Hollywood has long lavished attention on female stars and sex goddesses. Marketing strategies have simultaneously targeted the female consumer by narrative, genre or other intertextual appeals. This entry explores instead the women behind the camera. Here, women achieved some early success in fields such as editing and also took on stereotypically “feminine” tasks (interior design, costume, etc.) as well as clerical roles.

Women in various guises have also been deeply involved in writing scripts, although often in subordinate roles. A 1980 survey by the Directors Guild of America, however, listed only fourteen features directed by women out of 7,332. The picture has changed somewhat in subsequent years with directors like Barbra Streisand, Penny Marshall, Susan Seidelman, Jodie Foster, Julie Dash, Kathryn Bigelow, Martha Coolidge, Nora Ephron, Amy Heckerling and Sondra Locke. Besides women directors for feature films, women have been independent directors, producers and animators. Yet, this remains a male-dominated world where even the enrollment in film schools has stood at a 2:1 ratio for a long time. Hence, since 1972, the American Film Institute has set up Directing Workshop for Women, whose alumni include Maya Angelou and Randa Haines, a token gesture to increase the representation of women in directing.

While women’s films through the history of Hollywood have sometimes presented women with their own agencies and contradictions, the history of women directors suggests common threads and diverse contributions—and how this relates to images on screens and beyond them.

In the formative year of movies, when movies were smaller businesses, women were actually important players. Alice Guy Blache (1875–1968) ran Solax Studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey Lois Weber (1882–1939), a top-salaried director of the silent era, made social-realist films, with subjects ranging from prostitution to capital punishment. With the transition to sound, Dorothy Arzner (1900–79) was the only woman working in the male-dominated Hollywood mainstream. She made seventeen films between 1927 and 1943. Her heroines were strong working women, and female relationships and bonding were recurring themes in her movies. Ida Lupino, first an actor in noir films in the 1940s, formed her own company and directed six films for it between 1949 and 1954. The route from actor to director has proven a common path.

Breaking into the all-male Hollywood proved even harder for women of color trying to break into feature film-making. In 1989 Martinican Euzhan Palcy became the first black woman to direct a Hollywood film—A Dry White Season. Christine Choy, an Asian American film-maker, is known for her political documentaries. Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust was a critical success, but it had taken her years to complete—and fund—this period piece about a Gullah family in South Carolina.

While Hollywood poses a great barrier to women directors, women directors have accomplished a great deal as independent and avantgarde film-makers. Maya Deren (1917–61) was the first to receive a Guggenheim grant to engage in motion picture. She saw her films as poetry not prose. Yvonne Rainer has made films that challenge the notion of the female gaze in Hollywood films. Toni Cade Bambara combined literature with film and community activism. Lesbian film-makers have also combined activist explorations with a growing screen presence.

Yet the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies list released and voted on in 1998 does not include a single feature movie directed by a woman. These movies were chosen from a list of 400, including only five films directed by women, all produced between 1986 and 1993. While Prince of Tides was nominated for Best Picture at the 1991 Oscars, the Best Director nomination eluded even Barbra Streisand. Hence, the struggle and recognition accorded to women behind the camera comments on the gains and limits of gender and equality in the late twentieth century.