History discussion

RESEARCH ARTICLE

The ‘New Woman’, star personas, and cross-class romance films in 1920s America

Stephen Sharot*

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

(Received 27 June 2008; final version received 13 August 2009)

The popular cross-class romance films of the 1920s were influenced by two socio- cultural developments: the ‘New Woman’, particularly in the form of the flapper, and the diffusion of the norms of disinterested love within the context of consumerism. The personas of the three female stars discussed here – Mary Pickford, Colleen Moore and Clara Bow – represented variations of the ‘New Woman’. Mary Pickford combined rebellion against, and continuity with, Victorian norms of femininity. Colleen Moore balanced a fun-loving flapper image with sexual reticence. Clara Bow represented the sexually assertive and alluring flapper. All three stars were heroines in cross-class romance films and their personas informed the variations in the plots of those films, but their personas were all accommodated to disinterested love, a norm that confirmed that the freedoms of the New Woman were confined within a class system linked to gender.

Keywords: romance; consumerism; flapper; cross-class; stars; personas

Richard Dyer (1979, 1986) has argued that star images function to resolve or manage

contradictions within and between ideologies prevalent in society. Film star personas have

always been implicated in gender, and Gaylor Studlar (1996, p. 250) has noted that the

constructions of gender in the American films of the 1920s attempted to mediate between

archetypal new and old social/sexual identities. Many female star personas of the 1920s

were linked to the contradictions and conflicts between the passive, innocent Victorian

ideal and the ‘New Woman’, especially the scandalous flapper. The personas were

conveyed both by the stars’ roles and performances in their films and by non-filmic texts of

promotion, publicity and criticism, especially those found in film or fan magazines and

newspapers.

There were star personas that expressed just one side of the contradictions and

suppressed the other. The ideal image of the fragile, pious, domestic, and sexual innocent

was already dated prior to World War I, but it continued to be represented in films, such as

those of D.W. Griffith in the persona of Lillian Gish, during and after World War I. In

strong contrast was the sexually exploitative vamp, most famously associated with the star

persona of Theda Bara. The vamp was usually a woman from the middle or upper-middle

class who used her sexual powers to drain male energy, and in the 1920s she was largely

ISSN 0958-9236 print/ISSN 1465-3869 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09589230903525452

http://www.informaworld.com

*Email: [email protected]

Journal of Gender Studies

Vol. 19, No. 1, March 2010, 73–86

replaced by the image of the ‘gold digger’, often from the lower class, who used her

sexuality for material gain. Although the passive, sexual innocent and the vamp continued

to appear on the screen, as the foci of major screen personas they were replaced in the

1920s by stars whose personas reconciled conflicting notions of femininity and straddled

different classes. In both their films and their off-screen biographies the major female stars

provided models of New Women who crossed class boundaries and moved from poverty

to riches.

When the star’s role in a film was from the working class the plot frequently focused

on a cross-class romance, a plot which was particularly common in films from the First

World War through the early 1930s. It is on the cross-class romance films and their

relationship to star personas that this article will focus. An analysis of the films

demonstrates how the personas of the stars provided representations, in various forms and

degrees, of the socially mobile New Woman, how these personas were accommodated to

the interlinked norms of consumerism and disinterested love, and how the New Woman

was contained within a gendered class system.

The ‘New Woman’, class, and consumerism

The term ‘New Woman’ began to be used in the 1890s to characterize middle to upper-

middle class women who were engaged in educational, political, and occupational pursuits

outside the home. Around the turn of the century, the New Woman encompassed women

with a college education, suffragettes, reformers for social justice, and women who

remained single in order to pursue careers. From about 1910 the term ‘feminism’ came

into use and often became synonymous with new womanhood which, in addition to

economic independence and equal rights, now encompassed a more radical stance of sexual

liberation and fulfillment (Smith-Rosenberg 1985, pp. 176–177, Cott 1987, pp. 3–4).

Prior to World War I, it was taken for granted that the New Woman was restricted to

the middle and upper classes. One of the major interests of the middle-class reformers

among the New Women was the wage-earning woman, especially the young, unmarried

woman who had moved away from the family home. The reformers considered the wage-

earning women as innocent victims of economic and sexual exploitation in an industrial,

urban environment beset with dangers for the unprotected (Meyerowitz 1988, p. 117).

