Movies and women : an overview of women's
position in the changing society in the 1920s
著者（英） Hitomi Okamura
journal or
publication title
Doshisha literature
number 32
page range 173‑195
year 1986‑03‑10
権利（英） English Literary Society of Doshisha University
URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000016536
Introduction
MOVIES AND WOMEN:
AN OVERVIEW OF WOMEN'S POSITION IN THE CHANGING SOCIETY
IN THE 1920S
HITOMI OKAMURA
Around the 1920s when America was turning into a modern, capitalist society, a new type of heroine appeared on the screen who attacked the Victorian ideal of True Womanhood and discarded old clothes and artificial manners. The purpose of this paper is to examine the new image of women these heroines created in the context of social changes that were taking place at that time. In order to do this, it is important to understand how deeply the movie industry was involved in these changes. Robert Sklar explains their involvement in this way:
In American society, movies became a major factor in the reorientation of traditional values-Waiter Benjamin's word "liquidation" in the American context would be too strong. For no matter how despised they were by defenders of traditional middle-class culture, movies were, after all, made by men deeply committed to the capitalist value, attitudes and ambitions that were part of the dominant social order. Any new options they offered would clearly avoid breaking away from the fundamental economic and social mold.1
It is within this context that the new image of women on the screen must be understood. In the following sections of this paper, we will first focus on the business side of the movie industry to see what kind of values they represented. Then, how these values were reflected in the image of new
[173J
women they created will be discussed. In this way, we will be able to see the place of women in the modern, capitalist sodetyas it was presented in mOVIes.
The Growth of the Movie Industry
The power politics surrounding the movie industry in the first two decades of the twentieth century shows how Hollywood movies came to represent the ideology of the establishment. In the early teens, the enormous popularity of the films, which were then considered a lowly form of cheap entertainment shown in the immigrant neighborhood of the cities, caused great alarm and controversy among the ruling white middle-class. The cheap movie houses, then called nickelodeons because it cost only a nickel to enter, mushroomed throughout the cities after 1900. According to Lary May, at least in New York, they "increased from 50 in 1900 to over 400 by 1908, showing movies to approximately 200,000 daily."2 The popularity of these silent movies was due to the fact that they provided a very cheap yet exciting amusement to viewers who spoke various languages. Since many of the movies were imported from France, Germany, or Italy, they reflected different cultural values. (In those films sex was rarely condemned outright, for example3)
Other films attacked authority or showed low forms of entertainment such as vaudeville skits or boxing matches4 It is no wonder that the elite class should feel their cultural values being threatened by this new form of entertainment which seemed to have no respect for the dominant culture and values: here was a powerful tool of media which was beyond their control.
They began their campaign against this new "vice" from 1905 onwards.
The forces behind this campaign deserve notice, since they reflect the changes that were taking place in society. Lary May points out that, unlike the former Victorian reformers, such as feminists or evangelists who were opposed to the ruling order, these modern vice crusaders were the leaders of
their localities, many of them business and professional elites.s They
"constantly maintained that they were not being 'puritanical.' They favored uplifting amusements rather than abolishing them. Realizing the need for healthy forms of recreation to compensate for jobs which alienated workers, they hoped to bring people together in these arenas of enjoyment without economic barriers or class conflicts."6 They were shrewd enough to know that movies could be a powerful means of spreading their ideology and penetrating immigrant life in ways that the settlement house or conventional politics never could7 Thus they used censorship to their advantage.
Yet, started as a moral crusade for the immigrant working-class people, the efforts to uplift movies took a quite different direction: as movies became upgraded and respectable, they came to attain the middle-class people as . their major patrons. One result of this campaign to uplift the movies was the close down of movie houses in New York on Christmas Day, 1908, and the setting up of the first national censorship board for movies. Having learned from the crusade that immorality was bad for business, the film producers themselves were more than willing to cooperate with the reformers and joined them in creating censorship. They saw that this was a great chance to enlarge their market to the middle-class audience. After gaining judicial support and the approval of the ruling class, those early film producers could not only protect their business but also expand it since the films had now become acceptable to the respectable middle-class. As if to prove this, new movie theaters began to be built in more affluent areas of the cities.
Moreover, it became a fashion to build palace-like luxury movie houses, which ensured the middle-class patrons that movies were now "high-class, and refined" amusement.
