Women Film Editors: The Overlooked Pioneers of Cinema

When referencing films or television shows, it is customary to name the director or executive producer and the production company or distributor, but there are dozens of other professionals that contribute to these works before they reach our screens. The work of editors, for example, is vital and yet easily forgotten, and the directors and producers are given a disproportionate amount of the credit. This is especially true for women editors, whose ongoing legacy of creative labor has only recently gotten more attention. So, let’s learn a little bit about the history of women in film editing and strive to give credit where credit is overdue.

The Beginning

The first motion pictures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were minutes long at most, were silent, and were usually only one shot or simply a few shots strung together. When filmmakers like Edwin S. Porter began implementing more complicated sequences of shots, people had to be hired to physically put the films together. These people were called “cutters” because they carefully cut film strips and glued them together by hand over many hours. Despite the intricacy of the job and its impact on the final version of films, it was labeled unskilled labor and not a form of art in its own right. Importantly, most of these film cutters were uneducated, working-class women who were given low wages and minimal (if any) credit for their work in the films.

The term “editor” was not always synonymous with the job of cutting film; it also described someone who adapted and edited stories and scripts for films. Editing carried a more educated, sophisticated meaning and was acknowledged more than film cutting. American film producer Irving Thalberg is said to have been the first to call cutters “film editors.”After “talkies” integrated sound with film in the late 1920s and became standard in the industry, film cutting was considered more complicated and creative, the term “editor” became more common, and men tried to replace women in editing.

Cut to 2023, where the percentage of women editors for the top 250 films is only 21%.

The most comprehensive resource recording and honoring women film editors is Edited By, an online archive compiled by Su Friedrich, an American filmmaker known for her avant-garde, queer films and a former Professor of Visual Art at Princeton University. This site should be required viewing for anyone interested in film and media. But for those who are not prepared to spend a few hours reading about over two hundred women involved in film editing in the past century, this article will introduce ten names.

Viola Lawrence

Viola Lawrence is considered the first woman film cutter in Hollywood. She worked with a variety of studios and mentored other cutters like Blanche Sewell. She also pushed for more close-up shots to better convey emotion.

Hettie Gray Baker

Hettie Gray Baker was writing movie scenarios as early as 1900 while she was working in a library; she was hired as a story editor in 1913. In 1916 she became a film editor for Fox in its very early years and edited A Daughter of the Gods, a lost film with some interesting Hollywood firsts. While Baker may have been the first woman editor to be named in a film’s credits, she is uncredited for at least 20 other films. She is an inspiration for all cat ladies who love books and movies because in addition to working on films she also wrote books on cats.

Anne Bauchens

Anne Bauchens was a prolific editor with over 60 films in her filmography from 1915 to 1956. Most of these films were in collaboration with American filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, who said that he demanded in every one of his contracts that Bauchens would be the editor because she was the best editor he knew. Thankfully her skill did not go unnoticed by awards either; she was the first woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing and she was the first woman to win it in 1941.

Margaret Booth

Margaret Booth is one of the most influential figures in film editing history. She edited over 40 films starting in 1915. Nearly every MGM production from the 1930s until 1969, including The Wizard of Oz (1939) (which was edited by Blanche Sewell) and Ben-Hur (1959), needed her approval when she was the studio’s supervising editor. She is also recognized as a pioneer of "invisible cutting.”

Dede Allen

Embed from Getty Images

Dede Allen’s editing is generally agreed to be some of the best in the industry. She is best known for her films from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Dog Day Afternoon (1975).

Anne V. Coates

Embed from Getty Images

Anne V. Coates was the British editor behind the Oscar-winning Lawrence of Arabia (1962) among many other films spanning six decades.

Verna Fields

Embed from Getty Images

Verna Fields was an expert in sound editing and film editing. She worked closely with Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas (and his editor ex-wife Marcia Lucas), and Steven Spielberg and has been called their “mother cutter.” Her work on Jaws (1975) is especially praised and has earned her an Academy Award and an Eddie Award.

Thelma Schoonmaker

Embed from Getty Images

Thelma Schoonmaker holds record numbers of three wins and nine nominations in the Academy Awards for Film Editing and two wins and 11 nominations for the BAFTA’s category, with many other awards. She has edited Martin Scorsese’s films throughout his long and successful career.

Lillian E. Benson

Lillian E. Benson has a staggering 81 editing credits, many of which are for documentaries about African-American history and culture. She is the first African-American woman to join the American Cinema Editors and is currently a member of the board.