Go West, Young Women!

by Hallett, Hilary A.

• ISBN13: 9780520274099
• ISBN10: 0520274091
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-01-15
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

In 1920, Los Angeles became the only western city where women outnumbered men. In Go West, Young Women, Hilary A. Hallett explores the relatively unknown New Woman of the West and her role in the development of Los Angeles and the nascent film industry. Hallett explains how women on both sides of the screen pioneered the transformation of the fledgling film industry from a marginal, decentralized business controlled by wealthy Anglo-Americans into the dominant, cosmopolitan industry of early Hollywood centered in Los Angeles. As early publicity stories about female celebrities focused on their independence, resourcefulness, and traversal of Los Angeles's increasingly bohemian terrain, Hollywood came to represent a different kind of frontier, one that spoke to a country torn between Victorian rectitude and individual emancipation, dreams of upward mobility and fears of moral dissolution. From Mary Pickford's rise to become perhaps the most powerful woman of her age, to the racist moral panics of the anti-war years and the aftermath of Hollywood's first sex scandal, Hallett describes how the path through early Hollywood presaged the struggles over modern gender roles that animated the century to come.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Along the Road to Hollywood

Landscapes

"Oh for a girl who could ride a horse like Pearl White": The Actress Democratizes Fame

Women-Made Women: Writing the "Movies" before Hollywood

Melodramas of Hollywood's Birth

The Postwar Revolution in Morals and Manners, Redux

Hollywood Bohemia

The Movie Menace

A Star Is Born: Rereading Hollywood's First Sex Scandal

Conclusion: The Girl from Hollywood

Filmography

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

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