Gender Roles
“In a different era, she might very well have become a scientist. At the very least, it was an option that was derailed by her beauty.”
-Film historian Jeanine Basinger, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, 2018
Whether in Europe or America, gender roles were the same, celebrating women as wives and mothers. Although there were many women entering the workforce in the early 1900s, they were not typically in the field of technology.
In 1933, at the age of 19, Lamarr married Friedrich Mandl, a wealthy Austrian arms manufacturer with ties to Hitler and Mussolini. Mandl was conducting research in weapons control systems and Lamarr obtained knowledge of military technology. Yet, Mandl, obsessed with her, kept her from acting, holding her like a prisoner in their castle. Finding her controlling marriage unbearable, Lamarr escaped to Paris and divorced Mandl. Although she was quite intelligent, she was recognized only for her beauty and fame, having six husbands and three children in her lifetime.
“I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded — and imprisoned — having no mind, no life of its own."
-Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, 2011
“Perhaps my problem in marriage – and it is the problem of many women – was to want both intimacy and independence. It is a difficult line to walk, yet both needs are important to a marriage.”
-Hedy Lamarr, in The Only Woman in the Room, 2019
“They wanted something cheap and stupid. They wanted something dumb.
But I have little shelves in my brain, and it’s all there, it’s the truth.
-Hedy Lamarr, "Journalist Unearths Audio Taped Hedy Interviews", 1970
Hedy Lamarr Interview, "Journalist Unearths Audio Taped Hedy Interviews," Fleming Meeks, May 1, 2018, American Masters PBS
“I like women and there are so many misconceptions about them that it makes me very angry. They say women love to gossip. I do not think they love to gossip as much as men do. They say women keep men waiting while they dress. I have never in my lifetime gone out with a man that I did not have to wait for him. They say women are fickle. I say it is more often a husband that deserts a wife than a wife that deserts a husband...I prefer to talk with women…It is men, I think, who are likely to limit their conversation to strictly business or personal matters.
— Hedy Lamarr, Life of Hedy Lamarr, 1940
“Hope and curiosity about the future seemed better than guarantees. That’s the way I was. The unknown was always so attractive to me… and still is.”
- Hedy Lamarr, Ecstasy and Me My Life as a Woman, 1966
"You Too Can Be This Beautiful Contest", Western Family Magazine, November 6, 1941
“She also had the same kind of complicated relationship with being a woman. She wanted to be Louis B. Mayer, she wanted to be Cecil B. DeMille. She didn’t want to identify as a woman and she didn’t want to identify as a Jew. Of course, it creates a schism in your psyche. It means your roots are cut off from you, and in some ways you are floating in the world rootless. And what does that do to you? I think if you don’t understand her relationship with being Jewish you don’t understand why she was such a broken person.”
-Alexandra Dean, producer of 'Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story', February 2018