"One Hundred Years of Representation: The 'New Woman' in American Film and Television" (original) (raw)

From 2020 to 1920 and Back: One Hundred Years from the 19th Amendment

2021

In January 2021, A Black, South Asian woman, Kamala Harris, has risen to the position of U.S. vice president at the same moment as the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. The article considers the changes that have occurred during the last 100 years in order to question the narrative which describes the conquest of suffrage as a political experience based essentially on white and middle-class women. Emphasizing the intertwining of race and gender involves striking a bare nerve in the history of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement and the battle for political representation.

Keremidchieva, Z. (2013). "The Congressional Debates on the 19th Amendment: Jurisdictional Rhetoric and the Assemblage of the US Body Politic." Quarterly Journal of Speech, 99: 51-73.

Through its analysis of the rhetorical means by which the US Congress overcame jurisdictional objections to federal action on the issue of woman suffrage, this essay argues that the stasis of jurisdiction operates as a mode of assemblage of discourses, institutions, and populations. In Congress, the woman suffrage issue helped re-organize federal and state prerogatives over the management of racial and ethnic relations at home and US leadership abroad. Thus, from a governmental perspective women did not emerge as constituents but as tools of public policy. As a legislative precedent, the 19th Amendment debates prompt critical attention to the particular constraints that the discourses of state institutions pose for feminist political change.

DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT AND THE SPACES OF AMERICAN MODERNITY IN EARLY 1930S WOMAN'S FILMS

In this article, I deploy a chronotopic analysis of early 1930s woman's films to flesh out semiotic and phenomenological representations of American modernity through the figure of the modern woman. I emphasize how concrete ilm spaces—the private spaces of modern apartments and the public and work spaces of hotels, office buildings, and department stores—function as expressions of the modern woman chronotope in both semiotic—as producers and conveyors of meaning—and phenomenological senses—permiting a certain way of being. his will serve to show how a progressive vision of American modernity was articulated through the figure of the modern woman in early 1930s Hollywood films, and that as a chronotope, the modern woman was intimately linked with a hopeful conception of American democracy. Français: L'auteure procède à une analyse chronotopique de la femme dans les films du début des années 1930 afin d'en extraire les représentations sémiotiques et phénoménologiques de la modernité américaine à travers le personnage de la femme moderne. Elle met en relief la façon dont les espaces filmiques concrets — c'est-à-dire les espaces privés d'appartements modernes, et les espaces publics et les espaces de travail des hôtels, des immeubles de bureaux et des grands magasins — servent à exprimer le chronotope de la femme moderne sur les plans à la fois sémiotique — à titre de producteurs et de vecteurs de sens — et phénoménologique — à titre de cadre se prêtant à une certaine manière d'être. Les résultats de cette analyse illustrent comment s'est articulée une vision évolutive de la modernité américaine au moyen de la représentation de la femme moderne dans les films hollywoodiens du début des années 1930, et ils confirment qu'à titre de chronotope, la femme moderne s'est trouvée intimement liée à une conception optimiste de la démocratie américaine. Mots clés : années 1930, Bakhtin, cinéma classique hollywoodien, modernité américaine, représentation filmique de la femme, scénographies.

Can Moving Pictures Speak? Film, Speech, and Social Science in Early 20th Century Law

The article revisits the key 1915 Mutual v. Ohio legal decision, which endorsed censorship of film in the United States. Placing the decision in the context of two other related decisions (Kalem Co. v. Harper Bros. [1911] and Pathé Exchange v. Cobb [1922]) highlights the importance of the justices’ conception of the nature of film as more akin to physical action than to opinion and expression. The article locates this conception in contemporaneous popular discourse on technology and the social scientific discourse on influence.

Evidence of anxiety: Women's agency and engagement law in American literature and film, 1880--1935

2012

During the end of the nineteenth century, breach of promise laws, which had protected unmarried but engaged women for centuries during their vulnerable engagement period, began to come under public scrutiny. The demonization of this legal protection coincided with increased legal agency in other areas of married life for women, but in most historical and critical discussions of this era, breach of promise, also nicknamed Heartbalm, has been overlooked, and the purpose of this dissertation is to examine canonical and non-canonical literature from this period and recontextualize these works in light of breach of promise's historical impact on TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER

"Making Americans: Spectacular Nationalism, Americanization, and Silent Film"

Journal of American Studies, 2022

Examining archival footage and documents about the cultural work of silent film during the 1910s and 1920s, this essay reveals the complicity of film with the work of organized Americanization at both federal and industrial levels. Specifically, it argues that early American cinema was complicit with and critical of Americanization, as it negotiated multiple new Immigrant concerns. Joining the recent work of film and immigration historians, the article argues that, just as Americanization did not produce compliant citizens overnight, silent film as a new and powerful medium of persuasion could influence the new American viewers’ transformation only in part. Of particular interest is the use of film in industrial and educational contexts—which sometimes overlapped— purporting to both “educate” and Americanize the new immigrants to the US. It asks: What cultural work did silent film do for Americanization, the active and sometimes coercive campaign aiming to make new immigrants into good Americans? The films I read as case studies later in this essay—industrial, educational, and non-theatrical films such as An American in the Making (1913), The Making of an American (1920), and others—illustrate the potential of silent film as both mimesis (or representation of ideology) and as ideology.

The Theme of Cultural Adaptation in American History, Literature and Film (2009)

Description This anthology covers new ground in the field of adaptation studies, specifically, as a branch of American Studies that not only encompasses literature and visual media, but also a wide-range of subject areas including, but not limited to, history, political science and cultural/ethnic studies. By looking at adaptation specifically in relation to the United States, the book investigates a variety of culturally and historically transformative strategies, as well showing how the process of adaptation has been influenced by social, ideological and political factors both inside and outside the United States.