The long twentieth century: visual arts, photography and cinema

In the twentieth century, particularly in its last quarter, the circumstances of most European women changed, more radically perhaps than at any earlier time. In education, employment, politics and everyday life, many of the taboos and restrictions of earlier times were dispensed with. As the incoming tide floats all boats, so women have also become more present and visible in virtually all the arts, including those already discussed. There are, however, some persuasive arguments for taking a close look at what I am loosely describing as ‘the visual arts’: fine art, photography and cinema. Why these three? Partly because they represent new departures. In the 1890s, professional fine art training became available to women more or less on the same terms as men, and their numbers expanded swiftly. Photography was a new art, beginning in the 1840s; but after 1918, when even newer technology made it a far less cumbersome activity, it was practised by almost as many women as men. Cinema too was new, starting in France in 1895, and as a collective endeavour, it involved women alongside men at many levels.

The second reason is that the visual arts were remarkably transnational within Europe for much of the period. At the same time, paradoxically, they centred on Paris. Walter Benjamin called Paris ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’.73 But there is in some ways a better case to be made for Paris as an international centre for the fine arts, photography and cinema in the first half of the twentieth century. During the so-called belle epoque, and again during the inter-war years, it was to Paris that visitors, tourists, refugees and exiles turned, from almost every corner of the globe, if they were concerned with the arts. There were other cities with a strong artistic community and influential schools of thought: Glasgow in the 1890s, fin-de-siecle Vienna, Turin in the 1900s, Edwardian London, Berlin during the Weimar Republic. But none of these attracted quite such a varied and determined international artistic community, much more foreign than it was French. And this community was, significantly, more open to women than any we have so far noted.

As Linda Nochlin long ago argued, the question ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ cannot be answered without a paradigm shift from ideas about ‘individual genius’ to matters of professional practice.74 If we look across our whole period, 1700 to the present and across all of Europe, the number of really well-known women painters is still not great. The Frenchwoman Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) and the cosmopolitan Swiss Angelika Kauffmann (1740-1807) have received much attention lately, though neither is exactly a household name. Berthe Morisot (1841-95) was the only French woman painter to exhibit alongside the impressionists. For much of European history, women who became professional painters or sculptors (and there are more of them than has always been recognised) were almost always the daughters of artists, with access both to materials and to parental tuition. But by the late 1890s, art education was more accessible to young women or girl school leavers than it had been. The progressive Slade School in London admitted women on the same terms as men in 1871; the Glasgow School of Art, open to women since the 1850s, produced after 1885, under its new director Fra Newbery, a whole generation of decorative artists and painters who have retrospectively been called the ‘Glasgow Girls’.75 The Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts did not admit women until 1897 and then only after a long struggle.

Nevertheless in the last two decades of the century it had become possible to obtain a formal training outside the Ecole. To thousands of itinerant art students, men and women, the French capital offered, apart from the traditional advantage of the collections in the Louvre, a uniquely dense concentration of artists, teachers and studios. The long-established annual exhibitions known as the salons offered a pathway to recognition. Tuition could be bought in several teaching ‘academies’ such as Julian’s or Colarossi’s or in individual artists’ studios.76

The advent of women students, however, disrupted what had been a gender balance of a particular kind. Until then the only women in the studios had been artists’ models. Feminist scholarship has set out recently to discover more about the models whose faces are in familiar French paintings of the period; we do know that most of them were young and of modest, often immigrant origin; many were Italian. In the traditional vie de Boheme, the young women who posed clad or unclad were assumed to be sexually available - the ‘charming if errant Mimi Pinsons, Marcelles, Suzannes, Yvettes and Maries of Quartier life’ as one English guide put it in 1902.77 Most French bourgeois families would not dream of sending their daughters to train in a painter’s studio. The gifted sculptor Camille Claudel (1864-1943) who persuaded her family to let her come to Paris was an exception. Even independent gallery-visiting was off limits for the well brought up. Marie Bashkirtseff wrote in her diary for 2 January 1879:

What I long for is the freedom to go about alone, of coming and going, of sitting on the seats in the Tuileries. . . In order to go to the Louvre, I must wait for my carriage, my lady companion or my family. . . a woman who rambles alone commits an imprudence.78

