SOURCE: "Antecedents," in Women Directors: The Emergence of a New Cinema, Praeger, 1988, pp. 17-36.

In the following excerpt, Quart comments on the female characters in Christopher Strong, Sarah and Son, and Dance, Girl, Dance, arguing that the "Arzner heroine is … a self-determined woman."

Feminist scholarly attention continues to return to and circle in fascination around the narratives of the two women who alone worked as directors in classic Hollywood cinema. Although their films largely appear to conform to the mainstream patriarchal ideology (though in very differentdegrees and ways), imaginative efforts have been made by reading them "against the grain" to find underlying tensions created by their directors' femaleness—even visually conveyed defiances, disguised as compliance.

In America, again only Dorothy Arzner survived the transition from silents to sound, and alone directed until 1944, retiring when she chose to. Arzner, whose father's restaurant in Los Angeles brought her into early...