Women in the Early to Mid-20th Century (1900-1960): Women and the Arts

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WOMEN IN THE EARLY TO MID-20TH CENTURY (1900-1960): WOMEN AND THE ARTS

ELAINE SHOWALTER (ESSAY DATE 1977)

SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. "The Female Aesthetic." In A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, pp. 240-62. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.
In the following essay, Showalter contends that many women writers of the early twentieth century reacted to the violence of the First World War and the almost-masculine nature of the feminist movement by attempting to create a new kind of writing that offered a retreat from the real world rather than an expression of it.

The last generation of Victorian women novelists began to publish during the suffrage campaigns and the First World War. Suffragette writers had taken up John Stuart Mill's challenge to transmute the moral issues of Victorian feminism into an aesthetic philosophy. After the war, women novelists, half-inspired by the promise of a purely female art, half-frightened by the spectacle of how closely feminist militance resembled its masculine form, began to develop a fiction that celebrated a new consciousness. The female aesthetic applied feminist ideology to language as well as to literature, to words and sentences as well as to perceptions and values. Perhaps the war, coming at the height of suffrage militance, inflicted a sense of collective guilt upon activist women; certainly members of the W.S.P.U. transferred their energies from the vote to the war with suspicious alacrity. Women writers responded to the war by turning within; yet they renounced the demands of the individual narrative self. The world seemed dominated by the violence of ego; women writers wanted no part of it. Thus the fiction of this generation seems oddly impersonal and renunciatory at the same time that it is openly and insistently female. The female aesthetic was to become another form of self-annihilation for women writers, rather than a way of self-realization. One detects in this generation clear and disturbing signs of retreat: retreat from the ego, retreat from the physical experience of women, retreat from the material world, retreat into separate rooms and separate cities. Under the banner of the female aesthetic marched the army of the secession.

At the time, however, female aestheticism looked like a step forward. Some women novelists and critics felt that, as Mill had predicted, the literature of women had finally emancipated itself from its cultural subjection to a male tradition, and that its historical moment had arrived. It is true that James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson were pursuing some of the same experiments, and that Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence had similar visions of sexual polarity. Yet no reader would mistake one for the other, mainly because their verbal territories scarcely overlap, but also, as women writers liked to repeat, because women were holding to their own experience, values, and grievances. Virginia Woolf felt altogether pleased with what she saw of women's fiction in 1929: "It is courageous; it is sincere, it keeps closely to what women feel. It is not bitter. It does not insist upon its femininity. But at the same time, a woman's book is not written as a man would write it."¹

In 1920 a critical study called Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) by R. Brimley Johnson attempted to define the collective nature of women's fiction and to explain what was meant by the female version of realism: "The new woman, the female novelist of the twentieth century, has abandoned the old realism. She does not accept observed revelation. She is seeking, with passionate determination, for that Reality which is behind the material, the things that matter, spiritual things, ultimate Truth. And here she finds man an outsider, wilfully blind, purposely indifferent."² Johnson romanticized this quest in relating it to the war, which he thought had brought "a new spirituality" to a disillusioned generation. But he also thought it stemmed from feminist ideology.

In terms of subject matter and approach, the novels that Johnson discussed have a number of common traits that come from their feminism. They reverse the orthodox argument that women have limited experience by defining reality as subjective. In The Creators (1910) May Sinclair wrote that experience "spoils you. It ties you hand and foot. It perverts you, twists you, blinds you to everything but yourself. I know women—artists—who have never got over their experience, women who'll never do anything because of it." When she read Dorothy Richardson's novels, Sinclair was charmed by the total obliteration of structured experience: "Nothing happens. It just goes on and on."³ Several of the novels were attacks on the Victorian nuclear family; Eleanor Mordaunt's The Family (1915) and Rose Macaulay's Potterism (1920) were especially biting; Ivy Compton-Burnett's austere sensationalism was based on an exposure of the murderous psychic combat of parents and children.

Early twentieth-century novels were also anti-male, both in the sense that they attacked "male" technology, law, and politics, and that they belittled masculine morality. We can hear the muted clash of swords in the 1909 correspondence between Clive Bell and Virginia Woolf over the first drafts of The Voyage Out. Bell began diplomatically but quickly became less tactful: "Our views about men & women are doubtless quite different, and the difference doesn't matter much; but to draw such sharp & marked contrasts between the subtle, sensitive, tactful, gracious, delicately perceptive, & perspicacious women, & the obtuse, vulgar, blind, florid, rude, tactless, emphatic, indelicate, vain, tyrannical, stupid men, is not only rather absurd, but rather bad art, I think." Woolf responded with even more devastating courtesy, depersonalizing the disagreement, but putting Bell in his place: "Possibly, for psychological reasons which seem to me very interesting, a man, in the present state of the world, is not a very good judge of his sex; and a 'creation' may seem to him 'didactic.'"⁴

It is by "their tiresome restlessness," wrote Amber Reeves, "their curiosity, their disregard for security, for seemliness, even for life itself, that men have mastered the world, and filled it with the wealth of civilization … that they have armed the race with science, dignified it with art."⁵ Civilization and the illusion of progress was a byproduct of the masculine way of being, which women writers now came to see as sterile, egocentric, and self-deluding. Coming to terms with the paradox of male culture required an ironic inversion of some of the most cherished Victorian notions of male and female codes of living. Women were claiming that men's allegiance to external "objective" standards of knowledge and behavior cut them off from the "real reality" of subjective understanding. Just as the Victorians had maintained that women were too emotionally involved and anarchic to judge personality, let alone history, women now sweetly hinted that men were too caught up in the preservation of a system to comprehend its meaning.

Yet for all their new awareness, the heroines of this fiction remain victims; indeed they are victimized by their awareness. Whereas the heroines of Victorian fiction often did not perceive that they had choices, and in fact had only a selection of bad options, these heroines are confronted with choices and lack the nerve to seize their time. F. M. Mayor's The Rector's Daughter (1924) describes the plight of Mary Jocelyn, who deliberately abandons all hope of fulfillment or self-expression out of devotion to her father. Similarly Radclyffe Hall, in The Unlit Lamp (1924), makes her heroine Joan a self-destructive martyr to duty. In the end Joan's lover cries, "How long is it to go on,… this incredibly wicked thing that tradition sanctifies? You were so splendid. How fine you were! You had everything in you that was needed to have put life within your grasp, and you had a right to life, to a life of your own; everyone has. You might have been a brilliant woman, a woman that counted for a great deal, and yet what are you now?"⁶ Men resisted the tyranny of the family and broke away into silence, exile, and cunning; women succumbed. The female Künstlerroman of this period is a saga of defeat. Women novelists punish and blame their heroines for their weakness, their laziness, and their lack of purpose, for the manuscript yellowing in the desk, for the risk abjured. There is indeed a new interest in the creative psychology of women, but it is full of self-recrimination.

Part of the problem was tension between the novelists' lives as women and their commitment to literature. Members of a generation of women in rebellion against the traditional feminine domestic roles, they tried free love, only to find themselves exploited; if they then chose marriage, they often felt trapped. Storm Jameson, who admitted that her ideas about childbearing had come primarily from Anna Karenina, found herself near madness from the monotonous drudgery of her marriage: "I cannot explain my pathological hatred of domestic life and my frantic need to be free."⁷ D. H. Lawrence could maintain that the secret of artistic stability was to love a wife.⁸ Women, however, found themselves pulled apart by the conflicting claims of love and art. Those who fared best were emotional tycoons like Katherine Mansfield and Vita Sackville-West, who made their own terms with men and also retained title to the adoration and the services of less-demanding women friends. Other women—Stella Benson was one—insisted vehemently "on being a writer first and a wife second; a man would insist and I insist. A hundred years hence it will seem absurd that a woman should have to say this, just as it would seem absurd now if we should hear that Mr. William Blake's wife wanted him to take up breeding pigs to help her and he obstinately preferred writing poetry."⁹ But it came to nothing in the end. When the crises came, women went bitterly with their husbands, as they had always done.

Self-sacrifice generates bitterness and makes, as Yeats said, a stone of the heart. But beyond the outspoken contempt for male selfishness in this fiction is a much more intense self-hatred. Women gave in and despised themselves for giving in. Insofar as it is recorded in the novels, the concept of female autonomy is frighteningly undercut by theories of post-Darwinian determinism and retributive systems of almost theological rigidity. In Rebecca West's powerful novel The Judge (1922), for example, male egoism is portrayed in Richard Haverland, a twentieth-century Rochester whose romantic action is shown to be empty and escapist. Two women, Haverland's mother, Marion, and his lover, Ellen Melville, have to pay the price for his impulsiveness, his emotionalism, and his immaturity. Marion, who had sacrificed the potential of her own life to protect her son—she had agreed to a sexless marriage with a man she despised in order to make Richard legitimate—learns that one sacrifice leads inevitably to others. Her husband rapes her and she must bear a despised legitimate son. Richard kills his brother and flees with Ellen, who is pregnant with his illegitimate child. At the end, only Marion's suicide seems adequate to the situation. The story of Ellen Melville, a socialist and a suffragette, is equally futile; her dream of female equality is seen to have been a snare and a delusion. West's epigraph for the novel reflects on the political hierarchies that lead to diminishing returns of affection and hope: "Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the fathers."

Men are the sinners, but women are both the judges and the convicts. One feels overwhelmingly that the women are punished in this novel, punished for their innocence, for their self-betrayal, for their willingness to become victims. The collapse of the long love affair between West and H. G. Wells, which took place about this time, probably accounts for some of the bitterness of the book. As "their relationship deteriorated rapidly, with Rebecca increasingly anxious to break free and Wells increasingly determined not to let her go,"¹⁰ the tensions between West and Wells as artists became more pronounced. Ellen Melville, the suffragette who seems fated to relive an earlier generation's pattern of womanly suffering and self-sacrifice, is clearly related to West's disillusionment with the compromises she had made with Wells. He disliked The Judge very much and told her so; he called it "an ill conceived sprawl of a book with a faked climax, an aimless waste of your powers."¹¹ The book is flawed, but it is not aimless. Many of West's subsequent books, both fiction and reportage, dealt with the same questions of betrayal and judgment.

In the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, the moment of self-awareness is also the moment of self-betrayal. Typically, a woman in her fiction who steps across the threshold into a new understanding of womanhood is humiliated, or destroyed. Mansfield's fiction is cautionary and punitive; women are lured out onto the limbs of consciousness, which are then lopped off by the author. In "Bliss," for example, Bertha's recognition that the feeling she calls "bliss," the "fire in her bosom," is sexual ardor, is quickly followed by her discovery of her husband's adultery.

Virginia Woolf was disgusted with "Bliss," which she read in the English Review in 1918. Woolf confided to her diary: "She is content with superficial smartness; and the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an interesting mind. She writes badly too. And the effect was, as I say, to give me an impression of her callousness and hardness as a human being. I shall read it again, but I don't suppose I shall change."¹² Yet in Mansfield's brutality, Woolf recognized herself, her own hardness and her own vulnerability. Mansfield insisted that Woolf recognize the bond: "We have got the same job, Virginia," she wrote after their first meeting, "and it is really very curious and thrilling that we should both … be after so nearly the same thing. We are, you know. There's no denying it."¹³ A 1924 short story by Woolf, "The New Dress," echoes the theme and even the language of "Bliss." Mrs. Dalloway is closest of all to Mansfield's style and subject matter; Woolf merely substitutes revery for epiphany. Both Woolf and Mansfield see women as artists whose creative energy has gone chiefly into the maintenance of myths about themselves and about those they love. To become aware of the creation of a myth is to lose faith in it. Mansfield's characters are seen repeatedly at this moment of realization and collapse, but Mrs. Dalloway manages to escape by projecting her anxieties onto someone else. There is something instructive and chilling in the survival tactics of this fiction. Writing about one of Mansfield's most famous stories, "Miss Brill" (in which a lonely woman's marginally sustaining fantasy of self is wrecked when she overhears two lovers making fun of her in a park), Margaret Drabble recalled that she had been horrified by its cruelty: "I couldn't get it out of my mind: I think it changed something in me forever … one would not like to have written it oneself, however fine the achievement."¹⁴ As Septimus Smith becomes the scapegoat for Mrs. Dalloway's failures, so the heroines of Katherine Mansfield's stories become the scapegoats for hers.

The most consistent representative of female aestheticism was Dorothy M. Richardson, who might have been the Gertrude Stein of the English novel if she had been more self-promoting and more affluent. Edward Garnett, accepting the first volume of Pilgrimage for the firm of Duckworth in 1915, christened Richardson's work "feminine impressionism" and saw its connections with the work of other women novelists (Garnett had recommended Olive Schreiner's Women and Labour to Fisher Unwin, and he had also accepted Woolf's The Voyage Out). Richardson's later admirers linked her with Proust and Joyce; but her real tradition was female, and her subject was female consciousness. In considering her career and her art, we can see how her narrative techniques and her aesthetic theories grew out of a struggle to de-personalize and control a female identity that was potent with the promise of self-destruction.

Richardson had the professional life of a Mary Wollstonecraft or a George Eliot: she began as a teacher, then worked as a translator and journalist; she had affairs with selfish and unscrupulous men, and made contact with both the solid center and the louche fringes of London intellectual society. She was nearly forty years old when she began to write Pointed Roofs, the first volume of her twelve-volume, thirty-year study of "Miriam Henderson," a heroine whose life paralleled her own up to the point of authorship. In its diffuse way, Pilgrimage is a portrait of the young woman on the way to becoming an artist, and it is in this convolution—the novel ends when the heroine is ready to write it—that Richardson most resembles Proust and Joyce.

Like Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand, and many other women writers, Dorothy Richardson was the child of a forceful but unreliable father and a passive, depressed mother. In a family of girls, she became the surrogate son, a role that her sister-in-law later attributed to her "wilful and at times unmanageable nature."¹⁵ In times of financial difficulty—unhappily frequent in the Richardson home—Dorothy was spared the domestic routines that her sisters had to take on. On the other hand, she was expected to be her father's companion at meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, an organization he devotedly supported. Her father's scientific rationalism and the "deadness" of the association oppressed her, and later she came to identify "the dark veil under which I grew up"¹⁶ as the shadow of male scientific philosophy. Her own pseudo-maleness within the family became a source of uneasiness, particularly when she found herself identifying with her mother. Unlike her resilient, socially ambitious father, Dorothy felt threatened by the precariousness of their financial position and deeply humiliated in times of hardship. When Charles Richardson was finally declared bankrupt in 1893, his wife's invalidism was complicated by deep depression. Dorothy, herself feeling "trapped and helpless,"¹⁷ had to respond to, and care for, her mother; in November 1895 they went on a desperate holiday together to Hastings. But Mrs. Richardson was by then too despondent and alienated to be helped, and Dorothy returned one afternoon from a walk to find her mother dead in their room, having cut her throat with a carving knife.

In many ways this traumatic episode was the turning point in Dorothy's life; it freed her from the emotional demands of her family and allowed her to move to an independent life in London. As women writers always did, however, she paid dearly for her freedom. Her mother's suicide was first of all a warning, a hereditary hint that no daughter of an ardent Darwinian could ignore. More basically, it established a terrible precedent, a terrible contrast between the impregnable materialism and rationalism of men, secure with their built-in defenses, and the intuitive, involuntary, fatal sensitivity of women like her mother, defenseless against the deadly atmosphere of an indifferent culture. One sees this contrast stated most explicitly in The Tunnel (1919), the volume of Pilgrimage that describes Miriam Henderson's first years in London. Miriam's epiphany comes when she reads an insulting entry on "Woman" in an encyclopedia, and rebels against the futility of women's lives in an age controlled by science.¹⁸

At this moment of despair in the novel, Miriam, convinced that "life is poisoned for women, at the very source," can only recommend that, in protest, "all women ought to agree to commit suicide."¹⁹ Suicide becomes a grotesquely fantasized female weapon, a way of cheating men out of dominance. Martyrdom and self-immolation are viewed as aggressive, as a way of inflicting punishment on the guilty survivors. This passage, with its suggestion that Richardson saw her own mother's suicide as a protest against her father, is extremely significant; it is a direct advocacy of the art of self-annihilation that is the hallmark of female aestheticism. At times Richardson recognized that suicide was just another form of power politics: "If women commit suicide in becoming partisan, what is the use of their entering party politics?" she wrote in her journal.²⁰ She would not choose the martyrdom of commitment because that was masculine. Instead she chose to live at the perilous borders of egolessness, in the female country of multiple receptivity. She risked self-destruction through psychic overload, ego death from the state of pure receptive sensibility that George Eliot had described as the roar on the other side of silence.²¹

Richardson saw this openness to psychological stimuli—we could also call it a form of negative capability—as the natural result of woman's position in the world, as "the human demand, besieging her wherever she is, for an inclusive awareness, from which men, for good or evil, are exempt."²² One gets a clue in this passage to the sources of her lifelong sense of being embattled. Women's responsiveness to human demands had always kept them from becoming great artists, but Richardson thought she could see a way to turn this liability into an asset. Women had always been accused of a chameleon-like susceptibility to the ideas of their lovers. From her perspective, this openness merely demonstrated women's greater range, their comprehension of the timeless oneness beyond the ideological flux. "Views and opinions are masculine things," she wrote in Revolving Lights. "Women are indifferent to them really.…Women can hold all opinions at once, or any, or none. It's because they see the relations of things which don't change, more than things which are always changing."²³

Richardson's view helped her make sense of her own fragmented life in London at the turn of the century. During the day she worked as a dentist's assistant; at night she immersed herself in books and radical societies. She attended meetings of the Fabian Society, contacted Anarchists, and met with suffragettes, Quakers, and Zionists. In 1906 the publisher Charles Daniel asked her to write reviews for his new periodical, Crank. Among the cranks on Daniel's staff, Mary Everest Boole most impressed Richardson. She was the wife of the mathematician George Boole and mother of the novelist Ethel Voynich; she wrote with cabalistic intensity of epistemology and spiritualism and rated women's intuition high on the scale of human faculties. Richardson remained aloof in terms of committing herself to any of these groups or ideologies. Noncommitment itself became one of her ideals; she saw it as a characteristic attribute of feminine genius. Partisan politics, organized religion, and even personal relationships imposed false patterns on pure reality; women unsexed themselves by declaring any allegiance. The feminine mind, she wrote, "is capable of being all over the place and in all camps at once."²⁴ Her refusal as a novelist to structure consciousness came from this same refusal to impose any pattern or system on being.

But just as any novel must structure consciousness, whatever its pretensions to be pure, so Richardson's independence was a pose. She was much more easily swayed than she could ever bear to admit; the collective influence of London radicalism certainly affected her at this time. In the early 1900s she was particularly swayed by Fabian ideas. Much later she made fun of the doctrines of the Fabian Nursery, especially those of free love and the destruction of the nuclear family: "I recall a solemn discussion at a meeting of young women, on the desirability of selecting a suitable male, producing an infant, and going on the rates."²⁵ But in 1906, when she discovered that she was pregnant with H. G. Wells's child, she was determined to follow the Fabian gospel by raising the child completely on her own. Unhappily—for she had an intense maternal drive—she had a miscarriage in 1907, around Easter, shortly after visiting suffragette prisoners in Holloway. The whole affair brought her close to breakdown.

Wells, of course, cast his seed far and wide; in the recent biography of him by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, Dorothy Richardson is scarcely mentioned. She is simply part of the chorus, another Fabian groupie. In her biography, however, the Wells affair was a major event, both in personal and artistic terms. In the aftermath of this experience (Wells had moved on to Amber Reeves), she began to struggle with the first volume of her novel. I think we can assume that when she said that the novel came from her effort to "produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism" it was chiefly Wells's realism she had in mind.²⁶ Richardson's first literary efforts to define the female artistic identity took the form of a dialectic; eventually she wrote the anti-Wellsian novel.

There were historical as well as personal reasons why Richardson should have had to define herself in opposition to Wells. Although they were almost the same age, they came from different literary generations. In the year that Richardson began serious work on Pilgrimage, Wells published his twenty-seventh book, The New Machiavelli. He was an Edwardian with Bennett and Galsworthy; she was a Georgian with Forster and Woolf. Thus Richardson's repudiation of Wells was also a repudiation of the Edwardian novel of external realism and accumulated detail. It is also clear that to Richardson and Woolf the Edwardians represented a male literary culture. And though male artists too have had to struggle against the influence of famous predecessors, only in rare cases have those celebrities been their lovers.

In fact it had been Wells who had first encouraged Richardson to write. Some idea of how she recalled his cheerful and businesslike egoism, and her own unyielding epistemology, may be gleaned from the dialogues in Dawn's Early Light:

"Perhaps the novel's not your form. Women ought to be good novelists. But they write best about their own experiences. Love-affairs and so forth. They lack imagination."
"Ah, imagination. Lies."
"Try a novel of ideas. Philosophical. There's George Eliot."
"Writes like a man."
"Just so. Lewes. Be a feminine George Eliot. Try your hand."²⁷

Even though Richardson admired Wells and had been educated by him, she came to see him as an opponent, the quintessential male artist. Her name for him in Pilgrimage is "Hypo Wilson": Hypo (with its innuendos of hippoes and hypocrisy) actually means "less than, or subordinated to"; Wilson echoes "Wilkins," the name Wells used for himself as public figure in his own novels. Her Hypo is the public man, the figure-head, larger than life and slightly absurd.

Horace Gregory has commented on the debt that Richardson owed to Wells as a teacher; from him she learned conversational style, realistic observation, mimicry, and use of the novel as a medium for advanced ideas. Gregory also finds "undertones of Wellsian prophecy" in Richardson's feminism.²⁸ The debt is there, in the sense that any antinovel pays tribute to its antagonist. But the antagonism, the dialectic, is much more important. Wells was concerned with the visionary and the Utopian; Richardson opted for the prosaic continual present. He chose a novel of ideas; she chose a novel of consciousness. He was politically engaged (and serially monogamous in his politics); she disdained any ideological or temporal division of the all-embracing female psyche. Wells constantly changed, shifted, developed, and exchanged old ideas for new; Richardson worked at Pilgrimage for thirty years without any significant modification of her style, approach, technique, or ideas. In her serene lack of development, she was like the cello player in the joke who never moves his finger because he has found the note for which all the other cellists are searching.

On the personal level too, Richardson needed to free herself from the influence of Wells, whose exuberance and inventiveness had come close to taking over her personality. For Wells, possession was a challenge; he confided to a friend that "the more marked the individuality, the more difficult it is to discover a complete reciprocity."²⁹ Richardson cannot have been too difficult a conquest; Wells was only the most dominant figure in a series of male mentors, beginning with her father. Her efforts at psychological liberation came in middle age, and perhaps that is why they have something of the fanaticism of late converts to obscure religions. In her novels, if not in her statements to friends, she was able to analyze with considerable delicacy the process by which she discovered that Wells had transformed her into an extension of himself. Miriam becomes aware that she is seeing her own experience with Hypo's eyes and then betraying its integrity and complexity in an effort to entertain him. To reverse this process, which she understands as a feminist problem, the unconscious expression of her training in female subordination, she must deliberately and persistently oppose him. At the same time, she recognizes how round and firm and fully packed his personality is, and how wispy, tentative, and embryonic her own looks next to it. Defining an authentic self necessarily takes the form of "wide opposition" and negation for her; and, in this sense, she is still dependent: "The joy of making statements not drawn from things heard or read but plumbed directly from the unconscious accumulations of her own experience was fermented by the surprise of his increased attention, and the pride of getting him occasionally to accept an idea or to modify a point of view. It beamed compensation for what she was losing in sacrificing, whenever expression was urgent in her, his unmatchable monologue to her own shapeless outpourings. But she laboured, now and then successfully, to hold this emotion in subjection to the urgency of the things she longed to express."³⁰ Even honesty can become merely a tactic for pleasing a man; as long as Richardson worried about holding Wells's attention, the ideas themselves were secondary. As with the Fabian Society, it went against Richardson's grain to admit that she had been annexed, and she had to rationalize her own susceptibility by arguing that women remain basically themselves, despite shifting their allegiances with their men.