It was D. W. Griffith, with his The Birth of a Nation (1915), that raised the movie industry to the realm of art and brought full respectability to it. He was an evangelist on the screen, promulgating Victorian ideals of ascetic
individuals, purity of women, and familial harmony. As the reformist spirit was waning in the society at large, however, his popularity did not last very long. His films after World War I were financial failures. His antagonism toward big business and concerns over social problems of the day had no appeal to the new generation of urban middle-class who were quickly shedding Victorian values. The corporate order had become a fact of life to them, many of whom were managers and employees of big corporations.
Business was booming and the national economy was expanding on an unprecedented scale. Dazzled by national prosperity and affluence, the middle-class, seized by optimism, hailed the coming of the new age. If they found less satisfaction in their routinized, monotonous jobs in their offices, they were finding compensation in the pilrsuit of pleasure in the personal realm. They were going through moral experimentation and spending more money on consumer goods. It was obvious that people were breaking away from the asceticism of the past. The trend was for self-indulgence: more fum and excitement. And movies had to serve their needs. Despite his contribution to the history of movies in terms of artistry and techniques, a director like Griffith had to go.
However, another aspect of the important role which his film, The Birth of a Nation, played in the growth of the movie industry should be noticed. The success of The Birth of a Nation, financed by Harry Aitken, marked a turning point of the movie industry from sponsorship by private individuals to that of big corporations. Costing $110,000, The Birth of a Nation was by far the most expensive motion picture ever made up to that time. (And it is believed to have made more money than any other film until The Godfather was released in 19728) It brought instant wealth to the industry. "Just one of the millionaires it made 'was Louis B. Mayer, later head of Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer; he obtained the rights to show the film in New England and made more than a million with it in that area alone."g
With this bonanza Harry Aitken. . . went to Wall Street and got investment bankers to come into his newest venture, the Triangle Film Corporation. He could also afford to make generous offers to Broadway actors to lure them to his California studios. One of those actors was his friend Doug F airbanks.lO
Besides providing the rising cost of making films and the stars' growing salaries, the producers had to be able to afford the process of trial-and-error whereby they discovered just what the public wanted to see. In addition, the
"bigness" and "elaborateness" of the films left only giant firms able to compete in the market. "As a result, from 60 firms making over 2,000 movies in 1912, the 'Big Eight' made 90 percent of the 800 films made yearly in the twenties."ll The new moguls of the "Big Eight" were, unlike the American film makers who first made films, immigrant Jews who entered the business not as inventors, film makers, or even entertainers but as theater owners.
Sensitive to the taste and needs of their patrons who were turning away from the Victorian values and shrewd in their business sense, those moguls were able to make the film industry one of the nation's biggest industries. May explains their establishing of the corporate system in the following manner:
Clearly, the new film moguls had no nostalgia for the old entrepreneur- ial economy so dear to the independent producers. Rather, they followed the lead of other American firms that combined production, supply, and distribution. Like other major corporations, they too saw that these various parts could best be coordinated under one administrative office, complete with vice presidents and boards of directors. New York City offered a number of advantages for these functions. By the turn of the century, most large national corporations centered their business in New York. There they were close to Wall Street and banks where they could go for financing. By 1920, the shares of the Big Eight were traded on the stock market and gathered investors including American Tobacco, Du Pont, and the Bank of America. New York was also near the Eastern urban centers, facilitating monitoring of many of the movies' major
markets. Big Eight producers had access to the publishing and entertainment capital of the country as well. Here they could gauge mass tastes and purchase popular stories and players for their films. And with the bourgeoning advertising industry nearby on Madison Avenue, national promotion was readily available. 12
While administration and marketing remained in New York, the studios moved out of the eastern cities into Los Angeles. This led to the creation of Hollywood. It also helped create a favorable public image of the movie industry. As May points out, the frontier having been a symbol of freedom from the hierarchal, industrial East, Los Angeles offered contemporary Americans the vision of a new West. And this served to cater to an illusion and escape for modern men and women who found corporate order more and more oppressive. The moviegoers were fascinated by the extravagant palaces their movie stars built and the fun and pleasure they were having in Hollywood. Living in the age of leisure, people turned to movie stars as their leisure experts. Thus the public could happily forget about the business side of the movie industry, which in fact controlled every element of film-making.
How did women fare in such an industry? It is often pointed out that the film industry during the silent era offered a variety of jobs for women.
