SOURCE: "Working Girls," in Directed by Dorothy Arzner, Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 93-111.

In the excerpt below, Mayne focuses on issues of work and social class in the lives of women from four of Arzner's films: Working Girls, Nana, The Bride Wore Red, and First Comes Courage.

Contemporary interest in Arzner's career and her work has focused largely on how she, as a woman director in Hollywood, conveyed women's lives, desires, and experiences on screen. Arzner's work did indeed focus primarily on women's lives, women's friendships, and women's communities. But women are never identified in a simple or isolated way in Arzner's work. For instance, I suggested earlier in this book that Arzner's screenplay for The Red Kimono is indicative of her commitment not only to the exploration of the connections between women, but to those connections as they are shaped and complicated by social class. In this...