By Betty Kaklamanidou.
This patriarchal structure operates like a ‘fixer,’ a sophisticated, centuries-old system that protects male supremacy by eliminating the names of women who achieved greatness, leaving behind a male-centric narrative.”
This spring semester my two elective courses focus on the history of Greek cinema, specifically the work of Maria Plyta, the first female Greek director and film adaptation. In the second course, I teach intertextuality and adaptation through Barbra Streisand’s remarkable Yentl (1983), based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story. A few weeks ago, in a class of undergrad young students, I posed a spontaneous question: “Who here knows Barbra Streisand?” In a room of about ten, just a couple of hands were raised. For a figure who defined decades of music, cinema and so much more, this knowledge “void” felt surprising to me and to be honest, a little painful.
A week later, while speaking at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki for International Women’s Day, I repeated the experiment with a larger, more diverse audience of nearly 100 people. When I asked the general crowd who knew Streisand, many more hands were raised, although their majority came from individuals in their 40s, 50s and 60s. When I asked only those in their twenties to raise their hands, I got the same results as in my class. The hands vanished.
This observation led me to this personal piece, which is full of questions and anxiety, informed by books, a twenty-year career in academia and more than half a century of a life on this planet and witnessing of what history does to women. Do female pioneers, by the very act of breaking this fantastical “glass ceiling” trigger a systemic patriarchal reflex that ensures their eventual erasure? We often celebrate the pioneer for “opening the way,” yet we fail to notice the mechanism of reclosure. It is as if these women are Moses figures; they part the Red Sea of patriarchal restrictions to lead others through, but the moment they pass, the waters collapse behind them. The path is not paved; it seems that it is momentarily held open by sheer force of will, only to be swallowed by a male-dominated sea once the individual female presence fades. It seems that only a few exceptionally strong female individuals can make it past patriarchy’s agenda, which “allows” these exceptions, only to bury them under the weight of time and genealogical silence.
Let’s ponder on some of these exceptions, or a mental archive of ghosts if you will:
Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wollstonecraft;
Ann Catherine Greene;
Alice Guy, Lois Weber, and Ida Lupino;
Maria Plyta (see top image, from Eva, 1953), Rena Galani, and Lila Kourkoulakou;
Barbra Streisand and Lucille Ball….
From the twilight of the 19th century to the mid-20th, these women were not mere participants; they were architects. Each, in her own right, bypassed patriarchal structures, ascended to the heights of her field, and was celebrated in her time. They faced systemic obstacles, yet they produced monumental work.
And yet, we are faced with a haunting paradox: The work exists, but its presence has been evaporated. If they were the pioneers, the “firsts,” and the masters of their craft, why is their legacy not celebrated today? Why is the contemporary student, or even the contemporary citizen, unable to name them? We must interrogate the silence: Is the disappearance of their work an accident of time, or is it a deliberate, structural consequence of a patriarchy that permits the female exception only to erase the female lineage?
Why is our collective memory populated only by the “Founding Fathers”? We revere Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Edison, and the Lumière brothers. We label D.W. Griffith as the “Father of Narrative Cinema.” In the Greek context, we canonize Nikos Koundouros and Michael Cacoyannis. These names are treated as the bedrock of culture, while their female contemporaries are treated as marginal occurrences – if they are even discussed.
The late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a scholarly examination of the romantic comedy, a genre historically dismissed because its demographic was primarily female. At that time, a genealogical line was drawn between seminal films of the 1990s, such as When Harry Met Sally (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993) or You’ve Got Mail (1998) and the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. For someone like me, born in the early 1970s, looking back 30 or 40 years naturally brought me to that vibrant, witty, and female-driven cinema of the 1930s and 1940s – albeit male-directed. It was a tangible, reachable past. Today, in 2026, when we discuss the romantic comedy, the “past” has shifted. A 20-year-old student looking back 40 years lands squarely in the 1980s and 1990s. The pioneers of the 1930s, the female actors and writers who defined the very grammar of the genre have but disappeared from the visible horizon.
This is how the “Red Sea” closes. By the time a new generation arrives, the 40-year window has slid forward, burying the female pioneers of the previous century under a new layer of “modern” history. Patriarchy does not just rewrite history; it manages the expiration date of female achievement. We are trapped in a cycle where women are perpetually “new” because we are systematically denied our grandmothers.
