Suffragists Storm the Screen, continued...

Regular SFSFF blog contributor Christine U'Ren was inspired by the Mothers of Men program at SFSFF 2016 to write a series of posts devoted to silent films and suffragettes. This is the continuation of part 2. For part 1, go here, and for the first section of part 2, go here.

KINETOPHONES

In its January 11, 1913, issue, Moving Picture News reported, "Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, one of the most prominent leaders of the Suffrage movement, is considering an offer from the Thomas A. Edison concern to deliver a six-minute speech for the Kinetaphone [sic]."

The Kinetophone was an early sound-cylinder system for movies, first created around 1894, for viewing inside individual cabinets. In 1912-13, Edison offered a new, projected version of the technology. Synchronization between picture and sound cylinder "was achieved by connecting the projector at one end of the theater and the phonograph at the other end with a long pulley," according to the Library of Congress. Due to patent and training issues, Kinetophones didn't become widely used, but one surviving example shows that the sound could be synchronized rather well.

In April 1913, a Kinetophone movie featuring speeches by several suffragist leaders was shown at the Colonial Theatre in New York. What happened next is a bit of a mystery. The New York Tribune gleefully reported that the women, including "Mrs. John Rogers" (presumably Edith Nourse Rogers, who later became a long-serving Congresswoman) and Mary Ware Dennett, Harriet Laidlaw, and Frances Maule Bjorkman—the three authors of the Votes for Women screenplay—hated their own appearance on the screen so much they demanded to have the film suppressed. Moving Picture News reprinted the article, and it has been quoted by film historians as fact. But many of the statements attributed to the suffragists read as burlesques.

"'Was it I—I—in that picture last night?' [Mrs. Frances Maule Bjorkman] demanded. 'Why, it made me look fifty years old, and all askew. Telegraph to Edison and have the record or whatever it is smashed!'"

The reporter, writing as if he or she were on the spot at NAWSA headquarters, claimed that "other protests came thick and fast, by telephone, letter and in person. Mrs. James Lees [sic] Laidlaw…sent word to invoke the law if necessary to have that menace to the success of their cause removed at once."

The same page of The New York Tribune [April 10, 1913] in which these snarky headlines appeared includes other sardonic articles about suffrage activities [accessed through the Library of Congress].

But most of the women mentioned in the story had already seen themselves onscreen in Votes for Women the previous year, and probably would not have been shocked to see their images looking "about twenty feet tall." Even if there was something particularly awful about the Kinetophone film, in my opinion the Tribune reporter was not purely quoting actual comments, but having fun with the idea of suffragists—who had fought for years against women being judged solely for their looks—being vain enough to threaten to call police about an unflattering film.

The article does not discuss how well the new synchronization system performed. For whatever reasons, both Kinetophones and the films taken of the suffrage leaders by Edison disappeared. "Anybody who wants to see and hear a suffrage meeting will have to go to a real one now. They won't get it in a moving picture show," the Tribune reporter concluded.

This full-page advertisement (detail shown) appeared in Moving Picture World magazine [April 26, 1913 -- accessed through Archive.org].

EIGHTY MILLION WOMEN WANT--? 

If any suffragists were leery of appearing on the screen after hearing this story, the feeling didn't last long. On November 22, 1913, a second film sponsored by the Women's Political Union (WPU) was released, featuring real-life celebrities Harriot Stanton Blatch, leader of the WPU, and Emmeline Pankhurst, the famous British suffragette. ("Mrs. Pankhurst…did as well as might be expected of a woman of her age," commented Motion Picture News [Nov. 15, 1913] in an early review. "Mrs. Blatch seemed to pose a little.")

Emmeline Pankhurst seemed camera-conscious, according to Motion Picture News. Still of curtain speech from Motography [Nov. 29, 1913]; still with unnamed actor from Moving Picture World [Nov. 8, 1913 – both images accessed through Archive.org]. 

Eighty Million Women Want--? was written by Florence Maule Cooley, but Kevin Brownlow discovered that the scenario was by B. P. Schulberg, who would go on to become a powerful producer in the 1920s. Critics had several theories about the curious title, which alluded to a 1910 book about women's place in society by a well-known journalist and suffragist. (Motography magazine suggested that "The question mark…[signifies] the women's chance for … the ballot. This puts the whole thing, question mark and all, up to the men and, because the film arrived late on the day of its [premiere] showing, many of the men answered it by murmuring to themselves or to somebody else 'a previous engagement—I really can't wait,' and disappeared in the direction of the nearest restaurant." The Moving Picture World commented, "The average man has enough trouble trying to solve what one woman wants.")

