SOURCE: "Patterns of Violence Toward Women in Fritz Lang's White the City Sleeps," in Wide Angle, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1980, pp. 55-9.

In the following essay, Kaplan asserts that while Lang correctly assessed the decline in male authority in the public and private spheres, he puts forth only one solution: a return to the old-style patriarchal authority, instead of a move toward something new and positive.

Several feminist theorists have recently argued that, viewed historically, violence against women changes according to transformations in the traditional bourgeois family. Oppressive as it was, the cult of womanhood, entailing the protection of bourgeois women by their husbands, circumscribed violence against this female group. Poor, lower-class women and children have always been subject to violence (viz Jack the Ripper) and abuse by all kinds of masters, but in the modern period (particularly after the two World Wars) more classes of women became vulnerable as...