She also rationalized the problem of her "shapeless outpourings" by working out a theory that saw shapelessness as the natural expression of female empathy, and pattern as the sign of male one-sidedness. If a novel had symbolic form, that was because a man's truncated vision was responsible for it. Men could be tidy in their fiction because they saw so little. Richardson's battle with Wells became more than a battle of the books, or even a sexual skirmish. She was claiming that the entire tradition of the English novel had misrepresented feminine reality. In her letters to the poet and essayist Henry Savage, especially during the 1950s, when she was able to put it most positively, Richardson returned obsessively to her theories of the female novel: "Monstrously, when I began, I felt that all masculine novels to date, despite their various fascinations, were somehow irrelevant, and the feminine ones far too much infl. [sic] by magic traditions, and too much set upon exploiting the sex motif as hitherto seen and depicted by men."³¹

In pursuing a distinctively female consciousness, rather than attempting to explore female experience, Richardson was applying the ideas of the feminists, especially those of the social evolutionists and the spiritualists. She was fascinated by idealist theories of language and by the mystic's claims to being superior to the artist. Spiritualism in its highest and lowest forms she found irresistible; sixty years after the event she still loved to tell friends about a female palmist who had read her hand at a garden party and whispered "Begin to write." The faculty of prophecy, she wrote solemnly to Savage, seems to be a female trait, "save in those countries, notably Tibet, where men specialize in esoteric research."³² Women had a monopoly on the essences of being; men had a monopoly on the metaphors of being.

The distinction between consciousness and experience was an important determinant of the direction modernist women's writing took. The Victorian world had been sexually polarized by experience; the normal lives of men and women had scarcely overlapped. By 1910, however, advanced women like Dorothy Richardson could move freely in social atmospheres previously closed to them; they could enjoy a masculine range of sexual and professional experiences. But the possession of quantitatively more experience did not lead to picaresque or even naturalistic fiction. Instead women writers found the world sexually polarized in psychological terms. They had fought to have a share in male knowledge; getting it, they decided that there were other ways of knowing. And by "other" they meant "better"; the tone of the female aesthetic usually wavered between the defiant and the superior.

Women, Richardson thought, were wise in their ancient maternal suffering. If they were to keep their advantage, therefore, they must continue to monopolize suffering and refuse to benefit by the social changes that would permit them to share masculine consciousness. Conversely, men had to remain emotionally childish, or women would lose their power. Socialists had observed with distress that, in the political realm, Mrs. Pankhurst's initial motives, which had included personal ambition, gradually merged with a mystical self-destructive identification with the Cause. Similarly, the quest for the female consciousness, basically a liberating and fulfilling pilgrimage, could become a self-defeating rejection of all male culture, an end in itself, a journey to nowhere. In the case of Dorothy Richardson, I think, female consciousness became a closed and sterile world; thus she was an innovator who did not attract disciples.

When we try to get down to some hard definitions of female realism as Richardson understood it, we are faced with a difficult task. For one thing, her own antipathy to definitions and schools was an obstacle to, and an evasion of, any personal effort to sort out her ideas. In addition, her most enthusiastic critics and interpreters have tended to circle around her theories. The most troublesome problem has been isolating the qualities, if there are any, that make the writing female in an absolute sense. It is one thing to show that fiction before 1910 differed from fiction after 1910, and to label the differences metaphorically "male" and "female" (or "masculine" and "androgynous" or "bisexual"). It is another thing altogether to talk about female style when you mean female content. And it is the hardest of all to prove that there are inherent sexual qualities to prose apart from its content, which was the crucial point Richardson wished to make.

Like Joyce, Richardson had philosophical objections to the inadequacy of language; unlike Joyce, she regarded language as a male construct. Richardson maintained that men and women used two different languages, or rather, the same language with different meanings. As might an Englishman and an American, "by every word they use men and women mean different things." Typically, she never gives an example of these differences, and sometimes she seems to imply that women have a separate dialect, which they speak to each other.³³ Generally, she implies that women communicate on a higher level; in using the language—the "words," as she says—of men, they limit themselves the way an intergalactic race of telepathics would limit itself in using speech. Thus in all social interactions dependent on "words" women are disadvantaged—not as a deprived subculture forced to use the dominant tongue, but as a superior race forced to operate on a lower level. "In speech with a man," she wrote in The Tunnel, "a woman is at a disadvantage—because they speak different languages. She may understand his. Hers he will never speak or understand. In pity, or from some other motives, she must therefore, stammeringly, speak his. He listens and is flattered and thinks he has her mental measure when he has not touched even the fringe of her consciousness."³⁴ Similarly in law, art, systems of thought, religions, and even writing, women were merely participating in men's games. Arid intellect and egoism were the sources of all these foolish efforts; by becoming "women of letters," women risked spiritual sterility.

Such a philosophy would seem to preclude any successful competition with men in the fields of art, but Richardson argued that women's art was both qualitatively different and superior. It was the invisible art of creating atmosphere. Like mediums at the seance, women exhausted themselves in animating the inanimate, in creating harmony out of clashing personalities. Their preeminence in this art was the true source of emancipation. "It's as big an art as any other," Miriam assures Hypo in Revolving Lights. "Most women work at it the whole of the time. Not one man in a million is aware of it. It's like air within the air. It may be deadly. Cramping and awful, or simply destructive, so that no life is possible without it. So is the bad art of men. At its best it is absolutely life-giving. And not soft. Very hard and stern and austere in its beauty. And like mountain air. A woman's way of 'being' can be discovered in the way she pours out tea.… I feel the atmosphere created by the lady of the house as soon as I get on to the door step."³⁵

This whole approach to the female consciousness had affinities to spiritualism. Men might invent religions, but women were in touch with the Beyond. The utter paradox of this theory, however, was that, as Richardson ruefully admitted, "it would be easier to make all this clear to a man than to a woman. The very words expressing it have been made by men."³⁶

The stream-of-consciousness technique (a term, incidentally, that Richardson deplored, and parodied as the "Shroud of Consciousness") was an effort to transcend the dilemma by presenting the multiplicity and variety of associations held simultaneously in the female mode of perception. Henri Bergson's hypothesis that the intensity of an emotion depended on the number of memories and associations awakened by an event was relevant to this undertaking, but in Richardson's version all events evoke the same number of associations and thus have the same intensity.³⁷

Dorothy Richardson did not want to suggest intensity. As many critics pointed out, her lack of punctuation, use of ellipsis, and fragmented sentences, worked against the structural potential of the sentence in terms of wit and climax, and main and subordinate ideas. Virginia Woolf was sufficiently impressed by this technique to call it "the psychological sentence of the feminine gender, a sentence of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes. Other writers of the opposite sex have used sentences of this description and stretched them to the extreme. But there is a difference. Miss Richardson has fashioned her sentence consciously, in order that it may descend to the depths and investigate the crannies of Miriam Henderson's consciousness. It is a woman's sentence, but only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman's mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything she may discover in the psychology of her sex."³⁸

Richardson may indeed have fashioned the woman's sentence, or at least the chosen sentence of the female aesthetic. But Woolf is seriously mistaken in calling it unafraid. It is afraid of the unique, the intimate, the physical. By placing the center of reality in the subjective consciousness, and then making consciousness a prism that divides sensation into its equally meaningful single colors, Richardson avoids any discussion of sensation itself, especially as a unified and powerful force. Just as she would not commit herself to ideologies, she would not discriminate among her experiences.

Most of all, Richardson's art is afraid of an ending. Looked at from one point of view, her inability to finish is a statement in itself, a response to the apocalyptic vision of Wells and Lawrence. If men were so obsessed by their sense of an ending that they could not understand the present moment, women were outside of time and epoch, and within eternity. But as Richardson grew older, her relationship to Pilgrimage became more obviously possessive and anxious. The book was an extension of herself; to complete it was to die. When Dent published an edition of Pilgrimage in 1938, Richardson was deeply upset to read that critics thought this was the whole book. From 1939 to 1951 she worked on a final section of Pilgrimage; after her death the manuscript (published as March Moonlight) was discovered among her papers; presumably, it was still unfinished. Her conception of the book as a continuous process was the myth that enabled her to publish at all; without such a sustaining illusion, Olive Schreiner, a novelist of very similar temperament, found herself endlessly writing and rewriting the same unfinished book. It is significant that in March Moonlight Richardson finally identified her obsession with the process of her own life as guilt: "If one could fully forgive oneself, the energy it takes to screen off the memory of the past would be set free."³⁹

Pilgrimage can be read as the artistic equivalent of a screen, a way of hiding and containing and disarming the raw energy of a rampaging past. Richardson devised an aesthetic strategy that protected her enough from the confrontation with her own violence, rage, grief, and sexuality that she could work. The female aesthetic was meant for survival, and one cannot deny that Richardson was able to produce an enormous novel, or that Virginia Woolf wrote several, under its shelter. But ultimately, how much better it would have been if they could have forgiven themselves, if they could have faced the anger instead of denying it, could have translated the consciousness of their own darkness into confrontation instead of struggling to transcend it. For when the books were finished, the darkness was still with them, as dangerous and as inviting as it had always been, and they were helpless to fight it.

Notes

"Women and Fiction," Collected Essays, II, London, 1966, p. 147.
Some Contemporary Novelists (Women), London, 1920, pp. xiv-xv.
May Sinclair, The Creators, quoted in Johnson, Some Contemporary Novelists, p. 37; and "The Novels of Dorothy Richardson," Little Review, IV (April 1918), quoted in Johnson, Some Contemporary Novelists, p. 135.
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, I, London, 1972, pp. 209, 211.
Quoted in Johnson, Some Contemporary Novelists, p. xiv.
Radclyffe Hall, The Unlit Lamp, New York, 1929, pp. 358-359. See also May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life, London, 1919, for an elaborate study of female role-conflict and renunciation.
Journey from the North, I, London, 1969, p. 88.
D. H. Lawrence to Thomas Dacre Dunlap, 7 July 1914, Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Diana Trilling, New York, 1961, p. 83.
R. Ellis Roberts, Portrait of Stella Benson, London, 1939, p. 215.
Gordon N. Ray, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West, New Haven, 1974, p. xv.
Ray, p. 123. See also Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, The Time Traveller, London, 1973, p. 339.
A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf, New York, 1968, p. 14.
The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, I, ed. J. Middleton Murry, New York, 1929, p. 71.
"Katherine Mansfield: Fifty Years On," Harpers & Queen (July 1973): 107.
Rose Odle, "Some Memories of Dorothy M. Richardson and Alan Odle," November 18, 1957; unpublished ms., Dorothy Richardson Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
John Rosenberg, Dorothy Richardson: The Genius They Forgot, London, 1973, p. 8.
Ibid., p. 17.
The Tunnel, Pilgrimage, II, New York, 1967, p. 220. There is a very similar passage in A Room of One's Own, in which the narrator, doing research on women in the British Museum Reading Room, imagines a definitive male treatise on female inferiority. Virginia Woolf reviewed The Tunnel for the Times Literary Supplement (February 13, 1919): 81.
The Tunnel, p. 221.
Dorothy Richardson Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
Middlemarch, ed. Gordon S. Haight, Cambridge, Mass., 1956, bk. II, ch. 20, p. 144.
"Women in the Arts," Vanity Fair, May 1925.
Revolving Lights, Pilgrimage, III, New York, 1967, p. 259.
Quoted in Sydney Kaplan, "Featureless Freedom or Ironic Submission," College English (May 1971): 917.
Letter to Curtis Brown, January 16, 1950, Dorothy Richardson Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
Foreword to Pilgrimage, New York, 1938. See also Caesar Blake, Dorothy Richardson, Ann Arbor, 1960, pp. 181-182.
Dawn's Left Hand, Pilgrimage, IV, New York, 1967, pp. 239-240.
Horace Gregory, Dorothy Richardson: An Adventure in Self-Discovery, New York, 1967, p. 113.
Vincent Brome, H. G. Wells, New York, 1951, p. 127.
Revolving Lights, p. 255.
Quoted in Gregory, Dorothy Richardson, p. 12.
Ibid.
Oberland, Pilgrimage, IV, New York, 1967, p. 93.
The Tunnel, p. 210.
Revolving Lights, p. 257.
Revolving Lights, p. 79.
See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, New York, 1960. Katherine Mansfield had no sympathy with this refusal to take hold. "Everything being of equal importance," she wrote of Interim, "it is impossible that everything should not be of equal unimportance" (Novels and Novelists, New York, 1930, p. 137).
Virginia Woolf, "Romance and the Heart," Nation and Athenaeum (May 19, 1923): 229.
March Moonlight, p. 607.

SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR (ESSAY DATE 1988)

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

ON THE SUBJECT OF…

KATE MILLETT (1934-)

Millett's 1970 book Sexual Politics, widely perceived as an impetus for second-wave feminism, examines what Millett calls "male supremacy" from an historical, anthropological, sociological, and literary perspective. In the book, which began as Millett's 1969 doctoral thesis, she asserts that "all historical civilizations are patriarchies," and defines patriarchy as "the ideology of male supremacy socialized through temperament, role, and status," providing extensive historical examples to support her assertions, including an analysis of the misogyny present in Freudian theory and of the degradation of women characters in the works of such authors as D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. While viewed as provocative and polemical, Sexual Politics was enormously popular, selling 80,000 copies within months of its release. Millett became a well-known media figure. During the mid-1960s Millett was active in the women's movement, serving as a charter member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), as well as in the antiwar and civil rights movements. Her role as a central figure in the political and social controversy surrounding the 1970s women's movement was difficult for Millett, who received harsh criticism for her work as well as for her lifestyle, when her lesbianism was revealed in the mainstream media. Millett chronicles her experiences following the publication of Sexual Politics in her 1974 book, Flying. Millett was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and is an accomplished educator, literary scholar, and artist as well as an author. She has taught English at such institutions as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wasada University in Japan, and Barnard College. Her later works include 1981's Going to Iran, in which she relates her journey to Iran, where she addressed Iranian feminists on International Women's Day in 1979, and The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment (1994).

Millett, Kate. In Sexual Politics: The Classic Analysis of the Interplay Between Men, Women and Culture. 3rd ed., p. 26. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

WHITNEY CHADWICK (ESSAY DATE 1990)

SOURCE: Chadwick, Whitney. "The Independents." In Women, Art, and Society, pp. 265-96. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990.
In the following excerpt, Chadwick presents an overview of female artists and sculptors of the early-twentieth century, including Suzanne Valadon, Emily Karr, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gwen John, Frida Kahlo, and Germain Richier.

Referring to women artists as "independents" is already an arbitrary and misleading designation for no artist is independent of the complex of economic, social, and cultural practices through which art is produced. Nor can lumping together a diverse group of women be intellectually or theoretically justified when it produces alliances reducible only to gender. Yet at the same time, many women artists working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had an ambiguous relationship with the developing mythology of the vanguard modern artist.

The view of the modern artist as a heroic (male) individualist finds its fullest expression in the literature of post-Second World War art. The emergence of a self-conscious set of practices and characteristics through which the modern in art is understood, and the closely related notion of an "avant-garde" as the dominant ideology of artistic production and scholarship, coincides with the emergence of a first generation of women artists with more or less equal access to artistic training.

Vanguard ideology marginalizes the woman artist as surely as did the guilds in the fifteenth century, and the academies in the seventeenth and eighteenth. There is no female Bohemia against which to measure the exploits of a Suzanne Valadon, no psychoanalytic equating of artistic creativity and female sexuality, no Romantic legacy of the woman artist as an intense, gifted, and spiritual being. If Expressionism, as feminist art historians have argued, stands as a revolt of "sons" against "fathers," the relationship of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, and other women artists to German Expressionism is difficult to elucidate. In eliding representation by women with the social production of middle-class femininity, the work of Suzanne Valadon is left in a representational void, subject only to the creation of a new myth of the woman artist as "undiscovered." Valorizing stylistic innovation and monumental size leaves little room for the modest, stylistically consistent paintings of Gwen John and Florine Stettheimer. Identifying woman with nature and imaging femininity in its instinctive, enigmatic, sexual, and destructive aspects places major female practitioners of landscape painting like Georgia O'Keeffe and Emily Carr in an impossible double-bind in which femininity and art become self-cancelling phrases. Admitting women artists to canonical art history only retrospectively, and basing evaluations of their work on what Anne Wagner has called a "heroics of survival," removes artists from the social contexts which, in fact, made possible their work. Constructing woman as a signifier for male creativity banishes to the margins of the avant-garde a group of gifted women Surrealists.

Another aspect of the early Modernist myth which is receiving increasing attention from feminist art historians and critics concerns the extent to which the major paintings—and sometimes sculptures—associated with the development of modern art wrest their formal and stylistic innovations from an erotically based assault on female form: Manet's and Picasso's prostitutes, Gauguin's "primitives," Matisse's nudes, Surrealism's objects. Modern artists from Renoir ("I paint with my prick") to Picasso ("Painting, that is actual lovemaking") have collaborated in fusing the sexual and the artistic by equating artistic creation with male sexual energy, presenting women as powerless and sexually subjugated.

In her article, "Domination and Virility in Vanguard Painting," Carol Duncan traces the further sexualizing of creativity in the work of the Fauves, the Cubists, and the German Expressionists. She concludes that the vanguard myth of individual artistic freedom is built on maintaining sexual and social inequalities: "The socially radical claims of a Vlaminck, a Van Dongen or a Kirchner are thus contradicted. According to their paintings, the liberation of the artist means the domination of others; his freedom requires their un-freedom. Far from contesting the established social order, the male-female relationship that these paintings imply—the drastic reduction of women to objects of specialized male interests—embodies on a sexual level the basic class relationships of capitalist society."

Suzanne Valadon and Paula Modersohn-Becker were two of the first women artists to work extensively with the nude female form and their paintings both collude with, and challenge, such configurations. Confronted with the powerful presence of Valadon's nudes, critics were unable to sever the nude from its status as a signifier for male creativity; instead, they severed Valadon (who was not a "respectable" middle-class woman) from her femininity and allowed her to circulate as a pseudo-male, complete with "masculine power" and "virility." "And perhaps in this disregard for logic," wrote Bernard Dorival, "in this inconsistency and indifference to contradiction, lies the only feminine trait in the art of Suzanne Valadon—that most virile—and greatest—of all the women in painting."

Dorival's critical position is similar to that taken by many twentieth-century critics who, having jettisoned one half of the ideology of separate spheres bequeathed them by nineteenth-century critics, have confidently asserted that "art has no sex," and at the same time admitted to the canon only work by women artists which might be contained by the term "virile." Nevertheless, Valadon's status in the eyes of Dorival and other contemporary critics was not sufficient to insure her place in histories of modern art. Although she exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the Indépendants, and at private galleries like Berthe Weil and Bernheim-Jeune, and although Ambroise Vollard published and sold her engravings in 1897, by the 1920s her work was all but ignored.

The illegitimate daughter of a laundress, Valadon (1867-1938) became an artist's model in the early 1880s after working as a cricus performer. Posing for Puvis de Chavannes, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and other artists, she was part of the sexually free bohemian life of early twentieth-century Paris. Her entrée to the world of art came not through education, for she was largely self-taught, but through her identification with a class of sexually available artist's models, an association which liberated her from any lingering expectations about respectability and allowed her to enter into the sort of easy relationship with other artists and with her patrons which we seldom see in the careers of middle-class women artists of those years.

The subject of the nude in art brings together discourses of representation, morality, and female sexuality, but the persistent presentation of the nude female body as a site of male viewing pleasure, a commodified image of exchange, and a fetishized defense against the fear of castration leaves little place for explorations of female subjectivity, knowledge, and experience. The difficulty of distinguishing between overtly sexualized (i.e., voyeurism, fetishism, and scopophilia) and other forms of looking, and the fact that the male relationship of power and control over the female image would seem to allow women only a vicarious pleasure in looking, has prompted a significant body of feminist literature on issues of spectatorship.

Valadon's female nudes fuse observation with a knowledge of the female body based on her experience as a model. Rejecting the static and timeless presentation of the monumental nude that dominates Western art, she emphasizes context, specific moment and physical action. Instead of presenting the female body as a lush surface isolated and controlled by the male gaze, she emphasizes the awkward gestures of figures apparently in control of their own movements. Valadon often placed her figures in specific domestic settings, surrounding them with images of domesticity and community, as in Grandmother and Young Girl Stepping into the Bath (c. 1908), a striking departure from the practises of her contemporaries, like Renoir, who referred to his models as "beautiful fruit."

Like Degas, who recognized and encouraged her talent, Valadon often turned her bathers away from the viewer and depicted them absorbed in their own activities. But in her emphasis on the tension of the body as it executes specific movements there is little or no attempt to establish the closely framed single point of visual connection between viewer and model that is the hallmark of Degas's many pastels of bathers. The nakedness of Valadon's figures is specific to the act of bathing. Her nudes are full-bodied, weighty, and sturdy. Although sensuous, they stand in opposition to the archetypal and fertile female figures so prevalent in the avant-garde circles of Gauguin and the Fauves.

The shift from the imagery of seductive and devouring femininity produced by Symbolist painters and poets to an ideology of "natural womanhood" which identified the female body with biological nature was part of a reaction against feminism and the neo-Malthusians. Modest gains made by women in education and employment in France at the end of the nineteenth century provoked an intense anti-feminist backlash. It culminated in the battle over control of reproductive rights in France. Indignation among demographers over declining birth rates at the end of the nineteenth century was taken up by literary figures such as Zola, whose novel La Fécondité (1899) gave fictional form to a growing cult of fertility; "There is no more glorious blossoming, no more sacred symbol of living eternity than an infant at its mother's breast." The cry was taken up by artists, including Gauguin, whose colonization of the "natural" female Tahitian body reinforced early Modernism's exaltation of the "natural" female body always subject to the literal and metaphoric control of man.

Among the work of women artists associated with Expressionism, that of Paula Modersohn-Becker and Käthe Kollwitz most clearly reveals the clash between Modernist ideology and social reality. Caught between the artistic and social conservatism of the Worpswede nature painters and the influence of French Modernism, Modersohn-Becker struggled to produce images that embodied both poles of experience. Kollwitz (1867-1945) was committed to an art of radical social content unrivalled in her day, and her choice of graphic realism as a style, her exclusive use of printmaking media, and her production of posters and humanitarian leaflets, all contributed to later devaluations of her work and its dismissal by art historians as "illustration" and "propaganda."

Born in Dresden in 1876, Modersohn-Becker was the child of comfortably middle-class parents who encouraged her artistic interests until she showed signs of serious professional ambition. She made her first visit to the Worpswede artists' community in northern Germany in the Summer of 1897 where she began to study with Fritz Makensen. Encouraged by Julius Langbehn's eccentric book Rembrandt as a Teacher (1890), and by their interest in Nietzsche, Zola, Rembrandt, and Dürer, the Worpswede painters embraced nature, the primitive simplicity of peasant life, and the purity of youth. Langbehn's book became the textbook of the "Volkish" movement, a utopian reaction against industrialization which celebrated the rural values of the peasantry. Although she settled more or less permanently in the village after completing her studies in 1898, later marrying the painter Otto Modersohn, Modersohn-Becker did not share the group's disdain for academic training; the flattened and simplified forms that mark her mature style derive from the influence of French painters, particularly Cézanne and Gauguin, whose work she saw during four visits to Paris between 1899 and 1906, the year before her premature death.

Modersohn-Becker's interest in her models as personifications of nature developed in the context of the Worpswede artists' cultivation of the "earth mother," but it was not until after her first trip to Paris in 1899 that it entered her work as a major theme. One of Fritz Makensen's first Worpswede canvases was a life-sized Madonna of the Moors (1892) and as early as 1898 Modersohn-Becker recorded her impression of a peasant woman suckling a child in her diary; "Frau Meyer, a voluptuous blonde.… This time with her little boy at her breast. I had to draw her as a mother. That is her single true purpose." Linda Nochlin has also pointed to sources for Modersohn-Becker's cultivation of the imagery of fecund maternity in J. J. Bachofen's Mutterecht (1861), which was reissued in 1897 and widely circulated among artists and writers. Surrounding her figures with a tapestry of flowers and foliage, Modersohn-Becker ignored conventional perspective and anecdotal detail to produce monumental images of idealized motherhood; "I kneel before it [motherhood] in humility," she wrote.

