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audience segregated by gender. Hollywood madę wartime films with female home-front and małe military-front viewers in mind.

Film genres, studio production, and promotion strategies responded to changes in gender demographics brought about by the conflict. War films, for instance, were directed toward małe combat troops overseas while en-joying enormous popularity at home; female-oriented genres like domes-tic melodramas were aimed at women in the home front. Noir crime films targeted a masculine audience yet included strong femme fatales, redefin-ing femininity and “love-interest” characters and capitalizing on wartime easing of PCA censorship. Films noir featured the sawy strategy to target, market, and appeal to an audience stratified by gender with audacious ro-mantic female lead characters aimed at a 1940S home-front audience and brazen sex appeal with heightened violence for combat troops abroad. The growing number of femme fatale screen divas during World War II recog-nized the increasing female autónomy and independence of women work-ing in factories to support the military. The depiction of strong, bold women in« wartime films noir represented this cultural shift in traditional gender roles over the course of the war.

Wartime promotion, advertising, and media narratives reinforced these images. The Magazine War Guide recommended media plots to facilitate małe workers accepting women in the workplace: “The men in these fields must be prepared to receive women as coworkers. This can be done through stories showing the advent of women logging camps, on the railroads, rid-ing the ranges, and showing them not as weak sisters but as coming through in manly style.” Even advertising directed at women took a signif-icantly different approach during World War II. With war-related rationing, Fleischmanns Yeast featured a military uniformed woman on a motorcy-cle with the bold caption: “This is no time to be frail!” and “The dainty days are done for the duration.” Philco showed an aproned hoiisewife pum-meling a Nazi and a Japanese soldier with a kitchen sink (alongside a rifle-wielding U.S. serviceman and mallet-wielding małe factory worker): “With Everything—Including the Kitchen Sink!” DuBarry cosmetics showed a woman boarding a military piane: “Wartime living has taught many women to simplify their beauty care.”⁵ The pragmatic and necessary austerity of wartime affected women’s fashions and grooming aesthetics—or lack thereof. VeronicaLakes popular peek-a-boo,over-the-eyehairdo (spoofed in Billy Wilder’s comedy The Major and the Minor just after the successful release of This Gunfor Hire) became a serious hazard to enormous num-bers of women copying the glamorous style yet working in factories where machinery madę dangling locks a dangerous liability. In the interest of

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safety and the war effort the star was instructed to adopt a hairstyle with stray locks pulled back and away from her face for working women to em-ulate. This stylistic shift unfortunately proved a devastating move for Lake’s screen image. Such utilitarian functionality undermined the star’s glamour mystique and eventually her career. Not surprisingly, many wartime 1940S female stars and models, particularly during the 1942-43 period, sported hairstyles pulled up and back off the face in promoting a fashionable, func-tional aesthetic.

Given the małe talent shortage and lucrative female home-front demo-graphic, female stars and women in production roles enjoyed opportunity during the war years. A number of screen actresses gained prominerice, ide-ally coming into their prime in the 1940S—including Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Rosalind Russell, Betty Grabie, Rita Hayworth, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, 01ivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Greer Garson, Joan Bennett, and Joan Crawford. Women stars like Bennett, Grabie, Hayworth, and Hepburn acąuired morę power during this period than other wpmen before or after the conflict. World War II also provided an arena for talented women to make significant strides in the film indus-try behind the scenes and often “above the linę,” moving into writing, ed-iting, producing, and even production executive ranks. In “Hollywood Bows to the Ladies” the New York Times noted growing involvement of women in the studio filmmaking process by January 1945. “Picture-making, like every-thing else, is coming morę and morę under feminine influence. The ladies, no longer content with being just glamorous, are invading in increasing numbers the production field, a sphere hitherto almost entirely masculine.”⁶ Studios certainly capitalized on the ability of female talent to tap into the lucrative home-front audience—particularly with the predominance of working women earning substantial disposable income and having little to spend it on with the wartime rationing of consumer goods. After losing many international markets in wartime, Hollywood relied on targeting this domestic female audience. Women worked on several noir crime films and influenced the assertive, often working, heroines in films such "as Phantom Lady, Mildred Pierce, Gilda, and The Big Sleep, whereimages of noir women evolved beyond the typical femme fatale. Mildred Pierce and The Big Sleep, coscripted by female screenwriters like Catherine Turney and Leigh Brack-ett, showcased a variety of working girls—from self-employed entrepre-neurs to taxi drivers and rare-book clerks. Writers like Joan Harrison and Virginia Van Upp aćtually became producers and creative production ex-ecutives—a remarkable feat during the studio system era. Hitchcocka for-mer associate Joan Harrison moved into producer ranks to acquire greater