Republic of the Philippines

CENTRAL MINDANAO UNIVERSITY

College of Arts and Sciences

University Town, Musuan, Bukidnon 8710

Department of Languages and Literature

A Critical Discourse Analysis on the Feministic Themes of the Selected 60s

Hollywood Movies

Ma. Abbygale B. Ojales

ABELS 3B

May 2022

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 Chapter I

INTRODUCTION

In the foundations of popular culture, one of the many things that people love
to ponder on is the basis of gender and their roles. Throughout the years, gender
has been said to be one of the critical elements for the development of society, with
its notion being one of the most heated political issues that call for an equal and
reasonable discussion. The awareness of the issue was made possible due to the
women's movement and feminist politics, which includes work on gender equality,
challenging the position and status of males and females in society, and tackling the
establishment of gendered stereotypes, which has mainly contributed to increased
awareness of gender issues. 

The movie industry's history reflects the stunted rise of feminism and full civil
rights for women in society. Traditionally, commercial films have relied on actresses'
attractiveness and sexual allure to guarantee box office numbers (Rosen, 1973).
Western films have adapted to the growing inclinations of societal choice. The
classic Hollywood movies typify roles of overt sexuality and sultriness in women
actresses, frequently degrading and objectifying them (Rosen, 1973). 

In Western cinema, female personalities have been created with extreme

caution to reproduce patriarchal preconceptions. Films regarding women's concerns
and movies released in the name of women's empowerment were scarce in the past
(Vijayan, 2018). Women's characteristics are primarily concentrated on physical
attractiveness as portrayed in the media; focusing on family and traditional affairs is
the top priority. First and foremost, a woman's ability to effectively administrate the
tasks of wife and mother is critical - and she does not need to provide a strong
personality or wit to charm others (Tasmin, 2020). Furthermore, Tasmin (2020)
suggests that one of the most often used sources of information in the media.
Several types of research have found that excessive media consumption is linked to
more traditional gender norms, giving media the power to manipulate or redefine
concepts of gender through the people who are willing to view it as it is. When there

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is a redundancy in the amount of stereotypical portrayal of the women in movies, the
audience may regularly perceive these ideas as a "natural" gender role. 

However, with the growing rise of protests regarding equal rights, a new wave
of feministic views on movies is arising to the occasion – although the call for
equality for women was in dribs and drabs. Therefore, Hollywood films were
expected to be too sluggish in progress but not impossible to detect. Under the
second wave of feminism, which became evident in the late 60s, the women's
movement marked a seemingly abrupt break with the peaceful suburban life shown
in popular media, as revolutionary idealism sparked by anti-Vietnam War protests
(Brunell & Burkett, 2021). Feminism, as claimed by Jennifer Merin (2019), is defined
as an "advocacy of women's rights based on the equality of the sexes," believing in
the power of justice and fairness for all. 

Feminist film criticism is activism for equal rights by dismantling the patriarchal
ideology, which is often misogynistic, racist, and ableist, and reaching the cinema
content as an establishment that considers the politics and standpoints of its
creators, examining how men and women are represented in the movie (Merin,
2019). In terms of numbers, roles, and perspectives, women are underrepresented in
films compared to men (Shapiro, 2017). Under the still-burgeoning acceptance of
women empowerment in 60s movies, it is refreshing and exciting to see films
adapting to a concept ahead of its time. 

There is a vast need to study the earliest forms of feminism in movies to trace
the progressive shift in film contexts. There may be studies revolving around feminist
films in general, but not during the start of the second wave in feminism: the 60s.
Moreover, Hollywood films have the largest and most diverse global film industry
since the origins of filmmaking, so it is only rightful to explore its dominating grounds.
Discovering what is inside these 60s feminist films could help filmmaking students,
aspiring actors and actresses, and even normal citizens understand more about the
nitty-gritty of Hollywood cinema and its stance on women empowerment. 

Thus, the purpose of this study is to analyze the feministic themes using
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA, under the feminist stance, "aims to advance
a rich and nuanced understanding of the complex workings of power and ideology in

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discourse in sustaining (hierarchically) gendered social arrangements" (Lazar, 2007).
The goal of feminist CDA is to expose the intricate, nuanced, and frequently
conspicuous moments in which gendered preconceptions and patriarchal power
structures are abstractly formed, sustained, negotiated, and challenged in various
contexts and groups. This paper will identify why women are pigeonholed with
stereotypical roles through the use of Critical Discourse Analysis. This study will use
three (3) selected Hollywood movies entitled, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964),
The Ballad of Josie (1967), and Rachel, Rachel (1968) for observation.

