Movie-Struck Girls

by Shelley Stamp

Movie-Struck Girls examines women's films and filmgoing in the 1910s, a period when female patronage was energetically courted by the industry for the first time. By looking closely at how women were invited to participate in movie culture, the films they were offered, and the visual pleasures they enjoyed, Shelley Stamp demonstrates that women significantly complicated cinemagoing throughout this formative, transitional era. Growing female patronage and increased emphasis on women's subject matter did not necessarily bolster cinema's cultural legitimacy, as many in the industry had hoped, for women were not always enticed to the cinema by dignified, uplifting material, and once there, they were not always seamlessly integrated in the social space of theaters, nor the new optical pleasures of film viewing. In fact, Stamp argues that much about women's films and filmgoing in the postnickelodeon years challenged, rather than served, the industry's drive for greater respectability.


White slave films, action-adventure serial dramas, and women's suffrage photoplays all drew female audiences to the cinema with stories aimed directly at women's interests and with advertising campaigns that specifically targeted female moviegoers. Yet these examples suggest that women's patronage was built with stories focused on sexuality, sensational thrill-seeking, and feminist agitation, topics not normally associated with ladylike gentility. And in each case concerns were raised about women's conduct at cinemas and the viewing habits they enjoyed, demonstrating that women's integration into motion picture culture was not as smooth as many have thought.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, History

274 pages, Paperback

First published March 6, 2000

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon
by Shelley Stamp
ILL

"examples suggest that women's patronage was built with stories focused on sexuality, sensational thrill-seeking, and feminist agitation," http://press.princeton.edu/titles/685...

on the subject of birth control see below the movie "Hand that rocks the cradle"

ref to in We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement for movie Hand that rocks the cradle by http://www.starts-thursday.com/2010/0...


from WorldCat: Contents:
Spare Us One Evening: Cultivating Cinema's Female Audience --;
Playing to the Ladies --;
Added Attractions: Women in the Audience --;
Is Any Girl Safe? Motion Pictures, Women's Leisure, and the White Slavery Scare --;
The White Slavery Scare --;
White Slavery and Motion Picture Audiences --;
White Slavery on the Screen --;
Female Spectators at the White Slave Films --;
Ready-Made Customers: Female Movie Fans and the Serial Craze --;
Promoting Pauline --;
The Biggest Thrills Are Yet to Come: Serial Desire and the Heterogeneous Text --;
An Awful Struggle between Love and Ambition: Serial Heroines and Modern Femininity --;
What Sort of Fellow Is Pearl White? Serial Queens and Their Female Fans --;
Civic Housekeeping: Women's Suffrage, Female Viewers, and the Body Politic --;
Defining Female Citizenship in Suffrage Comedies --;
Recruiting Female Viewers --;
Civic Housekeeping and the Conservative Appeal.

[Greta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good study on how the motion picture producers and theater owners tried to cater to women and some of the ideological and social difficulties that were perceived, like women being in public unchaperoned (and trying to scare them off with white slave pictures, which were popular along with other sensational materials thought unsuitable—so they didn’t necessarily have the uplifting effect that producers thought they would). Suffragettes also made films & tried to use the women audience to advance the cause.

The more i read about fin-de-siecle culture in the US and France and the fear that men seemed to have about the disruptive influence of women in public spaces and their desire to keep women "under control", the more i'm reminded of the situation of women in many Middle Eastern countries. And it gives me hope that things will change there, too.