Who was the first woman to win an Oscar?
In the history of the Academy Awards, it’s no surprise that women have long felt like second-class citizens. The Oscars has always struggled with diversity and representation, an issue only truly addressed in the last decade. For example, it wasn’t until 1973 that a woman won ‘Best Picture’, and even then, producer Julia Phillips had to share the trophy with two male producers. It also took until 2010 for Kathryn Bigelow to become the first woman to win ‘Best Director’—a staggering 81 years after the first Oscars ceremony.
However, if you want to find the first woman to win an Oscar—any Oscar—you have to go back to the first ceremony on May 16th, 1929. At this ceremony, every single winner was a man – except the winner of ‘Best Actress’, of course. The Oscars were still finding its identity at this point, so there were only three nominees in each category, and one nominee was nominated for three of her performances from the calendar year.
Contesting ‘Best Actress’ were Gloria Swanson for Sadie Thompson, Louise Dresser for A Ship Comes In, and Janet Gaynor for three films: 7th Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the winner was Gaynor, who seemed to have the deck stacked in her favour. She became the first woman to win an Academy Award – and later admitted nobody in the building, least of all her, felt there was any importance to that victory.
“Nobody felt there was any historical significance,” she admitted to The Telegraph. “I was pleased to win the award, and it was a thrill because I got to meet Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks for the first time.”
In truth, the Academy was so new back then – only two years old, in fact – that the Oscars ceremony had nothing like the cultural cache or pomp and circumstance it has today. The entire awards presentation lasted all of 15 minutes, and Gaynor later revealed, “I remember there was an orchestra, and while you were dancing you saw most of the essential people in Hollywood swirling next to you on the dance floor. It felt more like a private party than a big public ceremony.”
Who was the first to win in a non-gendered category?
In truth, it stands to reason that the first woman to win an Oscar would have taken her prize at the first ceremony, thanks to the ‘Best Actress’ category. But, as previously mentioned, the Academy has always had a chequered history of rewarding women in non-gendered categories. So, it begs the question: who was the first woman to win one of these awards?
The answer is Frances Marion, a screenwriter who landed ‘Best Original Screenplay’ for The Big House in 1931. Interestingly, the first female winner of ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ came along only three years later when Sarah Y Mason won for Little Women.
Before you start thinking that this means the Academy has always been unusually forward-thinking regarding female screenwriters, though, it’s worth noting that the split between male and female writers in those days was much more even than it is now. The problem, though, was that these women writers were largely cloaked in anonymity.
“Half of all films written before 1925 were written by women, but writers’ names rarely appeared on the screen,” Cari Beauchamp wrote for the New York Times in 1997. “In fact, this figure is available only through the copyright records at the Library of Congress, where writers’ names had to be included.”
Still, the demand for writers was so high that Marion was the highest-paid screenwriter in America from 1916 to 1935. During this time, she wrote a mind-boggling 200 movies – and broke free from the shadows to etch her name in the Oscars history books.