According to Anthony Slide, "Women might be said to have virtually controlled the film industry."13 Not only were the stars women, but also in the field of screen-writing and even on the technical side of film-making there were many women. Molly Haskell points out that this phenomenon is
"a reflection of the general female orientation of the film industry and the specific popularity of women's themes as subjects."14 As the film industry gained respectability and legitimacy, and grew huge and was taken over by the corporate system, management positions and other positions of power in the production sections became male-dominated like any other corporation.
Anthony Slide's study on female directors in the silent era shows that they
quickly lost power in the '20s. Besides, there had been economic reasons for there being many women directors in the early days. For example, Carl Laemmle "startled the trade by giving women commissions to direct his pictures," and his Universal "could boast the largest number of women directors on its payroll.,,15 However, it was not Laemmle's belief in the feminist cause, but rather a purely economic reason that motivated his hiring women directors. As Slide explains:
Having committed itself to a certain number of films a year, Universal found that it had an insufficient number of directors under contract.
Rather than hire additional directors from outside at a heavy expense, it was far simpler to find new directors in the ranks of the studio's contract actors, screen writers, and editors-and who dominated such ranks?
Women.16
But their careers were short-lived. By the '20s, most of them either retired or were forgotten.
As to the unusually large numbe"r of women screen writers, they remained successful longer. For example, over 90% of Cecil DeMille's popular domestic dramas were written by female scenarists. 17 They were hired because they could provide what the public wanted: scenes of modern, urban style life. According to May, "[I]n 1920, the forty top female writers were of middle-class Anglo-Saxon stock. None were poor or of worker origin. Like their male counterparts, most were college-educated or had publishing backgrounds. Maturing in the Victorian twilight, they were captivated by urban life .... [T]hey were in the vanguard of moral experimentation, forging into dress reform, new sexual styles, and consumption.. . Their plots overwhelmingly.revolved around heroines like themselves.d8 (And also it may be noted that, in the '30s, they were quickly replaced by male writers as film trends changed. ) Yet, DeMille's films showed clearly how far modern women's revolution in morals and manners could go. What was new about
DeMille's films was that he gave marriage sex appeal. The cleverness of his approach was that, while showing the new sexuality of women, the dangerous power of eroticism was kept in check by confining it within marriage. Also, the new sexuality was shown as refined with an aura of luxury, suggesting high-level Gonsumption. "The larger implication was clear: To afford this type of woman, a man could not shed the work ethic. For s.uch a female did not 'sell herself cheap.' Infact, it was her expensive tastes that spurred men on to achieve.·»l9 For women, refined eroticism created by luxury became a means to get a successful man. Thus DeMille could produce commercially successful films by giving the audience sexual titillation and yet keep moral order intact.
His films reflected the radical changes taking place within the home. The home was no longer the Victorian ascetic home but a place to have fun and to consume. These changes were taking place in a way that ensured the reinforcement of the home to fit the new economic order.
The meaning of the home and marriage thus being enhanced, modern women seemed to be ever more confined in the home. With this background in mind, we wQuld like to see what kind of heroines appeared on the screen in this period when American society was changing from Victorian society into a modern, consumer society. We will take up two images: that of
"flappers" -young, sophisticated, urban women experimenting with new morals and manners-and that of the virgin, pure and noble, typically represented by Mary Pickford, the great heroine of the age. Although those two images co-existed in the '20s, Pickford belonged to an older period. Her screen role still was reminiscent of the Victorian virtues and morality of.
women, yet she had new vitality and spontaneity of emotions forbidden to women before. Comparing those two images we would like to see and evaluate the transformation of women from the Victorian ideal to modern heroines.
The '20s Heroines on the Screen
1). Mary Pickford, "America's Sweetheart"
Despite her screen image as "Little Mary," or "A Girl with Golden Curls,"
Mary Pickford was a successful career woman, self-sufficient and indepen- dent, earning the highest salary in the movie industry, choosing her own scripts, and directing her directors long before she became her own producer.