Her diary records an ambivalence toward marriage, motherhood, and art. Modeled on the diaries of Marie Bashkirtseff, Modersohn-Becker, unlike the former, had little sympathy for the growing women's movement. Although Karl Scheffler's misogynist Die Fraue und die Kunst (Woman and Art) was not published until 1908, the year after her death, its sentiments were commonly accepted throughout the period of Modersohn-Becker's development as an artist. Scheffler emphasized woman's inability to participate in the production of culture because of her ties to nature and her lack of spiritual insight. Modersohn-Becker's own ambivalence on these points is recorded in an allegorical prose poem in which she acknowledges her artistic ambitions as "masculine" and remarks on the mutual exclusivity of female sexual love and artistic success.

Modersohn-Becker participated in the second Worpswede group exhibition in the Bremen Kunsthalle in 1899, despite attempts by the director of the Kunsthalle to dissuade her. Negative critical response focused mainly on the work of the women artists in the colony and Modersohn-Becker left almost immediately for Paris. There she entered the Académie Colarossi and visited galleries showing the work of Puvis de Chavannes, the Barbizon painters, Courbet, and Monet. Gradually rejecting the Worpswede artists' commitment to a crude naturalism, her work began to record influences from Rodin, Japanese art, Daumier, Millet, and other French painters. By 1906, back in Germany, she had requested a copy of Gauguin's autobiography, Noa Noa, from her sister in Paris and had thrown off her husband's artistic influence.

Viewing Gauguin's retrospective exhibition in Paris in 1906 helped move Modersohn-Becker's figurative works in the direction of a primordial power sought through nature. Her nude self-portraits may be the first such paintings in oil by a woman artist, but as such, they are strangely ambiguous. Rejecting Gauguin's romantic nostalgia, she carries the simplification of form to an extreme which blunts the sensuality normally assigned female flesh in the history of art. The immobility, monumentality, and gravelly surfaces of these self-portrait nudes universalize the images, but the careful scrutiny of the female body and the frank confrontation between the woman and the artist fuse the issues of femaleness and creativity in new ways.

Modersohn-Becker's archetypal fertility images of 1906 and 1907, Mother and Child Lying Nude and Mother and Child are closely related to Gauguin paintings like the Kneeling Day of the God, but they clothe the subject of fertility and nurture with dignity, while at the same time collaborating with a late nineteenth-century ideology of timeless, unvarying "natural" womanhood. The sub-text of violence and control that accompanies Gauguin's representations of Tahitian women is missing from Modersohn-Becker's paintings with their lowered viewpoint and direct gaze. Gauguin's many paintings of Tahitian women replay the unequal relationship of the male artist and the female model in the inequities of the white male artist's relationship to native women in a colonialized society. His paintings bind women to nature through repetitions of colors, patterns, and contours; crouching female figures are placed in a submissive relationship to the downward gaze of the male artist and the women's blank gazes offer little insight into the specifics of their lives.

Modersohn-Becker's death shortly after giving birth provides an ironic commentary on the gulf between idealized motherhood and the biological realities of fecundity. Nochlin has pointed out this disjunction, observing that it is Käthe Kollwitz's depictions of women and children that insert motherhood "into the bitterly concrete context of class and history."

Kollwitz replaces the archetypal imagery of female abundance with the realities of a poverty which often prevents women from nourishing their children or enjoying their motherhood; in Portraits of Misery III, a lithograph, and in many other works, pregnancy without material support is cause for grief rather than rejoicing. Kollwitz, the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of the Arts (1919) and the foremost graphic artist of the first half of the twentieth century, was encouraged to draw as a child by her father. Studies in Berlin and Munich followed a period of training in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) under the engraver Rudolph Maurer. In 1891, she married Dr. Karl Kollwitz and settled in Berlin where she came in contact with the industrial workers of Berlin through his practice. A socialist, feminist (founder of the Frauen Kunstverband [Women's Arts Union] in Berlin in 1913), and pacifist, the themes of war, hatred, poverty, love, grief, death, and struggle dominate her mature work.

Influenced by Max Klinger's engravings, by Zola's realism, and by the memory of her father reciting Thomas Hood's "The Song of the Shirt" with its passionate appeal on behalf of working women, she turned to themes of social conditions and to the expressive mediums of engraving and lithography. Kollwitz's first major success came with a cycle of three engravings and three lithographs titled The Weavers' Uprising (1895-97). Based on Gerhart Hauptmann's play, The Weavers, about the revolt of the Silesian weavers in 1844, the cycle moves from the sufferings, including death, of the weavers to their decision to take collective action. Somber grays and blacks and sharp lines relieved by strong lights powerfully evoke the weavers' tragic revolt against inhumane working conditions.

As a result of the success of The Weavers' Uprising (which proved so politically effective when exhibited in 1898 that the Kaiser refused to award Kollwitz the gold medal she had won), Kollwitz was appointed to teach graphics and nude studies at the Berlin Künstlerinnenschule. Her subsequent concentration on the mother and child theme developed hand in hand with a series of personal tragedies which included the death of a son in the First World War and the loss of a grandson in the Second. Documenting the suffering that results from war and poverty led Kollwitz away from the expressions of individual torment that mark the work of her contemporaries Edvard Munch and James Ensor and that would soon dominate German Expressionism. Although her work shares the graphic expressiveness of the prints by members of the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups, she increasingly came to see Expressionism as a rarefied art of the studio, divorced from social reality. "I am convinced," she wrote in her diary dating from 1908, "that there must be an understanding between the artist and the people such as there always used to be in the best periods in history."

Kollwitz's insistence on the social function of art divorced her work from the Modernist cultivation of individual artistic freedom. Vanguard mythologies have proved equally difficult to sustain in the face of work which refuses the scope, and often the scale, of Modernist ambitions.

Despite regular exhibitions, Gwen John (1876-1939), like Valadon, was until recently most often presented as an "unknown," to be regularly "rediscovered" by subsequent generations of curators and critics, always in relation to her brother Augustus John, whose work bears little similarity to hers; her lover, the sculptor Auguste Rodin; and her patron, the American collector John Quinn.

Though she knew Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Rodin, and many other contemporary artists, and read widely, John had little interest in the theoretical aspects of artistic movements. Nor was she a joiner. Born and raised in Wales, and educated at the Slade School in London under Whistler's influence, John went to France at the age of twenty-seven and remained there for the rest of her life. Her work contains superficial affinities with that of Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, Vuillard, Bonnard, Modigliani, and Rouault, but its dry surfaces, restrained color and patterned brushwork are closer to the paintings produced by the Camden Town Group in London than to the French Modernists. Her reliance on intimate subject-matter was shaped by her early experiences at the Slade and her paintings, subdued in tone, and formal in arrangement, evoke powerful emotional responses.

John first exhibited in 1900 at the New English Art Club, returning to Paris after that exhibition partly to escape Augustus John's influence over her life. She supported herself by posing as an artist's model, often for English women artists, and by the Summer of 1904 she was posing for Rodin. John's relationship with Rodin belongs to the difficult history of women who, lacking familial and social support for their endeavors, have annexed their talent to that of male mentors and seen their own work suffer as a result. But it is art historians who have extracted her life from the historical circumstances in which she lived, and from the lives of the hundreds of other women painters working in London and Paris in the same years. Like many other women artists, she has been "rediscovered" as an exception and represented as unique.

Rodin defined his own artistic genius in sexual terms and his critics followed suit; "The period when Rodin was caught up in the grand passion of his life coincided with the creation of his most impassioned works," notes one twentieth-century critic. "Such was his innate vigor, even in decline, that everything which flowed from his hands with such dangerous facility bore the imprint of genius.…"John, like the sculptor Camille Clau del (1856-1920), who entered Rodin's studio as an assistant in 1883 and remained to become model, lover, collaborator, and artist in her own right, saw her creative life merged with that of Rodin in the eyes of others. Claudel's assistance in Rodin's studio helped insure his myth of superhuman productivity during the 1880s and early 1890s, and much of her creative output remains to be disengaged from his work of these years. John's relationship with Rodin, while equally intense, was not played out through their commitment to a shared medium. Describing herself as "une petite morceau de souffrance et de désir," and expressing a growing coldness toward painting, she nevertheless continued to paint, executing numerous drawings and at least a dozen paintings during her first decade in Paris.

Distinctive themes emerged in John's work during this period: simple interiors bathed in soft light and isolated female figures set against textured walls. Formally constructed, these works capture specific moments filled with light and atmosphere. The repetition of compositions is characteristic of her mature work and provided a means for the formal investigations which were her primary concern as a painter.

John's reflective, dedicated life allowed her to live largely independent of the social obligations placed on most women of her time, but critics continue to search for the "essentially feminine" in her work. The term "feminine" has also been used to build contexts within which to view the work of other women who moved in avant-garde circles, but whose personal and idiosyncratic styles have no place in vanguard mythology. Marie Laurencin's work was promoted by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who introduced her to the Cubist painters; Florine Stettheimer's social relationships with the New York avant-garde before and after the First World War proved more binding than her artistic ties to them. Both artists embraced the decorative and the fanciful in their work, and both fashioned a myth of the feminine that allowed them to be heard, but that insured they would never be taken as seriously as their male colleagues.

Educated at the Lycée Lamartine and at the Académie Humbert, where she met the Cubist painter Georges Braque, Laurencin (1885-1956) had a long, stormy affair with Apollinaire, which placed her in the group of artists who gathered around Picasso in the studio at the Bateau Lavoir, a run-down former wash house in Montmartre. Her painting Group of Artists (1908) includes Apollinaire, Picasso, herself, and Picasso's companion, Fernande Olivier, but the presence of herself and Olivier in the painting signals friendship rather than art.

In his 1913 treatise, Les Peintres Cubistes: Méditations esthétiques, Apollinaire called her a "scientific Cubist," but in fact her work has little to do with Cubism's conceptual and formal investigations. Instead it was her "femininity" which became the artistic yardstick against which her work was measured. She brought "feminine art to major status," claimed Apollinaire, but it was as his muse that she entered the Modernist mainstream and it was this construction which provided the Surrealists with a new image of the creative couple. Henri Rousseau's painting of Apollinaire and Laurencin, The Muse Inspiring the Poet (1909), presents her as a nature goddess. Apollinaire designated her "a little sun—a feminine version of myself," thereby removing her entirely from the creative ferment that propelled his male friends. "Though she has masculine defects," he wrote, "she has every conceivable feminine quality. The greatest error of most women artists is that they try to surpass men, losing in the process their taste and charm. Laurencin is very different. She is aware of the deep differences that separate men from women—essential, ideal differences. Mademoiselle Laurencin's personality is vibrant and joyful. Purity is her very element." Laurencin exhibited alongside the Cubists in 1907, and from 1909 to 1913, while Florine Stettheimer had only a single solo exhibition during her lifetime. After 1916, she exhibited only at the Independent Society of Arts Annuals, using her wealth and social position as a defense against art world intrusion and elaborating a notion of the "feminine" until her life and her art became largely indistinguishable.

Born in Rochester, New York, in 1871, Florine Stettheimer was the youngest of five children in a prosperous family. She studied at the Art Students' League in New York from 1892 to 1895 and then travelled in Europe with two of her sisters, taking painting lessons in Germany and visiting museums. The outbreak of war in 1914 forced the Stettheimer sisters to return to New York where the family home soon became famous as the social center of a group of avant-garde art dealers, dancers, musicians, artists, and writers. Stettheimer's paintings of this period are bright, calligraphic sketches full of personal symbolism, amusing anecdote, and social satire. Her unique personal style evolved out of a rigorous academic training, but her paintings focus almost exclusively on the social milieu in which she lived. The Studio Party (1917), like many of her other works, includes her social and artistic circle: Maurice Sterne, Gaston and Isabelle Lachaise, Albert Gleizes, Leo Stein, her sisters.

Stettheimer produced paintings as part of a self-consciously cultivated lifestyle which drew few, if any, distinctions between making art and living well. Protected by her wealth from having to exhibit or sell, she further insulated herself from the professional art world through her demand that any gallery wishing to exhibit her works be redecorated like her home. Stettheimer's exaggerated "femininity" was a way of establishing a role for herself as a woman and an artist; her contemporary, Georgia O'Keeffe, on the other hand, spent much of her life trying to escape attempts by critics and a well-meaning public to read her life in her work.

O'Keeffe's place in the history of American modern art, while far more secure than that of Stettheimer, remains circumscribed by critical attempts to create a special category for her. Her career, the critic Hilton Kramer later wrote, "is unlike almost any other in the history of modern art in America," for it embraced its whole history, from the founding of Alfred Stieglitz's gallery with its shocking displays of European Modernism to the eventual acceptance of modern art in America. And it anticipated by some years the color field paintings of Clyfford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, and others. The "rediscovery" that began her recent meteoric rise to the forefront of American art came only with her retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum, New York, in 1970 when a new generation of viewers were drawn to the uncompromising example of her life and the quiet integrity of her work.

Her relationship to her colleagues in the circle around Stieglitz, with whom she began living in 1919—the painters Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, and the photographer Paul Strand—was often equivocal. Referring to them as "the boys," she later commented that, "The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters." O'Keefe chose to live much of her life away from New York, developing her paintings in relation to the vast, austere landscape of the southwestern United States, particularly the area around Abiqui, New Mexico, where she moved permanently after Stieglitz's death in 1946.

Born in 1887, O'Keeffe studied anatomical drawing with John Vanderpoel at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905; two years later she was in New York studying painting at the Art Students' League. Quickly losing interest in academic styles derived from European models, she left to work as a commercial artist in Chicago. After attending a course on the principles of abstract design taught by Alan Bement—a follower of the art educator Arthur Wesley Dow—she taught Dow's principles in schools in Virginia, South Carolina, and Texas. She met Stieglitz after she sent a batch of abstract charcoal drawings based on personal feelings and sensations to Anita Politzer, a friend in New York who subsequently took them to Stieglitz.

In 1916, Stieglitz was one of the organizers of "The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters." The only woman included among the seventeen leading American Modernists was Marguerite Zorach, a California artist who helped introduce Fauve painting into the United States, but who is better known for her brilliant abstract tapestries. Thus, O'Keeffe was not the only woman shown by Stieglitz at his avant-garde 291 Gallery, but her situation there was unique.

O'Keeffe's paintings of the 1920s—from the planar precisionist studies of New York's buildings and skyline to the New Mexico landscapes with their distilled forms and intense colors, and the many paintings of single flowers—are intensely personal statements expressed in the reductive language of early Modernism. Her emergence during the early 1920s as an artist of great promise coincided with what appeared to be more liberal attitudes toward women including their increased attendance in art schools. Between 1912 and 1918, a number of women students at the Art Students' League, among them Cornelia Barnes, Alice Beach Winter, and Josephine Verstille Nivison, contributed drawings and illustrations to the radical Socialist magazine, The Masses, which promoted women's causes from suffrage to birth control. Other women produced paintings addressing current social realities, like Theresa Bernstein's Suffragette Parade (1916) and Waiting Room—Employment Office (1917), which depicts a group of weary women waiting for jobs.

Throughout the 1920s, the complex associations between O'Keeffe's paintings of natural forms and the female body elicited readings which the artist herself recognized as ideological constructions. Responding to the widespread popularizing of Freud's ideas in America, Henry McBride noted; "Georgia O'Keeffe is probably what they will be calling in a few years a B.F. (before Freud) since all her inhibitions seem to have been removed before the Freudian recommendations were preached upon this side of the Atlantic. She became free without the aid of Freud. But she had aid. There was another who took the place of Freud.… It is of course Alfred Stieglitz.…"

The ideology of femininity, which presented O'Keeffe as Stieglitz's protégée, that constructed her considerable talent as "essentially feminine" legitimized male authority and male succession. "Alfred Stieglitz presents" read the announcement for O'Keeffe's 1923 exhibition at his gallery; the following year he declared, "Women can only create babies, say the scientists, but I say they can produce art—and Georgia O'Keeffe is the proof of it."

In a decade of declining birth rates women were confronted by a barrage of literature urging them to stay home where, as mothers and homemakers, they became perfect marketing targets for a new peacetime economy based on household consumption. Throughout the 1920s, O'Keeffe was forced to watch her work constantly appropriated to an ideology of sexual difference built on the emotional differences between the sexes which supported this social reorganization. Men were "rational," manipulating the environment for the good of their families; women were "intuitive" and "expressive," dominated by their feelings and their biological roles. She was shocked when, in 1920, Marsden Hartley wrote an article casting her abstractions in Freudian terms and discussing "feminine perceptions and feminine powers of expression" in her work and that of Delaunay and Laurencin. "No man could feel as Georgia O'Keeffe," noted the Modernist critic Paul Rosenfeld in 1924, "and utter himself in precisely such curves and colors; for in those curves and spots and prismatic color there is the woman referring the universe to her own frame, her own balance; and rendering in her picture of things her body's subconscious knowledge of itself."

Criticisms such as these constructed a specific category for O'Keeffe. Hailed as the epitome of emancipated womanhood, she was accorded star status, but only at the top of a female class. The biological fact of her femininity took precedence over serious critical evaluations of her work. At the time when radical feminists were advocating "androgyny," and designers like Coco Chanel were "masculinizing" women's fashions, the art world countered by presenting a woman who was "emancipated" but "feminine," and in a class by herself. While Edmund Wilson lauded her "particularly feminine intensity," and the New York Times critic declared that, "she reveals woman as an elementary being, closer to the earth than men, suffering pain with passionate ecstasy and enjoying love with beyond-good-and-evil delight," O'Keeffe threatened to quit painting if Freudian interpretations continued to be made. Complaining that Hartley's and Demuth's flower paintings were not interpreted erotically she struggled against a cultural identification of the female with the biological nature of the body that has long been used to assign woman a negative role in the production of culture. It is hardly surprising that she responded with so little sympathy to attempts by feminist artists and critics during the 1970s to annex her formal language to the renewed search for a "female" imagery.

O'Keeffe met the Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871-1945) at Stieglitz's gallery in 1930. Although no details remain of the brief meeting, these two major figures in North American landscape painting were evidently sympathetic. If O'Keeffe finally found the art world's insistent refusal to allow her painting to stand in relation to that of her contemporaries a burden and a barrier to her development as a painter, Carr's isolation in British Columbia saved her from most such intrusions. After studying painting in San Francisco, London, and Paris for short periods between 1890 and 1910, Carr's strong, brooding paintings of the Pacific northwest and its Indians went almost completely unnoticed until the 1920s, when she met Mark Tobey and the painters of Canada's Group of Seven. Although never formally a member of the group, she exhibited with them beginning in 1927 in an exhibition called "Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern." Like O'Keeffe, Carr built an intensely personal style from a range of influences, and she distilled essential forms from a monumental and imposing nature and presented them without sentiment, moralizing, or anecdote. The breadth of these painters' visions, and the muscularity of their forms, should provoke new investigations into the contributions made by women artists to the traditions of modernist landscape painting. The success of such investigations will, however, rest on our ability to redraw the boundaries between woman, nature, and art.

During the 1930s, the sculptors Germaine Richier and Barbara Hepworth also elaborated the connections between nature's cycles of generation and erosion. Hepworth (1903-75), one of England's leading sculptors, studied at the Leed's School of Art and at the Royal College of Art in London where she and Henry Moore became fascinated by the interplay of mass and negative space. Visits to the studios of Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp in Paris in 1931 encouraged Hepworth to explore biomorphism within an increasingly abstract vocabulary. Living with the painter Ben Nicholson in the 1930s, she was an active participant in the development of abstraction in England. She worked steadily, even after the birth of triplets in 1934 slowed her sculptural production, and gradually evolved a totally abstract, geometric vocabulary.

Adrian Stokes, the painter and essayist, was a member of the group in England—with the painter Paul Nash and the physicist J. D. Bernal—who helped define this formal vocabulary. Writing in The Spectator in 1933 after Hepworth's exhibition at Reid and Lefevre, he noted; "These stones are inhabited with feeling, even if, in common with the majority of 'advanced' carvers, Miss Hepworth has felt not only the block, but also its potential fruit, to be always feminine.…"

This generative metaphor was deeply internalized by artists working under the influence of Surrealism. In a poem written in the early 1930s and dedicated to Max Ernst, the English poet David Gascoyne celebrated "the great bursting womb of desire." Jean Arp also chose procreation as a metaphor for artistic generation, writing in 1948 that "art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant or like a child in its mother's womb." The reasons for this particular trope lie outside the present work, but its effects proved nowhere more conflicting than for women artists in the Surrealist movement.

No artistic movement since the nineteenth century has celebrated the idea of woman and her creativity as passionately as did Surrealism during the 1920s and 1930s. None has had as many female practitioners, and none has evolved a more complex role for the woman artist in a modern movement. André Breton's romantic vision of perfect union with the loved woman as the source for an art of convulsive disorientation that would resolve polarized states of experience and awareness into a new, revolutionary surreality was formulated in response to a culture shaken by war. He advanced his image of the spontaneous, instinctive woman in a social context in which women were demanding the right to work and to vote, and the French government was promoting pronatalism as a strategy for repopulating the war-ravaged country. "The fate of France, its existence, depends on the family," declared a slogan of 1919, the same year that Breton, recently demobilized, returned to Paris. The following year a law was passed forbidding the mere advocacy of abortion or birth control; by 1924, when the First Surrealist Manifesto appeared, Breton had dedicated himself to liberating woman from such "bourgeois" considerations.

The image of ethereal and disruptive womanhood which enters Breton's poetry of the 1920s owes much to Apollinaire's imbrication of erotic and poetic emotion, his reliance on Symbolist polarities to express the duality of female nature, and his presentation of Laurencin as muse and eternal child. But the Surrealist woman was also born out of Freud's ambivalent and dualistic positioning of woman at the center of the creative and the subversive powers of the love instinct, in her incompatible roles as mother and bearer of life, and destroyer of man.

During the 1930s, women artists came to Surrealism in large numbers, attracted by the movement's anti-academic stance and by its sanctioning of an art in which personal reality dominates. But they found themselves struggling toward artistic maturity in the context of a movement that defined them as confirming and completing a male creative cycle and that metaphorically obliterated subject/object polarities through violent assaults on the female image. Not surprisingly, most women ended by asserting their independence from Surrealism.

Almost without exception, women artists saw themselves as outside the inner circle of poets and painters which produced Surrealist manifestos and formulated Surrealist theory. Most of them were young women just embarking on artistic careers when they came to Paris; many of them did their mature work only after leaving the Surrealist circle. Often they came to Surrealism through personal relationships with men in the group rather than shared political or theoretical goals. Yet they made significant contributions to the language of Surrealism, replacing the male Surrealists' love of hallucination and erotic violence with an art of magical fantasy and narrative flow.

Surrealism's multiple and ambivalent visions of woman converge in its identification of her with the mysterious forces and regenerative powers of nature. Women artists were quick to draw on this identification, but they did it with an analytic mind and an ironic stance. Artists like Leonora Carrington (b. 1917), Leonor Fini (b. 1918), the American painters Kay Sage (1898-1963) and Dorothea Tanning (b. 1912), and the Spanish-Mexican artist Remedios Varo (b. 1908) received varying degrees of formal training. Yet they meticulously built up tight surfaces with layers of small and carefully modulated brushstrokes. However fantastic their imagery, they often worked with the precision and care of illustrators, as if their creative model was scientific investigation rather than Surrealist explosiveness. Fini's many paintings of bones and rotting vegetation—like Sphinx Regina (1946)—and Varo's carefully crafted scientific fantasies—like Harmony (1956) and Unsubmissive Plant (1961)—resituate the woman artist in the worlds of science and art.