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 Statement of the Problem

This study generally aims to why women are pigeonholed with stereotypical
roles in the 60s using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

Particularly, it sought to answer the following questions:

 What are the reasons for the stunted view of American women in the 60s?
 What are the feministic themes in the selected Hollywood 60s movies?
 How did the selected 60s movies paved the way to future feminist films?

Objectives of the Study

This study generally why women are pigeonholed with stereotypical roles in
the 60s using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Specifically, it aimed:

 To explain why there is a stunted view of American women in the 60s;

 To identify the feministic themes in the selected Hollywood 60s movies;
 To narrow down the importance of why such movies in the 60s paved the way
to future feminist films.

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 Theoretical Framework

This section will discuss the theory and approach used in the analysis of one

(1) Hollywood movie with feministic themes: Rachel, Rachel (1968). This study is

anchored on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine the empirical and

normative foundations for societal inquiry to reduce dominance and expand freedom

in all forms.

Critical Discourse Analysis

This study chooses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to study the depths of

roles in women in the movies. CDA is a form of discourse analysis research that

focuses on how text and talk in the social and political context are used to enact,

reproduce, and oppose social power abuse, dominance, and inequality. It underlines

the value of multidisciplinary research to fully comprehend how language operates in

the formation and transmission of knowledge, the organization of social institutions,

and the exercise of power.

CDA focuses on discourses of power abuse, injustice, and inequality,

intending to uncover implicit or hidden power relations. Prejudices and oppression,

for example, are perpetuated in everyday life through elite-controlled political and

media discourses, and those narratives contribute to the social and cultural formation

of sexism. CDA assumes that institutions are gatekeepers to discursive resources

and that power and resource inequities between "speakers" and "listeners" are

linked to unequal access to those resources. CDA analysts are motivated by

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pressing social issues, and their purpose is to effect change through critical

knowledge.

Conceptual Framework

Feminist Films
Rachel, Rachel (1968)

Critical Discourse Analysis

Figure 1 shows the conceptual framework of the study.

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 The diagram shows the flow of the study in its concept form. It shows the

chosen 60s Hollywood movie [Rachel, Rachel (1968)] and how its feministic themes

will be the groundwork for analyzation.

First, the researcher went through watching the 1968 film, Rachel Rachel

directed by Paul Newman. Second, the researcher will explain the key feministic

elements that were prevalent through the use of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA),

and how this will serve as an underpinning for future feminist movies that became

predominant in the afteryears.

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 Chapter II

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

Critical Discourse Analysis in Gender

A paradigm used in academic research known as Critical Discourse Analysis

(CDA) seeks to investigate “power relations, ideological manipulations, and

hegemony” (Rahimi & Sahragard, 2007). The term Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

refers to what was formerly known as critical linguistics (CL), which emerged in the

late 1970s (Wodak, 2002). The term "critical theory" refers to a perspective or

attitude that is critical toward society (Rahimi & Sahragard, 2007).

The CDA undertakes to decipher and demystify both "opaque and transparent

structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power, and control" (Wodak,

2007). According to Wodak (2001), "CDA sees language as 'social practice,' and

considers the context of language use to be crucial." CDA views language as a

"social practice" (Weiss and Wodak, 2003). She believes the ideas of critique,

power, history, and ideology to be fundamental components of all CDA. According to

Widdowson (2007), the Critical Discourse Analysis movement is "particularly

concerned (and concerned about) the use (abuse of) language for the exercise of

socio-political power." In other words, critical discourse analysis (CDA) examines the

norms and values prevalent in the sociopolitical sphere. Thus, CDA indicates that the

assumptions of ideology and its aspects are subject to close examination at this

school (Widdowson, 2007).

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 According to Wodak (2001), the primary goal of critical discourse analysis is

to expose "the opacities in discourse that contribute to the exercise, maintenance, or

reproduction of unequal relations of power." It indicates that the cryptic statements

are clarified in order to reveal the unequal power structures that are governing the

society. According to Bell and Garret (1998), CDA is not only an educational

institution but also encompasses a variety of methods. In addition, Van Dijk (1998)

stresses that CDA is not "a unitary theoretical framework or a specific direction." 

With this, there is a need to use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to expose

how women are pigeonholed to various stereotypical roles in the 1960s Hollywood.

Moreover, we can contrast this to the female protagonist’s role if there is some truth

that Joanne Woodward’s character is directly opposing to these views on women.