The enormous money she was making-she was earning one million dollars a year when she joined the United Artists in 19202o-seemed to imply that now the new age had come when Horatio Alger aspiration became viable for women too. Magazine articles often revealed her as a shrewd business woman. We cannot help being perplexed at these two discrepant images-her image of an innocent adolescent on the screen, and that of a professional woman in real life. In considering this discrepancy, it seems important to note the peculiarity of her profession. She was in a business where enormous amounts of money rolled in. While in other industries women could hardly make decent wages, in the movie industry, instant wealth was promised if you became a star. Also her autonomy as an artist was due to the fact that she came into filmdom before corporate order was introduced to it, and just as film was beginning to mature as an art. Films were made in the ad hoc atmosphere where everybody-directors, actors, actresses, stage crew-got together and put their ideas into the film. Working under the direction of Griffith, she learned about film editing and cutting and she even wrote her own scripts. The rise of her fame marked the beginning of the star system in the film industry.
In 1919, when the leaders of the motion picture business, anticipating the biggest boom of the industry-with the war-time restrictions now gone and with the promise of larger audiences with the enforcement of Prohibition laws which left thousands of men riowhere to go but to movie theaters- decided to put the industry on a sounder business basis,
... [nJumber one on the priority list was to slash the exhorbitant salaries being paid to performers. It went against all business principles to pay people millions of dollars for having golden curls or being able to jump, or shoot, or look funny. It just so happened that the contracts of the very people who met those descriptions-Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, and Charlie Chaplin-were expiring this year21 But those people (except Hart) defeated the intentions of the film industry leaders by setting up their own United Artists. In this, Mary and the other artists could be free from the ever-tightening grip of the corporate system, which was becoming more and more hierarchal and regimented under the New York management. Mary was one of the last artists who could be so autonomous. She was now a manager, producer, director, and actress. Yet her screen image does not wholly reflect this self-sufficient, independent woman.
It was Mary Pickford herself who created the "Little Mary" image. She seemed to have a psychological need to play that kind of role. She had been on the stage ever since she was five after the death of her father. In an interview, she emphasized how serious she really was, being "the head of the family ... with all the responsibilities involved,"22 in spite of the playfulness revealed in her screen image. Playing a child role was a way of compensating for the childhood she never really had: "The child in me never grew up, because it never was satisfied. I still have the dreams and the longing of childhood."23 Herndon talks about the production of "The Poor Little Rich Girl" (1917) in which Mary played a child from beginning to end for the first time in a feature. She prevailed on Zukor to let her choose her director, Maurice Tourneur, and scenario writer, her friend Frances Marion.
The pranks and playfulness she and Frances thought up often offended the director. But in spite of his protest, Mary insisted on having her own way.
And she had a lot of fun making the film. Zukor and his executives frowned upon this film, declaring it was "putrid" and a failure. When it turned out to
be the biggest hit she ever had, she was exalted and decided that she would make more films like this24 And she gained considerable profit by exploiting the screen image her audience so loved. Molly Haskell analyzes the child-roles of Mary in this way:
The fact that she came to these child roles late in her career, in her maturity, only confirms that unwillingness to grow up she shares with a huge population of the American public, who flocked to these pictures in an orgy of misty-eyed infantalism.
The urge to return to childhood, to recover an innocence both historical and personal, is as deeply ingrained in the American psyche as the idealism that, corrupted, gives rise to it. It is the escape valve from the responsibilities and disillusionments .. 25
It is true that, as May points out, her female roles on the screen "made a fundamental break from the past."26 She "took on a personality free of the abstract ideal of purity,,27 of the Victorian era and presented a new standard of femininity. She could display "a whole range of emotions, while mixing drama with humor in an utterly convincing blend."28 The appeal of her characters lies in their vitality and energy which are boundless. "Over and over again, Pickford was the joyous, spontaneous female who brought into her personality that which Victorians had repressed: the playfulness of childhood and adolescent blossoming.,,29 Yet, this radical style of her female characters did not achieve true emancipation of women. The "Little Mary"
characters rebel against authority, and fight with evil forces as freely as men.
Yet freedom and sexual equality are sanctioned only because the characters remain adolescent and their rebellious impulses are kept in a realm of pre-adult responsibility. Herein lies a key to understanding the youth cult of the '20s, of which Mary was a prime exponent, and why flaming youth and revolution, which looked so radical on the surface, never threatened the establishment.
It was Mary Pickford herself that created those roles and shaped her child image. Her tragedy was that she became entrapped in that "Little Mary"
persona .which she later came to hate. When she wanted to discard that
·persona. her fans would not allow her to.