Women artists dismissed male romanticizing of nature as female and nurturing (or female and destructive) and replaced it with a more austere and ironic vision. Bizarre and unusual natural forms attracted the photographic eye of Eileen Agar (b. 1899) and Lee Miller (1908-77), while the Czech painter Marie Čerminova, called Toyen (1902-80), in a series of paintings and drawings executed during and after the Second World War presents nature as a potent metaphor for inhumanity.

Toyen's use of nature as a metaphor for political reality finds an echo in the work of Kay Sage, who met the Surrealists in Paris in 1937 and who spent the War years in New York with the Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy. Her paintings are among the most abstract produced within a Surrealism that embraced symbolic figuration as the key to the language of the dream and the unconscious. A predilection for sharp, spiny forms, slaty surfaces, and subdued melancholy light infuses her landscapes with an air of emptiness and abandonment; she herself identified strongly with these barren vistas stripped of human habitation.

Alienated from Surrealist theorizing about women, and from the search for a female muse, women turned instead to their own reality. Surrealism constructed women as magic objects and sites on which to project male erotic desire. They recreated themselves as beguiling personalities, poised uneasily between the worlds of artifice (art) and nature, or the instinctual life. The duality of the Mexican Frida Kahlo's life (1907-54)—an exterior persona constantly reinvented with costume and ornament, and an interior image nourished on the pain of a body crippled in a trolley-bus accident when she was an adolescent—invests her painting with a haunting complexity and a narrative quality which disturbs in its ambiguity. This is also characteristic of much of the work of another contemporary Mexican artist, Maria Izquierdo (1902-55).

Like Kahlo's Broken Column (1944), Leonora Carrington's Self-Portrait (1938) reinforces the woman artist's use of the mirror to assert the duality of being, the self as observer and observed. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir holds up the image of the mirror as the key to the feminine condition. Women concern themselves with their own images, she asserts, men with the enlarged self-images provided by their reflection in a woman. Kahlo used painting as a means of exploring the reality of her own body and her consciousness of that reality; in many cases the reality dissolves into a duality, exterior reality versus interior perception of that reality. The self-image in the work of women artists in the Surrealist movement becomes the focus for a dialogue between the constructed social being and the powerful forces of the instinctual life, which Surrealism celebrated as the revolutionary tool that would overthrow the control exerted by the conscious mind.

When it came to taking a position vis-à-vis Surrealism's inflammatory erotic language, women artists vacillated. More often than not they approached the issue of eroticism obliquely, focusing attention on aspects of the erotic other than woman's sexual desires. Carrington rejected Freud and turned to alchemy and magic for subjects; Tanning transferred sexuality from the world of adults to that of children. Paintings like Palaestra (1947) and Children's Games (1942) reveal nubile young girls caught in moments of ecstatic transformation. Their bodies respond to unseen forces which sweep through the room, animating drapery and whipping the children's hair and garments into the air.

Unmoved by Surrealist theorizing on the subject of erotic desire, and by Freud's writings, women appear to have found little theoretical support for the more liberated understanding of sexuality which Surrealism pursued so avidly. Turning to their own sexual reality as source and subject, they were unable to escape the conflicts engendered by their flight from conventional female roles. The imagery of the sexually mature, sometimes maternal, woman has almost no place in the work of women Surrealists. Their conflicts about this aspect of female sexuality reflect the difficult choices forced upon women of their generation who attempted to reconcile traditional female roles with lives as artists in a movement that prized the innocence of the child-woman and violently attacked the institutions of marriage and the family.

Less than positive views of maternity carry over into their work. The most disturbing images of maternal reality in twentieth-century art are to be found in Tanning's Maternity (1946), Varo's Celestial Pablum (1958), and Kahlo's My Birth (1932), Henry Ford Hospital (1932), and other paintings on this theme. In Varo's Celestial Pablum, an isolated woman sits in a lonely tower, a blank expression on her exhausted face, and mechanically grinds up stars which she feeds to an insatiable moon. The somber palette and matt surface cast their own pall over the work. These paintings are remarkable for their powerful imaging of the conflicts inherent in maternity: the physical changes initiated by pregnancy and lactation, the mother's exhaustion and feared loss of autonomy. The element of erotic violence so prevalent in the work of male Surrealist artists makes its first appearance here in the works of Tanning, Meret Oppenheim (b.1913), and Kahlo that deal with childbirth and motherhood. Now it is violence directed against the self, not projected onto another, violence inseparable from the physiological reality of woman's sexuality and the social construction of her feminine role.

For Kahlo, as for other women artists associated with the Surrealists, painting became a means of sustaining a dialogue with inner reality. Surrealism sanctioned personal exploration for both men and women; in doing so, it legitimized a path familiar to many women and gave new artistic form to some of the conflicts confronting women in early twentieth-century artistic movements.

NAN ENSTAD (ESSAY DATE 1999)

SOURCE: Enstad, Nan. "Movie-Struck Girls: Motion Pictures and Consumer Subjectivities." In Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, pp. 161-200. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
In the following excerpt, Enstad explores the relationship between women and the film industry in the early twentieth century.
[Working women walking on Eighth Avenue see] the flashing, gaudy, poster-lined entrances of Hickman's and of the Galaxy. These supply the girls with a "craze," the same that sends those with a more liberal allowance to the [stage] matinees. Their pictures spread out adventure and melodrama which are soul-satisfying.
—Ruth True, The Neglected Girl (1914)¹
Mary's eyes were smoldering that day with the fire of strange yearnings. She moved about her work as one walking in a dream—burning with a life that was not the life around her.
—opening lines, print version of What Happened to Mary (1912)²

During the same years that working women went on strike in unprecedented numbers, they were creating a motion picture "craze." Working women attended movies by 1905, but only formed a distinctive "fan" relationship with them after 1908. As reformer Ruth True noted, women's fascination with the movies exceeded the experience of the films themselves. Young working women gazed at the "flashing, gaudy" posters that lined the entrances to nickelodeon theaters, daydreamed about stars and about becoming stars themselves, and attended motion pictures regularly to socialize and to imaginatively step into the visual fantasies of the silver screen. When these women consumed motion pictures, they created new urban experiences and occupied the public spaces of streets and theaters in new ways. They built particular and distinctive social practices around motion picture consumption and incorporated the movies into their established consumer practices around dime novels and fashion, weaving motion pictures into their identities as ladies. Like the strikes of the 1910s, the movies signaled a new relationship of working women to public life. Of course, the motion picture industry did not promote the democratic participation in economic decisions that unions had sought. But for working women, the movies became a parallel site of social change in the public realm.

Neighborhood theaters, called nickelodeons, boomed after 1905. In the scramble for more narratives to satisfy eager audiences, producers translated a plethora of print fiction genres into film form, including dime novel romances. Working women saw elements of the dime novel romance formula in a variety of short melodramas after 1908, as producers presented working heroines who encountered adventures, gained inheritances, or married millionaires. In July 1912, the Edison Company and The Ladies' World, a popular magazine, collaborated to produce the sensationally popular serial story What Happened to Mary. Edison released the story about a New York working woman in twelve twenty-minute film episodes to coincide with publication of the segments in print form in The Ladies' World. This successful collaboration would be the first in a long line of motion picture serials featuring female heroines. Mary and her successors excelled in their work, triumphed over personal danger, heroically saved others, and gained promotion and respect. Romance took a back seat to adventure in these narratives; the working heroines captured robbers, raced through burning buildings, and leapt from moving freight trains. They did not, however, go on strike.

The motion picture theaters constituted a new public space in the early twentieth century, uniquely open to working-class women of all ethnicities.³ As historian Kathy Peiss notes, when movies moved from the arcade kinetoscopes to nickelodeons after 1905, women's attendance soared.⁴ There were at least six hundred nickelodeons in greater New York City by 1910, showing movies to 1.5 million people, or a quarter of the city's population, each week. Most of this early audience was working class. Historian Steven Ross notes that 72 percent of those attending were blue collar workers, 25 percent were clerical workers, and only 3 percent belonged to the "leisure" class. Women's attendance was greater for this amusement than for any other in the city: they comprised 40 percent of the working-class audience in 1910.⁵ Whereas many working-class parents believed that other places of public amusement, such as dance halls or amusement parks, were not appropriate for unchaperoned daughters, they thought the nickelodeons were safe and respectable. The motion picture theaters thus constituted a new public sphere. Film historian Miriam Hansen argues that while the movies certainly did not operate like Habermas's ideal of democratic exchange, they did serve as a new "public space, part of a social horizon of experience" for a new kind of collective, the audience.⁶ Motion pictures, then, offered both new urban experiences and new kinds of commodities to working women.

Working women's public mobility allowed them to enact public subjectivities within consumer culture. As part of these new subjectivities, working women claimed an active gaze in the streets and in the local theaters. This gaze was a consumer gaze—that is, it was tied to and justified by a consumer activity—but it was not merely acquisitive. Rather, it was interwoven with complex narratives and fantasies. When working women gazed at posters, dreamed of stars, and attended shows, they enacted subjectivities in a new public arena and engaged contradictions that they experienced as immigrant women workers, just as they did in their consumption of fashion and dime novel products. The motion picture serials directly catered to working women with visual fantasies related to their established practices of ladyhood. The serials solicited an identification with heroines who desired—and achieved—lavish social recognition both as workers and as women, in jobs that delivered adventure. This is not to say that motion pictures were an arena of freedom for working women; theaters and the range and content of films themselves regularly replicated hierarchies working women found elsewhere in society. Nevertheless, women's social practices of motion picture consumption generated new resources for the creation of public identities.

This chapter explores working women's relationship to the movies with the methods used to examine their experiences with fiction and fashion in chapters 1 and 2. First, I analyze motion picture production, particularly how the industry shaped and limited the range and content of the products available for women's consumption. I will trace the emergence of the serials compared to other types of film narratives, and the film industry's production of early "fan" products. I turn next to working women's consumption of motion pictures, focusing on the social practices they made in relation to the movies. As in chapter 2, I will distinguish between the acts of consumption—buying tickets, looking at posters, attending theaters—and the imaginative experiences of the films themselves. All of these aspects of consumption worked together as women imbued "the movies" with significance.

Studying working women's experiences with motion pictures presents a unique problem: identifying which specific films to study. While working women's consumption of all types of popular culture was varied, many read an identifiable set of dime novels and dressed in particular and distinctive styles. However, they saw all types of motion pictures. Nickelodeons typically showed four or five short films on the same bill, interspersed with singers or vaudeville acts. Exhibitors demanded that distributors provide a mixed bill of different types of narratives. Working women saw them all: social problem films, Westerns, melodramas, comedies, labor-capital films, travel films, railroad dramas, adventure serials, and military films. The problem of assessing women's relationship to the movies is thus complex. Historian Kathy Peiss has focused on comedies produced before 1910, citing a 1907 source indicating that comedies were the most popular with early movie audiences. Peiss's results are important and pathbreaking, but largely predate 1908, the era when more complex dramatic narratives developed and working women formed more specific fan practices. Historian Elizabeth Ewen has looked at popular stars and the types of stories that they played in. This too stands as an important beginning, but is focused primarily on the feature film era, 1915 and after.⁷

Here I focus on the adventure serials, in particular What Happened to Mary and the long-lived Hazards of Helen (Kalem, 1914), because they had roots in dime novel formulas and were aimed at working women as well as a broader audience. The market for motion pictures was relatively undifferentiated; that is, everyone attended all the time rather than dividing into particular market segments according to different interests. However, by 1909, producers standardized and differentiated fictional film products into types of narratives that they knew would be more appealing to some segments of the audience than others. Like the early story papers of the 1840s, the mixed bill of nickelodeon theaters operated on the principal of "something for everyone." Working-class women constituted a significant portion of the motion picture audience; it was in producers' interests to maintain their loyalty while ensuring that films would entice the widest possible audience approval. The adventure serials, beginning with What Happened to Mary, grew directly out of dime novel romance conventions and tapped a female reading public through their connection with The Ladies' World, a "low-brow" women's magazine. More than any other type of narrative, they emerged from, and intended to reproduce, established fiction consumption practices of working women. Thus, the serials are the best place to start examining specific film texts in relationship to working women's social practices of film consumption during the formative years of 1909 to 1916.

The motion picture industry struggled to become big business in the early 1900s, and that struggle profoundly shaped the films that working women could see by 1909. Leading producers pursued three related goals in their efforts to organize the early film industry and maximize their profits. First, they attempted to control the production, distribution, and exhibition of films. Second, they increased the pace and volume of production, and third, they standardized the film product to make it as predictable and interchangeable as possible, while maintaining audience enthusiasm. These forces shaped and limited the narratives, but they did not eliminate creativity. Rather, scenario writers, directors, actors, and producers applied their creative energies at once to economic and aesthetic challenges in this rapidly developing form of visual storytelling. As with dime novels and fashion products, the relations of production conferred both limits and possibilities on the products. When those commodities entered social circulation, working women wound them into their own social practices and imbued them with their own meanings.

Some film and social historians have celebrated the relative lack of organization of the young film industry before Hollywood, seeing it as providing a particular possibility for working-class expression. They note the predominantly working-class immigrant audience for movies before World War I, the preponderance of narratives representing working-class life, and the large number of immigrants among the independent film producers, particularly after 1912. The silent movies, according to these historians, were largely produced by, represented, and were viewed by the working class. These historians celebrate the silent era as a time of relative freedom of expression for film makers.⁸ In contrast, they see the Hollywood era as the time when movies became a big business and drove out working-class interests.

The relationship between working-class audiences and the developing popular culture industry of film is more complex than this view suggests. As a number of other film historians have pointed out, the industry wooed a middle-class audience as early as 1908. This is not, however, to claim that the movies were "middle class" rather than "working class." Indeed, to ascribe a class designation to a set of products deflects attention from how the capitalist marketplace shapes cultural products for all classes. The view that Hollywood signaled the decline of free expression because of the rise of rationalized production misconstrues the early industry and seems to assume that meaningful film can only be produced outside of the capitalist marketplace. Ironically, critics of the later, Hollywood era unwittingly maintain the bourgeois myth that some cultural artifacts under capitalism are free of market interests. However, as chapter 1 argued, this myth operated principally to maintain class distinction through commodities while denying that it was doing so. When some film and social historians celebrate the early movies as free or working-class expression, they underestimate the ways that the young industry's strenuous attempts to rationalize and organize production profoundly shaped its products by 1909, including those that overtly represented class conflict.

The emergence of the adventure serials was itself a result of economic interests and requires a more nuanced analysis. The serials engaged central issues of gender and class, but were standardized products of the most rationalized arm of the film industry. They offered powerful representations of women as heroic workers but, like the dime novel romances, did not represent working-class women's strikes or overt political action. Indeed, with very few exceptions, the motion picture industry did not make films that represented groups of women on strike. While this omission was consistent with the dime novel formula, it seems odd in the context of the dramatic strikes of the 1910s, especially considering the fact that movies about male strikers were rather common. As Steven Ross has pointed out, motion picture producers created a genre they called the "labor-capital film," which represented strike scenes from a variety of perspectives and served as a medium for social debate about the role of labor unionism in U.S. society.⁹ But labor-capital films only very rarely represented groups of women strikers. As a public realm of debate, the motion pictures replicated and even accentuated exclusions that existed elsewhere in public life. These exclusions did not occur naturally; they were effects of producers' efforts to standardize film production between 1908 and 1912.

Before 1908, many producers perceived the young U.S. film industry to be in a crisis. The simultaneous emergence of the fictional story film and the growth of nickelodeons around 1905 drew an ever-expanding audience with a voracious appetite for new motion pictures. As film historian Eileen Bowser notes, the French company Pathé-Frères filled most of the spectacular demand for films in the United States. Companies based in the United States felt hampered by the depression of 1907 and by the distribution and exhibition system, and were reluctant or unable to increase the capital investment necessary to expand production. The system of distribution and exhibition in the U.S. was entirely unregulated; films could be rented out repeatedly, providing increased profits to distributors and exhibitors but limiting producers' sales.¹⁰

The Edison Company led the move to gain control over production, distribution, and exhibition by founding the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) in December of 1908 with a group of eight other large producers, a distributor, and Eastman Kodak, the principal manufacturer of film stock. The MPPC consisted of many companies, such as Edison, that held patents for technology used in production and projection of motion pictures. By limiting rights to use of such technology to its members and licensees, the MPPC gained control of the industry, including the distribution system. Independent companies could and did exist, but they faced shortages of good materials and equipment, limited access to distributors, and regular lawsuits for patent infringement. Once the MPPC ensured that licensed producers would make tidy profits on their capital investments, the rate and scale of film production increased rapidly. The MPPC held the reins of the industry until 1912, when independent producers, and eventually the U.S. government, successfully challenged its monopolistic practices in court. During those four years, however, the film industry stabilized and underwent dramatic and irreversible changes.¹¹

The crisis in the film industry was not only economic but also aesthetic. As producers created more, and more complex, narratives to please clamoring audiences, they found viewers could not follow the silent stories. After the formation of the MPPC, producers responded by changing the mode of narration to utilize visual cues that could be widely understood across differences in class or national origin, including an increased number of camera cuts, closer shots, and new styles of acting.¹² Bowser argues that the changes in American film production originating in 1908 and 1909 were as radical as those at any other time in film history, and profoundly altered the relationship between spectator and film narrative. Before 1905, motion picture producers supplied a variety of narratives to the new theaters, including "actuality" films, comedies or jokes rooted in vaudeville traditions, lantern-slide shows, and comic strips. Directors shot these early narratives in presentational style; that is, the camera viewed the action as though it were on a stage, mimicking the live theater experience. Such techniques did not work well with more complex fictional narratives. In response to this problem, producers layered an increased number of camera shots to create depth and point of view, effectively bringing the spectator's view into the frame of action. Spectators now viewed scenes as invisible participants rather than as a removed audience. Closer shots accentuated this sense of intimacy, as spectators could see subtle shifts in emotion in actors' faces and postures. As a result, acting styles moved away from the large gestures and pantomime that worked to convey emotion on the stage. All of these techniques made possible a more distinctive and elaborate imaginative relationship between film viewers and motion pictures, particularly viewers' closer identification with film stars, and led to the birth of the star system.

Once producers reformed the system of distribution so that it granted them more control and profit, they rationalized production in order to increase their rate and volume of film output. A principal change involved modifying the role of the director. Previously, directors typically came up with stories, conveyed their intentions to actors, and worked the photoplays out in short rehearsals before shooting. As producers sought to increase the number and complexity of fictional narratives this system became impractical. First, it was too slow. Second, it worked better with shorter, less complicated narratives than it did with the longer films in which directors layered shots in more complex ways. Increasingly, companies hired scenario writers to craft visual stories according to the emerging types or genres of film narratives. Producers incorporated editorial practices from the cheap fiction industry, or "the fiction factory," as writer William Wallace Cook called it, and hired many writers who also wrote for that industry. The New York Times in 1913 noted that scenario writers were valued most for their ability to write according to specific instructions: "Many of [the scenario writers] work on order. A company suddenly requires a play about a certain actor, a certain locality, or possibly an animal it has purchased. Immediately, the company communicates with one of its writers, tells its needs and asks for a script, 'within a day or so.'… Companies are always desirous of finding new authors in this by-order method." The Times asserted that story ideas themselves were a dime a dozen. Companies paid scenario writers to explain "in short, jerky clauses, the direction for every movement on the part of each actor." Bannister Merwin and James Oppenheim, both of whom wrote scenarios for What Happened to Mary, were two of the six successful writers that the Times named as making scenario writing a "lucrative profession" because they were willing and able to provide what producers wanted.¹³

In some cases, scenario writing was even more rationalized. While writers like Merwin, Oppenheim, and Cook supplied fully developed visual narratives in scenario form, others simply sent plot ideas to editors who then assigned them to staff writers to develop into movie scenarios. For the freelance writers or amateurs supplying ideas, scenario writing was not particularly lucrative. As in dime novel fiction writing, much of the financial risk and unpredictability of the business was borne by the writers rather than by the producers. In 1909, Cook answered a Vitagraph advertisement he saw in the newspaper that claimed "We pay $10 to $100 for Picture Plays." Cook sent in an idea, and was shocked to receive a $10 check in return. Upon querying Vitagraph, Cook received a letter from the editor explaining that "The manuscript has to be revised in almost every instance in order to put it in practical shape for the directors.…The members of our staff, who are obliged to write practical working scenarios, appreciate the above facts because they know what it means to perfect a scenario with the synopsis of the story, the properties, settings, etc., etc." But mastering the art of "short, jerky clauses" would not raise Cook's rate appreciably: "The editor merely surmises, or so we think, that a thoroughly original manuscript in practical shape would be worth at least $25, but we seldom get one of that kind." Cook eventually did master the art of scenario writing, and in 1910 wrote a "good many" scenarios for an unnamed company that paid him $35 each. Cook complained that scenario writers were paid poorly, endured slow responses on scripts from movie companies, and were not listed as authors in the film credits. From his experiences in both dime novel and scenario writing, Cook considered, "Possibly the film manufacturers borrow their ideas of equitable treatment for the writer from some of the publishing houses."¹⁴

Such editorial control over scenario writing went hand-in-hand with creating a standardized product, which would make the industry more predictable and profit margins more stable. Films before 1909 ranged from 200 feet to 1000 feet in length; setting a standard length made it possible to set a single price for films, making them more interchangeable from a marketing perspective. In addition, producers sought to create customer loyalty by promoting films through company brand names as well as by genre. A distributor could put a Biograph drama in a package with an Kalem adventure serial episode and a Vitagraph comedy, for example, and exhibitors and audiences would have an approximate idea of what they would receive. Bowser notes that Biograph films were the most popular with U.S. audiences by 1910. As early as 1909, then, standardization meant that the creative energy of motion picture makers would be channeled into particular "lines" of roughly predictable products. Finally, the shift in film techniques was also part of the effort to standardize film products. Producers needed the widely understood visual cues to ensure audience involvement with the films. The new use of camera cuts and close shots invited strong emotional responses to the film.¹⁵

Ultimately, the purpose of a standardized product was to standardize audience attendance and emotional response to the films as much as possible. Producers wished not only to make movies but also to create a pleasurable movie-going experience that could be replicated on a weekly or even nightly basis. This involved shaping both industry structures and audiences' desires into a workable system of motion picture production and reception. Perhaps the most challenging element of this was capturing audience members' imaginations and desires in predictable and reproducible ways. Thus, it was at this point in film history (1908-1915) that producers began speaking of "spectators" conceived as individuals responding emotionally to a screen fantasy, as often as they used the older term "audience," which positioned viewers as a group.¹⁶ It would prove very difficult to control the various meanings that viewers took from films, but quite possible to create enough of a satisfying emotional response to ensure increasing popularity and success for the newly structured industry.

The final ingredient necessary to make motion pictures big business was a wider audience at the theaters. Because the industry had developed with a predominantly working-class audience, this meant reaching out to the middle class. Some exhibitors did so by building new, large theaters in theater districts to remove motion pictures from their association with the immigrant, working-class neighborhood nickelodeons.¹⁷ In addition, producers like Edison adopted a Progressive tone, arguing that films could be a tool of uplift for working and middle class alike. Like vaudeville producers two decades earlier, producers tailored films to please the desired middle class and even agreed to self-censorship to convince the public of their respectability.¹⁸ But producers could not ignore their working-class customers altogether. Bowser notes that they tried to create "educational" films, but working-class audiences rejected them so exhibitors refused to rent them.¹⁹ Nevertheless, the middle class had an effect on motion pictures long before its members attended movies in great numbers. Indeed, the need to please a middle-class audience, real or only wished-for, played a large role in determining which representations of working women would become standard in the movies.

