Like a generation of millennial women, I deeply identify with Andrea Sachs. The plucky heroine of The Devil Wears Prada endured a journey many of us know well; she evolved from a haughty girl to a more humble, self-actualized woman. Under the unrelenting gaze of an exacting boss and the benevolence of a mentor, Andy learned how to find value in the fashion industry. At the start of the film, she’s an ill-dressed reporter in need of a job who thinks she’s above a general awareness of famed photographer Patrick Demarchelier. By the end, she’s much better dressed, with a deeper understanding of how much more difficult it is to succeed as a woman in business, regardless of the industry.
Andy had things to teach us about women at work and the value of investing emotionally when it comes to your calling, and she’s not the only one. The 90s and early aughties are littered with stories of women who made lives that mattered. But those stories are rarely included in conversations about essential cultural texts that matter. It often feels as though if a film’s lasting impact is felt mostly by a female viewing audience, it’s the same as having no impact at all.
But screen stars like Elle Woods, Cady Heron and Torrance Shipman brought new dimensions to who women could be onscreen. With their various lives, choices and moral conundrums, they showed that there is no one way to be a woman. They were fully realized characters who had their own wants and desires. Sometimes those aligned with the social feminine ideal. Often they directly conflicted with them. But their existence allowed the full range of humanity to be represented where everyone could see them, learn from them and emulate them. They were their best and worst selves, and they taught us how to navigate the tough binaries women are forced to contort themselves into. They didn’t have to choose between sinner or saint, Madonna or whore. They made space in the ambiguous middle and invited us all to join them.
These women aren’t perfect; for starters, they aren’t real, and their circumstances are necessarily extraordinary. That is the nature of film. But they embody the various tropes and vague ideas of what womanhood encapsulates. Looking at them and scrutinizing them with clear, critical eyes means recognizing the lessons they have to teach, the mistakes they’ll help us avoid and the virtues we can carry forward into our own lives.
The women like Regina George who wore pink and played up their feminine wiles are just as valuable and necessary as the ones like Imperator Furiosa who picked up a gun and ran into battle. It’s time we recognize them as different individual points along the same spectrum of the expression of femininity, instead of as competing versions of an outdated and incalculable ideal.
There is no one way to be a woman. There are many.
“All The Women In The World” will be a column about the filmic heroines of our youth: the fictional women who taught us how to be, how to love and how to exist in the world. These women’s impact looms large. They are, for the most part, female characters who influenced the ones who came after them, reshaping the world in their wake.
This column is an argument for their implicit collective cultural value.