After she married Douglas Fairbanks, the star of the era, in 1920, she was ambitious about taking a new direction. She thought that since the whole world now knew that she was twenty-six years old and married, she would play a fitting role, a mature woman. Yet her attempt at new roles continued to fail. When she turned to her fans for advice as to what kind of roles they wanted her to play (the largest fan magazine, Photoplay), the first six roles the readers chose were Cinderella, Anne of Green Gables, A lice in Wonderland, Heidi, The Little Colonel, and Sara Crew. The prize-winning letter addressed to "My Dear Little Mary," concluded with a plea for child roles between ten and fourteen years of age. "These particular roles are your greatest opportunities for showing us what a wonderful actress you really are by your ability to create and preserve an almost perfect illusion. The illusion that you are a real little girl in spite of the fact that we know you are a grown-up woman.
Only a great actress or one who is really a child at heart, could make those little characters so natural that they become our friends."30 As this letter indicates, it was an age when people consciously turned away from reality and chose to believe in illusion. And what else besides escape and illusion did people want in mQvies?31
While Mary failed to succeed in new roles, F airbanks gained eve'n more popularity by appearing in films like The Mask of Zorro, The Three Musketeers, and Robin Hoodwhich showed far-off times and places, providing people with just what they wanted, Of course the role he had played before-a typical American male, cheerful on the surface, yet consumed with the worries of modern middle-class existence-was very appealing to the middle-class audiences' (the majority of whom were now employees or managers of
corporations, who accepted the corporate order yet felt constrained and restless with office work which offered no challenges). The earlier Fairbanks hero had initiated this audience into a new and exciting way to solve their problems: leisure and sports, a new frontier for male energy through which the instinctual side of life could be liberated. The Fairbanks hero had heralded the coming of the age of leisure. But his new roles in The Mask of Zorro and The Three Musketeers gained him still more popularity because they responded to the taste of audiences who were increasing their tendency toward escapism.
In a way, the career changes that befell both Mary and Douglas after their marriage are symbolic of the limitations placed upon women by society.
Both of them had been proponents of the youth cult, but Mary was not allowed to grow and mature, while her husband could only increase his masculine sexuality32 The implication is this: youth for women meant not just youthfulness but adolescent youth and immaturity. The basis of her popularity seemed to come from the nostalgia of people excited but at the same time a little perplexed by the new sexuality of young women, the
"flappers." She represented a wish-fulfillment of the society that wanted to deny the sexual equality of women.
Their marriage itself had a great cultural significance for society. It was hailed by their fans as the ideal of modern marriage.
During the next ten years, their union was constantly in the public eye.
Symbolic of the modern marriage they epitomized was their famous Hollywood estate, Pickfair. The home was now expanded far beyond the functional Victorian domicile. Modeled on a European chateau, Pickfair collected and refined elements of upper and lower-class pleasures. It was a consumer's paradise that resembled an innocent doll's house more than a formidable, aristocratic mansion typical of the eastern elites. Swimming pools, gyms, fountains, and cultivated lawns supplied a private "vacation .land."33
Their marriage indicated that "upward mobility could be expressed in this new realm of leisure even more than on the job itself .... Instead of being resentful of the wealthy, they demonstrated how modern consumption allowed one to emulate the styles of the high and mighty."34 Together, they showed that freedom and fun could be found in the private realm of leisure, and that way, the bond of marriage would be strengthened. In this sense they could be called cultural heroes of the age which marked the transition from a work-oriented Victorian society to a leisure-oriented modern society. The shedding of asceticism and the legitimacy of the pursuit of pleasure and self-indulgence gave the impression of a drastic change, yet as May pointed out, it was a reorientation but not a revolution, since the work ethic remained intact. People now more than ever sought success and money for their leisure.
But what this "modern marriage" meant to Mary Pickford herself remains ambiguous. As we have already seen,in her career life, she was facing great difficulties. Reading her biography, we learn that Mary herself did not have as much fun as Fairbanks did at home. She seemed to appreciate Fairbanks' fun-loving spirit but she herself was an essentially serious, hard-working career woman preoccupied with her work. In her temperament and nature, she still belonged to the older generation. Perhaps the implication is that modern marriage may not be the solution for career-oriented modern women. But younger women of the age, mostly urban, seemed too preoccupied with experimenting with new morals and manners to bother with the meaning of modern marriage. They were called "flappers" and brought more striking changes in the image of the ideal woman.
