by the rules of their respective societies because their range of options is too limited to break free of their limitations. The ordinary woman who becomes extraordinary are characters like Katniss Everdeen, who "begins as a victim of discriminatory or economic circumstances and rises, through pain, obsession, or defiance, to become mistress of her fate." Depending on the type of heroine a film champions, a film can be either socially conservative or progressive. Certain archetypal characters appear in many woman's films: unreliable husbands, the other man, a female competitor, the reliable friend, usually an older woman, and the sexless male, frequently depicted as an older man who offers the protagonist security and luxury but makes no sexual demands on her. A common motif in Hollywood's woman's films is that of the doppelgänger sisters (often played by the same actress), one good and one bad who vie for one man as Bette Davis in her double role in A Stolen Life (1946) and Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror (1946). The good woman is portrayed as passive, sweet, emotional, and asexual whereas the bad woman is assertive, intelligent, and erotic. The conflict between them is resolved with the defeat of the bad woman. A central element of the 1980s British woman's film is the motif of escape. Woman's films allow their respective female protagonists to escape their everyday lives and their socially and sexually prescribed roles. The escape can take the form of a journey to another place such as the USSR in Letter to Brezhnev (1985) and Greece in Shirley Valentine (1989) or education as in Educating Rita (1983) and sexual initiation as in Wish You Were Here (1987). In recent years elements of "Woman's films" appear in many 4-quad blockbuster movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) in which the character Elizabeth Swann decides her own fate throughout much of the film. History The beginnings of the genre can be traced back to D. W. Griffith, whose one- and two-reelers A Flash of Light (1910) and Her Awakening (1911) feature the trademark narratives of repression and resistance that would later define a majority of women's films. Other predecessors of the genre include women-centered serial films such as The Exploits of Elaine (1914) and Ruth of the Rockies (1920). The woman's film genre was particularly popular in 1930s and 1940s, reaching its