In the period immediately following World War II, the femme fatale embodied a host of male anxieties about gender roles. Returning soldiers worried that the women they left on the homefront wouldn’t look or act the same, that they might feel differently after years of separate lives. They also worried that these women wouldn’t give up their jobs—jobs the U.S. government had practically begged them to take in wartime, but which ultimately belonged to men.
As the film historian Michael Renov argues, American women received a clear message during World War II: “If you women don’t take jobs in the factories, schools, hospitals, and offices across America, your husbands and sons will die and we will lose the war.” This was communicated through government agency pamphlets like “This Soldier May Die—Unless You Man This Idle Machine” and ads that asked, “Women of [fill in the town], are you making these casualty lists longer?”
It was quite the turnaround from previous messaging around women in the workforce. During the Great Depression, the government had openly discouraged women from seeking employment, most notably through the Economy Act of 1932. This law stipulated that a husband and wife could not both work for the U.S. government, and it was never a question which spouse would lose their job in the process.
The mass exodus of men from the workforce after Pearl Harbor forced a change of heart, but it was only temporary. Just a month after the war ended, 600,000 women lost their jobs. That figure would jump to two million by November 1946. The expectation was now, in Renov’s words: “If you do not bear children, especially sons, dutifully and in large number, the American way of life for which so many suffered and died will be seriously threatened.” But not everyone could be expected to snap back to the status quo that easily, and the fear that certain women were selfishly hoarding jobs from suffering veterans began seeping into popular culture. This particular tension is explored frequently in noir, which cast career women as misguided at best, criminals at worst.
The film professor Jack Boozer points to “negative images of resourceful working women” in movies such as The Best Years of Our Lives and All About Eve. In noir, however, these negative images are heightened. “Ambitious women evoke a certain paranoia that is readily apparent in the metaphorical plots of classic film noir, where they are made to appear beautiful but also treacherous, criminally depraved and castrating in their desires,” he writes.