
not to put you on the spot or anything, but
only if you yeah. I mean one scene that highlights
the thing I was talking about, where where sexuality feels
more desirable because it's forbidden. I don't know if that's
(18:22):
quite the it's not the female empowerment thing, but we're
seeing that that I often think of that embodies what
a code censorship did is from It Happened One Night,
which there's Clark Gable and Clade Colbert. Which happened is
filmed right in at the moment that Joseph Green takes over,
so the code is now being formalized in a new way.
And the plot of it is is that they're on
(18:43):
the road together. They are not married, she's married someone else,
she's look with someone and he's the reporter who's going
to get a story about it. But of course they're
falling in love and there's a lot of witty banter
between them. But um there's a scene where they're both
staying in a hotel room together and there will be
very shocking for the time period. And so the way
that he makes this okay a is that he hangs
a blanket in the middle on a rope in the
(19:03):
middle of their room and he says, all right, now
I can't see anything, so you're fine. And so as
two starts like getting undressed, and then she just starts
throwing you know, her stockings and her clothes over at
the top of it to hang it as she's gonna
put on her pajamas, and he gets so he's like, well, now,
all I'm doing, of course, is imagine you on the
other side naked. And so the idea is that you
put up a wall, you put up a barrier, you
(19:25):
try to hide what's on the other side, and it
makes people think about it all the more but be
able to use their own imaginations in a way that
is you know, very stimulating and also requires more of
the viewer and it puts more of the sexuality into
your mind in ways that I mean, you could say
that that makes you more kind of pervy that you're
trying to think about what's over there, but also makes
it so that the sex is more about the viewer
(19:47):
instead of what's on the screen. And I think for
women in particularly that could feel like a way that
they could in this time when it was considered so
taboo for them to have overt sexual desires and opinions,
they could watch these movies and let it kind of
play out in their own imaginative bass in a way
that felt really good to them. That is really smart.
I wouldn't have thought of that scene like that. It's
(20:09):
like they were doing things that were meta before meta
was the huge thing to do in film. But it's
so cool to think of it this way because now
I'm going to go back and look at movies in
such a different light, because I guess I always think
of censorship as this kind of thing to rally around,
as a negative thing, as a bad thing, like there's
a shadowy cabal of like overlords who are telling you
(20:30):
what you can and what you can put in this,
and it's bad for me as an artist or for
that person as an artist. And yeah, this just really
puts things into a different light. So those are all
the questions that I have. But if you have anything
that you want to add, Bill free to I mean, yeah,
I know that what you were just saying is exactly
what I'm trying to get at is the idea that
I mean, both the sensors. Often we're not trying as
(20:52):
hard as we thought to block, and I think they
just wanted to make sure that it passed certain people's uster.
They were okay with movies talking to people in different ways.
But also the fact that artists are smart, and artists
censorship doesn't just welch people. I mean, of course, in
some ways censorship can when it's you know, legalized, and
people are you know, other voices are silence in very
(21:13):
real ways. But in places where we have you know,
foundational levels of freedom of speech, sometimes censorship instead work
to motivate the artists and inspire the artists in ways
that I think we don't think it's tough about. Yeah,
all right, thank you so much for talking about this today.
It's been a real pleasure. All Right, It's fun to
talk to you by. Thank you so much for listening
(21:39):
to this episode today. I hope you enjoyed it, and
I hope you enjoyed all of the interviews that we've
done for Women's History Month. You can let us know
how you felt about them at T D I h
C Podcast on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. We'll see you here.
In the same place tomorrow. A quick content warning before
(22:06):
we start the show. This episode contains mention of sex work.
Hey everyone, I'm Eves and welcome to This Day in
History Class, a show that brings you a little slice
of history every day. The day was March one, boxer
(22:32):
Jack Johnson was born. Johnson went on to become the
first African American world heavyweight boxing champion. Johnson was born
in Galveston, Texas. His parents, Henry and Tina Johnson, were
both formerly enslaved and had blue collar jobs. Jack was
the third of nine children, five of whom reached adulthood.
(22:55):
He grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood and went
through five years of school. After Jack left school, he
took a series of jobs. Throughout this time, he participated
in fights and built up his self defense skills. It
was in Dallas that Johnson was encouraged to train as
a boxer. Back in Galveston, he took on more jobs
(23:16):
and saved up enough money to buy a pair of
boxing gloves. He moved from street fights to taking part
in loosely organized boxing bouts. Johnson began traveling across the
country to fight in the late eighteen nineties, and it
was during this time that he became a professional boxer.
He gained a reputation as a formidable heavyweight and became
(23:38):
known as the Galveston Giant, but he was limited to
fighting on the black boxing circuit, which meant that he
got less money and could not fight in world championship matches.
Throughout his boxing career, he supplemented his income by taking
speaking engagements, as well as singing, dancing, and playing instruments
(23:59):
on the vaudeville sir get Johnson won his first title
when he beat Denver at Martin for the unofficial World
Colored Heavyweight Championship in nineteen oh three. The press urged
James Jeffries, the reigning white heavyweight champion, to take on Johnson,
but Jeffries refused to fight a black man. Once Jeffries retired,
(24:21):
Johnson pursued a fight with the new champion, Tommy Burns.
Burns agreed to the fight after he was offered thirty
thousand dollars to take it. In December of nineteen o eight,
Johnson and Burns went up against each other. The fight
lasted fourteen rounds before the police broke it up as
Johnson had beaten Burns badly. Johnson was declared the winner.
(24:44):
His win upset a lot of white America, and the
search for a white boxer who could beat Johnson began.
Novelist Jack London coined the term great White Hope to
describe the man who would fulfill this role. So in
nineteen ten, j Jeffries came out of retirement for the
fight he had previously refused. The press intensified tensions around
(25:06):
the fight by claiming that a Johnson win might lead
black people to riot. Johnson won in the fifteenth round
when Jeffreys threw in the towel before an inevitable knockout happened.
Race riots did erupt in cities across the US in
the aftermath of the match. Johnson continued to fight professionally
into the nineteen thirties and did exhibition matches after that,
(25:30):
but beyond his career, his personal life was also riddled
with controversy. He was married to and in relationships with
several white women at a time when interracial relationships were taboo.
He was charged with violating the Man Act after he
was accused of transporting a white sex worker across state lines.
He fled the US and lived in exile for several
(25:52):
years until he surrendered to U. S Marshals in ninety
He served ten months in prison. Johnson also faced allegations
of domestic violence. Johnson died in a car crash in
North Carolina. In the decades following his death, people began
to speak out on the racist motivations of the charges
(26:13):
that he faced. He was granted a presidential pardon in
I'm Eve cheff Cote and hopefully you know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. And if
you want to send us a note on social media,
you can do so on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at
t d I h C podcast. You can also send
(26:34):
us a note via email at this Day at I
heeart media dot com. Thanks again for listening to the
show and we'll see you again tomorrow. For more podcasts
(26:54):
for my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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