In Praise of Womanhood: A Look at Hollywood Wives and Mothers

In Praise of Womanhood: A Look at Hollywood Wives and Mothers
An ad in Life Magazine for the film “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” a work which shows the strength of women but also their need for a womanly heart. Public Domain
Jeff Minick
Updated:
A friend recently contacted me about the movie “Birds of Prey.” She’d read a review of the movie in The Epoch Times and was as appalled as the reviewer by the violence of a movie aimed at a young female audience. My friend wrote of older Hollywood films: “If a woman had to be strong (say her husband was at war), she did so displaying all of men’s best traits: honor, integrity, self-sacrifice. Here (that is, in “Birds of Prey”), the criminal violence of women is applauded.”

She added that we’ve gotten to the point where female characters in the movies must be as hardened and as violent as males, “which is no credit to women any more than it is to men.”

Jeff Minick
Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
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