One hundred years ago, a woman was elected as the president of the United States. This didn’t happen in reality, of course, but a fictional female president did appear in a film that was released exactly a century ago, in 1924 – and it’s one of the earliest surviving on-screen examples of a woman in that role.
The Last Man on Earth is a silent comedy starring Earle Foxe and directed by JG Blystone. Foxe plays Elmer, the one adult male in the future year of 1954 who hasn’t been snuffed out by a disease called “masculitis”. Luckily for him, he was living alone in a forest when the virus struck, so when he is brought back to civilisation, he is a sought-after specimen. The government buys him for $10m and two “senatresses” have a boxing match for the right to marry him – but Elmer only has eyes for his childhood sweetheart.
Adapted from a short story by John D Swain, The Last Man on Earth is really an excuse to have some risqué fun with the male fantasy of being pursued by countless women. “Little, if any, attempt is made to conceal the fact that they are impelled by sex impulse,” tutted the Virginia State Board of Censors in its review of this “smutty” and “indecent” work. But the film also mocks the very idea of a society with women in charge. The White House is overgrown and unkempt, while the president herself (Martha Mattox) prefers to tend to stray cats than to run the country.
“Just imagine,” says Erika Cornelius Smith, director of Research Strategy at the University of Illinois, and an expert on depictions of women in fiction. “Women boxing! Women in government! The only way audiences could cope with this type of thing in popular culture was that they knew it was absurd and it would never happen.”
For the rest of the 20th Century, there weren’t many other female US presidents on screen. Betty Boop and Olive Oyl made brief animated trips to the White House in 1932 and 1948, respectively, but most film-makers stuck to the familiar status quo of male presidents. “Popular culture is a space of creativity and imagination and possibility,” says Smith. “But [film and television creators] struggle to balance this wonderful opportunity to be creative with the need to sell advertising and make a profit. Their shows have to have a market. Possibility and profitability are always going to compete.”
But why would a female president threaten that profitability? If a film or a TV series departs from reality in other regards, why shouldn’t it shake things up in this particular way, too? Karrin Vasby Anderson of Colorado State University is the co-author of a book on the subject, Woman President, and she argues that, in the past, such a character might have put off more conservative viewers. “The US presidency has long been one of the world’s most important displays of traditional masculinity and heteronormative family values, with the first lady playing an important supporting role,” she says. “A woman president upends that.”
Changing tropes
That could be one reason why, when a female president does crop up on screen, she is rarely taken seriously: in many respects, the president in The Last Man on Earth set the tone for her less-than-inspiring successors for decades to come. One recurring element is that the scenario is set in the future when, the implication goes, the world is bizarrely different from our own. The first example of this, after The Last Man on Earth, is Project Moonbase, which was released in 1953 and set in the year 1970. Ernestine Barrier plays madam president, and other women occupy positions of power – although as Smith points out, the heroine (Donna Martell), a colonel in charge of a lunar mission, is “easily frightened and turns to her male colleague and love interest as soon as the situation becomes dangerous”.
Female presidents would go on to be seen in the imagined futures and futuristic alternate realities conjured up by Back to The Future Part II (1989), Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009), Independence Day: Resurgence (2016), For All Mankind (2019-present) and Don’t Look Up (2021). In Bart to the Future, an episode of The Simpsons from 2000, Lisa Simpson grows up to be “America’s first straight female president”. One of the episode’s prescient jokes is that her predecessor was a certain President Trump.
Another trope is that female presidents aren’t often put in the White House by an ordinary, free and fair election, but by a crisis. It’s an especially severe crisis in The Last Man on Earth, of course. To quote Farran Smith Nehme in Film Comment: “For a woman to be elected president, literally every single man on Earth – save one tree-dwelling hermit who presumably wasn’t registered to vote – had to die first.” But even in less extreme scenarios, it’s common in films and shows for a woman to step in only after the male president has died or resigned while in office. Just look at some of the most recent examples: Geena Davis’s Mackenzie Allen in Commander in Chief (2005), Patricia Wettig’s Caroline Reynolds in Prison Break (2005-2017), Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Selina Meyer in Veep (2012-2019), and Robin Wright’s Claire Hale Underwood in House of Cards (2013-2018) all became presidents without voters’ approval.
Similarly, the fictional women themselves aren’t always keen to do the job. “In television and film, the only women who can be trusted as US president are those who don’t want to be there,” says Anderson. “Heroic women presidents, like Téa Leoni’s character in Madam Secretary, have to be dragged into public service. Women with political ambition, such as Cherry Jones’s president in 24 and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character in Veep, prove to be untrustworthy, or their presidencies often end in tragedy. Fictional male presidents can be principled, effective, and politically ambitious. Women on screen still have to choose between ambition and trustworthiness.”
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