In the very early days of cinema, before box office break downs and marketing analyses, the audience was considered virtually as a single entity. Some films were aimed towards the younger viewer, but as the popularity of silent film child stars like Baby Peggy and Jackie Coogan demonstrated, they still appealed to the whole family.

There was, at first, little or no delineation between the sexes in terms of the kind of films which were rushed into production. But within a decade or so of the start of commercial film production, the more astute businessmen in the movie industry were already thinking about ways to maximise revenue - key to this was to create a product tailor made for certain sectors of the audience. Out of this, the women's picture was born.

The classic 'women's weepie' had one - or several - female protagonists; it focused on the dilemmas and clashes that fracture the smooth surface of family and home. Sexuality was addressed, but not overtly; class and propriety were key themes, with protagonists often punished for stepping outside the prescribed rules of appropriate female behaviour.

They were extraordinarily popular with audiences during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, but, although many of the great directors of the time turned their hand to at least one women's weepie (even Alfred Hitchcock, certainly not a director with a reputation for being sympathetic to women, made the Gothic women's picture Rebecca), the weepie was derided both by filmmakers and by critics.

The latter considered the women's film to be an inferior art form, unworthy of the serious consideration bestowed on more male orientated genres such as westerns and war movies.

It's not hard to see why. There was a tendency towards strident sentimentality and a nasty sanctimonious edge that seemed to enjoy enforcing suffering on characters who dared to dream of a different life. But when done well, there is no denying the power of these gloriously histrionic tearjerkers.

King Vidor's Stella Dallas (1937), for example, stars Barbara Stanwyck as a working class girl who sees a ticket to a better life with the unprepossessing son of a millionaire. By her own machinations, she finds herself inhabiting a marriage which she finds unsatisfying and a world which mocks her for her vulgarity. Stella is forced to sacrifice everything in order to give her daughter a chance to succeed in the very society that rejected her. There's not a dry eye in the house by the end of the film, thanks to Stanwyck's remarkable performance.

More mother and daughter conflict is found in a classic women's weepie, Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945), which is widely regarded to be one of the great women's pictures. Joan Crawford won her only Oscar for the title role of Mildred, a woman who survives against the odds when her no-good philandering husband leaves her, only to find that the spoiled daughter for whom she strove to create a better life despises her. Noble maternal self-sacrifice in a patriarchal society is the order of the day.

Perhaps the most interesting of the filmmakers who concentrated on women's pictures, and increasingly, melodramas, was German émigré Douglas Sirk, who came to prominence in the 1950s. His films had a saturated colour palette and wonderfully overwrought titles like All That Heaven Allows, Written On The Wind and Magnificent Obsession.

At the time they were dismissed as soapy, disposable proto-chick flicks, or an early precursor to what later became labelled as high camp. It was not until much later that Sirk's works were recognised as richly symbolic, highly intelligent subversive masterpieces - savage critiques on the complacency and small-mindedness of 1950s American society.

Sirk concurred with this interpretation of his work, saying of one of his pictures shortly before his death, "The studio loved the title All That Heaven Allows. They thought it meant you could have everything you wanted. I meant it exactly the other way round. As far as I am concerned, heaven is stingy."