silent film was mostly made for women with very different tastes. “Now one thing never to be lost sight of in considering the cinema is that it exists for the purpose of pleasing women,” Barry warned in an unhappy acknowledgment of this reality in The Public’s pleasure (1926). In their initial heyday, the Western and slapstick films of Ince, Chaplin, and Sennett, were understood to appeal to an increasingly marginalized audience of children and young men. Moreover, many of the most powerful leading ladies of the day deserted Griffith because of his insistence on casting them in what they considered old-fashioned melodramas. Indeed, it is possible to read Barry’s elevation of these directors’ status in part as a project of replacing early Hollywood’s feminine cast with a more manly sheen. For as Barry knew so well, in the years around the Great War, the years in which Hollywood rose, the industry’s reputation worldwide increasingly depended upon its mastery at producing the kinds of lavish, thrilling dramas and romances preferred by most of the female trade. The era’s contentious sexual politics ensured that women’s prominent roles in creating and consuming this distinctive visual landscape would make them into some of the most arresting figures out west. Thus an origin story about how Hollywood became Hollywood that marginalizes women cannot hope to explain why its first “social imaginary” lit up imaginations around the world.14
Those who composed the first movie fan culture often framed their tales about the women who made Hollywood as part symbol of the particular desires female fans invested in the picture business, and part realistic picture of what a wage-earning woman who landed in Los Angeles might expect. Margaret Turnbull, the author of the first novel advertised “to lift the veil” on motion picture production in Los Angeles, offered what quickly became the conventional wisdom about these heroines’ motivations. Turnbull wrote The Close-Up (1918) three years after leaving New York City to help her friend William de Mille organize the new scenario department at Lasky’s Feature Play Company in Hollywood. She was a successful playwright, a published novelist, single, and just entering early middle age when she arrived at the Los Angeles Santa Fe depot in 1915 and headed for her new job at an old barn down a dirt road lined with pepper trees. The novel begins with its twenty-seven-year-old protagonist, Kate Lawford, suffocating under the “factory-like” conditions of her secretarial job in New York. When her boss asks her to help him organize a new studio in Los Angeles, Kate assents, thinking, “Here was a vision of the West. The West which spelled adventure, and that fantastic world of make believe, a picture studio, adventure, and strange people hers for the taking, and if God were good, the power to dream again.” Life inside the “little [movie] colony” provides a perfect antidote to the dead-end drudgery of life back east. Kate begins as the studio’s office manager and ends as its biggest star. At the novel’s end, she lovingly bids her friends and fellow workers adieu before retiring to marry a childhood sweetheart and run a California ranch. Here, then, was a place where a working girl “with lots of ‘nerve’ ” could find interesting work and professional mobility, dance till morning with friends of “delightful” warmth, and experiment romantically with several men before selecting the one of her dreams. Like most of the first stories about the “Romance of Making the Movies” in Los Angeles, the tale presented an optimistic picture of what an ambitious working girl with “brains and beauty” (in the parlance of the day) and some luck might find in this New West.15
This presentation offered a sharp contrast with the parts played by women in the Old West. For much of the nineteenth century, the great newspaperman Horace Greeley’s charge “Go West, young man!” signaled a broad commitment to colonize the continent by sending the discontented men from all manner of Easts west. In the process, the West became not just a region populated mostly by single men but a space that symbolized their hope for seizing the main chance. “To the rightly constituted Man, there always is, there always must be, opportunity,” Greeley assured in 1850, exhorting men to “turn . . . to the Great West, and there build up a home and fortune.” But by 1900 female migrants outpaced male ones, effecting a “stunning” reversal in western migration patterns. Yet even as the feminization of western migration became entrenched, cultural elites and popular entertainers alike looked west to revitalize and rework masculine ideals that many white men feared under assault as women’s entrance into public life, the immigration of non-Anglos, and the corporatization of the workplace threatened their entrenched privileges. In this way, the long shadow cast by the West’s relationship to new masculine ideals and the tendency for studies on womanhood to look east have continued to obscure how the modern West’s possession of Hollywood created perhaps the most powerful generator and lure for a New Western Woman in full flight from feminine norms.16
A cultural concept, social reality, and frustratingly slippery term, the “New Woman” arose with modern urbanity in 1895 and was inconsistently applied to several generations of women who challenged different aspects of Victorian ladyhood. Many of the changes associated with the type emerged from women’s soaring participation in work outside the home, as the number of adult wage-earning women shot from 2.6 to 10.8 million between 1890 and 1920. Indeed, the term New Woman gained currency in relationship to the first generation of middle-class women who challenged assumptions about women’s intellectual and physical abilities by eschewing marriage in record numbers in favor of work in “male” professions, political activism, and social reform. By the 1910s the expression conjured images of women and “girls” who emerged from the working-class milieu associated with the leisure habits and labor conventions of female bohemians, entertainers, and ordinary wageworkers. As they took jobs in department stores, offices, and social services, for the first time the majority of women, usually those who were white and native-born, experienced work as an endeavor that sent them outside the confines of factories or other women’s homes. Exiting their jobs each evening, many of these recently rural transplants treated the city itself as a precious metal to be mined, extracting new pleasures from its burgeoning world of commercial amusements.17
Women associated with this less respectable scene did the most to embody, create, and consume the New Western Women associated with Hollywood’s original social imaginary, women like the “peerless fearless girl,” serial queen Pearl White. “You know my adventurous spirit and desire to live and realize the greatest things,” White reminds her crestfallen suitor in the first episode of The Perils of Pauline (1914) after rejecting his marriage proposal so she can gather material for the novel she wants to write. The first movie stars like White and actress-writer-producer Mary Pickford invited their female fans to identify with a protagonist liberated from many of the customary restraints that economic dependence and the cult of domesticity placed on their bodies and hearts. As was still customary, White received no credit on celluloid for her portrayal of a heroine whose popularity reached across the Atlantic and beyond the Pacific. Yet as far away as China, publicity trumpeted the western American–styled athleticism displayed by serial queens like White, “riding on a furious horse, climbing the cliff as if walking on flat land.” Indeed, the journalistic discourse that ran alongside the print versions of serials in newspapers and magazines made their protagonists into the first American film stars, explaining why the serial craze that began after 1912 coincided with the development of the star system. Like many of the first movie stars, White’s supposed real-life persona presented an even more extreme vision of a New Western Woman. Reports detailed her life history as an Ozark-raised former circus performer turned globetrotting single cosmopolitan who sought European “pleasure jaunts” and “beefsteak [or automobiling] and aviation” for fun. Artfully blending social reality with desire, such publicity displayed how even the most ordinary women workers gained access to the movies’ bohemian social settings and exciting work environments out west. After opening in 1915, studios like Universal City became major tourist attractions whose novelty and appeal involved their display of women’s unrivaled opportunities for physical mobility, romantic exploration, and professional satisfaction. A workplace whose corporate mythology promised an environment “Where Work Is Play and Play Is Work” supported other inversions such as becoming the first city where “ ‘Movie’ Actresses Control Its Politics.” Such promotions help to explain why so many young women and their elders around the world came to view what happened inside the little movie colony as having consequences for their own lives.18
The
