<P> Women are responsible for the ever - increasing public taste in sensationalism and sexy stuff . Women who make up the bulk of the picture audiences are also the majority reader of the tabloids, scandal sheets, flashy magazines, and erotic books...the mind of the average man seems wholesome in comparison....Women love dirt, nothing shocks' em . </P> <P> Pre-Code female audiences liked to indulge in the carnal lifestyles of mistresses and adulteresses while at the same time taking joy in their usually inevitable downfall in the closing scenes of the picture . While gangster films were claimed to corrupt the morals of young boys, vice films were blamed for threatening the purity of adolescent women . </P> <P> In pre-Code Hollywood, the sex film became synonymous with women's pictures--Darryl F. Zanuck once told Wingate that he was ordered by Warner Brothers' New York corporate office to reserve 20% of the studio's output for "women's pictures, which inevitably means sex pictures ." Vice films typically tacked on endings where the most sin - filled characters were either punished or redeemed . Films explored Code - defying subjects in an unapologetic manner with the premise that an end - reel moment could redeem all that had gone before . The concept of marriage was often tested in films such as The Prodigal (1931), in which a woman is having an affair with a seedy character, and later falls in love with her brother - in - law . When her mother - in - law steps in at the end of the film, it is to encourage one son to grant his wife a divorce so she can marry his brother, with whom she is obviously in love . The older woman proclaims the message of the film in a line near the end: "This the twentieth century . Go out into the world and get what happiness you can ." </P> <P> In Madame Satan (1930), adultery is explicitly condoned and used as a sign for a wife that she needs to act in a more enticing way to maintain her husband's interest . In Secrets (1933), a husband admits to serial adultery, only this time he repents and the marriage is saved . The films took aim at what was already a damaged institution . During the Great Depression, relations between spouses often deteriorated due to financial strain, marriages lessened, and husbands abandoned their families in increased numbers . Marriage rates continually declined in the early 1930s, finally rising in 1934, the final year of the pre-Code era, and although divorce rates lowered, this is likely because desertion became a more common method of separation . Consequently, female characters, such as Ruth Chatterton's in Female, live promiscuous bachelorette lifestyles, and control their own financial destiny (Chatterton supervises an auto factory) without regret . </P>

Baby doll was significant in film censorship history because it was the