SOURCE: "Women in Pairs," in Village Voice, April 28, 1975, pp. 77-8.

In the following essay, Haskell discusses Dance, Girl, Dance and First Comes Courage, arguing that Arzner is "the only director who consistently scrutinizes women who have priorities other than marriage and the family."

It obviously came as a shock to [Sigmund] Freud and other Oedipally-inclined artists and thinkers, to emerge from the coddled experience of their own mothers to find that other women—those who, perhaps, as little girls, resented having had to give up piano lessons so their brothers could study or wanted something more out of life than little genius/sons to dote on. Most of these artists and thinkers didn't struggle with the problem as honorably (though inadequately) as Freud did. The question What is a Woman? still carries the assumption—and desperate hope—that there is some one thing that is a woman. And...