Getting the Picture Right: Women in Early Hollywood

Abstract

Traditionally, historians have had as little professional interest in Hollywood as film scholars have had in history. Important insights about American culture have fallen into the breach. Modern American women's history has suffered in particular, since the story of modern femininity without Hollywood is like an opera without music: a visual spectacle that's missing a heart. Women poured their hearts into the making of Hollywood. They also made news, as when Alice Guy Blache moved into a state-of-the-art production facility in 1912 and Moving Picture World crowed: entire studio and factory were planned by Madame Alice Blache, the presiding genius of the Solax Company (p. 49). Lois Weber, reputedly the highest paid director in 1917, made pictures reflecting the Progressive Era's political ferment, releasing The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, which called for the legalization of birth control, that year. Women wrote more than half the silent era's screen plays, headed the scenario departments at film studios, and routinely earned the industry's highest salaries for their work. Mabel Normand, a star-producer at Keystone, pioneered the studio's slapstick style and performed its novel comedienne: a conventionally pretty girl who upended the conventions of respectable femininity. Star-producers like Helen Holmes wrote and enacted the period's Serial Queens, the gun-toting, death-defying heroines who attracted a wide audience and sent many middle-class women reformers into paroxysms over the industry's moral impact on female fans. In 1919, Mary Pickford, the era's first great star, spearheaded United Artists, a studio created to protect artists' ability to operate outside of the industry's emerging cartel. Dozens more female stars followed her lead, leveraging their celebrity into independent production companies. Yet a decade after Pickford founded United Artists the professional opportunities available to her sex shrank. As the sound era dawned, Weber advised ambitious young women not to follow her lead. You'll never get away with it, she warned in 1927 (p. 2).