Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood by Hilary A. Hallett (review)

At the end of the 19th century, Frederick Jackson Turner argued for the special place the frontier played in the development of a rugged, upwardly mobile American character. Decades earlier, Horace Greeley’s famed advice to the young men of America to “go west” captured this spirit. A trickle of settlers in the 19^th century turned into a flood after the discovery of gold in northern California and the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Two decades after Turner delivered his famed thesis, a new gold mountain emerged in California. The moving picture seemed to offer the same fame and fortune to the intrepid individuals who disregarded safety and convention. However, it was not the grizzled mountain man or the hardscrabble prospector of the 19^th century but the new woman who staked her claim to the new wealth of the West, or so argues Hilary A. Hallett in her compelling monograph on women in early Hollywood.

Hallett divides Go West into two parts: the first offers a cultural history of women’s work and the role of working women in early Hollywood. She argues that the movies helped construct the image of the “new woman” and that women in the industry were crucial to this expanding definition of womanhood. Part II is primarily concerned with representations of women in the movies, especially in the context of new ideas regarding marriage and sexuality. In the process, Hallett also provides a reading of the film censorship movements of the 1920s as both an attack on those who challenged gender norms and as an opportunity for middle-class women to assert some control over motion picture content.

In Part One, “Along the Road to Hollywood,” Hallett describes the early development of the motion picture industry in the context of both popular theater and the growing consumer culture of the Gilded Age. In convincing fashion, Hallett not only presents the familiar argument about the role of women in the cinematic star system, but also traces this gendered history of stardom in the context of the popular theater of the 19^th century. Relying on the work of noted cultural historians Lawrence Levine and Mary Ryan, among others, she argues that popular theater both challenged the high-low divide that marked American culture during the era and disrupted Victorian notions of separate gender spheres. The rise of theatrical melodramas and, generally speaking, what some historians have called the “feminization of American culture” provided women on stage and in the audience a new public presence in what was previously considered the “public den of male sociability” (35). With the birth of vaudeville and its more family-friendly offerings, women like Mary Pickford and other early film stars played an increasingly prominent role in popular theater.

Hallett claims that these women not only expanded employment opportunity but also helped redefine women’s social roles as mothers and wives through columns, screenplays, and the public examples of their own lives. She reminds us that these successes were often met with resistance. For example, unflattering newspaper columns regarding stage mothers were widely published with the purpose of diminishing female achievement or caricaturing female assertiveness. Indeed, as Hallett clearly demonstrates, the success of early female film stars like Pickford, Florence Lawrence, and Pearl White, attracted a growing number of mothers and their daughters to Hollywood. To underscore their agency in creating their own star images, Hallett emphasizes the business acumen of these mother-daughter pairs as much as their theatrical talent. Pickford, most notably, took control over her career and parlayed her stardom into great wealth and power as a movie producer and eventual co-founder of United Artists. Hallett also emphasizes the critical role women journalists and screenwriters played behind the screen in early Hollywood in promoting a more active and modern woman to audiences. She relies largely on the noted examples of Louella Parsons, Anita Loos, and Fannie Hurst.

In Part II: “Melodramas...