Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2003 "Science in skirts": representations of women in science in the "B" science fiction films of the 1950s Bonnie Noonan Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Noonan, Bonnie, ""Science in skirts": representations of women in science in the "B" science fiction films of the 1950s" (2003). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3653. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3653 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. “SCIENCE IN SKIRTS”: REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE IN THE “B” SCIENCE FICTION FILMS OF THE 1950S A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English By Bonnie Noonan B.G.S., University of New Orleans, 1984 M.A., University of New Orleans, 1991 May 2003 Copyright 2003 Bonnie Noonan All rights reserved ii This dissertation is “one small step” for my cousin Timm Madden iii Acknowledgements Thank you to my dissertation director Elsie Michie, who was as demanding as she was supportive. Thank you to my brilliant committee: Carl Freedman, John May, Gerilyn Tandberg, and Sharon Weltman. Thank you as well to Robin Roberts, who helped me get started on this project. A special thanks to Carol Lindsey, Karen Madden, Carol Mattingly, and Leslie Parr, without whose faith and support this project may never have been completed. A final comment to my mother, Marie Louise Madden Noonan (1909-2000): Mom, I did it, but you knew I would, didn’t you. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements . iv Abstract . vi Introduction . 1 Chapter 1 “You are about to adventure into the Dimension of the Impossible!”: Science Fiction Film Histories, Definitions, and Canons . 17 2 “How does a girl like you get mixed up in a thing like this in the first place?”: Representations of Women Scientists in the “B” Science Fiction Films of the 1950s . 92 3 “Science is science, but a girl must get her hair done”: The Struggle to Balance Professionalism and Femininity in the Giant Insect Films of the 1950s . 145 4 “How’re chances of me coming along?”: The Problem of Cinematically Representing a Heteroglot World . 206 5 “What then will the future reveal if this story is only the beginning?”: Where to Go from Here . 253 Bibliography . 268 Filmography . 274 Appendix A: Female Leads and Their Father Figures . 299 Appendix B: Female Leads and Their Love Interests . 301 Vita . 303 v Abstract This project shows how central representations of women in science were to the “B” science fiction films of the 1950s and uses these films as valuable indicators for cultural analysis. I argue that the emergence of the modern American science fiction film in 1950 combined with the situation of post-W.W.II women in science to create a genre explicitly amenable to exploring the tension between a woman’s place in the home and her place in the work force, particularly in the fields of science. Out of a context of 114 “B” science fiction films produced between 1950 and 1966, I offer substantial readings of seven films that feature women in science. Using changing gender roles after W.W.II as an analytical focus, each chapter explores relationality within films, among films, and between films and the culture in which they were produced, distributed, and consumed in order to make visible overall gender patterns, kinship systems, and possibilities for imagining change. The conclusion to the project uses the conceptual framework that has been established to suggest possibilities for a more thorough analysis of the American science fiction film genre, in particular as that genre resonates with concerns relevant to feminist theory. vi Introduction My parents thought I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up, and frankly so did I. At ten years old, I was fascinated by a book called Zip Zip the Man from Mars1 and convinced my younger cousin that he and I together could build a rocketship and travel to the moon. I had a six- paneled deluxe Gilbert chemistry set with which I attempted to concoct rocket fuel to propel a small balsa wood model rocket into space. I focused on science in junior high school, subscribing to a small monthly journal entitled Nuclear Physics. My parents bought me with their hard earned working-class dollars a special Funk and Wagnall’s science encyclopedia through which I searched every entry in the index in order to counter one of my science teacher’s overconfident pronouncements that there existed no source of energy that did not come from the sun.2 In high school I studied biology, chemistry, physics, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. In my sophomore year, I won first place in invertebrate zoology in a city-wide paper-reading contest (and later fourth place in the state) for a paper entitled “The Effect of Light Color and Intensity on Gryllus assimilus.”3 In my 1 junior year, I won second place in my school science fair for a project on chelation that illustrated the molecular structure and chemical action of ethylenediamine tetraacetic acid, a compound I had read about in Scientific American that seemed fascinating to me. After high school I got my first full-time job as an assistant laboratory technician in the department of Media Preparation in a bacteriology lab at the Louisiana State Board of Health. In college I had a part time job as a lab assistant in the university biochemistry lab, while I majored in first biochemistry, then chemistry, then biology, then molecular biology, fascinated as I was by the astounding discoveries being made at the time concerning the nature of DNA. I read for pleasure books such as James D. Watson’s The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968) and Linus Pauling’s Vitamin C and the Common Cold (1970). Finally, when I realized I had changed my major yet again—this time to psychology—and was skipping more classes than I was attending in order to protest the war in Vietnam and organize for the Women’s Liberation Movement, I dropped out of school and got a full time job in the back office of a brokerage firm, not thinking, just clerking, and 2 trying to figure out what it was I wanted to do with my life. Too late, I realized that what I really had wanted to be all along was not a scientist, but rather an actress in a science fiction movie. I wanted to be the girl who joined in the adventure. I wanted a place in the action of the world. I had internalized the images in the movies I had seen as a child and drawn on them to try to make a place for myself in a world that, even as I was becoming a young adult, was still extremely male-dominated.4 This misdirection was not completely illogical, since opportunities for girls in science were newly prevalent when I was growing up, opportunities of which my parents and teachers, and even I myself, were quite aware. My primary impulse, however, and the encouragement to which I responded, did not so much reflect my interest in a scientific career, but rather my desire to have a career at all and to have that career taken seriously, as were the careers of the cinematic women scientists to whom I looked for a vision of my future. I remember sitting in the Fox Theater, where I usually went on Saturdays for what we called the Kiddie Matinee. I rarely knew what picture would be playing, but usually, back in the fifties, the picture was a “B” 3 science fiction movie: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Attack of the Giant Leeches, Attack of the Puppet People, The Blob, The Fly, The Tingler, The Thing, It Came from Beneath the Sea, It Came from Outer Space, It Conquered the World, It! The Terror from Beyond Space, Kronos, Tarantula, Them!. I can still remember, as if a flashbulb went off and fixed the passing images in my mind, the first time I saw a movie called This Island Earth. I was sitting in the front row. When the title came up on the screen, it was accompanied by an overview of Earth as seen from space. There was eerie background music. I anticipated that I would be taken on an interstellar ride where the impossible would become possible, where I could escape the social confines of gender and class I sensed even then were closing around me. When the hero of the film, Cal Meacham, was identified as a nuclear physicist, I felt that even if the movie was not going to be about outer space, it was at least going to be about science, a field with fertile possibilities at that time for girls like me. In his lab, the nuclear physicist had an assistant (also male, but clearly subordinate) with whom I immediately and unconsciously identified (as a girl, I felt I would never 4 be able to be the male hero who was automatically entitled to participate in the adventure).