[6]

Katharine Hepburn plays a woman determined to dodge marriage and make a career for herself. She gets pretty far, until an unexpected turn of events turns her into a single mother. A Woman Rebels presents a peek at the feminist persona for which Katharine Hepburn would later become famous, but the film is a little too melodramatic for my taste. With the Hays Code firmly in place, the script tiptoes around subjects like Hepburn’s illegitimate baby and her sister’s unfortunate miscarriage, but you can piece two and two together. The Code actually makes these less exploited aspects of the story among the more interesting. Other parts of the movie, like Donald Crisp’s over-the-top chauvinistic father character and Hepburn’s questionable resolve to raise her daughter as her niece, are far more difficult to swallow.