Critique: Hollywood Invented the Girlboss

Source: jacobin
Authors: ByEileen Jones
URL: https://jacobin.com/2026/05/criterion-office-romances-women-workplace

What the article reports

Film critic Eileen Jones reviews the Criterion Collection's "Office Romances" series — a curated selection of 1930s–1950s workplace comedies — arguing that while Criterion frames the films as prescient on work-life balance and gender equality, most of them actually traffic in reactionary misogyny. Jones does close readings of His Girl Friday, Man Wanted, More Than a Secretary, The Apartment, and Woman of the Year to support the thesis, ending with a viewing guide.

Factual accuracy — Mixed

The piece is mostly reliable on plot and attribution but carries a few loose or unverified claims:

• The description of Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness (1981) and his argument about Hildy's "home" at the news desk is accurate to the book, and the year is correctly cited.
• Dorothy Thompson being "the first reporter expelled from Nazi Germany" is plausible but unqualified: Thompson was expelled in 1934, but she was not the only journalist expelled. The "first" is an unverified superlative that invites scrutiny.
• The claim that Ring Lardner Jr. and Michael Kanin wrote the final scene of Woman of the Year is accurate — they won the Oscar for the screenplay — but the article attributes the direction to "George Stephens" (spelled that way once) when the director's name is George Stevens. That is a minor but verifiable error.
• The statement that the stage version of The Philadelphia Story "had been written for Hepburn by her friend Philip Barry" is accurate.
• The biography cited — Kay Francis: A Passionate Life and Career — exists (by Scott O'Brien, 2006), though no author is named in the article.

Framing — Opinionated (appropriately signaled but not labeled)

This is criticism and personal essay, not reported journalism. The framing is evaluative throughout, which is fine — but Jacobin has not labeled it "Opinion" or "Film Criticism," meaning casual readers might not immediately register the register.

1. "take it from me" — Jones signals personal authority explicitly; this is an honest flag that what follows is her reading, not reported fact. Credit for transparency here.
2. "rabid sexism" and "frantic misogyny" — strong connotative nouns used as authorial characterization of filmmakers' intent, not attributed to any scholar or critic. These are interpretive claims stated as verdicts.
3. "the most corrupt, cruel, and soulless of the married executives" — character description of a fictional figure, but the phrasing is evaluative; a different critic might read Sheldrake as weak or cowardly rather than cruel.
4. "stupidest shit she'd ever read in her life" — attributed to Hepburn's reported statement to Stevens, which is a known anecdote, but the piece gives no source for the quote.
5. "Hepburn's career was probably the most shocking in the rapid way she was shunted" — "probably the most shocking" is an unattributed superlative with no comparative frame.

Source balance

Ratio: One external scholarly voice (Cavell), one subject anecdote (Hepburn), one institutional framing to push against. No film historians, no feminist film scholars (Laura Mulvey, Molly Haskell, and From Reverence to Rape are obvious omissions for this exact topic), no voices who might read these films differently. The essay is essentially monologic criticism — which is a legitimate genre, but the absence of counterpoint is notable.

Omissions

1. Feminist film scholarship canon. Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape (1974) and Laura Mulvey's gaze theory are the foundational academic frameworks for exactly this argument. Their absence means readers who want to situate Jones's readings have no ladder into the scholarly conversation.
2. Hays Code context. The piece mentions "pre–Hays Code" for Man Wanted (1932) without explaining what the Hays Code was, when it was enforced (effectively 1934), or how it shaped the tonal shift in workplace films from the early 1930s to the mid-1930s onward. That institutional context is material to why Man Wanted's attitudes look different.
3. Counterreadings. Some film historians argue that the very act of centering competent working women on screen — even in narratives that ultimately domesticate them — was culturally progressive by the standards of the era. That argument, even if Jones would reject it, is absent.
4. Criterion's curatorial note in full. Jones quotes selectively from the series description to set up her rebuttal. Readers cannot assess whether Criterion actually claims the films are progressive, or whether it is merely describing themes they raise.
5. Production/industry context. The article briefly notes the studio contract system but does not discuss how female stars like Francis, Russell, and Hepburn negotiated or were constrained by those contracts — a dimension that would enrich the argument about women's agency in this era.

What it does well

• Close reading is precise and pleasurable. The analysis of the More Than a Secretary "incompetent" scene — "I don't think I've ever seen a film in which the female lead tells the male lead he's incompetent" — is a genuinely sharp observation that most reviews of these films miss.
• Cavell citation is well-integrated. Rather than name-dropping, Jones actually explains Cavell's argument about Hildy finding her "home" at the news desk under "the harsh light cast by the lamp," and uses it structurally.
• The article acknowledges the films' range. "It's a fascinating mixed bag, this series" and the explicit viewing tiers at the end resist the flattening that a pure polemic would produce.
• The Kay Francis digression is properly hedged. "One wonders if Lois's remarkably sophisticated attitude was modeled directly on Kay Francis's own approach" — Jones signals speculation rather than asserting it as fact.
• Honest about genre. "Take it from me" and the first-person essay voice make the piece's evaluative nature clear even without a formal "Opinion" label.

Rating

Overall: 6/10 — Sharp, enjoyable film criticism let down by near-total reliance on the author's own voice, a few unverified factual claims, and the absence of the scholarly conversation this argument naturally belongs in.