This ad aimed at exhibitors appeared in the trade magazine Moving Picture World 

[Nov. 22, 1913 -- accessed through Archive.org].

Motion Picture News was relieved that "…the play itself is not an advertisement of the votes-for-women movement. The plot is fresh and interesting and the photography is good. The cast is very clever and deserves commendation." Motography [Nov. 29, 1913] concurred that "it was an agreeable surprise, in being not a eulogy of and a plea for suffrage, specifically, but a really and truly story with a young lawyer in love with a pretty girl."

"Altogether, the film is four reels of interesting action and should swell the coffers of the Unique Film Company."

The Colonial Theatre mentioned in this ad was not the site of the Kinetoscope disaster in New York, but a theater in Keokuk, Iowa. [The Daily Gate City, January 15, 1914—accessed through Library of Congress.]

As was typical of the times, the reviewers did not mention what Kay Sloan believes were suggestions of racism: "Scenes of the political boss's office included a black henchman, outfitted in top hat, tails, and cane, who pompously puffed on his cigar," she writes. "The implication was clear: a black man held political power while white women were denied the vote." Kevin Brownlow has noted that the character did not appear in the original script.

Motography's prediction about the film's success was correct: just a few months after its release, on Feb. 14, 1914, Motion Picture News reported that the Unique Film Company was moving to larger offices, "owing to the increase of its business," and the suffrage film was mentioned as the company's claim to fame.

YOUR GIRL AND MINE 

Not to be outdone by the WPU, in 1914 NAWSA began work on two separate film projects, as Sloan has detailed. The New York branch publicly offered $50 for the best screenplay, but abandoned their venture when they discovered that a New Jersey NAWSA leader, Ruth Hanna McCormick, had nearly finished producing Your Girl and Mine: A Woman Suffrage Play. That film was released Oct. 14, 1914, produced by McCormick and William Selig, with distribution handled by World Film Corp. (Brownlow remarks that Selig assigned a director, Giles Warren, and then took off for Europe, "thus demonstrating how little the studio heads had to do with actual production.") The film's release was rushed, in hopes of swaying voters in November; several states had women's suffrage proposals on their ballots.

This cartoon of the players appeared in an advertisement published in The Washington Times, Jan. 31, 1915. From left to right (in foreground): Ruth Grove as Beatrice, Olive Wyndham as the heroine, Charlotte Stevens as Helen, Grace Darmond as "Equal Suffrage," John Charles as the villainous husband, Margaret Collier as "Justice." The faces in the frames are less identifiable, but they are probably Clara Smith as Aunt Jane and Katherine Kaelred as lawyer Eleanor Holbrook. [Accessed through the Library of Congress.]

Another important contributor to the project was screenwriter Gilson Willets, the scenarist for the then-new and popular action serial, The Adventures of Kathlyn, which had many female fans. Shelley Stamp quotes the many contemporary reviewers who were impressed by the action-packed plot of Your Girl and Mine, and theorizes that the producers deliberately sought to appeal to thrill-loving audiences. As McCormick told James McQuade of The Moving Picture World (Nov. 7, 1914), "The aim, first of all, was to produce a photoplay that would appeal to every man and woman, regardless of whether they knew anything about the suffrage movement, or cared anything about it."

The film featured suffragist leader Anna Howard Shaw, "who was grabbed on her way West" to appear. "She…became very popular with the other actors, in spite of the fact that she did her level best to make suffragists of them all," giving extemporaneous speeches during rehearsals of the onscreen suffrage rally, reporter Eleanor Booth Simmons wrote. Several actors were personally selected by McCormick, who added prestige to the picture by casting stage stars such as Olive Wyndham and Katherine Kaelred. John Charles, who made a career of playing heavies, took the role of the monstrous husband, but "Mrs. McCormick wouldn't let Mr. Willets put in a stereotyped villain. She convinced him that it would be more effective to have Ben an attractive, rather lovable fellow…in the first act, and have him degenerate gradually…" Nevertheless, some reviewers and even a few other suffragists thought the men in the picture were implausibly evil.

A still from Your Girl and Mine evokes the real-life experience of suffragists who were jailed for protesting. [The New York Tribune, Oct. 25, 1914—accessed through the Library of Congress.]

