In 1940, Scarlett O'Hara's saga (Gone with the Wind, Selznick International- MGM, 1939) was still making box-office records across the United States, and RKO was shooting Kitty Foyle (1940), the story of a 1930s working-class woman which became a career-transforming hit for star Ginger Rogers. Both films were the culmination of a decade's worth of Hollywood productions about women who broke the rules, beat the odds and survived. Pushed between the struggles of first and second-wave feminism, the 1930s are often marginalised as an era of female empowerment for American women, and few historians would argue that the Hollywood film industry promoted and supported independent women on and off screen during the studio era. However, images of famous and forgotten women abounded during the Great Depression era, and popular historians and filmmakers would remember the decade as one where women represented strength, practicality and resourcefulness. Hollywood's interest in representing women's active roles in history and contemporary life was echoed in contemporaneous developments in academic and popular writing by the likes of Mary Beard and Edna Ferber. In line with this trend, many of the most popular films made during the 1930s were adaptations of literature authored by women and aimed at female audiences. Whether behind or in front of the camera, Hollywood women took an active part in creating some of the most memorable films of the ‘golden age’.

As Frederick Lewis Allen commented in Since Yesterday (1940), the first popular history of the 1930s, ‘So many more women of the upper and middle classes were working now than had worked in the pre- Depression years that in their daytime costumes simplicity and practicality were in demand’. Though Allen's book was full of headlining women such as political journalist and commentator Dorothy Thompson, First Lady and civil rights activist Eleanor Roosevelt, writer Pearl Buck, actress Katharine Hepburn and photographer Dorothea Lange, he argued that ordinary women's experiences and attitudes toward work had fundamentally changed. The American woman ‘type’ of the early 1930s was