What was more, the dominant subjects of easel painting and academic sculpture were dictated by a gaze that was relentlessly male and mostly heterosexual. The female nude was everywhere, whether as allegory, symbol of beauty or sexual object. Exaggerating only slightly, one could say that the dominant academic mode of the history painting was unequivocally patriarchal in both subject and treatment. But those artists who broke with the dominant tradition also did so in ways not easily available to women: the impressionists painted out of doors, alone, or took their sketchbooks or easels into cafes, bars and night clubs. As Griselda Pollock has observed of modernity in art, it would have been difficult if not impossible for a woman to paint Manet’s The Bar at the Folies-Bergere, let alone Toulouse-Lautrec’s series of studies in a Parisian brothel.79 Women were everywhere all right, but as subjects for the visual arts.

Another major stumbling block was the life class. Battles were waged over the admission of women to life classes, and whether the models should be draped or not, if they did attend. Nor did women escape the massive condescension of the art world: they were ‘tidier and more genteel than men’.80 In order to put them off even further, and to restrict entry to all but the well-to-do, most academies and studios charged women double the rate for men. For all that, women did begin to frequent art schools. To take one cosmopolitan example, the American painter James McNeill Whistler set up a school called the Academie Carmen, run by one of his former models, the Corsican Carmen Rossi in 1898. It was advertised as ‘Anglo-American’ and many of the enrolments were from Britain or the USA, but it also drew in Russian and German students. Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, a Russian who had already spent seven years at the St Petersburg Academy, has left a first-hand record of her shock on being told by Whistler that she ‘knew nothing’. In general Whistler found most women students, who unlike Lebedeva had received very little formal training, took better to his very directive treatment. He believed in starting from basics; many of his male students were impatient to start exhibiting at the salons straight away and consequently came into conflict with the ‘master’. By the third year of the academy, which did indeed provide thorough, if idiosyncratic training, Whistler would accept enrolments in the women’s class only.81 The sculptors Rodin and Bourdelle also held classes in which women and men were taught separately, the former being the more numerous.

Of the first generation of women in the fine arts, very few became well known, although rediscovery of them is bringing more light to bear on them. They often shared certain characteristics. Generally of middle-class origin, neither very rich nor very poor, but well educated, able to speak French for instance, which helped their case for going to Paris, they had probably shown initial talent and faced family disapproval. But more often than not, their training had been somewhat haphazard. Once in Paris, they encountered a particularly French trait, the dependence on the maitre a penser, the patron tutor, whose dictates and influence might affect one’s career. Some, like their male contemporaries, found this constraining. The Glasgow artist Bessie McNicol found the teaching at Colarossi’s ‘repressed rather than encouraged her’.82 Others, most of whose energy had gone into struggling for admission to art schools in the first place, remained in the academic mode and succeeded in mastering sufficient technique to do well in that style, only to find that it was being replaced by modernism. They might thrive as professionals, but became also-rans in art history. Such was the case of the Scottish sculptor Kathleen Bruce (1878-1947) for example: enterprising, competent and well connected, she had a successful career doing commissions in traditional form (busts, statues) well into the twentieth century. Some women did indeed fall under the spell of certain avant-garde masters such as Rodin and Whistler, but paradoxically the more unconventional the master, the harder it was for a less confident pupil to liberate her - or himself. Relatively few women of this pioneering generation made a breakthrough into modernism, which may explain why so few of them are valued today. Exceptions who made the jump into independent modernism include Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945), Sonia Terk Delaunay (1885-1979) and sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903-75). And of course the usual ‘enemies of promise’ were there, all the more so for women, who sometimes paid a high price professionally for falling in love with another artist. As one British women writer put it, ‘when a male artist marries, he acquires a housekeeper, a model, a brush-washer and perhaps a publicity agent. When a woman artist marries, with rare exceptions she perishes as an artist, gradually and perhaps painlessly.’83

