The controversy that completely baffled Geena Davis: “You’d get destroyed for it”
In 1992, Geena Davis starred in a sports movie that told a tale inspired by pioneering real-life female athletes from the 1940s. Davis knew the film, which predominantly starred women and was directed by a woman, would be an essential milestone in Hollywood’s on-screen and off-screen embracing of the female voice. However, to her surprise, one word that perfectly described the thinking behind the movie was seemingly outlawed during the press tour. In fact, Davis noticed that it would cause huge controversy if any of the cast or crew uttered it – so she did it anyway.
In the early ’90s, Davis’ career was in a good spot. She came to fame in the late ’80s with roles in movies like The Fly and Beetlejuice, but in 1991, she landed a role that would define her career. Her performance as Thelma Dickinson – a put-upon housewife who goes on the run with her best friend Louise Sawyer – in Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise was a revelation. The movie notched six Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Actress’ for Davis, but more importantly, it became a film that spoke directly to the experiences of women all over the world.
In 2022, Davis told British Vogue, “After that movie came out, people not only recognised me from it, they wanted to talk about the movie with me. It wasn’t like, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ It was like, ‘Listen, I gotta tell you, you have no idea. This is what it meant to me. This is how it changed my life.'”
Being part of something that prompted a societal discussion about the treatment of women was incredible for Davis. She began to ponder Hollywood and the kinds of roles that were out there for women and realised “how few movies give women an opportunity to come out feeling jazzed and empowered.” So, she resolved to make more movies like Thelma & Louise – and as fate would have it, the very next project that came her way was A League of Their Own.
Penny Marshall’s movie was inspired by the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which existed from 1943 to 1954. More than 600 women played in the league, and at its height of popularity, 900,000 Americans attended games played by the ten professional teams in the American Midwest. To this day, the league is viewed as the forerunner of every US women’s professional sports league.
Davis played Dorothy ‘Dottie’ Hinson, the catcher and assistant manager of the Rockford Peaches, and she loved making the movie alongside stars like Tom Hanks, Madonna, and Rosie O’Donnell. “I don’t think there’d been a movie with that many female characters – especially being athletic and successful,” she said.
However, she was also aware that there hadn’t been many movies like A League of Their Own in which the female characters were allies, not rivals or enemies, and she found this strange. To her chagrin, though, journalists picked it up and asked some incredibly patronising questions when the cast tried to promote the film. She grimaced when remembering how often gleeful interviewers would say, “So, a lot of women on the set; must be a lot of catfighting?” – something that would never be asked of a predominantly male cast. Davis would simply reply, “No, no. There’s none. We’re a team. We support each other.”
Even worse, though, was how one solitary word hung over the entire press tour like a spectre: “Feminist.” Despite the movie obviously being a feminist object, which isn’t a bad thing, Davis confessed, “There was a backlash against feminism. Nobody I knew would ever say that they were a feminist. You’d get destroyed for it. It was astounding.”
Davis was adamant that declaring A League of Their Own a feminist movie wasn’t a negative, though, and it was offensive that people acted as if it was. So, when journalists asked her, “Do you think this is a feminist movie?” with a smile and a wink, she would say, “Yeah.” Then, when she’d be met with a stunned, “What? Really? You’re saying you’re a feminist?” she’d double down. Amazingly, she remembers interviewers being so taken aback that they asked, “Can I write in the article that you said that?”
Ultimately, A League of Their Own made $132 million at the box office and was loved by audiences and critics. Davis was as baffled by the controversy then as she is now, as the film’s success seemed to show that “femisim” wasn’t a dirty word. However, she sadly admitted, “Having a successful movie with women in it didn’t change any opinion about women’s movies in Hollywood. They were still all of the mind that women will watch movies about men, but men won’t watch movies about women.”
