reinforcing conventional values, above all, the notion that women could only find happiness in love, marriage and motherhood. However, she argues that they were "subtly subversive". They implied that a woman could not combine a career and a happy family life, but they also offered women a glimpse of a world outside the home, where they did not sacrifice their independence for marriage, housekeeping, and childrearing. The pictures depicted women with successful careers as journalists, pilots, car company presidents, and restaurateurs. Similarly, Simmon notes that the genre offered a mixture of repression and liberation, in which repressive narratives are regularly challenged, partly via mise-en-scène and acting but also by conflicts within the narratives themselves. He further states that such resistances were present in some of the earliest woman's films and became the rule with Douglas Sirk's postwar American woman's films. Others have argued, however, that the narratives of these films offer only the repressive perspective and that viewers must read the texts "against the grain" to be able to find a liberating message. Critics such as Haskell have criticized the term "woman's film" itself. She writes: What more damning comment on the relations between men and women in America than the very notion of something called the 'woman's film'? ... A film that focuses on male relationships is not pejoratively dubbed a 'man's film' ..., but a 'psychological drama.'" Some woman's film have been met with critical acclaim. Woman's films that were selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" include It Happened One Night (1934), Imitation of Life (1934), Jezebel (1938), Gone with the Wind (1939), The Women (1939), Rebecca (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), Mrs Miniver (1942), Now, Voyager (1942), Gaslight (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Adam's Rib (1949), The Heiress (1949), All About Eve (1950), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Gigi (1958), My Fair Lady (1964), Funny Girl (1968), Wanda (1970), Grease (1978), Norma Rae (1979), Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), She's Gotta Have It (1986), Thelma and Louise (1991), The Joy Luck Club (1993), Selena (1997), and Titanic (1997). See also Chick flick Romance film Women's cinema References Notes Bibliography External links Hollinger, Karen Wallis (2014): Embattled voices: The narrator and the woman in film noir and the woman's film. Thesis submitted for a Doctor of Philosophy degree