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76 dga quarterly up the trend in the title of her 1974 call-to-action, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. And the big question became, where are the women behind the camera? By 1974 I had seen exactly one movie directed by a woman, Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) by Agnès Varda, and didn't know the names of any others. Then at a UCLA festival of women's films, I read Dorothy Arzner's name on the director's card of Dance, Girl, Dance and wept. Because the field of women's studies was in its infancy, few of us knew that there had been a clutch of women directors early in the 20th cen- tury, including Alice Guy-Blaché and Lois Weber. Or that Arzner, the first female member of the DGA, directed 17 features and Ida Lupino, the Guild's second member, directed seven, the last in 1966. Even fewer were aware that we were living in an era when the window for the "femme helmer" (as Variety had dubbed Arzner) was opening—if only a sliver. The good news: From Stephanie Rothman's feature debut in 1967 to Gillian Armstrong's first film in 1979, a dozen or so femme helmers entered the scene, among them Elaine May, Lina Wertmüller, and Joan Micklin Silver. The less-good news: Unless you lived in New York or Los Angeles, you might not have been aware that, apart from May, Wertmüller, and perhaps Barbara Kopple, other fe- male filmmakers were out there. In hindsight, the late 1960s and 1970s were a pivotal era for women directors whose films looked askance at society, social arrangements, and men. At a time when Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed that all he needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun, filmmakers like Rothman proved the directorial necessities were a script and an Arriflex. Rothman was a graduate of UC Berkeley and the USC film school. In 1965 Roger Corman hired Roth- man to direct It's a Bikini World (released in 1967), one of the last of the beach-party films. In her subsequent films, Rothman employed classical filmmaking tech- niques to tell stories of social transgressors, such as the Mexican revolutionaries in The Student Nurses (1970), the omnisexual predator in The Velvet Vampire (1971), and the exotic dancer in The Working Girls (1974). To he sands were shifting in Hollywood during the late 1960s and 1970s. Corporations acquired Hollywood studios. The so-called movie brats, film school-educated directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma, be- gan knocking on studio doors. "Women's libbers," as popular maga- zines dubbed those crusading for equal rights and equal representa- tion, asked, "Where are the women on screen?" From the evidence of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, M*A*S*H, and Midnight Cowboy, they were primarily lust objects, not leading characters. Molly Haskell summed C L A S S I C S The New Wave of Women By Carrie Rickey T In the 1970s a handful of female directors got a shot at making features. It didn't change things, but it was a start. Film critic and historian Carrie Rickey looks at their accomplishments—and legacy. Elaine May, A New Leaf (1971)