"A Woman of the Darkness"

"Feminist critics would later celebrate the noir woman — the iconic femme fatale — as a lioness of empowerment and sexual freedom. Janey Place articulates this view when she writes that the noir era 'stands as the only period in American film in which women are deadly but sexy, exciting, and strong . . . active, not static symbols . . . intelligent and powerful if destructively so.' The femmes fatales were certainly more than just sexpots; they were apolitical rebels against the traditional female role. Depression babes ambitious for a materially richer life but lacking education or business ambitions, they rejected domesticity (unless they wanted to negotiate a marriage of convenience to a wealthy man) and used their sexual wiles to undermine patriarchal power — to 'unman' a man and thus control him."

Salon presents an excerpt from Richard Lingeman's The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War.