Reputed to be the first feminist film journal (at least in the USA), this journal was launched by Siew-Hwa Beh and Saundra Salyer , who were grad students from UCLA and San Francisco State University respectively. Their first issue was published in 1972 (before Laura Mulvey’s ground-breaking intervention), and they asked Beverle Houston and me to contribute pieces. So we published two essays in their next two issues before the journal ended in 1976.
“Odd Couples: Woman and Manchild in Harold and Maude, Minnie and Moscowitz, and Murmur of the Heart” (Download) Women & Film 2 (1972).
“Woman and Manchild in the Land of Broken Promise,” Women & Film 3-4 (1973).
We were writing a number of feminist film essays around that time and publishing them in a range of journals— “Truffaut’s Gorgeous Killers” in Film Quarterly (Winter 1973/74), “Madwomen in the Movies” in Film Heritage (Winter 1974), and “The Night Porter as Daydream” in Literature/Film Quarterly (Fall 1975). In fact, all of our writings were feminist, but Women & Film was the only explicitly feminist journal in which they appeared.
Since the editors of Women & Film operated as a collective, they asked us if we wanted to write with them as part of the group. But we were already committed to our own collaboration and wanted to keep publishing in a wide range of journals. Still we promoted Women & Film to our students and colleagues and assigned it in our classes.