According to Steven Ross, "social problem" films regularly featured groups of women workers, while labor-capital films almost never did. Social problem films emerged as part of the Progressive mission of some producers and focused on current social issues, including the exploitation of so-called "dependent" workers—women, children, and the elderly. While they regularly exposed the dark side of industrial capitalism, they represented women workers as victims, not as politically empowered strikers. Indeed, Ross notes that in social problem films, "working women were portrayed less as workers than as women in need of constant protection by well-intentioned males." Labor-capital films, however, represented male—not female—workers on strike. According to Ross, who counts 274 labor-capital films produced between 1905 and 1917, this genre conveyed a variety of political perspectives on strikes. But I have found only one film that definitely represented a group of women on strike. Young working-class female characters did appear in labor-capital films, sometimes in heroic roles, but usually as daughters of strikers, not workers or strikers themselves: their loyalty and heroism were defined by their family relationships. In addition, labor-capital films typically represented a single working-class heroine rather than groups of women.²⁰

As chapter 3 noted, many middle-class people were accustomed to and comfortable with representations of working women as victims rather than as strikers. This may explain why film producers largely avoided the women's strikes as starting points for labor-capital films. A narrative that positioned working women as strikers would challenge both unregulated industrial capitalism and the prevalent masculine definition of political actors. Ross, however, praises the labor-capital film for "concentrat[ing] on a more controversial sector of the working class. Instead of focusing on unorganized women, children, and elderly wage earners, their plots dealt with adult male workers who labored in the nation's most contentious and highly organized industries." Such male workers, he notes, could not be construed as victims.²¹ Ross fails to consider that the controversial element of a film sprang not from the sector of the working class it pictured, but from the modes of representation and narration it utilized. As vulnerable victims, immigrant women workers on the screen could solicit pity from audiences. But as political actors, young immigrant women were far more controversial than skilled white men who worked in the highly organized industries of the early twentieth century. Indeed, as chapter 3 showed, some middle-class commentators who supported the shirtwaist strike persisted in representing striking women as victims asking for charity even in the context of overt, dramatic, and often militant political action. Labor-capital films usually focused on the workers most favored by the AFL and those closest to attaining political legitimacy in the eyes of the middle class, particularly Progressives. Both social problem and labor-capital films bore the imprint of producers' goal to please—or minimally offend—a middle-class audience.

The one film that I have found that represented a group of women on strike, The Girl Strike Leader (Thanhouser, 1910), relied as much on the dime novel formula as on labor-capital film conventions to tell its story. Thanhouser released The Girl Strike Leader only five months after the New York shirtwaist strike. In this film, producers did not represent working women merely as victims. Rather, the heroines take action by striking successfully to better their working conditions. At the end, the girl strike leader marries the factory owner, which validated her adventures as a striker and extricated her from labor altogether.²² This film placed the strike in the position of adventures in the dime novel formula, treating women viewers to a familiar ending, but one quite different from the actual conclusion of the shirt-waist strike. Film historians have interpreted the marriage to the factory owner as undercutting the representation of class conflict, but for working women well-versed in dime novel romance conventions, the story could profoundly validate their actions as strikers by rewarding the heroine for brave adventures.²³

The Girl Strike Leader fit into a developing genre of female adventure films, popular between 1908 and 1912, as much as into the labor-capital genre. Female adventure films drew on a variety of cheap fiction formulas and formed the basis for later adventure serials. A film "series" was a set of shorts featuring the same characters, such as the Keystone Cops, but unconnected by plot and released on no particular schedule. A "serial," however, tied episodes together by some element of an ongoing plot and was released regularly, usually weekly. Eileen Bowser notes that in 1909 the Kalem Company produced a series about a female spy working for the South in the Civil War that was an important precursor to the serials. The independent Yankee Film Company started a female detective series in 1910 in which a male detective's daughter takes over his job after he is killed.²⁴ Railroad dramas also regularly featured heroic women workers. The Lonedale Operator (Biograph, 1911, d. D. W. Griffith) shows a girl telegraph operator capturing robbers in a scene that at once anticipates both Hazards of Helen and an episode of What Happened to Mary. Indeed, Kalem's popular Hazards of Helen serial reused a railroad drama produced years earlier in order to avoid lags in the production schedule. The Grit of the Girl Telegrapher first appeared in the theaters as a regular short in 1912, and appeared again under the title The Girl Telegrapher's Nerve in March 1916 as episode number 69 of Hazards of Helen. Thus, the serials emerged from a group of films that were already popular with motion picture audiences and drew on popular fiction conventions for female adventures.²⁵ These films largely avoided representing women as victims or as overtly political actors.

The Edison Company joined forces with the magazine The Ladies' World to create the first female adventure serial, What Happened to Mary, in 1912. Edison was the leader in rationalizing film production, and What Happened to Mary was largely a product of producers' attempts to standardize production and reception even further. Edison and The Ladies' World released the twelve-episode story monthly in both film and print formats. The two producers sought a story with elements proven popular with fiction and film audiences. They hired seasoned scenario writer Bannister Merwin to writer the first scenarios and texts for both the film and print versions of the story. Later, James Oppenheim took over the scenarios while Frank Blighton continued the print episodes. The Edison Company used both Merwin and Oppenheim on a regular basis and could be confident that they would supply stories "on order."²⁶ The film company and the magazine publisher overtly aimed to share audiences: the magazine printed photographs from the movie set as illustrations, urged readers to see the film version at the close of each segment, and supplemented the story with articles on how films were made. Film episodes closed with a title urging viewers to read about Mary in The Ladies' World. The continuity of the story helped the Edison Company create a sustained interest in a set of related film products and linked film directly to women's established reading practices.

With What Happened to Mary, The Ladies' World gained motion picture fans as readers and associated itself with the glamour and modernity of the movies. The Ladies' World already had an established audience of working-class and lower middle-class female readers. It had begun as a "mail order journal," that is, it made money from mail-order advertisements printed throughout the magazine rather than from subscriptions. Hundreds of such journals existed at the turn of the century. They were highly accessible: producers mass-mailed the journals to homes free of charge. They typically printed "low-brow" fiction to draw consumers to look at the advertisements. Though considered a step down from the "legitimate" women's journals, such as Ladies' Home Journal or Woman's Home Companion, mail-order journals distributed a great deal of fiction to working people. In 1907, the post office withdrew mail-order journals' second-class mailing privileges unless they produced legitimate subscription lists, paid in advance. This drove many journals out of business immediately, and by 1912 the future of The Ladies' World, whose subscription rate was fifty cents per year, was in question. But within less than a year, after five episodes of What Happened to Mary, the editor credited the serial for the bulk of 100,000 new subscriptions.²⁷

The Edison Company and The Ladies' World heavily promoted the film and print story through the new star system and together shaped a fan culture. Before 1909, producers did not divulge the names of film actors. Rather, they operated with a stock system in which they steadily employed a group of actors whom they assigned to play parts as needed. By 1909, audiences were clamoring to know the names of the actors with whom they emotionally identified. Producers soon realized that this avid interest among the new fans, many of whom were working women, could be very lucrative, and began advertising motion pictures with the stars' names and photographs.²⁸ The Edison Company hired the popular Mary Fuller to play the leading role and launched an aggressive promotional campaign. Fuller had starred in female adventure shorts already and was a proven hit with audiences. One reviewer remarked on the Edison Company's "striking advertising campaign," which made him confident that all of his readers knew Fuller was the film's star even before the motion picture opened. In addition, The Ladies' World included photographs of and articles about Mary Fuller.²⁹ As part of the promotion of Mary, The Ladies' World and the Edison Company offered some of the film industry's first fan products. The Ladies' World encouraged admirers to buy "the Mary hat," modeled in the advertisement by Mary Fuller, a "What Happened to Mary Board Game," and a "What Happened to Mary Jigsaw Puzzle." The producers invited additional suggestions from readers: "It would seem only logical that we should have 'Mary' hats and gowns—perhaps a 'Mary' color for the women who are her admirers.… Perhaps there are other entertaining or utilitarian purposes to which the character of 'Mary' may be applied; and perhaps there are readers … who can originate ideas that have not occurred to the originators of 'Mary.' If so, let us have them."³⁰ Serial producers navigated uncharted territory in the consumer culture industry by requesting the guidance of working-class and lower-middle-class women.

Producers also relied on consumers to guide them in creating the plot of What Happened to Mary. Through promotional contests, producers encouraged fans' imaginative engagement with Mary and gained audience response from women readers. Each month The Ladies' World staged a contest that awarded $100 for the essay that best answered the question "What Happened to Mary Next?" The magazine reported that it received 2,000 entries in the first month of the contest and that by the fifth month the numbers approached 10,000. Three or four contest winners were published each month. On two occasions the winning essays for the contest did indeed outline the plot for the story that month.³¹ The ongoing contest informed the producers of audience desires that they could then utilize in shaping the unfolding narrative. In addition, the contest encouraged readers to create an imaginative fantasy world around What Happened to Mary. Such participation in the narrative could promote loyal purchases of movie tickets and magazines.

Other film producers soon tried to replicate What Happened to Mary's great success with serials of their own. The Selig Company joined with the Chicago Tribune to produce The Adventures of Kathlyn in 1913, and dozens of others followed. While What Happened to Mary was released on a monthly basis, later serials appeared weekly. The adventure serials quickly became a new and noted genre in silent film. By April 1914 Variety magazine declared that, "The serial thing in movies has come to stay. There's hardly a big concern now that isn't getting out a melodramatic series in which a young woman is the heroine and the camera has her having hair breadth escapes by the score."³² Many of the serials featured wage-earning women and some were detective stories, but all centered on adventure. As a group, the serials were products of producers' well-planned efforts to capture and sustain audience interest. For working women, though they contained no depictions of collective action, they constituted an exciting type of film product with roots in familiar fiction formulas.

Despite producers' self-conscious efforts to rationalize production and shape consumption, the movies took on new meaning once in social circulation. Producers could not fully control how working women wove motion pictures into the social fabric of their daily lives. Indeed, the cultural impact of the movies was far greater than the visual experience of the films themselves. Like dime novels and fashion, the meanings of motion pictures emerged in part from the social practices of the working women who consumed them. When working women bought tickets, viewed posters, dreamed of stars, and attended theaters, they made motion pictures part of their collective culture, including their workplace culture.

The ways working women acquired their movie tickets greatly influenced the kind of experience they had at neighborhood theaters. As working-class communities incorporated motion pictures into their daily routines, they blended family and ethnically based leisure customs with women's new patterns of consumption. Working women attended motion pictures with family groups, dates, and alone. Motion pictures became a new ethnic community event that everyone could attend, like picnics in the park, religious holiday celebrations, and weddings. One observer noted that motion picture theaters were practically the only place, along with public parks, where "whole families can together enjoy any kind of recreation." Another remarked in 1907, "Father and mother, the baby, the older children, the grandparents—all were there."³³ Depending on how family economies were managed, the price of a working daughter's ticket might come from the family purse or from her own wages after the bulk had been turned over to the mother. Either way, women's wages contributed to ticket purchases, but their position as dependent daughters would be reinforced if their tickets were paid out of family funds. Many girls and young women probably had their first experiences at the movies with their families, reinforcing their family-based identities in the new public arena.

Even as motion picture theaters fit into established neighborhood leisure practices, they fostered new forms of dating that were free of direct supervision and also considered respectable. Working women often attended motion pictures with young men who paid for their tickets. Reformer Ruth True noted that many workers did not hurry home after work but would "linger with a boy companion making 'dates' for a 'movie.'" This way of getting through the nickelodeon door set in motion a quite different set of social relations than when women attended with families. At motion picture theaters, working women had unprecedented opportunities for social intimacy with men. Jane Addams noted that the "very darkness of the room, necessary for an exhibition of the films, is an added attraction to many young people, for whom the space is filled with the glamour of love making." Such glamour must have been intensified by the occasional larger-than-life representations of romance on the silver screen. Many middle-class reformers found this attraction alarming and warned regularly against the "danger of undue familiarity made possible by dim lights."³⁴ Nevertheless, working-class parents continued to see the space as safe and respectable, perhaps because there were so many families there. Young working women and men thus made the movies a site of romantic and sexual experimentation and change.

When women gained access to motion picture theaters through dates with men, they participated in a developing sexual economy in which their appearance carried high value. The purchase of the movie ticket was only one item in a series of exchanges. According to middle-class reformers, men regularly expected "payment" for their movie tickets in the form of sexual relations: "They do not treat for nothing," warned one. Reformer Mary Simkhovitch noted that when a young woman went weekly with a man to the movies, he expected in return that she would "go with no one else and … [would] give him the privileges of engagement." Simkhovitch noted that this could lead to trouble: "Sometimes a passion for the theater will lead a girl to go with a man with whom she is unwilling to keep company and yet who expects his payment." The movies thus fit into the sexual economy of "treating" described by Kathy Peiss, in which payment for dates carried a tacit expectation for reciprocal payment of engagement or sexual favors.³⁵

From many working women's perspectives, however, they had already paid up front. In this sexual economy, the first step often was women's cultivation of an attractive appearance, which solicited the men's purchase. Fashion was necessary to achieve visibility. Jane Addams recorded that one young woman stole a "mass of artificial flowers with which to trim a hat," because she believed that "a girl has to be dressy if she expects to be seen." The woman was reportedly afraid of losing the attention of a man who had taken her to the nickelodeon. "If he failed her," Addams explained, "she was sure that she would never go again, and she sobbed out incoherently that she 'couldn't live at all without it.'" As chapter 2 noted, in a context in which women were systematically paid less than men, clothing could be seen as an investment in the future if it helped women make a good match. Dates to the movies were smaller prizes, but functioned as part of the same system. Reformer Clara Laughlin observed two women who "limited their indulgence in nickel shows" for several weeks in order to save money to buy very dressy clothes on the installment plan. Their clothes, in turn, won them dates that led to weeks' worth of regular movie tickets.³⁶ Though successful, the two women found themselves doubly in debt: to the store that sold them the clothes, and to the men whom they "owed" for the movie tickets, and who did not recognize their initial payment. Thus, women's love of the movies could socialize them simultaneously in the new practices of heterosexuality and in U.S. values of capitalist investment, and potentially also teach them the pitfalls of both for those in economically disadvantaged positions. Even when women attended the movies with dates for the "glamour of love making," they could find themselves enmeshed in new gendered hierarchies.

The newest pattern of leisure at the motion picture theaters was working women attending alone or with female friends. They bought their own tickets with their wages and often met groups of other young people once at the theater. While some working women also went to dance halls and amusement parks with female friends, the cheapness and respectability of the movies made them especially accessible. Louise Odencrantz notes that though young Italian women rarely socialized without a chaperon, many "were allowed to go out without their parents [to] moving-picture shows." Filomena Ognibene, an Italian woman garment maker, recalled that "the one place I was allowed to go by myself was the movies. I went to the movies for fun. My parents wouldn't let me go out anywhere else, even when I was twenty-four." Reformers noted that many working women attended the movies at least once a week, some with even greater frequency. Ognibene went to the movies two or three times each week.³⁷ When women used their wages for their own evening amusements, they laid claim to the practices and privileges of male wage-earners, just as they did when they bought clothing and dime novels. In addition, in these cases they occupied the public space of motion picture theaters outside of family or dating relationships.

Women's social practices of attending theaters and engaging in related fan activities also inflected the motion picture experience with specific meanings. For working women, the films themselves were not the only, and sometimes not the principal, draw. The nickelodeon served as a "general social center and club house," in Jane Addams' words, for people of all ages. For one woman worker who lived in a New York boarding house, having a place to talk in mixed-gender groups was the primary reason to go to the movies. She and a group of friends talked one night in her hallway "as it was too wet and cold to walk around the streets. After shifting from one foot to the other several times and being very tired of standing, some one suggested that we either go to a moving picture theater or to a cafe to have a drink." Likewise, a study of Progressive-run organized "homes" for working women showed that "in houses where there was only one reception room, the girls usually preferred to go to the movies or places giving an opportunity for intimate conversation."³⁸ Women who lived in tenements also lacked space for socializing. Movie audiences often talked through the films, interacting with the characters or ignoring the screen to continue a conversation.³⁹ The film itself was certainly important, but such testimony demonstrates how women used motion picture theaters to create a new public site for themselves. They imbued the movies with a sense of unprecedented freedom of mobility—a new and exciting public identity—quite apart from the content of specific films.

Working women's emerging fan practices claimed access to public space through the assertion of an active consumer gaze. Women's consumption of new fan products—particularly the posters at theater entrances and the photographs of stars that exhibitors often handed out free of charge—shaped a distinctive "fan culture" that far exceeded the event of motion picture attendance. Their fan practices also became part of workplace culture as women discussed motion picture stars and plots, much as they talked about dime novels, at the shops. In this way, women imbued both their night life and their daytime life with the glamour of the movies. Fan paraphernalia certainly was not working women's own cultural creation, but the product of producers' promotional efforts. Nevertheless, when fans wove the posters and photos into their own lives, they created what historian Kathryn Fuller called "a truly popular culture of film."⁴⁰

Specifically, posters functioned like shop windows to legitimate women's presence in the urban landscape and their active gaze at products and images that filled the modern city. Walter Benjamin notes that the rationalization of industry and the reverence for "reason" that characterized modern life did not drain the urban landscape of myth and magic. On the contrary, capitalist industry caused a re-enchantment of modern life within the urban consumer spaces of arcades and amusement parks, in the city streets plastered with theater and movie posters, and in the cinema itself.⁴¹ Stores created window displays to beckon and entice; department stores used glass and mirrors to focus shoppers' gazes upon products newly packaged to capture attention and promise delight. While shop windows and nickelodeon exteriors covered with posters existed primarily to sell products, they also became women's spaces. Historian William Leach notes that department stores became important spaces for middle-class women,⁴² but the degree to which working-class women participated in a similar space of visual spectacle and consumer desire on the streets is less acknowledged. Many had an established practice of window shopping on their way home from the factory, laundry, or sweatshop. One reformer noted that for working women "the shop windows … were one of the chief sources of entertainment and delight."⁴³ Gazing at the posters that lined nickelodeon entrances connected closely to this practice. When working women made the nickelodeon exteriors a site for their public subjectivities they made the enchantment of the city part of their own subcultural landscape, and made an active and desiring gaze a part of their public identities. Like the use of fashion, the social practice of motion picture consumption negotiated a modern culture that privileged looking in the construction of meaning.

Young working women created somewhat different patterns of consumption of movie posters in the evening than during the day. At evening, poster-lined nickelodeon entrances became sites where both men and women could meet and socialize. Jane Addams recorded that one group of women refused her efforts to interest them in a sponsored day in the country, "because the return on a late train would compel them to miss one evening's performance. They found it impossible to tear themselves away not only from the excitements of the theater itself but from the gaiety of the crowd of young men and girls invariably gathered outside discussing the sensational posters." Social workers Robert Wood and Albert Kennedy found this phenomenon threatening to young women, noting that "the crowds outside the door [of the motion picture theater], the lurid and sensational advertisements, and the absence of all chaperonage, are sources of danger."⁴⁴ Posters allowed working women to linger on the street in mixed-gender groups that were not composed primarily of dating couples.

During the day, working women looked at motion picture posters on their way to and from work, much as they gazed in shop windows at the latest fashions. Louise de Koven Bowen noted that two workers at a candy factory combined window shopping and gazing at posters: "On their way to and from the factory Hilda and Freda would often stop and gaze longingly in the shop windows … or they would read the fascinating posters which described the delights of the theatre they had no money to enter."⁴⁵ Some working women also looked at posters while on their lunch breaks. The brief time allowed—usually only thirty to forty minutes—and inclement weather often kept women inside the factories. But on occasion they took the opportunity to leave and linger on the streets. Reformer Harriet McDonald Daniels worried that the short lunch periods could lead the working woman astray. "On every side the picture shows flaunt their lurid posters before her eyes and on every corner and before every entrance groups of young men congregate to 'treat.'" The lunch break was usually too short for women to actually attend the movies, but like reading a dime novel, gazing at a poster could interrupt the tedium of the workday with a splash of color and a romantic image. Workers gazed at stars whose fame represented a counterpoint to their own devalued labor. Daniels believed Italian women to be particularly susceptible to such pleasures, precisely because their parents otherwise limited their freedom of movement in public. Some Italian women did not even walk to work without escort, but were accompanied to the factory door by brothers. Daniels wrote, "During working hours she is under the watchful eye of the boss, out of working hours she is under the strict surveillance of her parents; during this one little hour she is free and it would be strange indeed if in many cases she were not led astray."⁴⁶ Thus, although Italian women generally had less mobility in public than Jewish women, their social practices of moviegoing, including viewing posters, did allow them to occupy new public settings.

When working women looked at shop windows and movie posters they legitimated their public presence through a consumer gaze. But this gaze was not simply acquisitive. Rather, it connected to a complex realm of fantasy, imagination, and desire. In particular, posters prompted the imagination by presenting single images from larger narratives. Commentators noted the power of these large, colorful, and dramatic displays to capture attention. Reformer Michael Davis called the motion picture poster "a psychological blow in the face." He explained that "the poster is to catch the eye of the street passenger; it must hold him up," and described how a poster could suggest a sensational story with a single image:

The poster takes some feature or even suggestion of the performance having an elemental appeal, and exaggerates this to a point sometimes passing all resemblance to the actual show. Thus, a black-whiskered villain stands flourishing a revolver; Slouch-hat Charlie smites the swell with a bludgeon, while pals make off with the lady; by the side of the bleeding father, the pale hero utters a fully printed oath of revenge; a short-skirted female dances upon a globe of the world, supported by three gilded youths gazing upward! These are but four recollections of reality.⁴⁷

Working women's social practice of gazing at posters connected to a larger imaginative world, just as looking at shop windows connected to working ladyhood. Crucially, working women had great latitude to make their own meanings from the posters, both individually and in conversation with each other.

The significance of this active and imaginative gaze in public spaces has often been dismissed as acquisitive consumerism. But in important ways, this gaze created a possibility for women's desires, and not only desires for stuff.⁴⁸ The consumer gaze legitimated women's presence in public spaces on a daily, informal basis, altering entrenched gendered patterns of mobility. In addition, in U.S. society, conventions of looking have long operated as a way to signal dominance or deference. Custom allowed propertied white men to look directly at everyone, while women in public had to avert their eyes if they wished to avoid appearing "brazen" or sexually available. While white men became autonomous subjects in part through looking, people of color and all women were properly the objects of that look. When working women gazed at posters in public, they did not overturn established practices, but they did open up a new site of desire that could exceed the expectations of producers. I am not making a liberal pluralist argument that women gained freedom because they now could do what men had done; women's consumer gaze was certainly imbued with new hierarchies. Indeed, the capitalist marketplace repeatedly promised women a "modern" freedom from patriarchal constraints, even as it promoted subjectivities oriented to consumption and reconfigured gendered power relations. Just as the clothing that working women wore was not in itself "democratic," the new gaze was not inherently liberating. However, in both cases producers could not fully control the desires women would develop in relation to consumer culture.

In a context of unrelenting labor and inadequate compensation, the pleasure and power of participating in the new, modern public could be a way to maintain dignity and even a sense of hope, as one striking woman's story about the death of a co-worker indicates. During the Chicago garment strike of 1910, one young woman died after becoming ill while selling union newspapers. A striker described her grief to a reporter for American Magazine: "When I hear for sure thing a girl striker is dead, I lay on the bed crying' like everything. And then Anna, my chum, she lays on the bed cryin', and we both cry together so, on the bed. I don't know the girl, but I was feel so sorry that I must to cry. Oh, she was a poor girl, poorer'n we … and when I think on how it is with poor girls, I can't help from cryin.'" This young woman cried for herself and her poverty as well as for her co-worker. Strike leaders feared the despondency that could overcome workers who saw little in their futures but toil and poverty. The Chicago striker explained how she resisted giving in to her fear and despair:

Then suddenly I stop cryin' and I say to Anna: 'For why do we cry? Ain't she better off'n we! She ain't cold; she don't have to buy no winter underwears; she don't have to worry for the eats; she won't never go scabbin.' She's lucky, lucky more as we.' And Anna says 'Sure she is.' And then we both say ain't it a foolishness for to cry for someone as is luckier'n we. So we get dressed and we goes out on Halsted Street and we looks on nickel picture shows and mill'n'ry windows. Honest, I ain't been to a nickel show in nine weeks and I'm forgettin' how they looks!⁴⁹

These young strikers' trip to look at shop windows and films could be termed an "escape" from their troubles, but this would simplify a complex survival mechanism. The two women certainly did not deny their connection to the dead striker and her oppression—indeed, they declared themselves in a worse condition. Still, they sought out public activities that granted them a modicum of mobility, an active gaze, and a sense of possibility. The next day, they were back at their strike duties.

