Girl Trouble: Women Go to the Movies

Alison Macor

Shelley Stamp. Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 274 pages. $22.95 (paper).

On a summer afternoon in 1914, customers at a local department store in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, witnessed what must surely have been a curious sight: the appearance of an anonymous masked young woman, known only as “The Girl of Mystery.” Shoppers were invited to guess the woman’s identity, and those female customers who were also avid moviegoers understood who the woman represented: the thrill-seeking title character in a popular Universal serial called Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery. Staged by the Idle Hour Theatre to promote the serial’s upcoming run, the publicity stunt itself is not so unusual, particularly in the mid teens when motion-picture exploitation practices were being discussed in trade journals such as the Moving Picture World. But as Shelley Stamp so convincingly observes in Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon, what made this particular promotion distinct was the way in which exhibitors were using such stunts to attract a particular class of female filmgoer while simultaneously conveying the message that the retail space and the exhibition venue “both functioned as sites where the female body could be exhibited for the pleasure of others” (19).

Stamp’s thoughtfully researched first book, which grew out of her doctoral dissertation, combines textual and reception analysis with theories of spectatorship as it examines female moviegoers of the 1910s. Stamp’s exhaustive research unearths a wealth of primary materials that demonstrate how producers and exhibitors appealed to this relatively untapped demographic. Her findings enhance theories of early female spectatorship by suggesting how women took pleasure in particular narrative forms such as white slavery films and action-adventure serials that provided a unique viewing position and a potentially liberating social experience. In the process, Stamp constructs a vivid portrait of women’s moviegoing habits during this transitional period in film history.

In the first chapter the author recounts the strategies exhibitors used to court women at the movies. Through special invitations, coupons, and advertisements in women’s magazines, exhibitors appealed to the ladies by constructing an image of the movie theater as a respectable, sanitary environment in which to enjoy equally refined entertainment. From the types of solicitations used to the words chosen to convey their message, these promotional strategies demonstrate how the film industry was attempting to reposition itself and reconfigure its audience in the 1910s. As Stamp’s research demonstrates, however, trade publications and fan magazines simultaneously solicited women’s attendance at the movies and poked fun at female moviegoers in cartoons that drew attention to their chattiness and elaborate manner of dress. “At once vital to the growing industry and a challenge to expected audience decorum, the ‘movie-struck’ girl embodied many of the contradictions that surrounded women’s filmgoing at the end of the nickelodeon period,” Stamp writes (39).

Each subsequent chapter explores a single silent film genre popular with female audiences of the time and examines how such contradictions played out on the screen. Stamp situates textual analyses of these films within a context of reception that effectively documents the critical discourse surrounding each film, which often suggests issues at stake in the larger culture. In chapter 2, for instance, Stamp discusses the white slavery scare that preoccupied the country in the early teens and analyzes a few of the most popular vice films: Traffic in Souls (1913), The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (1913), and Little Lost Sister (1917). She argues that these films present “competing discourses” about leisure activities, female viewers, and “motion-picture morals,” which once again reveal an ambivalence about women’s place at the movies. What is most useful for theories of spectatorship, however, is Stamp’s assertion that despite stories that featured victimized young girls as protagonists, white slavery films offered female viewers a kind of visual mastery of an urban environment unavailable to them outside of the cinema. Additionally, Stamp’s primary research in this chapter demonstrates how the industry itself contributed to a discourse about female spectatorship by theorizing and problematizing the exhibition and reception of these films.

Stamp offers the most provocative proposition for theories of spectatorship in chapter 3, which examines action-adventure serials and their female fans. A discussion of the promotion and content of such continuing stories as The Perils of Pauline (1914) and The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913) emphasizes the intertextual layers of these fragmented narratives, which, Stamp argues, establish a crucial link between viewer engagement and narrative pleasure. For fans who supplemented their viewing experience with serialized newspaper narratives and fan magazine interviews with the motion-picture stars who played their favorite heroines, the pleasure of the many forms of the “consuming narrative” outweighed their enjoyment of the story itself. Stamp’s analysis also offers historical context about exhibition practices. By emphasizing exhibitors’ tendency to mediate the viewing experience by varying film speeds according to their programming schedules, Stamp draws attention to external factors that may have influenced spectatorship. Her assumption of fans as traditionally passive consumers is problematic, but her argument for serial fans’ active engagement contributes a necessary discussion of early fan behavior to fan studies in general.

Stamps’ next chapter about suffrage films brings her discussion of women’s moviegoing full circle. By tracing the relationship between suffrage groups and the film industry, Stamp draws parallels between women’s fight for voting rights and an ongoing negotiation of their role as motion-picture viewers. In chapter 3, Stamp discusses the evolution of the star system as it relates to serial stars and their fans, and she continues this dialogue about celebrity in chapter 4 when she analyzes the appearance in films and at screenings of noted suffrage leaders such as Emmeline Pankhurst. Stamp also shows how the early film industry’s contradictory reactions to the success of such politically progressive, feminist films “demonstrate the complex negotiation of cinematic space—on the screen and in the theaters—that cinema’s expanding female audience provoked” (194).

As Stamp observes in the book’s conclusion, female viewers did not bring an instant respectability to the film industry. And as each chapter makes clear, women were incorporated into cinema’s social sphere (and its “optical field”) with difficulty. Weaving together primary accounts of “movie-struck girls,” mainstream reception analysis, and extensive textual analysis of silent films, Stamp constructs an engaging narrative about female moviegoers’ habits, narrative pleasure, and their co-existence within women’s everyday lives. Industry and mainstream discourses reveal the kinds of expectations and demands that were made on women in the 1910s, while historical accounts of female viewers provide insight into their actual behavior at the cinema. Women’s “disruptive” presence at the movies complicates historical assumptions about film audiences in useful and provocative ways.

Alison Macor is an educator and film critic in Austin, Texas.