They had, however, overcome some taboos, and by so doing had enabled it to be taken for granted that women could train in the arts. Many of the early generation were diverted into what are sometimes regarded as the minor arts of illustration, embroidery, pottery, jewellery and enamelling, crafts that could be practised domestically. A proper estimate of the artistic field in the early twentieth century would surely give greater recognition to smaller scale work and would certainly provide more context against which to judge later reputations. In the late twentieth century - and this was common to virtually all the arts - it appears to be the case that women faced far fewer obstacles in the way of discrimination and dismissive attitudes in the visual arts, at least if the lists of prize-winners, grant holders and commissions are anything to go by. Conceptual art, video and public art have all been areas in which both men and women appear to compete on equal terms. Only very recently has there been anything like enough evidence to explore whether there are differences between men and women’s approaches to the fine arts when there is a reasonably level playing field. The furore over the British artist Tracey Emin’s My Bed (shortlisted Turner Prize, 1999) showed that it could be possible - though exceptional and controversial - to combine the extreme avant-garde with the thoroughly intimate. Another example is the haunting fabric sculpture to which Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911 in France, working in the USA) turned very late in life - having been brought up in a tapestry workshop.84

Photography, unlike fine art, did not require prolonged training. Following on from the daguerreotype, it was invented in the 1830s, simultaneously in Britain and France, by Nicephore Niepce and William Henry Fox Talbot. There is a long history of the pioneer days, a time of cumbersome and experimental technology, in which very few women figured; those who did generally had independent incomes and plenty of leisure. They included two outstanding British pioneers Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79) and Clementina Lady Hawarden (1822-65), whose beautiful stylised portraits have received much retrospective attention as art works. But during photography’s midsummer, the great age of black and white photography in the first half of the twentieth century, there was a striking growth in the number of serious photographers of both sexes, and once more the focus was Paris, although many of the best-known photographers of these years were not French, but refugees or emigrants from Germany and eastern Europe. ‘It was not enough to be young, you had to be Hungarian’, as Robert Capa famously put it.

Why so many and why in Paris? There are some straightforward explanations for the rise of the photographer. The first is technical. Moving on from the static and expensive apparatus of the studio, which few could afford to install, photography benefited from a sequence of inventions that made it more accessible: from the substitution of celluloid for glass (1880s), to the invention of the Kodak camera ‘which relieved the individual button-pusher of the need to determine focus and exposure time’ (1888) and the commercial processing of the film.85 After the First World War, photography could go out onto the street, once the new lightweight handheld camera had been invented in Germany. Gisele Freund’s father bought her ‘a Leica, which had only been in existence for four or five years. You could put it in your pocket and take 36 photos one after another - marvellous!’86 Almost overnight, photography came within reach of anyone prepared to take it up and was no longer confined to professional studios.

The second reason was political: many well-educated refugees, men and women, left the oppressive regime of Austro-Hungary before 1914, the Horthy regime in Hungary in the 1920s, and in the case of many Jews, the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s. They might or might not have been involved in politics. Germaine Krull for example, was involved with the Spartakists in 1919 but escaped. Gisele Freund narrowly avoided arrest as a student activist. Other emigrants from eastern Europe included men who were later famous photographers, such as Andre Kertesz and Brassai (Gyula Halasz). Not all of them went to Paris. Those who moved to Britain included Edith Suschitsky (1908-1978, later Edith Tudor Hart) who came from Vienna, and Gerti Deutch (1908-79) who married Tom Hopkinson of Picture Post, a major photomagazine. Less well-known today, but a pioneer of avant-garde photography was Ellen

Auerbach (1906-2004), who with Grete Stern set up the studio ringl + pit in Berlin, before being forced to leave for Palestine, London and the USA.87

But a large number of exiles did settle in the French capital - at a time when France’s early lead in photography was just a memory. Few of them had intended to become full-time photographers, and it offered an immediate trade. Several of the new arrivals had an artistic background, such as Ergy Landau, born in 1896 in Budapest, who had trained at the Bauhaus. Naomi Rosenblum argues that within this context, women were freed from the usual ties of home, while they were also obliged to earn a living, twin pressures which created the unusual circumstance of women ‘rivalling men’ as one journalist reported in 19 3 6.88 She suggests too that exiled women supported and helped each other in the competitive world of Paris photography. The spectacular rise of photojournalism enabled them to supplement freelance work. A further reason was the air of freedom in Paris, where there appeared to be a surprising degree of personal and sexual liberty: women smoked in public, homosexuality was tolerated, and the cafe-terrasse was a place where both sexes could meet freely. This was in fact a Parisian, not a French state of affairs: what went in Paris would not have been tolerated in say, Limoges. Ilse Bing, born in Frankfurt in 1899, wrote: ‘The minute I set foot in Paris, I knew I was in the atmosphere that suited me. . . I could smell art in the very air of Paris and felt ready to blossom.’89

