Bound by Paper: Girl Fans, Movie Scrapbooks, and Hollywood Reception during World War I

Fan media practices, shaped by the advent of commercial narrative cinema in the 1910s, owe much to young female audiences. However, in-depth knowledge of these early fan communities is slim, having gone largely unexamined by silent-film historians. Focused on paper-based scrapbooks, tutorials, and correspondence crafted by movie-loving girls coming of age in North America during World War I, this article traces the tensile relationship established between a burgeoning male-presided film industry and the first demographic to be culturally addressed as “adolescent” and “screen-struck.” By privileging first-person accounts of girl-led movie collectives from assorted walks of life, I introduce a richly diverse, if mostly unknown, reception archive that showcases the formative modes of spectatorial engagement, consumer participation, peer belonging, and affective subversiveness engendered by an audience historically deemed negligible or unproductive. Reading personal fan objects in tandem with newspaper articles urging girls to reuse film ephemera also reveals that the outbreak of World War I recalibrated how moviegoers and the US press conceived of appropriate film fandom and useful female labor. Visible and valuable due to their passionate attachment to the pictures, young female audiences came to be recruited to participate in war-relief efforts, their paper crafts and domestic upcycling contributing to the nationwide debate on resource scarcity, public female agency, and the decline of western civilization.