The December 1931 issue of International Review of Educational Technology—a monthly publication sponsored by the League of Nations’ International Educational Cinematographic Institute—begins with an editorial by the institute’s director on the values that women bring to cinema.1 The author cites censorship, education, and international peace as areas where women’s unique “level heads” make them especially well-suited for influencing film production. Premised on predictably gendered notions of women as mothers, teachers, and caregivers, the piece insists on recognizing women’s “right to a profoundly human double function, to educate and to assist.”2 However reductive and stereotypical the author’s rationale, it anticipates—and perhaps even unwittingly predicts—the abundance of women’s contributions to educational media, and other related sectors, in the decades ahead.
Indeed, many areas for which educational films were traditionally produced and disseminated throughout the twentieth century were spaces long seen as the purview of women: classrooms, private homes, churches,...
University of California Press