Film historian hosts event looking at women's poor treatment in Hollywood

Academics and film historians around the world join the top lawyer leading the UK civil action against mogul Harvey Weinstein at a DMU event examining women’s poor treatment in Hollywood.

The Women In Hollywood Symposium on Bank Holiday Monday will look past the headlines. Stories of campaigning women from Hollywood’s early years, now largely forgotten, will be told along with experiences of women working in the film industry both in front and behind the camera, and how one of the UK’s most famous film partnerships fought Harvey Weinstein.



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The De Montfort University Leicester(DMU) event has been organised by Dr Ellen Wright, Senior Lecturer in the Cinema and Television History research centre. 

She said: “As a historian specialising in the representation of women and their sexuality in Hollywood in the first half of the twentieth century, I have been watching the recent news with interest and seeing many occurrences that are depressingly familiar from my research into the industry at the start of that last century.

“I wanted to open this up to discussion at an event, to see if we can learn some lessons from the past and, given the recent concerns about the silencing of women's voices, take the opportunity to rediscover some forgotten stories and overlooked women.”

An exclusive interview with Jill Greenfield, the lawyer pursuing the UK civil case against Harvey Weinstein, will be broadcast. Keynote speaker is Professor Shelley Stamp from the University of California, founding editor of Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal, and author of Lois Weber in Early Hollywood and Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon.

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The event ends with a Q&A featuring female media practitioners, film historians. It is open to the public who would be welcome to join the discussion about gender pay gaps, the launch of #TimesUp and #MeToo, and how the factors impacting women in the film industry and broader society. This free talk takes place from 4.45pm to 6pm.

•       Interested in coming along? For more information, click here