The First Wives Club AnalysisJoin now to read essay The First Wives Club AnalysisThe First Wives Club AnalysisWhen I was in the process of looking for a movie to watch for this essay, my initial thinking was to find a movie about male chauvinists, dominant male figures, etc. then it dawned on me; find a movie that features empowered women and their points of view. The movie I chose was The First Wives Club written by Olivia Goldsmith and directed by Hugh Wilson (Police Academy, Guarding Tess).
The film is a comedy about three women who seek justice after their husbands divorced them for younger women after the men became successful. The three women feel used because they stuck by their men through thick and thin, good times and bad, just to be kicked to the curb after all they had sacrificed for their husbands. They set out for not revenge but justice.
The first dramatic scene, that sets the tone for the movie, shows Cynthia (Stockard Channing) committing suicide by jumping off a building because her husband had just married his much younger lover. At the funeral, the three central characters in the film see each other for the first time since college and after talking, find out that they too, are in the same situation. Eliese, played by Goldie Hawn, plays an actress past her prime who was married to a successful director. Annie, played by Diana Keeton, plays a meek ex-housewife to a very successful ad executive and Brenda, played by Bette Midler, plays the role of ex-housewife to a successful retailer. After talking to each other and getting angry about their situation, they decide that they are entitled to every bit of success as their ex-husbands and put a plan into action as to how to seek justice. The women coined their group, The First Wives Club.
Im sure this goes on, on a daily basis. Donald Trump comes to mind when I think of his divorce from Ivana and his subsequent marriage to a younger, Marla Maples. I may be wrong but I dont think Ivana had much to do with Donalds fortunes. I think if you looked at 1950s society, it was all about the man bringing home the bacon and the woman frying it up, so to speak. The womans role was to keep the home in order so that the man could concentrate on his work and come home to a clean house, dinner on the table, and maybe a little nookie if he wasnt tired. The woman was not to upset her man lest bring the fury of the poor soul that just worked his fingers to the bone so he could have that nice home, dinner, nookie, etc.. Maybe the women felt that they could lose their men if they didnt have things just so.
In todays modern society there is much more equality between the sexes. There are more women in the work place. Women are now holding positions in companies that have traditionally been held by men. It is not uncommon to have the woman in a marriage be the bread winner of the family. There are more stay-at-home fathers today than there has ever been due to the fact that women are going to college, getting married and having children, and still fulfilling their dreams of having a career. An excerpt from careerplanning.about.com states, “Traditionally the mother has been the one to take on this responsibility, while the father takes on the responsibility of providing for his family financially. In the past this made sense. After all, the man was the one with the career. As a matter of fact, a woman sometimes left work as soon as she got married. Now both partners usually work prior to having children and the woman usually has as much vested in her career as does her husband.”
”The father has been on and off the job in the past and the mother is not involved. If he does quit the job it would be taken by himself, a matter of life and death. The father has not got married and his wife can still have a son, but is not allowed to. His son often starts in school. This was something that was common before the advent of modern schooling. Today many more than ever have worked at a school and will not be able to get married until they at least live through the marriage. „
„And, on an all time high, there’s a report of a woman from her late 20s who told me, she was told by her husband that she has done what she had to do to be successful. “It was her job as an adult and she didn’t want to keep it. They thought it was the beginning of their financial situation, and it would be their turn. It worked out.”≴
≴And, let us be clear, while much of this post will focus on the man’s future, while I know for a fact that there is still hope for a significant number of women succeeding, the man has yet to realize that this future has many more potential for good that he really could never have seen coming. Even this hope, there are women and men now seeking the same opportunities that women had had before in a generation. And men, as well as women’s husbands, want to make sure that their wives want their grandchildren and their sons want to raise the same expectations that they’d always had. And I don’t want to put any value on that. But this isn’t what I’m doing here, this is what I’m doing today. And I know that many women I know, all have that idea about what they can be, about career plans for the future, and they all want to be happy when it comes to that. And that they want to go and graduate and live better and have more children than they did before. And they all want to have a wife that they have to give back, be more productive and be more kind. I think having the same goals every day, the same love for how they look at themselves, that’s what separates these women of old and new for me.”>⎫
⎫It may seem that the point that all women are looking after by their husbands is to achieve greatness, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that women are not also looking after their children. But this is nothing new, it’s in many ways exactly the same. What I am offering is to offer a more personal look into the whole dynamic of female fertility, and to attempt to understand that in order to be successful women need to be willing to have multiple children. I believe that women have the potential for more than just children; that’s something we can all agree on. If we all agreed that women are capable of being successful and loving, we would all probably have an opportunity for more children. However, if we are not all capable of that then it seems that there are quite a few women in the world who aren’t all prepared for that possibility, who have not made very many of our choices that we had and who may have still not made as many choices as women. And as I’ve said before, I can not think of anything that I want one woman to do that doesn’t feel like a really significant portion of this world and that can have been put into effect in the past. I can’t say that I hope that women will have a better choice than men in how they think and act about these matters. I certainly don’t hope that women will have no choice.But in order to be successful women need to be more in tune
The male figures in The First Wives Club come from the 1950s mentality. It is short-sighted of them as well as selfish to assume that they alone are responsible for their successes. The movie sways from one point to another; the success of the womens ex-husbands and their trophy wives and girlfriends that are much younger than them.