Declaration of Independence

An Unmarried Woman

Paul Mazursky, USA, 1978; The Criterion Collection

THERE’S A MOMENT EARLY IN PAUL MAZURSKY’S An Unmarried Women when Erica (Jill Clayburgh) and her gal pals are tippling and pondering 8 x 10 glossies of Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. “Why don’t we have stars like that anymore?” they wonder. (Jane Fonda and Streisand, they agree, don’t fill the bill.) “Why don’t we have their self-confidence?”

Well they might ask. The 1970s were a time when the Young Turks of the New Hollywood were reinventing cinema in their own image, with no obligation to include female stars. Nevertheless there appeared a group of films that did feature women wrestling with the impact of 20th-century feminism, and the dissolution of the marriage ideal in a world that had rendered obsolete those traditional fantasies, and collapsed the studio