From Reverence to Rape

From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies is a 1974 book (revised and reissued in 1987 and 2016) by feminist film critic Molly Haskell (born 1939). It was one of the first books to chronicle and analyze the "image of woman" in film. Along with Marjorie Rosen's Popcorn Venus and Joan Mellen's Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film, Haskell's book typified the second-wave feminist explorations of film history. She compared the depictions of women on-screen to real-life women off-screen to determine if the representations of women in Hollywood were accurate.

The book's title conveys Haskell's view that women in film had moved from one unrealistic extreme to another. In the silents and early talkies, women were often idealized and put on a pedestal according to Victorian values. But in the mid-1970s cinema, Haskell saw "a general deterioration in the way their sex has been portrayed":

Here we are today, with an unparalleled freedom of expression, and a record number of women performing, achieving, choosing to fulfill themselves, and we are insulted with the worst—the most abused, neglected, and dehumanized—screen heroines in film history.