The quality of some women's desires in relation to motion pictures can be discerned in what contemporaries termed the "movie-struck" fantasy, that is, the dream of a job in motion pictures. As Jane Addams noted, the motion pictures and the evenings at the nickelodeon became "the sole topic of conversation" for working women through the week, "forming the ground pattern of their social life."⁵⁰ A central part of this was discussion of stars and the potential pathways to stardom. Indeed, many working women even applied at the motion picture studios in hopes of gaining more lucrative and rewarding jobs. This reflected close identification with female film heroines, and deep-seated desires for jobs that paid well and valued workers rather than exploiting and discarding them. The movie-struck fantasy was a dream of lavish recognition much like that showered on the working-girl heroines in dime novel romances. It imaginatively combined women's workplace struggles with their rewarding consumer culture experiences and pleasures. Through this collective fantasy, working women wove the movies into the established fantasies of romance, adventure, and sudden changes in fortune that characterized working ladyhood.

Working women became movie-struck after 1908, when the shift in film techniques to closer shots and more cuts fostered a closer identification with players. Audiences clamored for information about and names of particular stars, and in response producers slowly shifted from a stock to a star system. Some neighborhoods, impatient for information from producers, named the stars themselves. The Survey noted in 1909 that "One little girl who plays a prominent part in the pictures of a certain New York manufacturer has been named Annette by her admirers on the East Side. Her appearance on the screen [always] brings a round of applause."⁵¹ Posters aided the imaginative process of identifying with or following particular stars, and producers supplied exhibitors with free photographs of stars to hand out as promotional tools. Working women could fuel their fascination with motion pictures and stars through the penny papers, which regularly carried articles about the movies; trade and fan magazines; and gossip. One observer noted that whatever their means of information, "the children of New York are sophisticated and … know quite as much about motion picture stars and the latest productions."⁵²

Many young people still fantasize about being in the movies, but such dreams were considerably less abstract during the nickelodeon era in New York City. Movies were literally being made on the streets all around working women. Most of the studios still were based in New York, including Biograph and Kalem, and journalists remarked that "a crowd always gathers" to see movies being shot at popular locations like Grand Central Station, a street lined with pushcarts on the Lower East Side, Midtown, or Brooklyn. It was well known that most of the studios hired "extras" or "supers" at the rate of three to five dollars per day, though extras seldom got work on a daily basis.⁵³ This was an enormous sum of money for a factory worker used to making six dollars per week, and the work seemed exciting and easy. In addition, working as an extra was known to be one route to a position as a stock player for a company. Applying for a motion picture position was little different than applying for a factory position, until assigned to a role, as one journalist described: "[The applicant] will have to report every day at eight o'clock, stand in line before the directors as their assistants pick out the 'types,' and then, if she is picked, she will have to make up as a Spanish girl, a factory girl, a 'society lady' wearing a borrowed evening gown, or anything else the director may suggest." The Biograph Company studio at 11 East Fourteenth Street was especially accessible to workers on the Lower East Side, many of whom worked in factories within easy walking distance. Kathryn Fuller noted that the Biograph studio was daily besieged by movie-struck young women hoping to win jobs, and some stars like Lillian and Dorothy Gish actually got their start in this manner.⁵⁴

The ways that producers promoted the earliest stars may have encouraged working women to dream of motion pictures as a possible employment option. Before 1908, commentary on the films focused on technology and explained how the films were made and projected. By 1907 to 1908, the shift in filming techniques and acting styles directed more attention to the actors themselves. Articles about stars in popular and trade papers and magazines from 1909 to 1914 focused on the work of acting in motion pictures, rather than on stars' private lives, as they would by 1915. As film historian Richard de Cordova notes, promotional material created a discourse on acting that participated in the larger effort to assert the respectability and "art" of the cinema, and thus draw a middle-class audience. Nevertheless, the early articles clearly represented the stars as workers whose main task was to express emotions with facial expressions, "gesture," and "motion." Articles regularly explained the action of a picture from the point of view of an actor who endeavored to communicate a particular emotion or perform a stunt. De Cordova rightly argues that this should not be viewed as a demystification of the means of production, but as a creation of a certain kind of knowledge about film.⁵⁵ Indeed, trade papers, newspapers, and magazines portrayed acting both as paid labor and as involving real adventures: "at times the moving picture woman is subjected to dangers. Her horse may throw her when she is doing fast riding, or the wolf dogs may become unmanageable and bite." Articles about Mary Fuller described her work routine of real-life dangers, including sliding down a rope from a seventh-floor window, driving a motor boat, and riding a bucking bronco.⁵⁶ For working women reading the penny press or cheap magazines, this knowledge encouraged fantasies of new, exciting jobs and provided tips on how to act. A Ladies' World article entitled "The Photoplay: An Entertainment and an Occupation" reported that a successful motion picture actress must "be so inspired with her theme, and really feel the part so thoroughly, that she can go through it at a moment's notice. Her facial expressions and movements carry the whole idea to the audience. Then, too, she must learn to move very slowly and deliberately or the actions on the screen will be blurred."⁵⁷ Such press coverage could fan the flames of fantasy by collapsing the distance between paid labor and familiar narratives of adventure. Whereas in the dime novel romances, heroines encountered adventures after losing their jobs, in the movie-struck fantasy stars got paid for adventures in the course of their work.

The movie-struck fantasy is significant not because working women really got jobs in motion pictures—certainly few did. The encouragement women received through promotional material intended to capitalize on movie-struck women's intense loyalty as consumers. Nevertheless, the fantasy provides clues to the imaginative element of movie consumption. In many ways, the movie craze dovetailed with the practices of ladyhood. The latter was a signifying practice, a shifting identity that built upon the exclusions working women faced and the possibilities that consumer culture provided for appropriation of cultural codes. The imaginative self-construction of lady-hood could prepare women to embrace the movie-struck fantasy. Many working ladies would be confident of their ability to fulfill the requirements Mary Pickford claimed qualified one for motion pictures: "A girl cannot take the part of a lady unless she is one—she can not fake poise, grace, repose, the courteous gesture and air of good breeding unless she has the instincts of a lady and the necessary training in manners."⁵⁸ Like the dime novels, the movie-struck fantasy figured a magical transformation that served to confirm one's true inner qualities. Film historian Charles Musser has argued that immigrant audiences constructed fantasies around early stars of silent films, and also enjoyed the ways that the same star could take on dramatically new identities week after week, including diverse ethnic roles. Musser has suggested that immigrants' daily practices of constructing themselves as Americans, with new dress, mannerisms, and patterns of speech, could make them identify with, and enjoy watching, stars do the same thing in the movies. The way that such rapid change was accepted in the movies made them appealing as a counterpoint to the oppressions that immigrants faced. As Musser said, "the movies provided [immigrants] with an alternative to the alienation and struggle experienced while constructing a new world during the course of their everyday lives."⁵⁹ For working women who enacted identities as ladies, the movies provided fantasies and models of magical transformation.

Women's social practices of film consumption thus created a collective culture connected to their consumption of other commodities, such as dime novels and fashion. Film became more than an object or a narrative in women's lives; it became part of their imaginative landscape—or collective dreamworld—and as such was integral to their enacted identities. This collective culture framed women's viewing of specific films, though as with dime novels and fashion, individual idiosyncrasies and multiple possibilities for interpretation ensured that working women made a variety of meanings from those films. We cannot know how different women responded to the content of the posters or the serials. Nevertheless, a close look at how the serials What Happened to Mary and Hazards of Helen solicited audiences' identification and offered them visual fantasies can reveal more about the contours of working women's collective culture of film.⁶⁰

The specific process and mechanism of identification with a fictional character and scenario in print or film has been the subject of great debate in film and literary theory. It is generally accepted that the identifications people make with fictional characters can be very important in how people develop their own identities. Film critics argue that identity emerges not as the sum of the content of images with which people are presented, but from a process of identification rooted in the affective experience of the film. When a spectator comes to identify with a character, she or he takes up residence in a fictional world. The story that the spectator participates in is not real, but his or her responses to it certainly are, and can be formative in the construction of the self. Individuals bring different identities, perspectives, and histories of interpellation to the viewing experience and inevitably make a variety of meanings as they interpret the films for themselves. It is crucial, then, to work with a sophisticated notion of identification that can accommodate the complexity and variability of individual responses.

Film critic Elizabeth Cowie argues that identification occurs not when we see or read about someone who is "like" us, but when we see a character who has a similar "structural relation of desire" to our own. That is, when we can come to desire with a character, we can identify with them, even if the character is of a different gender, class, or race, or is in a story about a different time or culture. According to Cowie, "The pleasure in identification lies not only in what is signified—a meaning—in that traditional realist sense, that is, a coming to know; it also lies in a coming to desire made possible by the scenario of desire which I come to participate in as I watch a film, view an image, or read a text."⁶¹ The protagonist's "characteristics" are less important to the process of identification than her desires and how spectators are invited to participate in them. Following Cowie, I will examine What Happened to Mary and Hazards of Helen for the structural relations of desire of the working-girl heroine, and the ways an identification with her is solicited through print and visual narrative devices. The serials offered working women an identification with a heroine who desired and received dramatic social recognition as a worker and a woman.

What Happened to Mary, like the majority of silent films, no longer exists in film format. However, the print version of the story from The Ladies' World has survived. Comparison of scenario plot descriptions and the print episodes reveals that the film and fiction versions of What Happened to Mary followed the same plot line, although they necessarily used different devices to solicit the identification of viewers and readers. While the film relied on visual cues and conventions, the print version could narrate characters' thoughts and emotions. This created inevitable differences in storytelling. For example, the first film episode began with Mary as an abandoned baby found in a basket on Moseses Island by Billy Peart. A Bioscope review reported that "Mary rapidly grows up, as is the way in films" and the film story continues when she is eighteen. By centering on Mary and her rapid growth, the film signaled to viewers that she, not Billy Peart, would be the protagonist of the story. Through the new techniques of film cuts, the viewer would be a silent observer of the basket being left, and of Mary quickly growing to young womanhood. The print version, in contrast, begins with a description of Mary's appearance as a young woman. Readers learn that she was left on Moseses Island in a basket in a later scene, told as Billy Peart's memory.⁶²

Despite these differences, the print version of What Happened to Mary was remarkable for print fiction in that it solicited readers' identification in large part by portraying looking relations. Bannister Merwin, who wrote both the print and film versions of the early episodes, appears to have structured the magazine story to describe the scenes in the film. The Ladies' World encouraged readers to approach the story as a narration of the motion picture, and provided articles describing how particular central film scenes were made.⁶³ Indeed, the print narrative is almost completely devoid of dialogue; it consists predominantly of visual description. Along with the photographs from the movie set as illustrations, the print version sought to parallel the film experience and allow fans to "read" the movie. Of course, the print version is not the same as the film version and cannot stand in for it. However, a close look at the print version reveals something of the overall experience of the serials. In addition, it reveals a solicitation of identification, through looking and a particular set of desires in the working-class heroine, that would be common to other serials.

The print version of What Happened to Mary designates Mary as the protagonist and solicits identification with her not by consistently narrating from Mary's point of view, but by setting up a suspenseful series of looking relations that encourages an emotional response on her behalf. The opening lines of the story describe an open-ended desire in Mary, a longing for something she cannot name: "Mary's eyes were smoldering that day with the fire of strange yearnings. She moved about at her work as one walking in a dream—burning with a life that was not the life around her." While the story gives an intimate if vague portrayal of Mary's emotional state, like the film it also invites the reader to position herself as part of the scene, observing Mary as one of the villagers: "If you who had known her long had asked her suddenly, 'What is different with you, Mary?' she would have looked at you with startled query … for she did not know that anything was different. Her new yearnings had not yet burst into flames." Readers knew that Mary was the protagonist because it was her desire that they follow and watch. But what did Mary desire? Suddenly, readers discover that Mary is at the harbor, looking at a yacht that has just landed. Four wealthy people get off a launch from the yacht: two older people who are rudely "aloof to her," and a young man and woman. "And the girl's eyes had met Mary's, and something subtle had passed between them—the secret unspoken password of maidenhood."⁶⁴ This scene figures class distinction and the alienation and longing that can go with it for the working class.

Scenes 2 and 3 invite an emotional identification by prompting anxiety and indignance on Mary's behalf. Readers see Mary enter the store owned by her adoptive stepfather, Billy Peart. She does not look at him as she heads to the ice cream parlor in the rear, but readers see him watching her: "Billy glanced at her in his quick, hard, speculative way, and clamped his lips together in a fashion even more frog-like than usual … and shifted his weight from foot to foot." Thus readers are cued that Billy is not a person to be trusted: he's speculative, shifty, and nervous. The fact that readers see Peart but Mary is not watching inaugurates a device common to the What Happened to Mary story and later serials: readers know something the protagonist does not. The scene might mildly prompt readers to be wary of Billy for Mary's sake. In scene 3, readers witness Mrs. Peart yelling at and physically threatening Mary for being away from the shop for too long. Mary, however, does not answer, but "smiled faintly at the two children, who were tasting [ice cream]." This scene demonstrates that Mary is oppressed in her household, and that she is good and kind to children in spite of it. These two scenes solicit an identification imbued with feelings of indignance or anxiety for Mary, so good yet treated so badly. Readers may have wanted to defend her.

Scene 4 of the first episode sets up the soon-to-be-familiar pattern of suspense, in which the audience knows more about the heroine's danger than she initially does. Readers and film viewers learn that when Peart found Mary in the basket, he also found a note promising him $1,000 if he marries her to a local man before she turns twenty-one years old. Mary, however, is unaware of her adoptive status or Peart's financial interest in her marrying. Readers see Mary in town, approached by a young local man. They then learn that this whole scene has been witnessed by Billy Peart. The print version has to narrate Billy's gaze sequentially, but the film version could have placed Peart in the background through much of the encounter, letting the viewer know that this scene was of interest to him. The print version notes, "Billy stopped in his tracks, his bulging eyes fixed on the young couple with an astonishment that quickly gave place to satisfaction."⁶⁵ While Mary casts an active, desiring gaze toward the yacht and the rich girl, she is often unwitting of, and therefore vulnerable to, the gaze of others. This scene solicits anxiety for Mary, distrust of Billy, and perhaps a desire for her liberation. Through a set of accidents and incidental kindnesses of strangers, by the end of the first episode Mary learns of Billy Peart's plot and that her parentage is a mystery, and acquires a bit of money to escape the island. Readers identifying with Mary would feel relief and exhilaration at the denouement of the first episode. The whole audience is invited to identify with the freedom of a young woman alone, newly released from patriarchal authority and her established social identity.

The narrative strategy of letting the audience know more than the protagonist is common in suspense thrillers. Suspense arises not simply because we do not know what will happen, but because readers or viewers know something will happen, but not exactly what. Knowing more about the situation than the characters prompts anxiety on their behalf. Cowie cites Alfred Hitch-cock's distinction between surprise and suspense: a bomb going off is a surprise; the audience seeing a bomb planted under a table where people are sitting is suspense. Hitchcock notes that in suspense "the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen."⁶⁶ In What Happened to Mary, the suspenseful scene is not as dramatic as a bomb under a table (though subsequent episodes and later serials did utilize such extreme devices), but readers do know about a plot of which she is entirely unaware and are invited to desire her escape and liberation, that is, to come to desire with Mary.

The process of an intensely pleasurable identification hinges on readers participating in Mary's predicament. The story's mechanisms invite readers to take up her cause and align their desires with hers. They will then become implicated in a dramatic moment, full of an intensity of feeling, even though some of it, like anxiety, might seem unpleasant. In the suspense plot of What Happened to Mary, readers could come to desire more than Mary did. While Mary's desires and her sense of danger are vague, readers know the details of her predicament and can wish for her liberation all the more. By Cowie's model, when readers identify, they align their own loss, lack, or desire to the character's, so that they are feeling on behalf of the character, and indirectly on their own behalf as well. Thus, the apparently unpleasant aspect of the identification process may be imperative for an emotionally intense and satisfying experience. Of course, such identification is not inevitable. Readers can resist narrative cues or impose other emotional tones upon them. But if readers long with Mary in some way during the episode, they can feel an intense thrill when she escapes the island and achieves liberation.

At the close of the first episode, Mary arrives at a status familiar to dime novel enthusiasts: she is an orphan. As chapter 4 demonstrated, the metaphor of the orphan as free from patriarchal control was one that some working women had already incorporated into their own imaginative resources from the dime novels, and they used it to express a desire for freedom from sexual harassment. Like the dime novels, What Happened to Mary follows a melodramatic structure in which a heroine loses her established social identity, encounters a number of challenges and adventures, gains new social recognition for her adventures, and finally receives a reward. The first episode of the Mary serial merely initiates this larger plot formula. A good part of Mary's enigma has not been resolved. What more does she really want? Who were her parents? And how will Mary make it alone in the world? Indeed, even as readers might find the ending to the first episode satisfying, they may feel a curiosity and perhaps an anxiety about Mary's future.

Homeless and penniless, Mary is freed from her established social identity; the next several episodes portray her adventures in finding and performing work and confer new social recognition on her as both a worker and a woman. Mary's job is full of challenge and danger, but she ultimately receives fabulous rewards and recognition from co-workers, bosses, clients, and audiences. Later episodes maintain a similar emphasis on visual description and methods of soliciting identification with Mary by first prompting anxiety or indignance on her behalf.⁶⁷ Mary inevitably faces some adventure or challenge in which others oppose her unjustly or secretly plot against her. In episode 3, Mary gets a job as a chorus girl in a play. When the lead falls ill on opening night, Mary performs in her place, and like one dime novel heroine, is a smash hit. Readers might cheer her success particularly because she has been unjustly ridiculed by the other chorus girls. Unlike the dime novel heroine, Mary is a paid stage worker when she performs, which links work and adventure more closely.

Mary's adventures, like those of the dime novel heroine, revolve around her status as a woman worker. The constructed categories of honorable "worker" and honorable "woman" both largely excluded working women. Dime novel and serial narratives centered on the contradictions at the juncture of those exclusions. For example, What Happened to Mary raises the question of whether Mary can succeed in her work-place despite being female. Though Mary excells at her job, a competitive co-worker, a covert embezzler, regularly spoils it purposely to make her look bad. Mary proves her status as a worker, and gains revenge, by lying in wait in the office for him one evening, catching him stealing from the safe, and holding him […] at gunpoint for several tense moments. Finally, the co-worker lunges at Mary, knocks the gun from her hand, and wrestles with her until the boss arrives with the police. When they ask Mary how she held a male rival with "superior masculine strength" for so long, Mary shows them the gun. Then the boss reveals that the gun, which Mary found in his desk, is not loaded. Lacking maleness—or a loaded gun—Mary achieves social recognition as a worker even as the episode reaffirms her femininity by marking her "natural" weakness—she is more vulnerable than a male hero would be. In recognition of Mary's proficiency, her boss gives her a promotion.

The plot of What Happened to Mary significantly revised the dime novel formula of social recognition and reward for adventure: Mary's reward hinged on recognition for her work rather than marriage to a rich hero. Her final reward in the last episode of the story was to gain her inheritance, while the dime novel heroine received her inheritance about half way through the narrative, in what Peter Brooks calls the "recognition" in the melodrama. Readers and viewers of What Happened to Mary learned that Mary was a "missing heiress" by episode 5, but dastardly villains and adventures kept her from collecting the cash for seven more episodes. Literary critic Rachel Brownstein argues that the traditional novel ending of marriage, for example in Samuel Richardson's Pamela, offered the female protagonist not just a husband but a realized feminine identity. Others' recognition of the protagonist's new status was as important, she argues, as the marriage itself.⁶⁸ In dime novel romances, marriage essentially affirmed the working heroine's adventures and her feminine worth, so that she could visit her former co-workers as an honorable working woman. What Happened to Mary omitted this narrative tradition of signaling female social recognition, reconfiguring the affirmation of femininity within the praise she won from coworkers and bosses for her adventures.

The Ladies' World and the Edison Company drastically broke from formula by not ending the serial with the heroine's wedding. While Mary had occasional romantic episodes, romance did not structure the plot. This innovation was probably a fluke. Producers fully expected their female and male audience to be anxiously awaiting Mary's romantic fate, and encouraged that expectation with the regular appearance of admirers. A male reviewer for the Bioscope complained about this aspect of the serial, revealing the importance to him of a recontainment of Mary's power—and her cash. "One regrets the absence of any real 'love interest.' At one moment in her career, Mary seems about to succumb to the tender passion, but a new adventure crops up, and the eligible young man is forgotten. We must confess that we should have liked to see him brought in again at the end, to share Mary's dollars, which we feel sure are far too many to be safe in the keeping of a lonely spinster, even though she is so capable a manageress as our heroine." Producers' prime motivation in subverting audience expectations was additional profit: they had already planned a sequel, Who Will Marry Mary, based entirely on romance. However, the sequel never approached the popularity of What Happened to Mary and was terminated after six months. Who Will Marry Mary lacked the adventure and the struggle in work that readers and viewers found exciting. Serials that followed kept romance marginal. Despite the popular culture industry's initial assumption that women always cared most about romance, it recognized that this profit-motivated accident revealed audience desires.

Later serials learned from the mistake of Who Will Marry Mary: they emphasized adventure over romance and accentuated suspense and sensationalism. One reviewer even criticized What Happened to Mary for being too mild: "One fancies that the author, or the producer, might have 'taken his gloves off' more effectually to one or two of the more sensational passages. One doesn't desire horrors, but it is possible to be realistic without incurring the censor's displeasure."⁶⁹ Perhaps Edison held back in order to please a cross-class audience. But later serials chocked their episodes full of hair-raising feats of daring, car chases, fires, and the capture or death of numerous villains.

Hazards of Helen, which began in 1914, combined the workplace-based adventures of What Happened to Mary and popular fascination with the powers and dangers of technology. Hazards of Helen featured a female telegraph operator who weekly encountered life-imperiling mishap or villainy in the course of her job. Helen was constantly running atop trains to prevent them from crashing. Viewers were invited to identify with the working woman in a setting that typically connoted masculinity, modernity, and the paradoxes of industrialization for working-class audiences. "Railroading," as historian Walter Licht says, "held out the lure of adventure, travel and escape." The world of railroading was the world of men: the homosocial space of railroad work and the regular absences from family and community created a camaraderie around labor that became the source of many popular stories.⁷⁰ Women were just beginning to work in the railroad industry in 1914. Their numbers would climb during World War I, but when Hazards of Helen ran, Helen was particularly modern—she worked at a kind of job long celebrated as epitomizing the honorable male worker.⁷¹

Railroads themselves were distinctly modern and epitomized the power and danger of the machine. Although railroads had transformed the U.S. economy and social life, the industry had a particularly high accident rate. Trains signaled workers' heroic achievements in production as well as their significant vulnerabilities.⁷²Hazards of Helen played on people's fascination with this potential danger. While Helen usually prevented a crash, occasionally the audience got to see trains collide. Such catastrophes had cross-class appeal, but had become particularly common in "low-brow" cultural forms and in working-class spectator events. Some cheap stage melodramas at the turn of the century featured train wrecks. Additionally, in 1907, nearly 250,000 New Yorkers turned out at Brighton Beach to see two locomotives in a staged head-on collision at sixty miles per hour, an event repeated at the 1909 Chicago Labor Day celebration. The Union Labor Advocate noted that "thousands of railroad operating employees will be on the ground to study the 'disaster.'" Labor-capital films often included such sensationalism as well. For example, an advertisement for The Wage Earners (Atlas, 1912) read, "Everyone will want to see this great picture of Labor and Capital. Many thrilling and exciting scenes, such as the big train wreck, auto wreck, the wild ride on the handcar, the flying leap onto a moving train, the big walkout, the mob scene and many others."⁷³ A female heroine, traditionally seen as particularly physically vulnerable, could epitomize the dichotomy between the power of machinery and the vulnerability of humans for both male and female audiences. Through cunning and bravery, as well as strength, Helen always prevailed. Thus, the railroad serial maintained What Happened to Mary's focus on the female character's desire for social recognition as a worker and a woman, while linking this theme to a working-class cultural motif that had an established history with a male audience.

