{"id":30498,"date":"2015-02-08T20:42:03","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T02:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=30498"},"modified":"2015-02-08T22:50:20","modified_gmt":"2015-02-09T04:50:20","slug":"memory-books-the-movies-and-aspiring-vamps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2015\/02\/08\/memory-books-the-movies-and-aspiring-vamps\/","title":{"rendered":"Memory books, the movies, and aspiring vamps"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Kristin here:<\/p>\n

We are happy to have a guest entry from our long-time friend and colleague, Leslie Midkiff DeBauche<\/strong>, who recently retired from teaching film at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. Back in the 1990s, when David and I were helping edit a series called “Wisconsin Studies in Film” (University of Wisconsin Press), Leslie contributed Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I<\/a>. Now she is involved in a fascinating project on the same period, the 1910s. There is much focus these days on reception studies, which focuses on trying to gauge the reactions of audiences to movies. Reconstructing mental events is a difficult, near impossible task. Yet Leslie has found a way to glimpse the ways in which American girls and young ladies of decades ago consumed and thought about movies: by studying the scrapbooks they left behind. Here’s a sample of what she has discovered.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u00a0Fangirls of yesteryear<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kate Key received a scrapbook bound in red leather and entitled My Commencement<\/em> as a gift from her oldest sister Ruth when she graduated from Lampasas High School, class of 1917.<\/p>\n

She was eighteen, born and raised in this central Texas farming and ranching community of about 2,100. As far as I can tell, there were no dedicated film theatres in town. Instead, movies alternated with concerts, vaudeville and plays on the bill at the Witcher Opera House. So, I was surprised to read in her class prophecy (a humorous forecast of what the students would be doing in a fictive future) that Elsie Moses and Leta Townsen would return for their class\u2019s reunion in 1928 as movie stars and graciously show their films at the Grand Opera House.<\/p>\n

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This caused me to wonder whether girls who lived in other parts of the United States also made jokes out of the movies? Might scrapbooks offer film historians like me, interested in the ways that films fit into the lives of everyday people, a new sort of evidence of exhibition and reception in the 1910s and 1920s? When girls mentioned movies in their scrapbooks, or pasted in ticket stubs and theater programs, did they whisper \u201copen sesame\u201d to a quotidian film culture? Was that culture different from and more pervasive than that practiced by fangirls (and boys) who avidly consumed Photoplay<\/em> and wrote mash notes to their favorite actors? I began to search out scrapbooks, specifically high school and college memory books.<\/p>\n

To date, I have collected upwards of 45 scrapbooks.\u00a0The scrapbooks I have found and studied are mainly the products of white, middle class and upper middle class girls. I have an example or two at either end of the economic spectrum. Despite my best efforts, I have had no luck so far finding the memory books made by African-American teenagers, though I suspect these exist. (I would welcome any suggestions.) New immigrants to the country may not have been aware of this \u201ctradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before I survey what I have learned from American girls about themselves and about movie-going, let me tell you a bit about scrapbooks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Multi-purpose compendiums<\/strong><\/p>\n

They have a long history in the United States. Samuel L. Clemons, Mark Twain himself, was an avid scrapbook-maker, and he patented a model featuring self-adhesive pages in 1873. By 1880, how-to books like E.W. Gurley\u2019s Scrapbooks and How to Make Them, Containing Full Instructions for Making a Complete and Systematic Set of Useful Books<\/em>, guided novices with instructions for what to include and even recipes for the glue to stick objects in place.<\/p>\n

Arranged by topic and indexed for efficient access, early scrapbooks consolidated recipes for food or household concoctions. They served as encyclopedias and also provided entertainment. Poetry and fiction were appropriate inclusions harking back to the days of commonplace books. The scrapbook became a means for autobiography and a method of keeping family history. Gurley promoted making scrapbooks both an individual and a collective endeavor. Neighborhoods might organize a scrap-book club, and families could draw on the help of relatives to fill the gaps in their chronicles by bringing their books to reunions. For example, in 1906, Marion Renfrew, a school girl in Boston, invited her friend Eva Alberta Mooar to a party celebrating the \u201cdebut\u201d of the \u201coffspring of her labor and patience Memory Book.\u201d Eva saved that letter in her own scrapbook, and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe preserved Mooar\u2019s book in its archive.<\/p>\n

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Marketing scrapbooks to girls<\/strong><\/p>\n

Girls were a devoted audience for advice about creating scrapbooks, and the activity became, increasingly, a gendered one. By 1905, scrapbooks were a commodity, mass produced, sold at stationery shops, and complemented by auxiliary \"\"<\/a>businesses which supported them. Companies manufactured specialty paper corners, some with elaborate designs for sticking photographs to the scrapbook page. One genre of scrapbook was the memory book designed mostly for girls and young women and given to them as presents on special occasions like graduation from high school or college.<\/p>\n

The Reilly & Britton Company offered eight different titles of school memory books for sale by 1917. The price of these gift books depended on their binding; \u201cFancy cloth, decorated with gold and two colors,\u201d cost two dollars (about $40 today), but a leather cover with a velvety finish called ooze, added an extra dollar and twenty-five cents.<\/p>\n

A blank page might have invited girls to fill in stuff of their choosing, but flowery Art Nouveau borders pushed the design toward a notion of conventional, appropriate girlhood. The filled spaces also conjured the metaphor that school was a garden, carefully tended, its flowers growing in tidy uniform beds. Memory books featured standard tables of contents that suggested what girls should preserve and how their mementos ought to be arranged. However helpfully intended, these headings also functioned to delimit what high school included and to prompt girls to tell a cheery, triumphal story in which \u201cfavorite\u201d teachers, \u201cbest friends,\u201d all sorts of parties, athletic endeavors, and the rituals of graduation would lead ineluctably to the happy reunion foretold by the class prophecy.<\/p>\n

Still, what I have come to relish about girls who made scrapbooks is that they did not necessarily abide by the dictates of their books\u2019 blueprints. They surely recognized the ideological requisites of girlhood structured onto memory book pages, but they may not have entirely subscribed to them. Often and idiosyncratically, girls changed and adapted their books.<\/p>\n

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Girls make scrapbooks to suit themselves<\/strong><\/p>\n

Elizabeth Walker travelled more than one hundred miles from Mineola, Texas to attend the College of Industrial Arts at Denton in 1918. She seemed to embrace the process of compiling My Memory Book<\/em>. Hers was larger than most: 15\u201d wide, 11\u201d tall, and 2 \u00bc\u201d thick. It appears that she received it when she matriculated and she filled in the pages as she progressed through her four years of teacher-training. After Elizabeth graduated in 1922, she became a teacher in El Paso. She continued to slide letters, documents including the Code of Ethics for Texas teachers and newspaper clippings, inside the back cover of her book during the 1930s. The most recent insertion was dated 15 July 1969. It was snipped from the school\u2019s (now Texas \"\"<\/a>Women\u2019s University) alumnae bulletin and brought her up-to-date on members of the class of \u201922.<\/p>\n

Still, at the beginning, the freshman Elizabeth had composed a bantering dialogue with her memory book\u2019s table of contents. She treated it as a slightly irritating senior who was trying to tell her how to act. For instance, halfway down the list of things she was supposed to save were pressed flowers and leaves. \u201cDon\u2019t believe in \u2018em,\u201d retorted Betty.<\/p>\n

Alice Ebeling graduated in 1919 from South Bend High School in Indiana. She drew a line through the heading \u201cHer Gowns,\u201d replaced it with \u201cClassmates,\u201d and used the pages for autographs from her friends including Lester Frank (left). Apparently, he was on the receiving end of a prank she played in Spanish class.<\/p>\n

Corinne Campau, Sophie B. Wright High School, New Orleans, class of 1919, crossed out \u201cFavorite Studies\u201d and pasted in a drawing of a rotund store clerk resembling the Campbell Soup kids drawn by Grace Drayton. Even better, the illustration covered up rude comments Corinne had written about a first-aid class and its annoying, irrelevant, teacher: \u201cIT\u2019S a joke. (\u2018Girls, I heard a case of a beautiful young woman\u2014Oh, a sweet lovely young woman who fell on a brick + broke her hip.\u2019)\u201d<\/p>\n

To me, there is irony, if not a nervous, dark humor in the decision of Fannie Klapman (Murray F. Tuley High School, Chicago, 1920) to glue a little cloth envelope embroidered with flowers on the page designated for \u201cCard Parties.\u201d The description she wrote underneath said, \u201cNew Year\u2019s card from my brother at that time in France.\u201d (He mustered out safely and went on to graduate from Crane Junior College in 1920.)<\/p>\n

As well as manifesting a playful irreverence, the ways that girls altered memory books testified to a belief in their own agency. Scrapbooks were not private or secret like diaries. Girls took them to school where they solicited classmates\u2019 autographs and good wishes; they showed them to friends who visited their homes. Although I expect many girls started to compile their memory books by following the order set out in tables of contents, when that rubric didn\u2019t accommodate their stuff or their lives, they deliberately, messily, and with the knowledge that their actions would be seen, took matters into their own hands. They also began to make changes in the history of their lives at school almost as soon as they pasted their stuff in place. Memory books, like memory itself, were changeable, dynamic.<\/p>\n

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Movies and American girls<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Since none of the books I have examined contain designated pages for films, how did American girls fit movie scraps into their memory books? When I consider my collection of artifacts, two broad patterns hold.<\/p>\n

First, girls saved ephemera including ticket stubs, programs, occasionally newspaper advertisements that proved they actually saw films. (Above, Rebecca Little’s scrapbook from 1918.) I\u2019ll call this category \u201cGirls Go to the Movies.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Second, and more intriguing, scrapbooks are crammed full of evidence that girls incorporated the movies–their actors, narrative conventions, and film titles\u2014into a vernacular culture, national in its scope, spanning different religious affiliations. (Above, Hattie Stein’s School Friendship Book<\/em> describes how she and her friends saw a Max Linder movie at the YMCA in Appleton, Wisconsin.) Let\u2019s name this second motif, \u201cGirls Make Fun with Movies.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Girls go to the movies<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Scrapbooks show that movie-going was one activity among many that mattered to girls in the 1910s and 1920s. No one expressed this better than did Marie Ostheimer, who graduated from West Chester Normal School in southeastern Pennsylvania in 1917. The only mention of film in the thirty-six pages of her Normal Life<\/em> is the Liberty Bell-shaped newspaper ad for The Poor Little Rich Girl<\/em> at the Idlehour Theatre which she clipped out (see bottom image). Nevertheless, she captioned it \u201cThose movies every Saturday afternoon.\u201d Her annotated two-page spread surrounds Little Mary with play programs, an excellent evaluation she received for a class presentation, news cuttings about her own and her friends\u2019 trips\"\"<\/a> home, and a receipt that was evidence of some sort of kerfuffle over a doctor\u2019s bill. It is a snapshot of learning, leisure, and life experiences among which going to the picture show was part of the routine of weekend fun.<\/p>\n

When girls did go to the movies with friends\u2014which always seems to be the case\u2014the screening was only one feature of the afternoon or evening\u2019s or weekend\u2019s entertainment. Case in point: Hattie Selma Stein, Busheys Business Academy, Appleton, WI, 1921-1922. She used a vaudeville program (above, the film Secret Gift<\/em> is the 2nd turn and the chaser) to record the movies she attended during her year at school. Hattie jotted down the names of her companions, what the weather was like, how they \u201cannoyed\u201d the \u201cnervous humans\u201d seated in front of them, where they had snacks afterwards, and whether she and her boyfriend Perry won the race to the dorm\u2019s porch swing at the end of the evening.<\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t always name the movie that served as the pretext for the date. Neglecting to note the film\u2019s title wasn\u2019t unusual in the scrapbooks I\u2019ve examined. Instead, what girls saved was their experience of going to the movies.<\/p>\n

For both Hester Swan from Independence, Missouri, class of 1919, and Janet Seidenman, who graduated from Western High School in Baltimore in 1926, food made an evening with friends and films tasty–an adjective which, at the time, meant not only yummy but also “in conformity with good taste.” Swan and twenty others attended a “line party,” featuring Marguerite Clark starring in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch<\/em>. “After the show Grape Sherbert and Cake were served. We all had a lovely time and enjoyed the show and refreshments immensely.” In a page of her scrapbook, Seidenman drew an arrow from a caption “Richard Barthlemess [sic] in ‘The Fighting Blade.’ Peanut chews were served and everybody was happy,” to her admission ticket, which she also festooned with an inch-long strip of Kodak film negative.<\/p>\n

Every so often, though, going to the movies was a special occasion. Girls responded to promotional hype surrounding roadshows. When they saved movie programs, it was invariably from \u201cbig\u201d films shown at a theaters which usually presented plays, for instance, the Majestic Theatre in Boston or the Savoy in San Francisco, or motion pictures made on the grand scale by D.W. Griffith. Hattie Stein captioned the ad for Broken Blossoms<\/em> (right) showing at the Lawrence University Chapel, \u201cKill Me While I\u2019m Happy.\u201d She also noted that two \u201ccollege fellows\u201d were on hand to cheer her up and, of course, there was \u201clunch,\u201d a colloquialism for snacks, at Sniders afterwards.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Girls make fun with movies<\/strong><\/p>\n

Girls did much so more than purchase tickets, sit in theaters, and watch movies before munching on peanut chews. Memory books show that girls around the United States incorporated the movies into their own playful culture. Certainly this is evidence that by the mid-teens, Americans were widely and deeply aware of information about movie stars, narrative conventions, movie-making itself, and the nuts and bolts of film exhibition. I think it’s also akin to the ways girls exercised control over their scrapbooks. When they used movies to make jokes, girls inflected the tone of the film industry\u2019s advertising and narrative messages. They impressed their own proclivities onto increasingly standardized fare. The graduation convention of the class prophecy is a good place to start to see how girls adapted and used the movies for their own purposes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So you want to be in pictures?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Class prophecies were an American school graduation tradition at least through the 1960s when I completed junior high. They were intended to be light-hearted, funny predictions about the future lives of the members of the class. Prophecies were guided by certain conventions of the form. They were often read publicly during graduation festivities, and it was not unusual to find pages designated for the class prophecy in memory books. Sometimes a prediction hinged on the student\u2019s traits, interests, or romantic inclinations; it could hinge on word play about their name. It was important that the audience got the joke, or most of the jokes.<\/p>\n

In nearly every class prophecy I encountered written from 1917 onward, at least one student was proclaimed to be destined for a job in the film industry. The most elaborate example lodged in Bertha Glennon\u2019s memory book. Glennon graduated in 1918 from high school in Stevens Point, WI, the small city where I live. In fact, she was the author of her class\u2019s prophecy and it was also her honor to read it aloud at Class Day a few days before the more formal graduation exercises. (She wore a dress of old-rose colored voile for the occasion.) The rhetorical device she created to frame her story was personal, timely, and more than a little macabre. The United States had entered World War I in April of Bertha\u2019s junior year, and she had done her bit by helping to supervise in the Red Cross Room at school where students rolled bandages.<\/p>\n

In the class prophecy, Glennon imagined herself as a nurse taking a break from her duties in a hospital on the western front. She sat on a hill and watched bombs explode in the distance. In each burst of smoke, Bertha saw a vision of the future. Boom! As the dusty haze resolved into an image, she identified classmates Ovid Meyer and Ada Kuhl in the midst of shooting a scene for a movie melodrama. Bertha Glennon described mise-en-scene, cinematography, and editing in sharp detail.<\/p>\n

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Glennon also wrote a diary that documented what she did every day during 1918, so, I know that in the five months leading up to her graduation she went to the movies fifteen times. Once she went on her birthday, another time because she didn\u2019t have a date to the prom. She also recorded once when she went with her mother to visit a sick uncle. At his house she found a movie magazine which she read to pass the time while the grown-ups chatted. Bertha Glennon may have been a little better informed than most of my scrapbook girls, but she was not movie-mad.<\/p>\n

Most often in class prophecies, girls were cast as movie stars. Dewene Flynt, Elizabeth Walker\u2019s classmate at Mineola High School (1918) was sure to work for the American Motion Picture Co. and Adelheit M.W. Dettmann of Atlantic, Iowa (1918) was destined to be \u201cCharles Chaplin\u2019s leading lady.\u201d After graduating in 1919 from Sophie B. Wright high school in New Orleans, Elizabeth Wakeman “will play piano at a moving picture show.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cMy Ambitions\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

As you might guess, in real-life 1910s and 1920s America, relatively few girls made the transit from the high school auditorium to the movie studio, not even Rebecca Little who graduated from the Cumnock Academy in Los Angeles in 1918. (Martha Graham danced at the May Day celebration at her school that year.) Yet among the young women I have met in these books, one did actually become an actress: on the stage in the 1920s, on the radio in the 1930s, in the movies in the 1940s and 1950s, and on television in the 1950s and 1960s. She also wrote a novel, under the pseudonym Xanthippe, which was adapted into a film. Edith Meiser who graduated from the Liggett School in Detroit in 1917 is the exception that proves the rule. She was extraordinary.<\/p>\n

In fact, the hopes girls had for themselves and the wishes they made for others, were, in the main, conventional: success, happiness, good luck, and marriage. In a cartoon of a schoolgirl dreaming of her future, Sylvia Seidenman (Western High School, Baltimore, 1917) might have chosen the nurse with a hypodermic needle, a mother, a scholar, a ballet dancer, or a teacher with a ruler in her hand. Sylvia drew an arrow pointing at the typist, noting “This for me.” Edna Kallberg (Central High, Minneapolis, 1921) cut out and glued down a fat-cheeked toddler washing dishes (below left). \u201cMy Ambitions\u201d was the heading which she affixed like a valance above the illustration. Nellie McKeever, from Westport High School, in Kansas City, Missouri (1924) had more talented friends and teachers than most girls did, but the same sentiments abide in their art and calligraphy (below right).<\/p>\n

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Girls didn\u2019t make jokes with the movies when they autographed each other\u2019s books; they wrote cautionary rhymes. \u201cLong may you live; happy may you tarry, Court whom you please, but mind whom you marry.\u201d (Mollie Winer warned Mary Louise Howell, Commercial High School, Atlanta, 1918.)<\/p>\n

Some alluded to infamous moments in classes. Nearly always, they expressed the desire to be remembered. As Beatrice B. requested of Dolly Bennett (Houghton High School, Houghton, Michigan, 1921) \u201cIn the wood-box of your memory, save a little stick for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The differences between the humorous fortunes cast for girls in class prophecies and the sincere but commonplace wishes one girl offered to another show that they fully understood a paradox at the heart of the popularity the film industry enjoyed with the American public. The stuff of the movies–its stars and its stories–must be both fanciful and familiar, provocative enough to pique the imagination, but also secure, a safe playground for parody. The industry provided fodder for jokes, whether it meant to or not.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Starring Lydia Kahn, Baby Vampire<\/strong><\/p>\n

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I will close this post with one last example of how girls employed the movies for their own amusement, to their own ends. The society these scrapbook girls lived in valued \u201ccorrectness\u201d in dress, speech, and behavior. Girls realized there were consequences\u2014in life as well as in fiction–for not minding their Ps and Qs. As my grandmother Kate Key might have said, they knew \u201cstraight-up.\u201d But, propriety did not stop girls from making fun of the rules governing them as young women, and movies gave them the ingredients for jokes.<\/p>\n

Let me introduce Lydia Kahn, \u201cBaby Vampire.\u201d Vampire? The reference is to the character\u2014a woman who destroyed men\u2014made most famous by Theda Bara when she starred in the 1915 film, A Fool There Was<\/em>. It was based on an 1897 Burne-Jones painting which inspired Kipling’s poem as well as both a play and a novel by Porter Emerson Browne. The movie coined the noun vamp<\/em> and the verb to vamp<\/em>. It also sparked jokes among young people all over the United States.<\/p>\n

Kahn, the daughter of architect Albert Kahn, was memorialized as a vampire in Helen Schloss\u2019s memory book. The girls were part of a remarkable class of upper and upper-middle class young women, including actress Edith Meiser, who graduated from the Liggett School in Detroit in 1917. The in-joke linking Lydia Kahn to Theda Bara was doubly made. First, there was the epithet Schloss scrawled next to her name. “Baby” in this context means vamp-in-training. Second, I found an allusion to Kahn as Bara in an issue of a little newspaper–more tongue-in-cheek than hard news–that the Liggett girls published their senior year. In a column headed \u201cHeard at Grinnell\u2019s\u201d (a music store in downtown Detroit), one joke referenced a song, \u201c\u2019I\u2019ve Lost Him so Why Should I Cry?\u2019 which paraphrased the actual, “I’ve Lost You So Why Should I Care.” The titular question was attributed to “Kahnie,” which was Lydia’s nickname.<\/p>\n

The sheet music portrayed Theda Bara\u2014dressed, I think, for her role in Carmen<\/em> (1915). Was Kahn a flirt? Had she broken up with some boy? Or, he with her? Was the question in the title ironic? Maybe Lydia Kahn was the opposite of a vamp but she bore a physical resemblance to Bara; perhaps Lydia Kahn did a great imitation of Theda Bara.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll never know exactly why this joke worked so well that Helen Schloss transposed it from the Cap and Gown<\/em> to her School Friendship Book, but my scrapbook collection can provide a context for interpretation. It turns out that Theda Bara\u2019s vamp is the most common reference to the movies in memory books.<\/p>\n

Lydia Kahn wasn\u2019t alone, even in Schloss\u2019s memory book, where Lucile Boynton was available to give lessons in vamping, \u201cEfficiency guaranteed in three easy lessons. Prices reasonable.\u201d Hester Swan\u2019s place card at the Foster\u2019s party (below left) read \u201cVamp\u201d and pictured dangling earrings and a sophisticated demeanor. Although I expect this evening in Independence, Missouri was innocent, Swan wanted to remember that \u201cMe and \u2018My Pal\u2019 were together one whole \u2018Luxurious evening.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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The prophecy for the Sophie B. Wright high school of 1919 foretold how Corinne Campau\u2019s good friend Louisiana Clayton would depose Theda Bara as queen of the vamps after she graduated. This joke may have begun at the fashion show the seniors had hosted for the school\u2019s junior class. Under snapshots of Lou dressed as the \u201cFuturist,\u201d and Aline Richter as \u201cHobble-Skirt Girl,\u201d Corinne renamed them: \u201cThe school Thedas\u2014Some Vamps\u201d (above right). Everything about Lou screamed vamp: her outr\u00e9 costume, the slouchy, hand-on-hip pose, her dark-colored lips. There was another photo on the following page of Corinne\u2019s memory book: here the school Theda is surrounded by classmates costumed as men–some kneeling, others leaning in–as Lou, blas\u00e9, looks off the right.<\/p>\n

Even boys were liable to be called \u201cTheda\u201d or to be teased as vamps. Adele Franz seems to be recounting an embarrassing moment glimpsed in a boat house when she noted that Alfred J. Peterson, \u201calias Theda\u201d would star in a production of \u201cAs the Lord Made Him.\u201d And, Fannie Klapman printed \u201cJewish Vamp\u201d beside a collage she had made by gluing the cut-out head of one of her male classmates onto the buff torso of a guy wearing a swim suit sitting at the wheel of an auto (below left ). To amplify the incongruity, underneath the picture she wrote, \u201cKinda reduced, eh Rudolph?\u201d This might also be early evidence of Valentino\u2019s star persona. No one in Fannie\u2019s class was named Rudolph.<\/p>\n

Klapman also commented upon other autographs friends wrote in her memory book. Next to a picture of Sara, who made an analogy between her own good wishes for the graduate and her love of Harold Lloyd, Fannie, somewhat cattily, I think, adds the annotation, “A would be vamp” (below right).<\/p>\n

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Hattie Stein and her girlfriends in Appleton, Wisconsin wore out the verb, vamping their way throughout their school year in 1920-1921.<\/p>\n

What ought we to make of so many Thedas and so much vamping? I\u2019m not entirely sure. If this is an example of an early 20th century meme, then Theda Bara and the vampire she portrayed function to throw conventional femininity and social mores into high relief. Bara was unambiguously evil in A Fool There Was<\/em>. Girls (and boys) recognized this and camped her up even more. Girls could play dress-up and pretend to be bad\u2014the better they were at the game, the clearer it was that they knew the rules of correctness. When I look at the references to Bara and vamping chronologically (and I surely wish I had more examples from 1915 and 1916), I detect a change. In the earliest mentions, there are connotations of physically sexuality (as with poor, perhaps naked, Alfred Peterson) and an imperious woman (hear the disdainful tone of \u201cI Lost Him So Why Should I Cry\u201d and imagine the smug look on Lou Clayton\u2019s face as she ignores her admirers). By the early 1920s though, it seems to me that all menace has drained from verb and it simply means to flirt.<\/p>\n

While there is more to tell about American girls, their memory books, and the movies, I must stop here. For readers who have watched and thought about American silent film or have studied its history, I hope that my research has added to your store. If you are interested in women\u2019s history, I trust the scraps which illustrate this piece have reinforced what you know and have piqued your curiosity. I have grown inordinately fond of many of these girls and fascinated by their doings. My search for memory books continues; they are a rich resource for historians. They are exuberant, charming, funny, sometimes poignant and sad. They bear witness to how girls lived their everyday lives, what possibilities they were able to imagine for themselves, and the ways that movies fit into both these spheres.<\/p>\n

\n

I would like to thank David and Kristin for inviting me to share my work with you. It is a huge honor. I would also like to thank Doug Moore for shooting most of my photographs, and Sally Key DeBauche for casting her professional archivist\u2019s eye on my scrapbooks and helping me to think about them as a collection.<\/p>\n

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Kristin here: We are happy to have a guest entry from our long-time friend and colleague, Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, who recently retired from teaching film at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. Back in the 1990s, when David and I were helping edit a series called “Wisconsin Studies in Film” (University of Wisconsin Press), Leslie contributed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,12,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fans-and-fandom","category-film-history","category-silent-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30498"}],"version-history":[{"count":61,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30588,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30498\/revisions\/30588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}