Some Little Shopgirls Worked in the Movies: The Dangers of Dark Theaters and the Creative Interventions of Girl Cinema Fans

In the opening decades of the 20^th century, the development of cinema minted a new national pastime—and yet, the ways that men and women were hailed into movie-culture varied greatly. It was not long before film producers and publicity departments capitalized on women’s leisure time and expendable income, while a parallel advertising industry recognized new avenues to ply female audience members with consumer goods.

The advent of the movies, however, occurred alongside deepening alarm over the burgeoning “girl problem” at century’s turn: the sense that America’s young women were becoming dangerously unruly. In 1909, the Chicago settlement house activist Jane Addams fretted, “Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon city streets and to work under alien roofs.” As young women entered the public world of production and capital, Addams worried, something ineffable—their purity, their naivete— was getting lost in the shuffle. The movies occupied a conflicted role amidst a time of social change: despite the fact that marketers and film producers eagerly courted female viewers as passive, impressionable consumers, in fact feminine engagement with cinema encompassed all aspects of production and reception—indeed, it was little shopgirls and their spending power that prevented the new media from fading into insolvency and technological inertia.

New research demonstrates that the “girl problem” was more complex than it appeared to the alarmed minds of reformers. Early cinema scrapbooks—fashioned from the leavings of a massive print culture that sprang up to support the film industry— acted as vehicles for young women to become immured within a culture that positioned them as consumers of disposable goods, whilst simultaneously revealing an anarchic capacity for youthful creativity and sophisticated mediatic curation of the external world.