The Cinematic Shrews of Teen Comedy: Gendering Shakespeare in Twentieth-Century Film (The Taming of the Shrew) (Critical Essay‪)‬

[1] The discourse of feminism since at least the last two decades of the twentieth century has had to combat repeatedly questions of "conformity" and "happiness": if feminism must work against patriarchy, must women reject, in full, every aspect of traditional femininity and domesticity, even heterosexual intimacy? if the feminist movement has been truly successful, why are so many women still unhappy or unsatisfied? is "happiness" the gauge by which we judge feminism's success? In her classic study Backlash, Susan Faludi summarizes the so-called "post-feminist" position that many individuals have taken in the era since the height of the women's movement in the 1970s: Faludi contends that this attitude is a sign that the project of feminism has not, as the popular discourse of our age would have it, been completed, that the purported equality of women cannot have been accomplished if a defeatist ideology, like the one she summarizes, could be popularized. And while the anti-feminist movement has economic and social effects on women's lived experience, it achieves its greatest cultural visibility in the popular media, particularly cinema and television. According to Faludi, amid the financial insecurity brought on by competing home entertainment technologies in the 1980s, Hollywood sought conformity to popular opinion over innovation and artistic vision and "restated and reinforced the backlash thesis" that American women cannot be happy because "their liberation has denied them marriage and motherhood" (113).