2). The Flapper Revolution
Molly Haskell defines the nature of the "flapper" film in this way:
Freedom meant "lingerie" parties on yachts, all-night fraternity parties,
complete with hip flasks and mud baths. The trend was toward a more sophisticated vision of the world, of marriage and divorce and desire, a view in tune with the accelerating pace and shifting patterns of the Jazz Age. And yet for the most part the "new morality" extolled in such films was more rhetorical than real, a vicarious splurge for women who wanted to look and feel daring without actually doing anything, who wanted to shock the world by coming home after midnight-but no later.
Why Girls Leave Home was the title by which a 1921 film proudly announced itself. Why Girls Go Back Home was a sheepishly titled 1926 suc·cessor. 35
There is a slight variation in flappers: a lower, or lower-middle class flapper, typified by the "It" girl made famous by Clara Bow created by Elinor Glyn:
and the privileged, upper or upper-middle class flappers of Anita Loos. But the difference is in degree, not in kind. The "It" girl was not, as Haskell points out, "as naughty as she seemed, but rather a disturber of the peace, redeemable by marriage.,,36 She may suggest "sensuality and wildness but doesn't stray any farther from the straight and narrow than the distance of a long cigarette-holder or a midnight joy ride.,,37 The upper-class flapper types, on the other hand, may be "bigger teases perhaps, and more arrogant heartbreakers than Clara Bow, but they are no more genuinely free with themselves."38 .. [E]ven when they are not concerned with reputation, [they]
are not at all that abandoned . . . . Their freedom is emotional rather than sexual.,,39 They may look iconoclastic scoffing at proprieties, but they never cut themselves off from their roots or milieu40 As these screen images show, the flapper revolution was only a superficial trend.
The flappers certainly "look" much more modern with their skimpy and short clothes, and short hair, rouged cheeks and lips-which had formerly been the signs of prostitution-and they marked a real' change in the American feminine ideal. Yet they were actually not so far from Mary Pickford's image. They were just another version of "Little Mary,"
inheriting the youth cult of which Mary was a prime proponent. Haskell points out "the physical incongruities of the flapper screen-type: the round cherubic face, wide eyes, and tiny lips, and the slinky satins clinging suggestively to slender, boyish bodies."41
Frederick Lewis Allen, in his famous book on the '20s, Only Yesterday, argues persuasively that what this image suggests is that it is not just youth but "unripened youth" that was worshipped: "[TJhe quest of slenderness, the flattening of the breasts, the vogue of short skirts (even when short skirts still suggested the appearance of a little girl), the juvenile effect of the long waist.,,42 He further suggests that "[yJouth was their pattern but not youthful
,,43
Innocence . . .
It is ironic that the flappers were treated as a symbol of liberated modern women, since they did not seek freedom from men or men's desire. Rather, their main concern was how to allure men with their new style and new charm. The fact that women had to depend on men economically and socially had hardly changed, even if they had won legal equality with the passage of the Equal Suffrage Amendment in 1920. More women were joining the work force, but they were given less responsible jobs and lower pay. Living in the age of materialism and commercialism in which money promised happiness and pleasure, women's dependency increased. The result was manipulation and calculation by women in their relationships with men at the cost of their spiritual dignity.
It is important to recall that, as Lois W. Banner points out, although it was never stated as such, there was a rise of new anti-feminism in the '20s. The anti-feminists, who claimed they were the real feminists of the 1920s, attacked prewar feminists as unfeminine and asexual:
In 1927, writer Dorothy Dunbar Bromley defined a "new-style feminist"
who bore no relationship to the "old school of fighting feminist who
wore flat heels and had very little feminine charm, or the current species who antagonize men with their constant clamor about maiden names, equal rights, women's place in the world." The new-style feminist was well-dressed, admitted that she liked men, did not care for women in groups .. 44
Anita Loos, one of the most successful screen writers of the age, was one of them. Haskell quotes Loos as saying, "women always knew they were more intelligent than men, but ... in the twenties they were smart enough not to let them know it."45 The faisity of her idea is revealed in the humiliating roles her characters play. In her memoirs, Kiss Hollywood Goodbye, she says:
The lovers in those movies were products of the.old American custom of men supporting women; so a girl's chief asset was the allure with which she disguised her normal acquisitiveness. That type reached its perfection in the gold diggers of the Twenties. Their technique might have been based on a theory that the most charming of all behavior lies in the canine species. Irving Thalberg used to tell me, "When you write a love scene, think of your heroine as a little puppy dog, cuddling up to her master, wagging an imaginary tail, and gazing at him as if he were God."46
Apparently Loos failed to realize how powerless women really were without men's money. Her mistake was to believe in the illusory power to manipulate men. And also, like the young generation of the age, she believed she had power just because she could make fun of authoritative figures. The heroine of Loos's fiction, Gentlemen Prefa Blondes, shows this quite clearly. She plays an innocent, dumb girl, but she knows she is really smarter than anybody. She secretly makes fun of all kinds of people; one of them is a Victorian reformer, Henry Spoffard, her future husband, "who is of a very very fine old family who is very very wealthy"47 noted for "senshuring[sic] all of the plays that are not good for people's morals.,,48
Because Mr. Spoffard loves to reform people and he loves to senshure[sicJ everything . . . So Mr. Spoffard spends all of his time looking at things that spoil people's morals. So Mr. Spoffard really must have very very strong morals or else all the things that spoil other.
