In her book Backlash, Susan Faludi talks about these films as portraits not of female madness but of the crumbling of an old-fashioned institution: “Marriage, not the woman, is the patient under analysis in women’s films of the seventies, and the dialogue probes the economic and social inequalities of traditional wedlock.” The Hollywood formula was coming undone, as were the female leads in these films. While the fallen women of the previous decades were still clinging to the illusion of respectable womanhood, driving themselves insane trying to live up to it, the madwomen of the seventies
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