Women in the 60s

The 1960s saw a change in American society's perception of women's roles.

According to Schulman (2020), women before are portrayed as joyful housewives,

secretaries, teachers, and nurses on mainstream tv and in advertisements at the

start of the decade. On the other hand, they were viewed as unsexy, unfortunate

spinsters and naggers if they didn't get married, while those who asserted

themselves were seen as rude and selfish. As a result of their responsibilities as

wives and mothers in society, women were expected to pursue beauty, elegance,

marriage, and family. However, the general public was blind to the idea that not all

women being created equal during this time.

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 However, In the 1960s, profound cultural shifts were beginning to alter the

role that women played in American society (Walsh, 2010). Since more women than

ever have been entering the workforce in large numbers, there was a corresponding

increase in the level of discontent among women regarding the massive gender gap

in pay and advancement opportunities, as well as sexual harassment in the

workplace. The women's march of the 1960s influenced white and middle-class

women to form an organized movement for greater rights—known as second-wave

feminism (Khan Academy, 2017). In addition to Khan Academy’s (2017) claim,

traditional housewife and mother roles proved unsatisfying for many married women

in their late twenties or early thirties.

It was said that Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963

ignited the first spark of change, according to Burkett (2020). In the book, Friedan

spoke of the suburban housewife's "buried, unspoken" problem: absolute exhaustion

and a sense of powerlessness (Burkett, 2020). Domesticity had deadened women

who had been told they had it all—nice houses, lovely children, responsible

husbands—she said. They were too socially influenced to acknowledge their own

frustration.

Feminist trends of the 60s began to take hold in the 1970s; over the following

decades, the gender roles of men and women changed. Most young women, at least

those in the middle class, are expected to have the same career opportunities and

earnings as men, according to the history book America Divided: The Civil War of

the 1960s by Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin (as cited by Walsh, 2010). New

York Radical Women and Redstockings were two of the first women's liberation

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organizations to form on the East Coast of the United States. These early efforts

grew NOW, the National Organization for Women today (Napikoski, 2019).

The stereotypical views of women in the 1960s are important to take note of in

studying the role of the female protagonist in the movie Rachel, Rachel (1968). This

is to examine how traditional the roles of women are during this era, and to

accompany this general thought with more fictional, albeit true-to-life evidences as

portrayed in the movie.

Representation of Women in Hollywood Films

In real life, women make up half of the world's population, but in the realm of

fictional films, they only make up a third of the people (Sun, 2022). Slow but steady

efforts are well underway by women in Hollywood's media and entertainment

industries to end the gender gap (Price, 2021).

A book published by Christina Lane entitled Feminist Hollywood: from “Born

in Flames” to “Point Break” (2000) looks at contemporary female directors who have

come to Hollywood from the world of indie filmmaking to examine the differences

between commercial cinema and counter cinema. Inside the book, Lane investigates

the merits and drawbacks of feminist expression in the industry of commercial

filmmaking, which is male-predominated. The author incorporated interviews from

different female directors to close what has been called the “theory gap,” which

frequently ignores the professional experiences of women and relies on incorrect

assumptions to describe how the industry functions. In the conducted interviews,

Lane concluded that the interviewed female directors were conclusively put in the

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position of having to make a choice: either they would keep complete control over

their films but have to be content with a more limited audience, or they would cede

some of that direct authority to the male-dominated industry to appeal to a larger

audience.

Lane’s book may not be related purely on the perception of women in

Hollywood films, but the study is important to determine how impactful the power the

men’s gaze was under the realm of the male-dominated industry.

Additionally, a chapter in the book The Routledge Companion to Media &

Gender entitled Mass media representation of gendered violence explored the

pervasiveness of representations of gender-based violence (GBV) in the movies.

The chapter author, Lisa Cuklanz (2015) argues that the treatment of female

characters in mass media as objects that can be witnessed, managed, used,

abused, and even disposed of encourages people to think of women and girls as

lower levels than human beings. Furthermore, mainstream media reinforces the

bashing of individual perpetrators and victims, lacks structural analysis and social

interpretations for gender-based violence, circulates stereotypes of helpless victims,

and endeavors cultural dominance when various nationalities or ethnic groups are

involved (Cuklanz, 2015).