All of these factors: technical facility, low cost, easily acquired expertise, free and easy moral atmosphere, which favoured the exile, also favoured women. Some of them, such as Germaine Krull, born in Vilda, Poland in 1897, had already trained in photography in Munich. Escaping to Paris however, Krull was able to publish a series of nude studies (Etudes du nu, 1930) of a freer style than would have been possible in Germany, although she is probably better known for her abstract visions of the Eiffel tower, Metal (1927). Man Ray modestly remarked of her that ‘alongside himself she was the greatest photographer of the age’.90 Certainly French magazines published more nudes, but it is less clear that they would have reacted differently from the British magazine Picture Post, which left out several images from Grace Robertson’s reportage ‘Birth of a baby’ as being too explicit about the pain of childbirth.91 Taken as a corpus covering an immense variety of genres (portraiture, industrial photography, street scenes, photomontage, surrealism, fashion, abstraction, advertising, animal studies, etc.) the work of the women photographers active in Europe in the 1930s easily matches that of their male colleagues, in both quality and quantity. In fact their images are often indistinguishable. Yet they are not all household names in the way that some of the men of the period are (Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Kertesz). A few, who had post-war careers, such as Gisele Freund, born in Schoenberg in 1908, did indeed make the breakthrough. Many lost their equipment and negatives through having to flee during the Second World War. Some, such as Claude Cahun (Lucie Schwob, b. Nantes in 1891) were eccentric and destroyed their work. Some gave up photography, emigrated to new countries and changed their lives.

One factor which appears to have been fairly influential was the dominance after the war of the photographic agency Magnum, which was not noticeably woman-friendly. The case of Maria Eisner (1909-91) is instructive. Arriving in Paris as a refugee from Nazi Germany, she was not a photographer herself, but an enabler. She set up the democratically run agency Alliance-Photo, providing work for a group of like-minded men and women, whose images dominated the picture magazines of the 1930s, among

Them Robert Capa (Endre Friedmann), his then fiancee Gerda Taro and his Polish friend Chim (David Czymin), and also Denise Bellon, Emeric Feher, Juliette Laroche, Rene Zuber and Pierre Boucher. This group was the kernel behind the Magnum agency, which was launched in Paris after the war, in her own flat, with Eisner as a founding member and secretary. When she took on the New York office on her marriage, she fell foul of Capa who would not tolerate her remaining in the agency once she had a child. She has effectively been written out of Magnum’s official history, as Gisele Freund, initially the only woman photographer, also claimed to have been, although several women later succeeded in joining Magnum, Eve Arnold and Austrian-born Inge Morath for instance.92 Feminist historians have maintained that the work of women photographers in general has been greatly underestimated until recently. Their work was for various reasons less accessible physically (discarded, hidden away, unpublished), and in any case, collectors were more interested in men, and in action or wartime shots. Florence Henri (1893-1982), despite being ‘the most prominent photographer to apply the style of late Cubism to the camera image, . . . was ignored for decades’.93 Photography is a case, however, where resurrection needs to make no apologies. It is a rare field where the quality of European women’s work is, at least today, receiving plenty of deserved attention. Photography’s ‘European age’, though, has probably been and gone, as the focus in modern camera work today is far more global and international, with a degree of American predominance.

The same can of course be said of the cinema. Early European cinema, from its beginnings in France in the 1890s, was a collaborative endeavour, embarked upon by small groups of people who gradually took on bigger and bigger projects. This was the ‘seventh art’, with no formal apprenticeships or gatekeepers at first. Rather like photography, practitioners of early cinema learnt on the job. Women might or might not be involved, but there were few or no institutional mechanisms to keep them out. A recurring figure in feminist film history is Alice Guy (c. 1873-1968), originally Leon Gaumont’s secretary, who wrote and directed hundreds of short films for Gaumont in France in the days before the First World War. Later famous directors, such as Louis Feuillade, were once her assistants. She had a second career in America too, but her pioneering role was only belatedly recognised. It was possible for a woman to have such a trajectory in the informal circumstances of early cinema.94 But even in the 1920s, it was turning into a more hierarchical industry, with large-scale financing, production and distribution, as it provided mass entertainment in the middle years of the twentieth century. In the henceforward complex but pyramidal structure of film companies, women were present increasingly only in certain sectors.

