Still from the film The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947) showing a man looking askance at a women seated next to him
Screenings

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim

  • This is a past program

The UCLA Film & Television Archive presents classic film and contemporary cinema in the Hammer's Billy Wilder Theater.

Part of the Women to the Polls: A Suffrage Film Festival.

Making an American Citizen

Cinema pioneer Alice Guy Blaché uses an immigrant’s assimilation story to crystallize the (no)place of American femininity in citizenship—elevated, disenfranchised and domestic, implicitly white and bourgeois, a key symbolic prop for masculine suffrage. (1912, dir. Alice Guy Blaché, DCP, black & white, 16 min.)

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim

Set in 1874, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim revisits women’s suffrage in relation to employment, femininity, and heterosexual romance. One of the first trained “typewriters,” joining an all-male workplace, Miss Pilgrim becomes a suffragist and falls in love with her boss. Made two years after the end of WWII, the film poses suffrage, employment, and women’s ambition as challenges to romantic and personal happiness. (1947, dir. George Seaton, 35mm, black & white, 97 min.)