"Before She Was a Virgin. ..": Doris Day and the Decline of Female Film Comedy in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

Doris Day's complicated "dialogue" with her audiences varied over the decades, and endures, in a distorted way, in popular memory. This article studies the decline of her film stardom and her retirement from films as concurrent with the definitive end of the female comic as the unequivocal subject, rather than object, of comedy.