At the bottom of the pyramid, women were routinely employed as semi-skilled workers in the processing of film, developing, printing and hand-colouring. Higher up, technicians, cameramen and crews were overwhelmingly male, and the financing, producing and distribution of films was virtually entirely in male hands. On the creative side of film, women were of course highly visible as actresses, later known as film stars. There were also a minority of women editors, scriptwriters, musical-score writers and costume designers. On the other hand there have been very few women film directors, though their numbers have certainly increased since the 1970s.

The response of the historian to this can take two directions: either to list and validate those women directors who have made it, or to consider why film historiography is the way it is, considering that the rise of cinema coincided with changes in the status of women. The first approach would indicate that there is in fact no clear pattern about where, when and how European women have made films, although latterly subsidies and television have proved useful ways of crashing through the barriers. It is true that in the early days the small scale of operations meant that gate-keeping mechanisms were minimal. This was the age of Germaine Dulac (1882-1942), Marie Epstein (1899-1992) and Leontine Sagan (1899-1974); in the field of documentary, the German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) was perhaps the best known. In mid-century, the number of women film-makers declined, in a pattern common to other aspects of European culture of the 1940s and 1950s, but has to some extent taken off since then. Some women have been part of a creative partnership: Marguerite Duras with Alain Resnais; Muriel and Sidney Box in Britain; Margarethe von Trotta (b. 1942) with Volker Schlondorff. Von Trotta’s solo career illustrates another phenomenon. It has been argued that West Germany’s production subsidy system in the 1970s ‘enabled women directors to work in numbers unparalleled in other nations’95 although France too has a system of subsidies that has helped indigenous production stand up to foreign imports. There Agnes Varda (b. 1928) has carved out a long and distinctive career from an explicitly feminist stance, while younger directors such as Diane Kurys, Coline Serreau, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat have reached a wide audience. From the 1980s in particular, a number of women directors have worked in television, which has provided a different career path, sometimes leading to cinema debuts, elsewhere consolidating work in a range of television genres, especially in Britain, but also, surprisingly in Spain. Finally, deliberately providing outlets for women’s films, as the annual Creteil festival does in France, has encouraged avant-garde feminist film-making, generally a minority spectacle.96

The second approach, looking critically at film history, would draw on some elements noted above to argue that the unremitting concentration on the film director has marginalised study of the production of films as a collaborative process, in which creativity may be shared among several participants: actors, editors, designers, musicians and so on. In this respect, the new directions being taken by some film historians are quite promising for women’s history. For example, the study of stars - that is actors - as of at least equivalence to the director and producer; the study of studios and their histories; the sociological study of films and of their audiences. In certain European countries, in particular in France, women have had creative input into films as editors, and we might consider the editing function within film-making as a case study of women’s participation at a more creative level.97

Editing is the ordering of shots and sequences which gives the film its structure, pace and rhythm. In the age of classical cinema, this could take any form on a continuum ranging from ‘Hollywood continuity’ in which the viewer does not notice the editing, and to more rapid and jolting cutting known as ‘montage’ which was favoured by certain European directors such as Abel Gance and Sergei Eisenstein. In Britain, Italy and the USA, editing was in fact more likely to be done by a man, but in France, perhaps surprisingly, some of the great films of the black and white era, up to and including the New Wave, were edited by women. This might be because of a partnership between director and editor. His companion Marguerite Houlle-Renoir edited most of Jean Renoir’s French films, and indeed she had to take many decisions in his absence over two of his masterpieces, Partie de campagne (1936) and La Regie du Jeu (1939). In other cases the partnership might be professional but was often long term over several films, such as Marguerite Beauge with Abel Gance. The contribution of the editor is a very different one from that of shooting. Agnes Guillemot, who edited many New Wave films, has argued that editing requires the eye of someone who has not seen the shooting. Marie Epstein, who acted as editor for her brother Jean, and later went on to make films with Jean-Benoit Levy, being one of the rare women film directors, has said, ‘Editing has to be felt. You are on your own and you sense the film coming together. It is like beating time in music. . . You see the rhythms of the sequences emerging’.98 Because it is an unobtrusive function, and because it has some affinities with sewing or repairing, in the words of Colin Crisp ‘the editor’s job could be assimilated to that of the little woman’.99 For this reason, Dai Vaughan, in his biography of a male film editor, Stewart McAllister, uses strategies instantly recognisable from women’s history, since he seeks to rescue a marginalised figure from obscurity.100

