Iulia Necșulescu

“...they had us working days and nights on end" Judy complained in McCall's. "They'd give us pep-up pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they'd take us to the studio hospital and knock us cold with sleeping pills- Mickey sprawled out on one bed and me on another. Then after four hours they'd wake us up and give us the pep-up pills again so we could work another seventy-two hours in a row. Half of the time we were hanging from the ceiling, but it became a way of life for us.”
― Anne Edwards, Judy Garland

“The repressive fifties were giving way to the rebellious sixties, symbolized by miniskirts and Playboy magazine and the young, progressive-thinking family in the White House. Elizabeth's great achievement during this period was that she made the public want her as she was: she made being sexy, independent and defiant of cultural norms the desirable way to be.”
― william J Mann

“Women were never absent from film history; they often simply weren’t documented as part of it because they did “women's work”, which was—by definition— insignificant, tedious, low status, and noncreative. In the golden age of Hollywood, women could be found in nearly every department of every studio, minding the details that might otherwise get in the way of more important, prestigious, or creative work (a.k.a. men's work).
If film historians consider the classical Hollywood era’s mode of production a system, we ought to consider women this system’s main-stay, because studios were built on their low-cost backs and scaled through their brush and keystrokes.”
― Erin Hill, Never Done: A History of Women's Work in Media Production

“Though
the actresses who played female boys were of all ages and performed in a vari-
ety of acting styles, they were generally small, thin, white, and photogenic, and
their performances combined boldness and vulnerability. Their femaleness al-
lowed them to convey fragility and androgynous beauty. These performances
demonstrate that cross-gender casting, which may seem like an inherently
transgressive practice to twenty-first-century scholars, can also uphold conser-
vative gender, class, and racial regimes. At the same time, the performances
cannot be dismissed as reactionary or antifeminist, because they embodied
middle-class women’s sentimental politics and created a space in which wom-
en’s bodies had an important role in producing an idealized masculinity.”
― Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934