Your Girl and Mine used as plot elements some of the real legal injustices in US law in 1914. The heroine's husband spends her money and wills custody of their children to his cruel father, and she is unable to protect them. The Chicago Tribune [Oct. 15, 1914] noted that the film listed specific legal statutes to support the story, but some were unconvinced. The New York Tribune [Dec. 21, 1914] published a lengthy letter by a man who insisted (inaccurately) that "the property of a wife cannot be seized for her husband's debts in any state." One Boston anti-suffrage newspaper, The Remonstrance Against Woman Suffrage [July 1915], also complained that the film cherry-picked and combined laws from various regions, and argued that states where women had the vote, such as Colorado, Washington, and Utah, were actually less protective of children than "male-suffrage states."

"Unable to point to Massachusetts laws which are unjust to women, [suffragists] have exhibited all over the state a sensational film, 'Your Girl and Mine,' which scrapes together and luridly portrays objectionable laws in some of the more backward states," the writer fumed, failing to realize that it was in fact suffragists who pushed through a bill in Massachusetts in 1902 that allowed women equal guardianship of their children.

The issue of child custody played an important part in the equal-suffrage argument of Your Girl and Mine. Charlotte Stevens played the heroine's older daughter, and went on to appear in films throughout the 1920's. [Image source: The Day Book, Chicago, IL, June 11, 1915—accessed through the Library of Congress.]

It has been reported that Your Girl and Mine was shelved before its full commercial release, due to problems with the distributor, but Mary Mallory uncovered public screenings across the country (detailed in her informative essay). In spite of the wide publicity and generally good reviews, the film didn't do well enough to encourage NAWSA to produce a second feature, and didn't stop five out of seven states from defeating equal-suffrage bills in 1914. As far as we know, Your Girl and Mine was the last of the officially sanctioned suffrage-association productions for the big screen.

Compare a real suffragist meeting (top) with the movie version (bottom). [Images accessed through the Library of Congress (top, Miller NAWSA Suffrage Scrapbooks, 1909-1910) and Archive.org (bottom, Moving Picture World, Nov. 7, 1914)]

Did the films by suffrage groups change the movie industry? Some companies went back to their old ways: Éclair Film Company, which had produced Suffrage and the Man with the WPU in 1912, produced a short drama "with an anti-suffrage twang" just one year later. (Moving Picture World described the plot of Our Daughter aka His Daughter: "Julia Stuart gives a presentation of an absorbed suffragette mother who neglects her daughter.") But other commercial productions supporting the idea of equal suffrage followed: they include Thanhouser's The Woman in Politics [1916] and the recently restored Mothers of Men [1917; remade 1921], which just played at SFSFF21.

First National studios ran a "straw ballot" in 5,000 movie theaters to try to gauge the political opinions of 27 million new voters. (Exhibitors Herald, Sept. 18, 1920—accessed through Archive.org.) See the results here. 

Social reformists of the silent era had big plans for the use of moving pictures as educational tools. Not everything they foresaw came to pass—projects intended for wide commercial release are still typically made for entertainment rather than instruction (but social critics can still focus on films' subtextual messages). Kevin Brownlow has written that "problem pictures" proliferated in the very early twentieth century, but dropped off "once the era of reform [roughly 1901–1917] was over." The country's focus turned to WWI, and various suffragists used both their contributions to and their protests against the conflict to support their arguments for equal suffrage. The campaign was finally won in 1920 with the full ratification of the 19^th amendment—and moving pictures were created to teach women how to use a polling place.

Photoplay celebrated Mary Pickford's newly granted right [Nov. 1920—accessed through Archive.org].

But some predictions about films and society came true: in an interview with Moving Picture News [Aug 12, 1911], suffragist and opera singer Alma Webster-Powell declared "I would use [moving pictures] in every educational institution if I had my way…[from] kindergarten…right on up through the different grades of the schools—it is the only way to teach children, for what a child sees in a picture it remembers."

Political activists today are more likely to self-produce documentaries or short pieces for YouTube than to partner with film studios for big-screen features. Still, the idea of moving pictures as rhetorical platforms can have a major effect on American society: the far-reaching Citizens United decision involved an opinionated political film.

FOR FURTHER READING

Print: 

• Kay Sloan, The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film
• Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon
• Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era
• Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr., Winning The Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement
• Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood

Online: 

• Mary Mallory, 'Your Girl and Mine' Promotes Women's Suffrage and 'Mothers of Men' Promotes Women's Causes
• Eleanor Booth Simmons, Suffrage Enlists a New Ally – Melodrama (Oct. 25, 1914 article about Your Girl and Mine, including production information and a lengthy plot outline)
• Mothers of Men, website devoted to the restoration of the film
• The Library of Congress collection of women's suffrage documents and photos

Christine U'Ren is a graphic designer and longtime silent film enthusiast. The last she checked, her absentee ballot for the June 2016 primary still had not been counted.