Vaughan, like many feminists, has made the point that auteur theory in cinema has a lot to answer for. This is ironic, since auteur theory was originally devised in France to provide a countervailing force to the Hollywood studio system, in which editors were directly hired by producers in order to control films, at the expense of the director. Auteur theory by contrast elevated the director into the leading position as the chief creative artist, the author, of a film. It argued that a film carries the director’s inspiration and, as it were, handwriting. Retrospectively, auteur theory has dominated film history, especially in Europe. When leading historians such as Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell refer to ‘giants’ to illustrate the 1940s and 1950s, they list Bunuel, Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, Antonioni, Bresson, Tati and Satyajit Ray (all but two of them Europeans). Histories of the 1960s and 1970s will list directors of the French New Wave: Godard, Truffaut and Resnais; ‘new German cinema’ is Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, and so on.101

There are obvious reasons why auteur theory had a meteoric rise and still rules most film criticism. But it has posed problems for feminists, who have suggested that it reproduces the ‘male angst about the romantic hero faced with a post-industrial world and the disturbance of gender relations threatened by the women’s movement’.102 Genevieve Sellier has argued that male subjectivity and authenticity is highly valued in the modernist ethic associated with the French New Wave, with women seen in terms of contingency, nature and reproduction. In the whole French New Wave, only two films articulate a female character’s focal consciousness, and in both a woman filmmaker was concerned: Hiroshima mon amour, made by Alain Resnais with Marguerite Duras, and Cleo de 5 d 7, by Agnes Varda.103 Much feminist film criticism has indeed been concerned with analysis of the ‘male gaze’, a term launched by Laura Mulvey to indicate that in Hollywood cinema (but in a great deal of European cinema too) the female figure on screen is set up as an object ‘to be looked at’, assuming a male spectator (although many if not most cinema audience members are female).104 Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren are European examples of the female star who may or may not be a good actress, but who quickly became a screen icon. A contrario, whereas countless police and thriller films incorporate the murder of a woman, the film A Question of Silence, made by the Dutch woman director Marleen Gorris with the deliberate aim of speaking to a female spectator, and in which three women randomly murder a man, caused remarkable controversy.105

Finally, if we view the cultural field as a whole, it is clear enough that cinema has depended on female audiences at different times and for different reasons: ‘surveys from London to Vienna showed going to the movies to be women’s preferred leisure activity outside the home’; they formed two-thirds of the British audience.106 Parallels could be drawn between this phenomenon and the women who ‘read novels’ in the past. But here too, feminist and other kinds of theory about spectatorship have reconstructed the cultural field surrounding the production of films to suggest new ways of analysing the viewer’s appreciation of the product. Previously minor genres, such as melodrama and film noir, have been ‘re-examined for signs of disruption’. Even the ‘women’s picture’, a genre particularly popular in the 1940s, in which a female protagonist has been seen in conflict and potential transgression, usually resolved in a conventional way by death or marriage, has been retrieved by feminist criticism which has stressed that it can encourage analysis of the patriarchal order.107 There are imaginative approaches to film history, in other words, that can illuminate corners of the cultural field previously neglected. Nevertheless, what this tends to reveal is that women are still in a minority within film-making, that the power relations of cinema are not encouraging to them, and that their contribution as actors, editors and assistants is still undervalued. A glance at the credits from virtually any film, European or not, will show that not only the chief actors, but the bit parts, extras, editors, producers, technicians and so on are very largely men. In this respect television, at least in Britain, has been a great deal more women-friendly than cinema - a question that takes us even closer to popular culture.