people's morals would spoil his morals49
His sister is a caricature of women who had enjoyed a brief equality in the labor force during World War 1.
So it seems that Henry's sister has never been the same since the war, because she never had on a man's collar and a necktie until she drove an ambulance in the war, and now they cannot get her to take them off.
Because ever since the armistice Henry's sister seems to have the idea that regular women's clothes are effeminate. So Henry's sister seems to think of nothing but either horses or automobiles and when she is not in a garage the only other place she is happy is in a stable.5o As her language reveals, this "heroine" is a dumb blonde girl, a type
"gentlemen prefer," but, inside, she is full of calculation, always contriving to take advantage of the gentlemen who gather around her. She has no compunction as to living on the money provided by her millionaire gentleman friend "who is interested in educating her." Comparing gentlemen in various countries, she decides that " . . . I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and safire[sic] bracelet last forever."51 Her interest in men is purely monetary. Her marriage to the boring sentimentalist Henry is not out of love but because of his money. It seems that the relation between men and women has become commercial: women's main concern now was how to sell herself high in the marriage market. The new image of women emphasized youth and style,52 which led to women's concern for appearances. DeMille's films taught women that " . . . the way to attract successful men was to surround themselves with an aura of luxury. Clothed
in a Tiffany gown, or Coty jewelry, a plain woman would supposedly become not only beautiful, but high class."53 And it was supposed that " ... glamor leads to a leisure-oriented home that only a man with money can buy."54 Again, the emphasis was on marriage. On the screen, marriage brought happy endings to modern women.55 In real life, statistics show that women were marrying younger and in greater number. After all, the old institution was as sound as ever.
Conclusion
We have seen the rapid growth of the movie industry at the beginning of this century when it shed the former image of a cheap entertainment for the working-class and strove to make movies respectable so that their market could be expanded to the ruling middle-class. Willing to meet the needs of their new patrons, they were sensitive to the changes taking place among them. It was a time when America was turning into an affluent, consumer society with the business class emerging as its new majority. Breaking away from the asceticism of the past, they were seeking pleasure and excitement in the realm of leisure. Movies attained great popularity among them because they could provide exactly what they wanted. Not only did movies serve as entertainment, they taught people how to adjust to the new corporate order: if people found their jobs monotonous and routinized, they could find compensation in leisure and consumption in the private realm. Thus, the home came to bear a new significance in the new economic order. With the reinforcement of the ideology of the home, women's place in society hardly changed. They were not to seek a new role outside the home for fear of threatening its stability. The decree that "women's place is in the home" was never more true. The new heroines on the screen never questioned marriage, however iconoclastic they seemed. But, the drastic change that was taking place in manners and morals gave women the illusion of freedom. The
flappers jumped from the pedestal and demanded a certain "male" liberty- drinking and smoking, etc. Yet it is difficult to judge how much they really gained compared with their nineteenth century counterparts. "The argument about women's special morality, which had underlain so much nineteenth- century reform, and the reality of women's separate culture, which had defined nineteenth century gender distinctions and given women a special place of their own, were fractured; if not completely destroyed."56
The image of the ideal women had certainly changed. The emphasis was now on their physical appearances: unripened youth was worshipped. If they looked slightly more real than the Victorian image of women, they seemed to have fallen from their former height of moral superiority to the inferior status of immature and childish beings. Their new style-short hair, short skirts, and skimpy clothes-gave them more physical freedom. Yet, "the new style was in some ways simply a new standard of conformity. While before women had to look pure, now they had to look sexy."57 The new sexuality limited rather than liberated them because now they saw themselves and were seen by men as sexual objects. "What the flapper's 'freedom' really signified was an escalation in the war to attract men. To be socially acceptable, to be attractive, to win a husband, to keep a husband, women had to look sexy, free, and available."58 It seems that the new image and new definition of women in the modern society only served to keep women in their place. What awaited them was, after all, the same old route-marriage.
