Not That Kind of Woman: Censorship and the Representation of Female Sexuality in Pre-Code Hollywood

Abstract

The Pre-Code era is a misnomer that refers to a four-year period in which the Hollywood motion picture industry formally decided to abide by a self-regulatory code concerning film content, the Production Code, from 1930 to 1934, before it was heavily enforced. Fearing federal censorship and boycotts from religious and reform groups, the MPPDA president, Will H. Hays, along with a small group of Catholic laymen and priests, led to the creation of this form of self-censorship and managed to impose it upon the industry itself. The Code was written by a Jesuit priest and drama professor, Daniel A. Lord, who believed in the moral importance of entertainment, and that the industry had special moral obligations and responsibilities in producing morally good films. The first part of this thesis intends to investigate – with the aim of original documents and letters from the MPPDA digital archive – how, during those four years, Hays and the Studio Relations Committee struggled to enforce the Production Code, while the second – taking into account four Pre-Code films, Red-Headed Woman (1932), I’m No Angel (1933), Female (1933) and Design for Living (1933) – aims to analyze how, in spite of the SRC’s attempts to censor it, female sexuality was portrayed on screen.