In focusing on the theme of the female tourist and how she has been presented in film, this paper addresses several of the issues mentioned in your message, namely, "how a tourist industry was formed and how it developed," the development of guidebooks (especially guidebooks for women), tourist attractions, and international perspectives, for example, where are the women tourists going in the films, what sites do they see, what are their expectations. The economic impact of women tourists has been enormous. Since the 1970s, more women than men applied for passports in the United States. As women on average live longer than men, this means that many widows on pensions go on tour, a relatively recent phenomenon.
College and university women experience the "junior year abroad," when they travel, often to Europe, to study. As the growing preponderance of liberal arts students in the United States are women, this means, again, a heavy influx of female tourism. The impact of film, however, in helping for the cultural images that underlie this burgeoning female tourism.
There are gender differences in the construction of tourist motif-types, but the historian is not always able to encounter materials which clearly separate and delineate these motif-types. Since the earliest cinema, however, destinations of a touristic type, sometimes in Europe, sometimes at an anonymous seaside, night club, or gambling establishment, are stock elements.
The earliest films were often tourist films: newsreel slide shows of trains arriving in stations, earthquakes, sites, mountains, around the world. As the film industry evolves, the film with a tourist so named, the tenderfoot at the dude ranch, was actually identified, a person interested in leisure and observation, who was invariably a minor figure in the story. It was unusual to have a film about tourists per se. "Around the World in 80 Days," possibly the most famous tourist film, had the classic passive female, the Indian princess who was rescued and taken along by Phileus Fogg. Typically the male protagonist, where tourism was involved, was on an international mission as a newspaper reporter or spy. It became a regular feature of films from about 1905, when story lines emerged. In the United States, early films often featured western motifs, with women visiting the dude ranches. The 1920s brought motifs of the dance hall, the Broadway stage, and the yacht, the last epitomized by the "It" girl, portrayed by Clara Bow.
As the tourist industry evolved in this century, the relative importance of a tourist setting increased dramatically. Although the tourist was rarely the hero or heroine of the film, the tourist setting became a preferred form of social living. In the 1920s and 1930s film protagonists might be on a boat going to Europe. More recently, films were set in hotels, Capri, beaches, where James Bond might stay, parties, and Monte Carlo, a seemingly endless stream of good locations. These really illustrate what was important in the world of tourism.
Anita Loos' 1929 film "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," featuring two American women in Paris, remade in 1953 with Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, was the story of someone would really like to do in paradise, what tourism is really about. The film "My Man Godfrey," in 1936, told the story of a young American woman sent to tour Europe in order to forget an affair at home. In Europe she found romantic encounters with gondoliers, matadors, and waiters. "Top Hat," produced in 1935, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, was the story about divorcees in Italy. In 1937 in "Stage Door," young women visited New York to find men.
In the early films the woman was normally in a group with a friend or a chaperone, if you are early in the century. By the time Audrey Hepburn's woman tourist appears, in William Wyler's "Roman Holiday," in 1953, chaperones have disappeared. Audrey Hepburn played a naive and over-protected princess on holiday in Rome. She met Gregory Peck and the rest of the story was their romantic adventures among the tourist sites of Rome. "The Last Time I Saw Paris," made in 1954, was an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's tragic love story of interwar France, updated to begin just after World War II. The female tourist in love was also featured in "Three Coins in a Fountain," set in Rome in 1954. Five years later, the film "Pillow Talk," which starred Doris Day (1959), had the famous quotation: "Jan, you can't fall in love with a tourist."
Mass tourism can be easily identified in the evolution of film. It was present before the growth of the film industry but as tourism increased in the era of the jumbo jet, larger numbers of women appeared in backgrounds in airplanes and on ships. By the 1960s and 1970s, the independent woman traveling to Europe, usually Rome or Paris, emerges more clearly as does the motif of the cruise ship and the "Love Boat," an obvious filmic visualization of the woman tourist. In "Lifeguard" (1976) a lifeguard has an affair with a young woman on the beach. "Room with a View," in 1986, taken from a story by E. M. Forster, is the account of a young Edwardian woman and her romantic adventure in Florence.
The ultimate tourist film concerning women may be "May Wine," made in 1990. It is a French production in English, the story of an American mother and daughter who independently have affairs with the same gynecologist in Paris. Along the way there are many references to sites such as the Eiffel Tower; then they turn to romance and shopping.
Not all tourist films take a woman to the secular joys of Paris or Italy.A small number, usually religious films, typically feature a nun saving some children somewhere or having visions as in "The Song of Bernadette" (1943) or "Heaven Knows Mr Allison." These, however, are exceptional. Gender related motifs in the films are not accidental. They express the reality not of sex or shopping but gender stereotypes. This paper argues that these motifs, whether in cinema or the literature that preceded the coming of film, reflect the culture of their times, in other words, what people really think about when thinking of tourism. These motifs will reflect the choices of destinations and activities. Understanding them is essential to the economics of tourism.
Historically, few women wrote about travel and tourism. When they did it was hard to discern because the courtly writers, such as Madame de Lafayette and Madame de Scudry and the romance writers, such as Aphra Behn, did not portray women touring as such. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a tourist in the early 18th century but only because of her husband's high office. The 19th century writers Madame de Stael (Corinne) and the Bront sisters showed available young women and men who courted them, but the women were not tourists, they were fixed in place.
The North American periodical press indexes (Poole's and Readers Guide) show that the peak for France was likely to be in the time of the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the age of the grand steamer or the railway, when getting to France became easier. Other tourist sites eventually appeared in the North American periodical press but even then for American women, and perhaps all women as wells, France and perhaps northern Italy remained the optimal tourist destinations at least through 1990 and "May Wine." It is possible the woman and tourism settings will shift to London, New York, or other sites in the future but, so far, the films do not show this.
In conclusion, one can see how films operate. The tourist sites that the women prefer will be standard in the films: beaches, resorts, restaurants, dance halls, cruise ships, the Orient Express, anything Agatha Christie does, and the normal sights of the Grand tour: a little of London, Paris, and Italy, and, on occasion, Athens or the Pinakothek in Munich. There is a chronology to gender images in the films and only in the last twenty or thirty years did women appear significantly as tourists, with films named accordingly. Their role earlier was labor or ancillary labor roles and they were less frequently portrayed as tourists. There will be alternatives, lesbian films, documentaries. Given that sitcoms are large, we are trying to establish a benchmark against which research in this area of women, culture, and tourism will operate.