Close analysis of episode 58, "The Wrong Order," demonstrates that the serial solicited an identification with Helen through suspense and offered a fantasy of recognition and admiration. This episode opens with an intertitle that reads: "Helen, a telegraph operator, returns from her vacation." Audiences then see Helen walking into the telegraph office and greeting her male coworkers. The camera positions viewers as an invisible part of the staff, visually following Helen as she greets each man heartily. The men are clearly delighted to see her, and shake her hand in a demonstration of camaraderie. Part of the group goes out to the yard, where an express train awaits. An intertitle signals the action to come: "The observation car is a better place for you to ride than this dirty engine." The camera views the group from the back as Helen starts to climb onto the engine car. One of the men stops her and mouths the line of the intertitle, and Helen shrugs and agrees. This sets up one question of the short: Should Helen be treated differently because she's a woman? Does she need to keep her clothes clean? The audience then sees Helen and her boyfriend on the observation car, the last car on the express. Medium-close shots allow an intimate view of Helen and her easy manner with her boyfriend. Camera cuts to the engine car show that there is a mechanical problem, while Helen and her boyfriend grow impatient. The boyfriend goes to investigate, leaving Helen alone on the back of the car reading an issue of Collier's. Cross-cutting between the engine and observation cars serves to accentuate Helen's isolation from the work of the men. The train leaves twenty minutes late.

The episode next sets up a suspenseful situation and an identification with Helen as the only person who can save the day. The camera shows the engineer abandoning the train to tend his injured wife, leaving the express, now late and running out of control, on a collision course with a freight train. The audience learns about the problem, but Helen is unaware. The camera, in medium shots, shows the last station before the collision point receive a wire with instructions to stop the express, but it is too late—the express has just sped by. But the audience, viewing the action via a long shot from Helen's point of view on the back of the train, sees a man running out of the station waving his arms. Helen is thus notified of the problem. This point-of-view shot reinforces audience identification with Helen partly because only she, from her "feminine" position on the observation car, realizes the danger. The audience sees a medium-close shot of Helen's face as she registers the horror of the situation and then springs to action. The doors from the observation balcony to the train itself, however, are locked. Always resourceful, Helen immediately climbs up onto the top of the speeding train and runs along it to the engine car. An intertitle explains the action to come: "Unable to enter the steam filled cab, Helen makes a desperate attempt to stop the train." In medium-close shots the audience watches Helen climb on top of the engine and then slide down on one side to reach the hand-brake at the front. Pulling hard on the brake, Helen slows the express enough that, as the camera cuts to a long shot, the freight has time to change tracks at the switch before the express train speeds past it. A medium shot shows Helen leaping from her precarious perch into the ditch when the express is almost stopped. Immediately, Helen is surrounded by railroad men, who help her up and congratulate her. The final scene parallels the opening scene: Helen is back in the office at a new desk, signaling a promotion. A medium-close shot shows her proudly admiring the desk. The final shot shows Helen standing while the men help her brush the dirt off her skirt.⁷⁴

Hazards of Helen thus solicited an emotional identification from viewers. If they became indignant for Helen when she was excluded from the male workers' activities, or anxious when she was unaware of her danger, they would also feel a vicarious thrill at her physical bravery and heroism. Helen faces a limit because of her femininity, placed on the observation car in order to keep her clothes clean, and she literally goes over the top to demonstrate her ability to be a good worker. In the process, she gets her clothes dirty, indicating that the imposed limits on her were, in fact, rather silly. Helen is affirmed in her job with a new desk and a promotion, but she is also affirmed as a woman when the men help her brush off her skirt. The male camaraderie of the workplace is extended to Helen, and is charged with a special intimacy or mild eroticism. Like the dime novel heroines who proved their ladyhood in part through physically aggressive adventures, Helen proved her worth through physically demanding work that did not abrogate her femininity.

Helen could represent the disadvantaged overcoming social restraint in spectacles similar to those staged by the Jewish immigrant Houdini. Helen was often placed in a position of vulnerability and peril to the nearly ubiquitous train robbers. Trapped, tied, gagged, locked away, Helen routinely performed Houdini-like tricks of evasion and escape. Though the villains were always armed, Helen, like Mary, rarely had access to a loaded gun. When she did require one, she used her creativity to procure it. In the thirty-first episode, villains lock Helen into a cattle car on a freight train that, unbeknownst to the conductor, is on a collision course with a passenger train. As the bad guys fight the good guys on the platform outside Helen's cell, one drops his gun. Helen makes a fishing line out of a hairpin and a strip of her dress, drags the gun to her in the cattle car, and shoots and severs the wire holding the semaphore arm so it swings to Danger, prompting the conductor to stop the train […]. Here Helen uses her feminine accoutrements to make up for her initial lack of a gun and emerges, again, the hero.⁷⁵

Hazards of Helen played on the space of contradiction inhabited by women workers and provided fantasies of power and belonging. Her reward was neither an inheritance nor marriage but simply warm recognition at the end of every episode. (Indeed, the refusal of a marriage proposal appears to have become a common narrative device.) Helen was fired from her position and had to prove herself to her bosses in at least two episodes. In episode 42, Helen is discharged because management believes she failed to turn a copy of an order over to a conductor, resulting in a near train collision. In fact, she did so, but cannot prove it because a spiteful coworker has destroyed the order. Through an array of spectacular adventures, Helen captures both the conductor, who has gone insane, and the spiteful employee, who plotted to dynamite the train. Helen is exonerated and restored to her duty with special recognition. In episode 13, Helen loses her job after being robbed by two crooks. Later, she sees the culprits flee on a freight. Hot in pursuit, Helen drops off a bridge onto the moving train, fighting until she falls off the train with one of the robbers and lands in the water. The thieves are thus captured and Helen is given her job back, with honor.⁷⁶

The serials were products of the most rationalized arm of the film industry, and bore the limiting effects of industry priorities. Most notably, they did not represent strikes as a kind of female adventure like the labor-capital films did with male strikers, nor did they represent heroines as overtly political. But the serials' sensationalism and melodrama were not meaningless or trite. Like the dime novels, adventure serials engaged contradictions that working women faced on a daily basis and offered them gratifying fantasies of social recognition as women and workers. Of course, the movies invariably ended and working women went back to their daily lives of devalued labor and social contradiction. But while the serials did not directly change women's material conditions, they did, in Cowie's words, make possible "the scene of the wish." That is, like labor unions, motion pictures provided a legitimate place for women to imagine recognition and value as workers.

The meanings of the movies emerged from an array of social practices that working women created around their motion picture consumption. Motion picture theaters were new kinds of social spaces in which women could enact public identities. Looking at posters, dreaming of stars, and viewing the films all privileged looking and appearance in the construction of meaning and the self. Women's participation in this certainly implicated them in new gendered hierarchies. But working women's consumer gaze was more than simply superficial or acquisitive. It entailed complex fantasies of worth connected to their work-day; to their status as workers, women, and immigrants; and to their established practices of ladyhood. The films themselves were far from simply emancipatory for working women. However, working women made them into resources for the ongoing tasks of maintaining dignity and creating identities. Just as they embraced the shirtwaist strike and its utopian promises, working women could make motion pictures a site for new public identities and new dreams of being valued.

Notes

Ruth True, The Neglected Girl (New York: Russell Sage, 1914), 67.
"What Happened to Mary," The Ladies World (Aug. 1912): 3.
I am indebted to Miriam Hansen's brilliant work on cinema as a public sphere. See Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 1-19, 90-126. Roy Rosenzweig also talks about the importance of the early motion picture theaters as a public space in Eight Hours for What We Will. See also Peiss, Cheap Amusements.
Ibid., 148.
Michael M. Davis, The Exploitation of Pleasure: A Study of Commercial Recreations in New York City (New York: Sage, 1911), 21; Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 19; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 146, 148.
Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 14.
Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 226 n 53; 154-58; Elizabeth Ewen, "City Lights: Immigrant Women and the Rise of the Movies," Signs 5 (3) Supplement (Spring 1980): S45-S66. Comedies were the most numerous of the motion pictures before 1908, but with the advent of new filming techniques and more complex narratives, they became less central. See Eileen Bowser's superb History of the American Cinema, vol. 2: The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990), 56.
The scholar most associated with this view is Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film (New York: Teachers College Press, 1939). See also Garth Jowett, Film: the Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976). The most recent application of this perspective is Ross, Working-Class Hollywood. See Hansen's excellent critique of this view in Babel and Babylon, 68-70.
Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 56-85.
My understanding of early film history relies principally on Bowser, History of the American Cinema, vol. 2. See especially 28-32 for a discussion of the early crisis in the industry. I also draw on Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner, 1990); David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Robert Sklar, Movie-made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1994).
Bowser, History of the American Cinema, vol. 2, 28-32, 217.
See ibid., 19, 53-54; Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 16, 23.
Cook, The Fiction Factory; "Writing the Movies: A New and Well-Paid Business," New York Times, August 3, 1913 (printed in Gene Brown, ed., New York Times Encyclopedia of Film 1896-1979 [New York: Times Books, 1983]).
Cook, The Fiction Factory, 155-56, 167.
Bowser, History of the American Cinema, vol. 2, 54, 167-68.
Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 84.
Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
Snyder, The Voice of the City. For a discussion of regulation of the early cinema, see Janet Staiger, Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
Bowser, History of the American Cinema, vol. 2, 44.
Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 48, 57, 74. See also Kay Sloan, The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 62-69. Sloan claims, "After the long shirtwaist strike in New York in 1909 and 1910, films starring courageous, beautiful women strike leaders inundated theaters" (64). I have been unable to substantiate this claim. There were a number of films, such as The Struggle (Kalem, 1913) in which the daughter of a striker played a significant role among a group of male strikers, but even in these movies the female character did not play a role as a recognized leader. Sloan claims that The Long Strike (Essanay, 1911) "featured a labor leader who courted the boss' son to win the demands of the women strikers." However, the Moving Picture World review that Sloan cites as her only evidence does not indicate a strike of women workers. Indeed, the heroine meets the boss's son when on her way to the factory at the noon hour, carrying her father's lunch pail. She is the daughter of a striker, not a striker herself. See "The Struggle," Moving Picture World 16 (June 7, 1913): 1009; "The Long Strike," Moving Picture World 10 (December 23, 1911): 989.
Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 57.
"The Girl Strike Leader," Moving Picture World 7 (July 23, 1910): 193.
Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 74; Sloan, The Loud Silents, 64-66.
Bowser, History of the American Cinema, vol. 2, 178, 185. The episodes of What Happened to Mary could be understood if viewed separately, as each traced a particular adventure that was resolved within the time of the short. This has caused some not to classify What Happened to Mary as a serial. See Bowser 206. However, themes of Mary's mysterious origin, her struggle in the work world, and romance all were pursued across different segments and tied the stories together. Indeed, What Happened to Mary had far more narrative continuity than Hazards of Helen, which is always classed as a serial. In Hazards of Helen, a romance between Helen and another worker provides a very loose continuity between rather interchangeable episodes of adventure. However, by the time Hazards of Helen began in 1914, serials were an established genre, and the film fit the bill in terms of its sensational content and its release schedule.
Some of these films drew quite directly on the "Laura Jean Libbey" dime novel formula, while others drew on other cheap fiction conventions, including the dime novel romances featuring wealthy heroines that were read by working women. As chapter 1 argued, even these characters usually figured class inequities in some way. Female characters could also be found in Westerns and other dime novels targeting a primarily male audience. The film industry creatively mixed a number of dime novel conventions in creating the female adventure short.
"What Happened to Mary," Bioscope (July 31, 1913): 368-69; Rothvin Wallace, "The Activities of Mary," The Ladies' World (Mar. 1913): 11.
Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 4:360-68. The Ladies World was bought by McClure Publications, Inc., in February of 1912. Charles Dwyer discussed the impact of What Happened to Mary on subscription rates in "The Editor and the Reader," The Ladies World 33 (12) (Dec. 1912): 1. 42.
Lewis E. Palmer, "The World in Motion," The Survey 22 (June 5, 1909): 356; Bowser, History of the American Cinema, vol. 2, 93, 106-19; Kathryn Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 115-33; Richard de Cordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
Mary Fuller with Bailey Millard, "My Adventures as a Motion-Picture Heroine," Collier's 48 (15) (Dec. 30, 1911): 16-17; "What Happened to Mary," Bioscope (July 31, 1913): 369. (Bioscope was a British film magazine; What Happened to Mary opened in England in 1913.)
"Miss Mary Fuller Wearing the 'Mary' Hat," The Ladies World (June 1913): 4; Wallace, "The Activities of Mary," 11.
The Ladies World 33 (8) (Aug. 1912): 4; 33 (9) (Sept. 1912): 1. For winners that matched plot developments, see 33 (11) (Nov. 1912): 40; 34 (1) (Jan. 1913). Later serials overtly promised that winners would determine the upcoming plot. See "The Perils of Pauline: Today's Prize Offer," Atlanta Georgian, June 14, 1914. See also Kathryn Fuller's description of a Thanhousser contest for an ending to the serial A Million Dollar Mystery (1913) in At the Picture Show, 128.
Buck Rainey, Those Fabulous Serial Heroines: Their Lives and Films (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990), 459; Ben Singer, "Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama: The Etiology of an Anomaly," Camera Obscura 22 (Jan. 1990): 91-129; "Perils of Pauline," Variety (April 10, 1914); see also "The Trey O'Hearts," Variety (August 7, 1914).
Simkhovitch, The City Worker's World in America, 124; Sherman C. Kingsley, "The Penny Arcade and the Cheap Theatre," Charities and the Commons 18 (Jan. 1907): 295. For discussions of the role of theaters in ethnic working-class neighborhoods during the silent era see Peiss, Cheap Amusements, on New York, 139-53; and on Chicago in the 1920s see Cohen, Making a New Deal, 120-29.
True, The Neglected Girl, 116; Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 86; Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Young Working Girls: A Summary of Evidence from Two Thousand Social Workers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 114. See also Louise de Koven Bowen, Five and Ten Cent Theaters (Juvenile Protection Association of Chicago, 1909, 1911). Addams and de Koven Bowen were both talking about Chicago. Patterns of motion picture projection and attendance were very specific to each city at this time. I have only used Chicago sources when I also have a source from New York City that corroborates its basic point.
Harriet McDoual Daniels, The Girl and Her Chance (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1914), 73; Simkhovitch, The City Worker's World in America, 131. See also Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 53-55, 110-13.
Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, 80-81; Hasanovitz, One of Them, 247; Laughlin, The Work-a-day Girl, 147.
Odencrantz, Italian Women in Industry, 204, 235. Filomena Ognibene quoted in Ewen, "City Lights," S58. Laughlin reported that working women typically attended motion picture theaters more than twice per week. Laughlin, The Work-a-day Girl, 143.
Esther Packard, A Study of Living Conditions of Self-Supporting Women in New York City (New York: Metropolitan Board of the YWCA, 1915), 51, 86.
Mary Heaton Vorse, "Some Picture Show Audiences," Outlook 98 (June 24, 1911): 443, 446.
Fuller, At the Picture Show, 115.
Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 253-55; see also McRobbie, "The Passagenwerk and the Place of Walter Benjamin in Cultural Studies," 96-120; and Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) for discussions about the connections among modernity, the city, and motion pictures. In particular, see Marcus Verhagen, "The Poster in Fin-de-Siècle Paris: 'That Mobile and Degenerate Art'," 103-29.
William R. Leach, "Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925," Journal of American History 71 (2) (Sept. 1984): 319-42.
Laughlin, The Work-a-day Girl, 142.
Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, 91; Woods and Kennedy, Young Working Girls, 114.
Louise de Koven Bowen, Safeguards for City Youth at Work and at Play (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 19.
Daniels, The Girl and Her Chance, 73. Some white-collar workers did attend motion pictures on their lunch hours. In addition, the Strand theater on Broadway opened an inexpensive lunchroom for "working girls" within the massive theater structure. Many factory workers, however, would not have had time to walk there to have lunch. See "A Theater with Four Million Patrons a Year," Photoplay Magazine 7 (Apr. 1915): 84.
Davis, The Exploitation of Pleasure, 54.
See Lauren Rabinowitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 22-26, 82-97, for discussions of the meaning of the female gaze in public and in cinema.
Quoted in Mary Field, "'On Strike' A Collection of True Stories," American Magazine (Oct. 1911): 736. In the Women's Trade Union League Papers, Tamiment Library.
Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, 86.
Palmer, "The World in Motion," 356.
Quoted in Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 153.
Sarah Helen Starr, "The Photoplay: An Entertainment, An Occupation," The Ladies' World 33 (6) (June 1912): 9; Ernest A. Dench, "Our Brooklyn Jungle," Illustrated World 26 (Oct. 1916): 222-23; William A. Page, "The Movie-Struck Girl," Woman's Home Companion 45 (June 1918): 18. See also Fuller, At the Picture Show, 129.
Page, "The Movie-Struck Girl," 18; Bowser, History of the American Cinema, vol. 2, 24; Fuller, At the Picture Show, 130.
Richard de Cordova, "The Emergence of the Star System in America," in Christine Gledhill, ed., Stardom: Industry of Desire (London: Routledge, 1991), 17-29.
"Acting for the 'Movies'" Literary Digest 48 (Feb. 28, 1914). This first-person article about Mary Fuller was reprinted from the newspaper the Indianapolis Star.
Starr, "The Photoplay," 9.
"Mary Pickford Has a Word to Say" Harper's Bazaar (Apr. 1917): 55.
Charles Musser, "Ethnicity, Role-playing, and American Film Comedy: From Chinese Laundry Scene to Whoopee (1894-1930)" in Lester D. Friedman, ed., Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 54.
I have chosen to look closely in this chapter at only two of the serials, but my analysis of these two is informed by a broader examination of the genre. I viewed a number of serial episodes at the Library of Congress, Motion Picture Division, including episodes from Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery, The Ventures of Marguerite, Hazards of Helen, Girl and the Game, Pearl of the Army, The Lightening Raider, The Purple Mask, and A Woman in Grey. I read print versions of What Happened to Mary, Who Will Marry Mary, Plunder, The Adventures of Kathlyn, and The Perils of Pauline.
Cowie, Representing the Woman, 4.
Advertisement for What Happened to Mary, Edison Archives; "What Happened to Mary," Bioscope (July 31, 1913): 368-69; "'Mary' and the Movies," The Ladies' World 33 (10) (Sept. 1912): 1.
Ibid.
"What Happened to Mary: The Remarkable Story of a Remarkable Girl," The Ladies' World 33 (8) (Aug. 1912): 3.
Ibid.
Quoted in Cowie, Representing the Woman, 51.
For example, in episode 2 Mary buys some new clothes to replace her clothes from the island. (For immigrant women whose purchases of new clothes were among their first acts in the new country this scene could have particular appeal.) The female shopkeeper, however, treats her rudely because she is so plainly dressed. When Mary picks out the loveliest clothes in the shop, she repeats the common dime novel convention of the working girl instinctively dressing herself impeccably once she becomes an heiress. The presence of the storekeeper who degrades Mary because of her plain dress invokes class distinction, and invites indignation on Mary's behalf and enjoyment of Mary's purchases as a vindication of her ill treatment. "What Happened to Mary in the City," The Ladies World 33 (10) (Sept. 1912): 12.
Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine (New York: Viking Press, 1984), xxi. See also Cowie, Representing the Woman, 6-7.
"What Happened to Mary," Bioscope (July 31, 1913): 369. Note that for this reviewer, sensationalism was necessary to achieve a "realistic" effect.
Walter Licht, Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 163, 160.
The producer's decision to make Helen a telegraph operator for a railroad dovetailed men's heroic stories of labor with formulas based on female heroines. Women did work in the railroad industry at this time; however, their positions were redefined to exclude them from men's promotional track. In 1918, only 2.6 percent of all women railroad workers were telegraph operators. Helen served, like Mary, not as a representation of the "real" working opportunities or experiences of working-class women, but as a fantasy of women in the (masculine) workplace, privy to masculine adventures and amenities. See Maureen Weiner Greenwald, "Women Workers and World War One: The American Railroad Industry, A Case Study," Journal of Social History 9 (Winter 1975): 154-77.
Film critic Ben Singer argues that this combination of power and vulnerability undergirded a desire for sensationalist films and images by the turn of the century; sensationalist images particularly focused on new and dangerous forms of transportation such as the train, the streetcar, and the automobile. Singer, "Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism" in Charney and Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 72-99. See also Singer's discussion of the Hazards of Helen serial in "Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama," 102-3.
The stage melodrama version of "Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl" when revived in early 1900s, for example, featured a "realistic" train collision. "Labor's Grandest Demonstration," Union Labor Advocate (Sept. 1909): 15; advertisement, Moving Picture World 14 (3) (Oct. 1912): 262.
Episode 58, "The Wrong Order" is at the Motion Picture Division, Library of Congress.
A number of reviews and synopses of episode 31 can be found in the Helen Holmes clipping file, New York Public Library for Performing Arts.
Information on episodes gained from promotional material found in the Hazards of Helen clipping file, New York Public Library for Performing Arts. In The Girl and the Game, a railroad series starring Helen Holmes, the heroine refuses a proposal in the first episode. The camera cuts between two romantic closeups: the man proposing, and Helen smiling slightly, shaking her head, "no." The romantic film techniques, all the more startling because true close-ups were rare at this time, served to highlight the narrative innovation of the refusal. For information on episode 13, see Bowser, History of the American Cinema, vol. 2, 187.

MARTIN W. SANDLER (ESSAY DATE 2002)

SOURCE: Sandler, Martin W. "For the Printed Page." In Against the Odds: Women Pioneers in the First Hundred Years of Photography, pp. 140-67. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2002.
In the following essay, Sandler recounts the lives of such female photographers as Jesse Tarbox Beals, Consuelo Kanaga, Margaret Bourke-White, Marjory Collins, and Louise Dahl-Wolf, remarking on their pioneering efforts and far-reaching influence on every aspect of the medium.

At the turn of the century Eva Watson-Schütze stated, "There is one open field yet very little touched by the camera, and that is illustrations, and I look for great things in that direction in the future." Little more than a decade later, Collier's magazine would proclaim, "It is the photographer who writes history these days. The journalist only labels the characters."

Actually, photographs had been used as the basis for illustration as early as the 1850s, when wood engravings copied from photographs adorned the pages of many newspapers and magazines. It was the introduction of the halftone plate in the 1880s that made the reproduction of actual photographs in publications possible. The key to the halftone printing process was the use of a screen of fine lines on glass that broke a photographic image into thousands of dots. The pattern of dots was transferred photographically onto a chemically treated printing plate. All of the tones—blacks, whites, grays—could be reproduced.

Of all the countless advancements in the history of the medium none had a more profound impact on emblazoning photography in the public's consciousness than did the halftone plate. By the late 1920s, photographs printed in newspapers became one of the chief means by which people received their news. Out of this development grew the news photographer, a new type of cameraperson with the ability to anticipate when a newsworthy event was about to take place, the talent to snap the shutter at the most telling moment during the event, and the stamina to travel from assignment to assignment.

By the 1930s, the success of photographs in newspapers led to the establishment of photographic magazines. Destined to become extraordinarily popular, the picture magazine spawned the photo essay and created yet another new type of photographer, the photojournalist.

New types of photographic styles would emerge as well. The ability to put pictures into print would lead to the development of advertising, fashion, and industrial photography as vital and distinct avenues of photographic expression. As in news photography and photojournalism, women would play a pioneering role in all these approaches.

