“Female Showmen”: Mapping the Gendered Landscape of Early Film Exhibition

The figure of the pioneering, multi-talented, energetic ‘showman’ establishing the places and spaces of early film culture in communities across America is well known. To date, however, the predominant story of such ‘showmen’ has been one casting men in leading roles. Nevertheless, a preliminary survey of film trade journals between 1908 and 1917 finds 140 women as sole proprietors of moving picture shows, inviting further investigation to determine the full scale of the phenomenon. This paper presents findings from New Hampshire, where pilot research using newspapers, city directories, town reports and fire insurance maps has discovered at least a dozen women exhibitors during the period of film’s emergence and transformation into ‘cinema.’ Starting from the premise that to participate in modern life is to be absorbed into traffic, this paper explores the social, cultural, economic and geographic landscape that enabled and constrained the mobility of ‘female showmen’ as they navigated and transformed the topography of a developing medium, thereby contesting the cultural unintelligibility of women’s identities as powerful media entrepreneurs. By drawing upon statewide demographic patterns as well as micro studies of local practices, cinema’s spatially mediated and spatially mediating place in early 20th century modernity is considered in relation to spatial and social forces such as rail and road systems, rural depopulation, and the women’s suffrage movement. The paper uses geographic information system (GIS) technology to map women’s engagements at specific sites of exhibition and to identify historical and geographic conditions shaping and regulating their media access.