YMMV / Woman of the Year

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation:
  • A common interpretation of the movie can be summed up as "Tess is punished for being a strong woman and is made to eat Humble Pie at the end so that Sam can 'win' the Battle of the Sexes." Ring Lardner certainly felt this was what had happened; in an interview given in 2000, he said that the screenwriters returned from vacation to find that a new ending had been written in their absence and was about to be shot.
    "She had to get her comeuppance for being too strong in a man's world so they wrote a scene where she tried to fix breakfast ... and gets everything wrong ... Some of the worst lines we rewrote, but we couldn't fix it, we couldn't change it fundamentally."
  • However, a more positive reading is that Tess learns that marriage (and parenting) will require time and attention. Since she was already busy almost every minute with her work, she needs to find the proper balance between work and family. Under this reading, the screenwriters did a better job of fixing it than they thought, as the key is Sam's statement that he doesn't want Tess to give up her current life completely to be "just Mrs. Craig," but instead to find the balance of being "Tess Harding Craig."
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The film begins with Sam picking a fight with Tess over whether baseball should continue during the war. Little did either know that women would be the ones to make sure baseball survived World War II, starting one year after this film's release, with the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
• Values Resonance: The conversation around Tess adopting a Greek child refugee without taking the child's needs into account resonates with modern conversations about the ethics of international child adoption.

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