The placement of male creators at the epicenter of cinematic evolution is no historical accident. In the silent era, women were not just participants; they were trailblazers. Yet, because the field of Cinema Studies was largely codified through a patriarchal lens, priority was given to the “Founding Fathers.” We continue to teach Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, and Georges Méliès as the holy trinity of origins. Meanwhile, Alice Guy, who arguably birthed narrative cinema itself, is reduced to a brief mention. Before the sound era, Lois Weber was a veritable tour-de-force in Hollywood. Actress, screenwriter, director and owner of her own studio, Weber’s filmography counts more than 130 films although only around twenty of them survive today. As one of the most highly paid directors of the silent era, her absence from the canon, while contemporaries like Griffith, Chaplin and Keaton remain etched in stone, perfectly illustrates the “Red Sea” phenomenon. Despite being among the architects of narrative film as well as a fearless critic of the shortcomings of established institutions and practices such as religion (Hypocrites, 1915) and the country’s devaluation of educators (Blot, 1921), Weber’s legacy remains buried under genealogical silence.
In contrast to the silent era and its openness to women frequently holding positions of power, such as producing and directing, the arrival of sound saw their presence as directors virtually evaporate. Only figures like Dorothy Arzner, and later Ida Lupino, managed to navigate the industrial machine. As women were pushed away from the director’s chair and confined to the space in front of the lens, the “male gaze” became the universal standard. We might celebrate Maya Deren, but her recognition remains a niche academic luxury, far from the global public consciousness. By the 1960s, female creativity was systematically pushed to the margins, finding sanctuary in documentary and experimental film.
Barbra Streisand presents a unique case study, particularly for Generation X. A member of the Silent Generation (born in 1942), her career ignited in the mid-60s, while she has remained active ever since. For my generation, she was a multifaceted powerhouse, singer, actor, director, producer, musician, a woman whose excellence we viewed with profound awe. With Yentl (1983), Streisand became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a major motion picture. While she became the first woman to win the Golden Globe for Best Director for the film, this milestone was met with a glaring Oscar snub in the directing category. In her biography, My Name Is Barbra (2023), Streisand writes that when Steven Spielberg watched Yentl during a private screening, he was so enthusiastic that he told her not to “change a single frame” (Streisand 2023, 583). However, when the Los Angeles Times later published an interview with her, the text implied Spielberg had helped Streisand with the editing, creating a public impression that her success was “assisted” by a male master. The gendered double standard here is staggering when compared to her male contemporaries. When Martin Scorsese appeared in a cameo in Robert Redford’s Quiz Show (1994), it was celebrated as a collegial nod between masters and not a single writer suggested that Scorsese’s presence meant he had “helped” or “influenced” Redford’s vision. As I explore in my forthcoming monograph on Maria Plyta (Bloomsbury), I use Streisand’s story to underline that systemic bias ensures that even the most recognized female stars are never truly immune to a patriarchal machinery that seeks to diminish female excellence, initiative and originality. However, as we stand in 2026, Streisand is 84 years old. The intimacy that Gen X felt with her work is not being transmitted to Millennials, Gen Z, or Gen Alpha. Their relationship with her legacy is being severed by the same “genealogical threat” that swallowed the silent pioneers. When a female figure like Streisand becomes “unknown” to the new generation, it isn’t just a lapse in pop-culture knowledge; it is a symptom of a patriarchal system that refuses to let female excellence become a permanent part of the cultural DNA.
It is true that time is an equal-opportunity destroyer of historical remembrance. Soon, the icons of my era, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, will mean no more to the generation born in 2020 than Clark Gable or Tyrone Power meant to mine. They will become relics, signs of a distant context.
However, there is a fundamental difference in how history treats the “pioneer.” While male figures enter the status of “Founders,” female pioneers are forgotten, and sometimes displaced, meaning that their innovations are often reassigned to the nearest male contemporary. We see this in the case of Ann Catherine Greene, who preceded Conan Doyle, or Lizzie Magie, the true inventor of Monopoly, whose brainchild was appropriated by a man who became a millionaire while she was erased from the narrative (an insight, ironically, that surfaced in the 2024 horror film Heretic).
This patriarchal structure operates like a “fixer,” a sophisticated, centuries-old system that protects male supremacy by eliminating the names of women who achieved greatness, leaving behind a male-centric narrative. It isn’t just that we forget; it’s that the historical, genealogical thread is intentionally cut. How do we oppose this patriarchally constructed “Red Sea” of female blackout? How do we preserve the memory of women in science, art, and thought?
I do not have the answer, and I question whether the efforts of individuals can truly dismantle such systemic machinery. Can the scholarship of Julie Grossman on Ida Lupino, or the research of my own team on Maria Plyta and the “PUC: Plyta’s Unknown Cinema” project, counteract a global machinery of silence? How can scholars reach a wider public? How can female excellence bypass the cacophony of social media? How can we ensure that even the dominant voices of today, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Chloé Zhao, and Greta Gerwig, among many others, do not simply vanish into genealogical silence forty years from now?
Work Cited
Streisand, Barbra. My Name Is Barbra. New York: Viking, 2023.
Betty Kaklamanidou is a Professor and Vice-Chair of the School of Film at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece.