The Bechdel Test Was a 1985 Joke Between Friends

In a 1985 strip of Dykes to Watch Out For titled "The Rule," two women stand outside a cinema. One explains she only goes to movies that meet three conditions: there have to be at least two women in it, who talk to each other, about something besides a man. The other says that sounds strict. The first woman agrees, half-joking, and says the last movie she was able to see was Alien, in 1979.

That is the entire origin of what is now called the Bechdel test. It's a comic-strip gag, drawn for an alt-weekly readership in the mid-eighties, that escaped its frame and turned into a film-criticism shorthand used by The New York Times and the Swedish film board. It happened slowly. The strip ran in queer alt-weeklies for two decades before academic film scholars picked it up in the 2000s.

Bechdel has been clear, over and over, that she didn't make up the rule. The credit belongs to her friend Liz Wallace, whose name is written on the marquee of the comic-strip cinema. "I can't claim credit for the actual rule," she has said. "I stole it from a friend." Bechdel suspects Wallace got the idea from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, which had pointed out, in 1929, how rare it is in fiction for women to be friends with each other on the page.

Bechdel now asks people to call it the Bechdel-Wallace test. The name on the marquee was always Wallace's.