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 REVIEW OF RELATED STUDIES

Women In Hollywood

A study by Maryann Erigha (2015) entitled Race, Gender, Hollywood:

Representation in Cultural Production and Digital Media’s Potential for Change

argues that the entertainment industry in Hollywood has been a significant

contributor to the widespread dissemination of what's trending, not just in the US

alone but in the world. However, most of the stories and myths that make up

Hollywood's cultural production were written by white men. Narratives written by

women and members of racial or ethnic minorities, on the other hand, have become

less prominent over time. Moreover, although women made up more than half of the

population of the United States in 2010, there is still substantial gender inequality in

the movie and television production industry in Hollywood [(Lauzen 2009; Lauzen

2012; Erigha 2015)]. Lauzen (2012) (as cited by Erigha, 2015) concludes that

between the years 1998 and 2011, women filled 16 & 18 percent of the roles behind

the scenes on the highest-grossing films.

Similarly, a recent study conducted by San Diego State University's Center for

the Study of Women in Television and Film and titled It's a Man's (Celluloid) World

discovered that the number of men onscreen outnumbered the number of women by

a ratio of 2 to 1 in the year 2021 (Lauzen, 2018; Sun, 2022). Moreover, this

proportion remained the same throughout the parts of lone protagonists (31%),

significant characters (35%), and even extras (34%), with a difference of fewer than

3 points between the current year and the previous year. This shows that even in this

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modern world, the onscreen presence of women is still small in comparison to those

of men.

Another study shows the lack of diversity in Hollywood, not just in race but

with gender as well (Kunsey 2018). Kunsey’s (2018) study compares the

performance of women in the top five highest-grossing live-action films directed by

men in 2018 to the performance of women in the top five highest-grossing live-action

films directed by women in 2018. The findings of this paper, which centers on

quantitative background data and qualitative content analysis, suggest that movies

directed by women feature much more positive portrayals of women and that female

directors frame female characters in a much more positive light (Kunsey, 2018).  

Furthermore, the presence of a crucial female director behind the scenes has a

significant impact on the accuracy of these positive portrayals.

A study conducted by Yang, Xu, and Luo (2020) sees a quantitative approach

in examining how women are underrepresented in movies and how it progressed

over time. The researchers propose a new indicator to probe the progress of female

representation and its correlation with the success of a movie. This measure is the

female cast ratio, and they compare it to the result of the Bechdel test, which is a test

that is used commonly. Women's obstacles both in the production and distribution

stages of the film industry were brought to light by three significant findings from the

study. First, movies need more female filmmakers, especially female screenplay

writers, to have better female representation. However, the percentage of female

cinematographers has been meager. Second, films that have the prospects to tell

exciting and informative stories about women have lower budgets, which typically

causes the movie to receive a more significant amount of criticism. Lastly,

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moviegoers' calls for increased female representation in films haven't proven

powerful enough to sway the industry. Films with weak female models can still be

massive hits and make a lot of money at the box office (Yang et al., 2020)

The studies presented will help us greatly on creating a conclusion regarding

the women in Hollywood. Moreover, there is a need for research about women’s

portrayal in the 60s Hollywood films to accurately define the struggles of women in

the movies as well as to prove yet another gender gap that is visibly noticed during

this period.

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 Chapter 3

METHODOLOGY

     

This chapter presents the processes and methods that the researcher used to gain
the outcomes of the study. 

Research Design

         This study uses a qualitative type of research designed to analyze the

feministic themes of the 1968 Hollywood movie Rachel, Rachel using Critical
Discourse Analysis. With the use of CDA, we can critically describe the ways in
which various discourses are responsible for the creation, maintenance, and
glorification of social inequality.

Corpus of the Study

         The researcher studied the 1968 Hollywood movie Rachel, Rachel directed by

Paul Newman and starring Joanne Woodward. 

Data Gathering Procedure

The researcher looked through the internet to gather information about Critical
Discourse Analysis, the portrayal of women during the 1960s, and stereotypical
cinematic depictions of women in the movies. Moreover, the researcher watched the
movie detail-by-detail to pay attention to its feministic themes and to explore how
such a movie paved the way for future feminist films. 

Data Analysis

         The researcher employed Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) under Discourse

Analysis to analyze the social context used to identify the feministic themes of the
movie. With that in mind, we analyze the main character’s language and personality

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to determine how it opposes the power dynamics during the era of the 60s and how
it opens to the exciting possibility of a concept that is ahead of its time. Moreover, the
researcher also employed content analysis to evaluate the qualitative data for the
presence of concepts and themes. For this part, the researcher will watch the
concept and themes of the movie, as well as to examine why it’s symbolic for its
feminist stance.

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