According to Laura Jacobs in Vanity Fair, "Requirements were minimal: a big city, three pretty faces, some wolves.
[2] According to Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post the genre has been one of Hollywood's most successful since the 1920s: The theme... has been an unusually enduring and lucrative one, exploiting each succeeding era's anxieties surrounding women's changing roles and helping define those eras' new ideas of modern life.
And each offers its mostly female audience the delectable cake-and-eat-it proposition of a morality tale served with plenty of vicarious vice -- and extravagant dollops of yummy fashion.
[2] The genre arguably started in 1925 with Sally, Irene and Mary and included many early Joan Crawford films.
But it still resuscitates a genre that, at its best, articulates something essential about womanhood, its unspoken contradictions and ambivalences, its double standards and hypocrisies, and the joys and sometimes life-or-death necessity of friendship among women.