Why did editing become one of the few creative film jobs open to women?

In early Hollywood, directing, shooting, and producing a film were jobs almost entirely closed to women; directors, cinematographers, producers, and executives were nearly always men. Editing was the exception, for a surprisingly bureaucratic reason: the job was classified as technical rather than creative. When the Motion Picture Editors Guild formed, it deliberately chose to be "below the line," a technical guild instead of a creative one, and in a film's early years editors were seen as people who simply cut out the bad bits and strung the footage together. That lower status, ironically, opened a door: editing gave creative women a place to leave their mark on filmmaking. The history of the craft includes many women editors, among them Dede Allen, Anne Bauchens, Margaret Booth, Barbara McLean, Anne V. Coates, Adrienne Fazan, Verna Fields, Blanche Sewell, and Eda Warren.

The label "merely technical" badly undersold what editing actually does. Film editing is often called the "invisible art" precisely because, done well, it disappears: the viewer becomes so absorbed that they never notice an editor's hand at work at all. Around 1918, the Russian director Lev Kuleshov demonstrated just how powerful that invisible hand could be. He intercut the exact same shot of an actor's face with a bowl of soup, then a child playing, then a woman lying in a casket, and audiences praised the actor's performance—seeing hunger, delight, and grief in a face that, in reality, had never seen any of those things. The shot had been filmed years before the others; simply placing images next to each other in sequence was enough to manufacture an emotional relationship that existed only in the viewer's mind.

In practice, finishing a film's edit usually moves through three stages: the editor's cut, the director's cut, and the final cut, with directors of major theatrical releases guaranteed a minimum of ten weeks after filming wraps to shape their own first version. Along the way, unused footage used to be discarded by literally throwing strips of film onto the floor—which is exactly where the expression "cutting-room floor," still used for any performance that never makes it into the finished film, actually comes from.