Notes
1 Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), pp. 90-91.
2 Lary May, Screening out the Past The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 35.
3 May, p. 37.
4 May, pp. 37-38.
5 May, p. 45.
6 May, p. 52.
7 May, p. 52.
8 Booton Herndon, Mary Pick ford and Douglas Fairbanks: The Most Popular Couple the World Has Ever Known (N ew York: W. W. N orton and Company, Inc., 1977), pp. 61-62.
9 Herndon, p. 62.
10 Herndon, p. 62.
11 May, p. 177.
12 May, pp. 178-179.
13 Anthony Slide, Early Women Directors (New York: A. S. Banes and Company, 1977), p. 9.
14 Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974), p. 74.
15 Slide, p. 52.
16 Slide, p. 52.
17 It is interesting to know DeMille's original reluctance to make such films. He was interested in making Westerns mid historical costume dramas when "he received new instructions from the company's New York business office, that 'what the public demands today,' said a memo, 'is modern stuff with plenty of clothes, rich sets, and action.'" It was early in 1917. DeMille ignored this. But at the end of that year J esse Lasky challenged him to make the picture of Old Wives for New, to "become commercial" and "try to do modern stories of great human interest." Sklar, p. 94.
18 May, p. 189.
19 May, p. 213.
20 May, p. 119.
21 Herndon, pp. 176-177.
22 Mary B. Mullet, "Mary Pickford Describes Her Most Thrilling Experiences,"
American Magazine, 95:34-5 (May), 1923, 34.
23 Mullet, p. 34.
24 Herndon, pp. 152-156.
25 Haskell, p. 62.
26 May, p. 19.
27 May, p. 12I.
28 May, p. 12I.
29 May, p. 125.
30 Herndon, p. 228.
31 In their study of a typical mid-West town in the '20s, Middletown, the Lynds cite from a Saturday Evening Post advertisement: "Go to a motion picture ... and let yourself go. Before you know it you are living the story-laughing, loving, hating, struggling, winning' All the adventure, all the romance, all the excitement you lack in your daily life are in [
1
Picture. They take you completely out of yourself into a wonderful new world ... Out of the cage of everyday existence' If only for an afternoon or an evening-- escape'" Lynds, Middletown, p. 265.32 "It was in Zorro, his thirtieth film, that Doug first came on strong as the phallic symbol. ... Part of this new sexiness is due to his use of that other phallic symbol, the sword" (Herndon, p. 209). He could thus increase his fans by attracting the female audience who had not been interested in his films. (Herndon, pp. 208-209) 33 May, p. 145.
34 May, pp. 145-146.
35 Haskell, p. 76.
36 Haskell, p. 45.
37 Haskell, p. 79.
38 Haskell, p. 8I.
39 Haskell, p. 8I.
40 Haskell, p. 80.
41 Haskell, p. 82.
42 Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen- Twenties (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1957), p. 108.
43 Allen, p. 108.
44 Lois W. Banner, Women in Modern America: A Brief History (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Publishers, 1984), p. 150.
45 Haskell, p. 44.
46 Anita Loos, Kiss Hollywood Goodbye (London: The Quality Book Club, 1976),
pp. 190-191.
47 Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925), p.
135.
48 49 50 51
Ibid, p.
Ibid, p.
Ibid, p.
Ibid, p.
135.
138.
193.
100.
52 The Lynds point out that the ideal image of women in the nineties was the matronly figure "so suggestive of home, comfort, and motherly love." But in the '20s, advertisements in every magazine emphasized "youthful beauty," giving instructions for banishing the matronly figure and restoring youth. Lynds, p. 117.
53 May, p. 213.
54 May, p. 213.
55 May, p. 219.
56 Banner, p. 152.
57 Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman, A History of Women in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), p. 292.
58 Hymowitz and Weissman, p. 292.
