women to seek work in some aspect of the picture business, making them a particularly visible eddy in the massive current that washed up in Southern California in the early twentieth century. “There are more women in Los Angeles than any other city in the world and it’s the movies that bring them,” one shopkeeper bluntly asserted in 1918. The city census supported the claim. In 1920, Los Angeles became the only western city where women outnumbered men, a development sharply at odds with traditional boomtowns that had long been dominated virtually “everywhere and always” by single young men. The city’s female residents were unusual in other ways as well. Nearly one in five was divorced or widowed. Since single women tended to work outside the home more than their married counterparts, this helps to explain what one demographer called the most noteworthy characteristic of the Los Angeles labor force: the high number of women who worked after the age of twenty-five.
These gender dynamics were at odds with older western boomtowns. In the decades after gold was discovered in 1848, young single men swarmed the northern reaches of the Pacific Coast in search of riches in sex-restricted occupations like railroad construction, mining, and lumber. Consequently, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco all initially sported an urban version of the virile, ethnically polyglot masculine culture associated with the Wild West. But Los Angeles’s economic base of real estate, tourism, and motion pictures created the service and clerical jobs that attracted women. Women in these sectors of employment in Los Angeles also benefited from California’s early passage of woman suffrage and jury service in 1911, as well as legislation establishing the eight-hour day (1911) and a minimum wage (1917) for women. Gender stratification and racial discrimination remained widespread, but white women experienced less social stratification and greater legislative protections than in most cities. In all these ways, Los Angeles better reflected the direction of twentieth-century urban development than San Francisco, Chicago or New York. This urban frontier attracted the modern pink-collar worker out for economic opportunity and excitement as much as it did Midwesterners. Indeed, the two were often one and the same. “At night in bed I would lay [sic] awake and day dream about the big hit I would make if I were to go to California,” recalled one young women in the motion picture autobiography she wrote in Chicago in the 1920s, adding parenthetically, “I know better now.”19
Much to the later consternation of those like Iris Barry, such women were at the center of the film industry’s expanding fan base in the years surrounding the Great War, the years in which the movies became Hollywood. The re orientation of fan culture toward women during the 1910s was sped by the creeping conviction among many industry insiders that their good fortune demanded catering to the female trade. Focusing on the ladies in the audience was one of several strategies the flickers adopted from the stage. All types of theatrical impresarios had learned decades earlier that attracting the ladies with new kinds of plays and heroines enlarged their audience and increased the respectability of the entertainment offered. In hopes of effecting the same changes, movie fan culture mostly addressed an idealized, “fanatic” female film spectator with increasing savvy during the 1910s. This book builds upon the explosion of work on women in film’s silent era. By examining the motivations and tactics behind attracting more female fans, Shelley Stamp, Janet Staiger, Miriam Hansen, and others have explored how the movies became a space to contest gender norms. By 1914 Motion Picture News, a trade paper aimed at exhibitors, was reporting that “women and girls” were the principal readers of “moving picture news,” a remarkable shift of opinion given the emphasis on men a few years earlier. By the early twenties, some estimated that women occupied 75 percent of seats. As a result, the movies’ ideal spectator became a young white woman. Women’s identity as the most fanatic moviegoers led to the feminization of movie fan culture just as the industry’s most prestigious fare became a feature-length story picture centered on a female star. Such developments were behind an English actor’s lament that Hollywood was “a land where the worship is not of the hero but of the heroine.”20
Like all good mythmakers, movie fan writers shaped their tales about the industry’s female personalities as much to answer the perceived needs of this ideal fan as to fit the facts. As with western myths more generally, these stories were not simple fictions, but a blend of wish fulfillment and social reflection. Stories that aimed to appeal to these movie-struck girls linked their heroine worship of the first movie stars to supporting their ambitions as a sex. As with the tales of an earlier era aimed at boys, these stories romanticized and sensationalized their protagonists’ quests for individual success.21 Yet women’s remarkable record of influence inside the movie colony of this era was no fantasy. The increasingly female audience for the movies selected many deserving of their allegiance, but a disproportionate number of those who earned their most enduring fealty were other women. In a trajectory that followed those of other women professionals, their record of influence as actresses, directors, writers, producers, and publicists through the early 1920s would not be equaled until more than half a century later. Involved in all aspects of the business, these women offered some of the most visible models of professional advancement and personal freedom available at the time. Women like Mary Pickford, Alla Nazimova, Norma Talmadge, Gloria Swanson, Anita Loos, Frances Marion, June Mathis, Clara Kimball Young, Elinor Glyn, and Lois Weber were all key players in shaping the infant industry and the new images of femininity and masculinity that it sold. Journalists like Adela Rogers St. Johns and Louella Parsons churned out the publicity that explained who mattered in the industry and why. Such women spun stories about heroines whose fearless navigation of the West’s preeminent modern city foretold their ability to win once inconceivable renown.22
Future star-producer Gloria Swanson got ideas about the type after meeting Clara Kimball Young, one of the first stars to establish her own production studio. Swanson met Young shortly after moving from Chicago to Los Angeles, recalling how “the world of 1916” was “a man’s world” and a “business run entirely by men.” But Young’s success suggested otherwise. In what other business,” Swanson wondered, “could this delightful elegant creature be completely in de pen dent,” “turning out her own pictures, dealing with men as her equals, being able to use her brains as well as her beauty, having total say as to what stories she played in, who designed her clothes, and who her director and leading man would be.”23 Again, theatrical practices cleared a path for women like Young. By 1900, the field of commercial entertainment had already promised so-called stage-struck girls a unique avenue to individual success. On all types of stages, female performers from “extras” to stars often earned greater recognition and more money than men, making commercial entertainment one of the largest, best-paying fields open to women without much formal education. As the theater’s fortunes fell, stories about women’s prospects in the movies played to a fresh generation of female wage earners with much more than survival on their minds.24
Indeed, one of the few attempts to determine why women migrants dominated the exodus that created the rural problem that had so worried progressives since Teddy Roosevelt suggested why studio work would have appeared to satisfy the impulse that drove so many to cities like Los Angeles. The editors of a massive survey conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1912 regarding the opinions of “farm house wives” about why so many rural women left home called the theme of the responses they received the “feeling that the attractiveness of one’s surroundings is of more importance than the practical farmer” recognized. Women’s letters to the USDA repeatedly recorded how the search for sociable work, more attention to aesthetic pleasures, and “the entertainments and amusements that the towns and cities offer” sent them down country roads to town. One Arkansan succinctly summed up the difference between rural women’s and men’s needs: “We would rather have free telephones and moving pictures than free seed.” Taken together, the letters present the countryside’s landscape as so bereft of feminine influence that a woman with a taste for aesthetic pleasures and the society of others was left with few choices but to escape. “Do you wonder we get lonely and discouraged and are ignorant and uncultured and long to get away for good?” The comedic actress Louise Fazenda testified to how many felt they had nothing to lose. “At my home in Utah they impressed on me how utterly useless I was until I could bare [sic] it no longer,” Fazenda recalled. “So like the old darky song, ‘I packed up my grip and