A woman, in fact, was among the earliest photographers to have their pictures appear on the printed page as news photographers. Jesse Tarbox Beals, born Jesse Tarbox in 1879, received her first camera at the age of eighteen when, while teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, she responded to an advertisement in Youth's Companion offering a free camera, plates, and instructions to new subscribers. After taking some pictures, she found that she could make more money taking portraits than she could teaching school.

In 1897, she married machinist Alfred Beals and taught him photography. Three years later the couple went into business together as itinerant photographers. In 1902, Beals was hired by the Buffalo Courier to head its fledgling photographic department. She approached her new position with extraordinary energy and ingenuity. In 1903, she achieved what may well have been the nation's first newspaper "scoop" when, at a murder trial where no cameras were allowed, she captured images of the proceedings by photographing through a transom above a door. The amazing number of pictures that she produced for the newspaper on a variety of subjects soon captured national attention. "She levels her camera lens," stated a magazine, "on nearly everything that creeps, walks, swims, or crawls within the boundaries of the United States and Canada."

Her determination to photograph every news-worthy event within her reach often placed her in real danger. When her editor at the newspaper informed her of a major fire in Rochester, New York, and told her she had fifteen minutes to catch a train to the site, Beals hastily gathered up her bulky equipment, finished dressing on the trolley to the station, and made the train. Of her experience in recording the fire she later wrote, "I had never seen anything that so reminded me of Dante's Inferno as the smoking areas of burned-over blocks at the fire. But I plunged in and did all that I could, and when I came out of that fire place I would not have known myself. Icicles were frozen over all my wraps and it took literally hours to get thawed out so I could finish up my negatives."

Some of Beals' most moving photographs were those she took of the appalling conditions under which immigrant families were forced to live in New York City's tenement districts. Her photographs of life in these tenements and alleys, like the work of fellow photographer Jacob Riis, helped make the nation aware of this social ill and influenced the reform that was eventually achieved.

While Beals focused exclusively on news photography, Frances Benjamin Johnston, like many of her colleagues, captured both newsworthy images for newspapers and compiled photographic stories for some of the earliest picture magazines. As early as 1886, Johnston distributed posters describing herself as "making a business of photographic illustration and the writing of descriptions for magazines, illustrated weeklies, and newspapers." An astute businesswoman, she revealed her personal and professional approach to her work by stating, "I have not been able to lose sight of the pecuniary side, though for the sake of money or anything else I would not publish a photograph that fell below the standard I set for myself."

As in the documentary photographs she captured at Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes, the pictures Johnston took for various publications revealed her concern for humanity, particularly the status of women. The series of pictures she took of women working in a Lynn, Massachusetts, shoe factory, for example, are marked by a sensitivity to the dignity of these workers who labored long hours for three to five dollars a week.

One of Johnston's most dramatic accomplishments as a press photographer came about in 1899 through her friendship with then Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. Vacationing in Europe, she was made aware that Commodore George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, was making several European stops before returning to a triumphant homecoming in America. At Johnston's request, Roosevelt contacted Dewey and got the commodore's permission for Johnston to board his flagship Olympia in Naples and take the first photographs of America's newest hero and of life aboard the celebrated vessel.

The scores of photographs that Johnston took of Dewey and of the members of the Olympia's crew at work and at leisure represented a real coup. Dozens of photographers had been attempting to get such pictures. That this early photographic scoop had been accomplished by a woman was, no doubt, particularly galling to many of her male competitors.

Consuelo Kanaga also earned her living by pursuing a variety of photographic genres. She entered the world of news photography in 1919 as a photographer-reporter for the San Francisco Daily News. In the early 1920s, she photographed for the San Francisco Chronicle. For the better part of the next forty years she would intermittently carry out news assignments for a variety of publications.

Kanaga brought to her press photography all those special talents that distinguished her work in other areas of the medium. As author Barbara Millstein has written, where Kanaga differed from her fellow press photographers "was in her choice of subject matter, in her deliberate composition, in her meticulous printing, and finally, in her heart."

Kanaga's talent at composition is clearly apparent in the photograph she titled Fire. Photographing at close range, Kanaga waited until the main figure in the center revealed her deepest anguish. She framed this woman with two other figures, capturing the solemn expression of the woman to her right and the hint of curiosity on the face of the woman to her left. Given that this was all accomplished under the constraints of a spontaneous news photograph, it was a masterful achievement.

By the beginning of the 1930s, pictures in newspapers and early picture magazines had established the photograph as a primary means of communication. Early picture-dominated magazines such as Fortune, Collier's, and National Geographic in particular had captured the nation's attention through their photographic coverage of people and conditions throughout the world. It would be one picture magazine above all, however, that would have the greatest impact.

In 1936, Henry Luce, the founder of Fortune, launched a new picture magazine called Life. The prospectus described the publication as different from even the most ambitious of its predecessors: "Pictures are taken haphazardly. Pictures are published haphazardly," the prospectus proclaimed. "Naturally therefore they are looked at haphazardly … almost nowhere is there any attempt to edit pictures into a coherent story.… The mind-guided camera … can reveal to us far more explicitly the nature of the dynamic social world in which we live."

On November 19, 1936, the first issue of Life hit the newsstands with an impact equaled only by the advent of television some two decades later. Optimistic estimates predicted an initial circulation of about 250,000. Within four hours, all 466,000 copies of the first issue had been sold. The "mind-guided camera" had touched a vital nerve.

ON THE SUBJECT OF…

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE (1903-1987)

A socialite, politician, diplomat, editor, and author, Clare Boothe Luce was celebrated for her wit, charm, and wide-ranging talents. After divorcing millionaire George Tuttle Brokaw in 1929 she took a position at fellow socialite Conde Nast's magazine Vanity Fair, where she became managing editor until 1934. She next turned to writing for the stage, but her first play proved a failure. Two days after production commenced, however, she wedded millionaire publisher Henry R. Luce, whose publications included Time and Fortune. A subsequent play, The Women, scored enormously on Broadway, and two more plays also earned acclaim. Critics praised the book version of The Women, calling it "exceedingly clever, original, and ingenious." Luce also brought her husband greater success, for his magazine Life had been created at her suggestion and had become immensely popular with American readers.

In the 1940s Luce became increasingly active in American politics. She was elected to the House of Representatives in 1943 and re-elected the following year. During the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower she was appointed ambassador to Italy. A subsequent appointment to the ambassadorship of Brazil proved controversial, however, and in 1959 Luce left the world of politics to work for McCall's. Throughout her life Luce served several organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund, the Oceanic Foundation, and the Hawaii Foundation for American Freedoms. Her published works include Stuffed Shirts (1933), a collection of satirical sketches about New York City society, and Europe in the Spring (1940), an account of her travels in Europe at the onset of World War II. Additionally, she wrote the plays Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938), and Margin for Error (1939), and edited the volume Saints for Now (1952), a collection of biographies of saints.

Over the years countless photographers, many of them famous or destined to become so, would join Life or contribute images to the magazine. They were aided in great measure by technical advancements, particularly advantageous to photojournalists and news photographers. These advancements included the introduction of the Leica and other small 35mm cameras that permitted a photographer to shoot quickly and repeatedly at eye level, rolled "fast" film that allowed for the taking of sequences of pictures in thousandths of a second, and the flashbulb, which replaced cumbersome, often ineffective, flash powder. Armed with these new tools, Life's photographers captured images that would remain in the public memory. Of all these photographers, none was more important or more vital to the magazine's early success than Margaret Bourke-White. Destined to become the world's best-known photo-journalist, she would shoot more press photographs than any other photographer in history. She traveled the globe, captured images of people and places rarely seen, and set the standard for generations of photojournalists to follow.

She was born in New York City in 1904 and raised in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Both of her parents were connected to the publishing industry—her father a printing engineer, her mother working on publications for the blind. In 1921, Bourke-White studied photography with Clarence White. She went on to college, but was far from a committed student and attended seven colleges before finally earning a bachelor's degree at Cornell. It was while taking photographs for the yearbook at the University of Michigan that she determined what her life's work must be. "We all find something," she later wrote, "that is just right for us, and after I found the camera I never really felt a whole person again unless I was planning pictures or taking them.…"

Bourke-White began her professional career as an architectural photographer in Cleveland, Ohio. She then undertook advertising work before accepting a commission to photograph a Cleveland steel company. These industrial images so impressed Henry Luce that, in 1929, he offered her a job as a staff photographer on his new magazine, Fortune. Her photography was so instrumental in Fortune's success that when Luce launched Life, he immediately hired her as one of the publication's first photographers.

Bourke-White's photograph of the newly built Fort Peck Dam in Montana adorned the cover of Life's premier issue. The main story in the magazine was her long photo-essay on the workers who were building the dam and the local townspeople, and for this she received Life's first photo credit.

For the next twenty-one years, Bourke-White was Life's most prolific and important photographer. She took tens of thousands of pictures recording people and places at home and in almost every corner of the globe. She photographed miners in South Africa, field-workers in Slovakia, aristocrats in Hungary, and emigrants in Pakistan. She took memorable photographs of Mahatma Gandhi just six hours before he was assassinated and recorded the first German air raids on Moscow. She was the first photojournalist to enter Russia after its revolution and sent back the first views of this almost unknown society that Americans had ever seen. In 1943 she became the first woman to fly on a United States combat mission. Two years later, she was among the press corps that encountered the barbarism at Buchenwald and other concentration camps.

Bourke-White was the consummate photo-journalist. She would let nothing deter her from getting the pictures or the story she pursued. "Sometimes," she said, "I could murder someone who gets in my way when I am taking a picture. I become irrational. There is only one moment when a picture is there, and an instant later it is gone—gone forever. My memory is full of those pictures that were lost."

Aside from her photographs themselves, one of the most important contributions Bourke-White made to photography was pioneering the photo essay. Two other women photographers, although they were not photo-journalists, also provided early evidence of the effectiveness and appeal of stories told through a series of pictures. They accomplished this through two special assignments they carried out while members of the FSA photographic corps.

One of these picture stories, titled "Cross Country Bus Tour," was taken by Esther Bubley. Born in 1921, she was raised in Superior, Wisconsin, and attended Superior State Teacher's College for two years before studying art at the Minneapolis School of Art and Design. In 1940, she moved to Washington, D.C., and a year later became a microfilmer at the National Archives. Some months later she was hired by the FSA as a darkroom technician. In 1942, she was promoted to join the ranks of the agency's photographers.

Bubley's assignment in compiling "Cross Country Bus Tour" was to capture images of a specific aspect of the American home front in World War II. Her task was to photograph soldiers, and other wartime travelers, on a Greyhound bus route that went from Washington to Pittsburgh and then on to Chicago, Louisville, Memphis, Chattanooga, Knoxville, and then back to Washington. Bubley boarded a bus and traveled the entire route capturing images of passengers waiting in the bus terminals, boarding the bus, traveling aboard the vehicle, and pausing between stops. She displayed a particular talent for depicting passengers in relaxed and poignant moments, elevating the series beyond that of a mere visual chronicle. She also accompanied each of her pictures with detailed notes. The photographs that the FSA photographers took were made available free of charge to commercial publications. Editors of several magazines and newspapers selected images from Bubley's series and created their own "Cross Country Bus Tour" picture stories.

Marjory Collins's major contribution to the FSA files was also a photographic series designed to portray the American home front during World War II. Collins was born in 1912 and spent her childhood in Scarsdale, New York. After studying photography with Ralph Steiner in the 1930s, she worked as a photographer in New York City before being hired by the FSA.

One of her early assignments was to portray small-town life in wartime. Specifically, it was to capture images of people engaged in civil defense activities, planting victory gardens, and immersing themselves in other patriotic wartime efforts. "Make people appear as if they really believed in the U.S.," read her shooting script.

Collins selected Lititz, Pennsylvania, as the appropriate setting for the series she titled "Small Town in Wartime." There she took many pictures of such home front activities as scrap drives and draft board meetings—but she went much deeper. As one studies the photographs in the series, it becomes apparent that her main goal was to portray the special nature of everyday life in a small town even during a time of national stress. Like Bubley's "Cross Country Bus Tour" images, select photographs from "Small Town in Wartime" were acquired by national publications that presented their own picture stories based on the Collins series.

Aside from providing photographers the opportunity to produce images for magazines and newspapers, the ability to reproduce photographs on the printed page created another vital outlet for photographic expression. Once the halftone process was fully developed, photographs began to appear in all types of books. One of the most significant of these books was An American Exodus, compiled by Dorothea Lange and her husband, Paul Taylor, published in 1939. A pioneering effort to combine words and photographs in book form, Lange and Taylor used conversations by Lange's subjects as the basis for the book's narrative. A different narrative technique was used in their book, Land of the Free. In this book, the photographs were accompanied by a "sound track," a lyrical poem written by Archibald MacLeish. So impressed was MacLeish by the images that he later explained, "The original purpose had been to write some sort of text to which the photographs might serve as commentary. But so great was the power … of these vivid American documents that the result was a reversal of that plan."

One of the images with which MacLeish was so taken was a Great Depression-era picture destined to become the most widely reproduced photograph in history. It took Dorothea Lange all of ten minutes to produce the immortal image that she titled Migrant Mother. Passing by a sign that read Pea Pickers Camp, she turned her car around and entered the wet, soggy place where she almost immediately encountered a woman and her two children. As Lange later described it, "I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions.…She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in the lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it." Beginning with its publication in Land of the Free, Migrant Mother became such an icon of an era that throughout the rest of her career Lange would complain that it threatened to make her known for nothing but having taken that image.

An American Exodus and Land of the Free were but two of the many books that appeared in the 1930s and 1940s featuring FSA photographs. Of all these volumes, one that found the largest readership was In This Proud Land, with text by Roy Stryker and Nancy Woods. Works by Marion Post Wolcott and Marjory Collins were all featured in the book, including Lange's memorable photograph of a woman at a revival meeting and Wolcott's compelling image of a judge at a Virginia horse show.

It was through books such as American Exodus, Land of the Free, and In This Proud Land that Dorothea Lange's photographs in particular received their widest distribution. In the decades following their publication, other women photographers such as Laura Gilpin, Barbara Morgan, Imogen Cunningham, Nell Dorr, and Margaret Bourke-White would all present many of their images to the world in book form.

The halftone printing process was introduced at a time when the United States was rapidly becoming the world's industrial leader. In a nation of people who had long been captivated by pictures of the "largest" or the "most recent," images of machines and industrial structures held a particular fascination. The ability to reproduce photographs in newspapers and magazines came also at a time when, more than ever before, the camera was becoming regarded as a faithful recorder of those symbols that defined an era. As the nation entered a new century, there was no greater symbol of all that America had achieved and of the widely held belief in the inevitability of continued progress than the machine. By the late 1920s, the pages of the nation's magazines and major newspapers were filled with photographs of the latest machines and industrial structures and with images of those who worked above, beneath, and around them. Within a decade, museums throughout the nation were proudly displaying photographs as well as paintings depicting all the various aspects of industrialism.

Out of this burgeoning industrial photography emerged photographers who would not only record the evidence of industrial progress but would bring their own interpretations to their images. Of these photographers Margaret Bourke-White most significantly expanded the horizons of photographing the industrial world.

Many of the earliest Bourke-White industrial images were taken on assignment for Fortune. Dedicated to presenting industrial life in words and pictures, Fortune became American industry's greatest champion. And Bourke-White was the magazine's most important photographer—not only in terms of the photographs she contributed but in the manner in which she helped make the pictures as important as the words in the publication's approach.

To Bourke-White, it was the aesthetic qualities found in otherwise utilitarian industrial objects that defined their importance to photography. "Any important art coming out of the industrial age," she wrote, "will draw inspiration from industry, because industry is alive and vital. The beauty of industry lies in its truth and simplicity: every line is essential and therefore beautiful." It was this focus on simplicity and detail, even in the largest objects, as well as the emotion she conveyed through these images that characterized her industrial photographs.

One of the greatest icons of the industrial age was New York's George Washington Bridge. The building of the bridge was a monumental achievement to which Bourke-White paid homage. Of the many pictures she took of the structure, the most compelling is the one in which the viewer is drawn into the photograph by the two enormous pipes in the foreground of the image. The long spans of cable, the gigantic superstructure, even the huge bolts anchoring the pipes are revealed, testimony to Bourke-White's special ability to portray size and detail while simultaneously conveying the special type of beauty that she continually found in the industrial world.

Just as Fortune and other publications played a pivotal early role in advancing the development of industrial photography, so too did one of America's largest corporations, Standard Oil of New Jersey. In 1941, a Roper poll revealed that Standard Oil was the least respected company in the nation. In response, the corporation hired a public relations firm to better its public image. After a period of study, the public relations people sent back a report stating that the image problems Standard Oil was having were due in large measure to the fact that the company, despite many good things it was doing, was not controlling the publicity that surrounded the corporation and its work. Among the recommendations was that Standard Oil hire a team of photographers to take pictures showing as many aspects as possible of the work that company employees were doing and the many benefits that the nation's citizens were deriving from these activities. The report went on to point out that these photographs should not only be published regularly in the company's trade journal, The Lamp, but even more importantly, funneled to the large-circulation magazines.

Standard Oil's management seized upon the report, particularly the idea of disseminating photographs that would enhance the company's image. Using the FSA's photographic accomplishments as a model, they created the Standard Oil of New Jersey Photographic Project. Convinced that they could replicate the FSA's success, they hired Roy Stryker away from his government work and instructed him to hire the best photographers with a bent toward industrial photography he could find. Among those Stryker brought aboard were Todd Webb, Edwin Rosskam, and Esther Bubley. Such FSA luminaries as Russell Lee, John Vachon, and Gordon Parks also agreed to take on special assignments.

The photographers who worked for what came to be known as the SONJ project were given great latitude. They were allowed to apply the broadest of interpretations to their mandate of extolling the virtues of Standard Oil. Esther Bubley, for example, produced a photo story on cross-country bus travelers similar to the one she had compiled for the FSA.

Many other images that Bubley captured for the SONJ project were industrial photographs in the truest sense of the term, and although she never attained the status of a Bourke-White, they are images that rival the best of the genre. One theme that developed within the world of industrial photography, for example, was in direct contrast to the notion of the all-powerful machine, espousing instead that regardless of the awe-inspiring feats of modern machinery brought to everyday life were, human beings still controlled them. Bubley's photograph of a worker standing atop an enormous structure at the Tom-ball, Texas, gasoline plant is a powerful presentation of this theme.

The SONJ project photographers produced more than eight thousand images. Ironically, despite their quality, the photographs never achieved the results that Standard Oil desired. While due to the images The Lamp became the most effectively illustrated of all trade journals, their use by national magazines was extremely limited, probably because they were regarded by many editors as an extreme example of Standard Oil "blowing its own horn." Today we can appreciate the role the project played in giving industrial photographers the chance to experiment within certain parameters and how it revealed that corporate sponsorship, like government support, could provide photographic opportunities.

The development of the halftone had also given rise to the proliferation of the photograph in mass media and perhaps nowhere more effectively than in advertising. Those with products to sell could now enhance their ads with photographs of their goods rather than with drawings. As early as 1902, Kodak featured photographs by Nancy Ford Cones in its newspaper and magazine advertisements. In the 1920s, Ruth Bernard, Clara Sipprell, and other female photographers enhanced their careers with advertising work, and two women, Margaret Watkins and Wynn Richards, became leaders in the field.

No area of commerce benefited more from the ability to include photographs on the printed page than did the fashion industry. For designers and merchants, the photograph became an indispensable means of conveying trends and selling merchandise. For photographers, the world of fashion presented broad new vistas accompanied by significant new challenges.

By the late 1930s, increasingly successful magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Woman's Home Companion were bringing the latest styles into homes throughout America and abroad. With millions of dollars at stake in potential sales and with designers' reputations continually on the line, fashion photography became the most competitive undertaking women photographers had ever faced. Even more than the world of advertising, it was a field dominated by men, one in which significant barriers against women photographers, consciously and subconsciously, had been established from the beginning.

Some women, however, did break through. Two sisters, Kathryn Abbe and Frances McLaughlin-Gill, along with Genevieve Naylor and Kay Bell Ragnall were among those women who were able to secure significant freelance work. And two women, Toni Frissell and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, not only succeeded but became true pioneers of the high-fashion image.

Toni Frissell first gained widespread recognition for her fashion work when she became a staff photographer for Vogue in 1931, a position she held for eleven years. Just prior to that, Town and Country had published her first series of fashion photographs, titled Beauties at Newport.

Frissell brought both energy and daring to her work. She let nothing deter her from getting exactly the picture she sought: "[T]he other photographers were all men," she would recall, "but I didn't think much about it. I used to be absolutely unself-conscious. For example, when I was very, very pregnant and photographing from an odd angle from the floor I saw next to me a beautifully creased pair of pants and perfectly polished shoes. I looked up and there was Condé Nast himself looking down at me. He said, 'What are you doing down there?' and I answered, 'Well, I'm interested in the way it looks from down here. I see things in my own way.'"

Frissell's pictures are marked by her understanding that a great fashion photograph is as much an image of a woman as it is of an article of clothing. "Instead of using studio lights," she later wrote, "I took my models outside to natural settings, even though they were dressed in furs and evening gowns. I wanted them to look like human beings, with the wind blowing their hair and clothes. As a photographer I was most successful when I did things naturally."

Frissell was the first fashion photographer to take models away from the confines of the studio. In conducting her "shoots" in exotic places around the world, she set a pattern followed by fashion photographers to this day. As her greatest contribution to the field, it was an innovation that in great measure paved the way for a fashion photograph to be judged not simply for its content but for its photographic attributes. Along with the images she captured for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, Frissell also photographed extensively for Garfinkel's department stores in Washington, D.C., images which were distinguished by the inclusion of treasured national landmarks.

In the 1930s, another woman photographer, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, began a career in fashion photography that would eventually bring her to the top of the field. Born Louise Dahl in San Francisco in 1895, she attended the California School of Design and studied painting with artist Frank Van Sloan. In 1921, a friend invited her to the studio of Anne W. Brigman, a visit that changed her life: "I was floored by the beauty of the Brigman photographs," she later wrote, "and entranced by the prospects of what the camera could do."

In order to make ends meet while developing her photographic skills she took a job designing electric signs in New York, and then returned to San Francisco to work for a decorator. Her career took another positive turn when she was introduced to Consuelo Kanaga, who became a lifelong friend. In 1927, the two traveled together to Italy and Morocco where Dahl-Wolfe carefully observed Kanaga's photographic techniques.

In 1928, Dahl met and married sculptor Mike Wolfe. Four years later the couple moved to a mountain cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. It was there that Dahl-Wolfe began to photograph seriously. She captured scores of images of mountain people, which were eventually published in Vanity Fair. In 1933, she and her husband returned to New York and a year later she acquired her first advertising account. Encouraged by her success, she set herself up as a freelancer and obtained photographic commissions from Woman's Home Companion and from department stores, including Bonwit Teller and Saks Fifth Avenue. In 1936, she became a staff photographer for Harper's Bazaar, a position she held for twenty-two years, and one through which she produced her finest work.

A leader in the photographic presentation of high fashion, Harper's Bazaar, following the lead set by Toni Frissell, sent Dahl-Wolfe throughout the world to capture images of the world's top models, elegantly clothed in exotic surroundings. Her fashion assignments took her to South America, Africa, Hawaii, the Caribbean, and many other locales. At a time when most fashion photographers worked in black and white, Dahl-Wolfe became known for her mastery of color. "One has to have a sense of putting color together in harmonious arrangements," she said, "planning backgrounds carefully, with an eye responsive to color." Her photographs were marked also by the dramatic manner in which she positioned each of her models within the framework of the page upon which the image would be published. She had a special ability to include arresting scenes within her photographs without diminishing the viewer's focus on the clothing the model was wearing. These groundbreaking techniques combined to establish Louise-Dahl Wolfe as one of the most influential photographers to bring the world of fashion to the printed page.

Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion