Promoting and Containing New Womanhood in the Pages of Photoplay: The Case Of “Little Mary” Pickford and Her Mediated Alter Egos on the Cusp of the Roaring Twenties

Promoting and Containing New Womanhood in the Pages of Photoplay: The Case Of “Little Mary” Pickford and Her Mediated Alter Egos on the Cusp of the Roaring Twenties Kylo-Patrick R. HART Abstract Actress Mary Pickford is perhaps best remembered for her silent-screen persona “Little Mary.” But there was another important aspect to her Hollywood career that is frequently overlooked today: Pickford’s rise to power and fame corresponded with the era of the “New Woman” in U.S. society. This article explores the mediated construction of new womanhood as communicated through the coverage of Pickford’s career between 1918 and 1921 in the pages of the fan magazine Photoplay. It demonstrates how Photoplay used coverage of Pickford to promote the ideal of new womanhood until 1919, when she became the most powerful woman in American moviemaking by co-founding United Artists with three men. After that, at the start of the Roaring Twenties, the magazine sought to contain new womanhood by presenting Pickford almost exclusively as a child, without continuing to acknowledge her abilities as a savvy movie mogul and grown woman as it had regularly done in the past—until significant changes in her personal life required another noteworthy shift in the magazine’s coverage patterns of this star. Keywords: fan magazine, feminism, new womanhood, Roaring Twenties, stardom Actress Mary Pickford (1892–1979) is perhaps best remembered for her silent-screen persona “Little Mary,” the charming, childlike, demure, mischievous, spunky character type she played in so many of the more than 200 movies she appeared in over the course of her career (Felder 1996: 334; Windeler 1973: 7). With her barely five-foot frame, expressive features, and trademark curls, Pickford became widely regarded as America’s Sweetheart after she gave up a decade-long career on the stage in 1909 and made her transition into movies. In an era that prided itself on innocence, Pickford emerged as the cinematic feminine ideal, the girl every young man wanted to have—as his sister (Felder 1996: 334). She played a 12-yearProfessor and Chair Department of Film, Television and Digital Media, Texas Christian University, USA. 31 Cultural Intertexts Year VII Volume 10 (2020) The Roaring (20)20s old when she was 24 (in 1917’s The Little Princess) (Corliss 1998: 53); she was equally convincing playing the long-suffering, poor little girl (e.g., in 1919’s Daddy Long Legs) as the poor little rich girl (e.g., in 1917’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm). As entertainment writer Richard Corliss sums up Pickford’s appeal to fans: Pickford was a household goddess of the silent screen. […] She didn’t ooze sex appeal, even of the Lolita type; in her film roles she was closer to daughter than to sweetheart. […] Little Mary struck so deep a chord in the new mass of moviegoers because she reflected the dreams of the immigrant and the pain of those she called “the Great Unloved.” [...] Like Steven Spielberg, Pickford made an art and millions from the acute remembrance and reconfiguration of childhood. (1998: 54) But there was another important side to Mary Pickford that is frequently overlooked by many of her remaining fans today. While on screen Pickford retained an innocent, childlike appeal, off screen she was regarded as a powerful businesswoman in her own right, one who achieved complete control over her own career— “including the contractual right of final cut of her films, by the time she was 25 years old” (Eyman 1990: 2). “It took longer to make one of Mary’s contracts than it did to make one of her pictures,” producer Sam Goldwyn once remarked, attesting to the star’s keen ability to negotiate the most favorable terms for herself in exchange for her much-in-demand performances (Felder 1996: 334). Pickford earned $5 a day when she started working in movies in 1909; by 1916, as a result of her business acumen, she was earning an unprecedented $10,000 a week (Windeler 1973: 6; Felder 1996: 334). She was a pioneer in product endorsement with offerings ranging from Mary Pickford massage cream to the Little Mary radiator cap (Corliss 1998: 53), as well as the first female movie star to helm her own independent production company, Mary Pickford Film Corporation, upon launching it with her mother in 1918 (Felder 1996: 335). The following year, when she founded United Artists along with fellow actors Douglas Fairbanks and Charles Chaplin and director D. W. Griffith at the age of 26, Pickford ranked among the most powerful players Hollywood has ever encountered. Pickford’s rise to power, fortune, and fame corresponded with the era of the “New Woman” (Singer 1996: 177) in U.S. society, which came into being in the years between 1880 and 1920, and it reached new heights at the start of the Roaring Twenties, a decade filled with significant social, cultural, and lifestyle changes for American women and others (Hourly 32 Cultural Intertexts Year VII Volume 10 (2020) The Roaring (20)20s 2017). During this period, new conceptions of a woman’s legitimate domain emerged that deviated from the stringent expectations of women during the Victorian era. As film studies scholar Ben Singer (1996: 177) has noted, substantially reduced fertility rates and the growing range of widely available, labor-saving products and machines provided lower-, middle-, and upper-class women alike greater freedom to pursue activities outside of the home. “Whereas only about 10 percent of women worked in paid labor in 1880,” he writes, “this figure had almost doubled by 1910, or tripled if one looks only at the urban population. By 1910, over 40 percent of young, single women worked for several years before marriage, and the figure was probably over 60 percent in urban areas” (Singer 1996: 177). In addition to the workplace, Singer explains that the ongoing development of amusement parks, department stores, movie theaters, and music halls encouraged the increasing presence of women in the public sphere during this period, as did enhancements in mobility enabled by electric trolleys and the heightened popularity of bicycles as symbols of female emancipation. As the United States moved into modernity at the turn of the century and beyond, the increasingly pervasive cultural image of women as able to stand on their own began to displace outdated notions of female dependence on men (Singer 1996: 178). The trademarks of the New Woman included energy, independence, initiative, self-reliance, and direct interaction in the extradomestic world; print media became preoccupied with these attributes and their corresponding cultural construct of modern womanhood as they continuously endeavored to articulate, caricature, critique, define, detail, and mythologize its various dimensions (Singer 1996: 177-178). These were not always easy tasks, however. Ultimately, popular magazines and other publications in this period ended up seeking to contain the New Woman almost as frequently as they sought to l (...truncated)