Such concerns were largely replaced among the New Women of the 1920s in favor of their

own individual fulfillment, and although there were social reformers among the New

Women of the 1920s, their critique was focused on the sexual division of labor and the

need to reduce dependency on men by combining marriage with gainful employment

(Scharf 1980, pp. 20–28). The media now gave little attention to these reformers and

focused instead on those New Women who were characterized by their consumerism and

sexual expressiveness.

Gender was one of the most significant factors that shaped consumer demand and

since, from the late nineteenth century, the consumer was frequently represented as a

woman (Felski 1995), the heightened consumerism of the 1920s was bound to focus the

interlinked discourses of consumerism and sexuality on women (Cott 1987, pp. 172–174).

The New Woman type that most closely signaled the relationship between consumerism

and women’s emancipation in appearance and behavior was the flapper. An invention of

the 1910s, the flapper became a symbol of the Jazz Age 1920s and a focus of the period’s

discourse on manners and morals. With her short hair, use of cosmetics, smoking, short

skirts, and flamboyant dancing, the flapper was seen to personify a lifestyle condemned by

conservatives as undermining morality and religion (Latham 2000, Zeitz 2006).

74 S. Sharot

The changes in women’s fashion in the 1920s were understood by contemporaries to

indicate a more profound change in women’s behavior, but historians have argued that the

degree of change has been exaggerated. An argument has been made for a major shift in

manners and morals with respect to women in the 1910s, and others have pointed to

antecedents of what came to be seen as flapper behavior among certain sectors of

American women in the 1890s and 1900s (McGovern 1982, Banner 1983, p. 195, Steel

1985, pp. 213, 236–237, Peiss 1989). However, liberal commentators in the 1920s

adopted the popularized image of the flapper as part of their formulation of what Christina

Simmons, following Foucault, has called ‘the myth of Victorian repression’. For the

sexual revisionists of the 1920s the flapper embodied the notion of a free and sexually vital

woman, a companion of men who, unlike the negative images of Victorian women, did not

seek to limit contact with men or control their sexuality. The flapper’s sexuality was not

perceived as overpowering men; she was soft and romantic, and although she viewed her

paid work as a sign of her independence, she did not seek a career that would require her to

forgo marriage (Simmons 1989).

The flapper and the general shift from sexual reticence to sexual expressiveness were

associated with the middle, especially upper-middle, class. However, the wage-earning

women who lived apart from their families appear to have been a vanguard in the decline

of strict sexual standards. The pre-World War I reformers’ discourse of innocent, helpless

wage-earning women in an evil environment was replaced after the war by one of

resourceful women who had freed themselves from the constraints of their families,

succeeded in supporting themselves on low wages, and sought amusements in the new

forms of commercialized entertainment, including the movies. In some respects, young

flappers from the middle class imitated working-class girls who lived on their own or with

their peers and socialized freely with men (Meyerowitz 1988, pp. xxii–xxiii, 117–125).

Many working-class girls in turn adopted the flapper image, which for them was an

expression of class aspiration as much as a statement of personal freedom. Stylish clothes

and the use of cosmetics were presented by the new forms of advertising as means of

empowerment and self-improvement, and they were simply necessary for women who

wished to obtain employment in offices or as sales clerks in department stores.

Although prior to World War I many working-class women had asserted their

independence by entering the public leisure spaces of the new commercialized

entertainments (Peiss 1986), they were rarely referred to as ‘New Women’. From World

War I this designation came to evoke a wider range of women that cut across class

boundaries (Todd 1993, pp. 1–3, 24–25). The extension of the phrase was related, in part,

to the changes that had occurred and were occurring in the employment of women.

Between 1910 and 1930 the number of working women, particularly single working

women, increased considerably, and although the proportion of women in the total labor

force hardly changed, there were significant changes in their occupational distribution.

There was a growth of women’s employment in the lower ranks of white-collar work, from

17% of working women in clerical and sales in 1910 to 30% in 1920. By 1930 there were

almost two million women employed as secretaries, typists and file clerks and another

70,000 as saleswomen (Chafe 1991, pp. 65–71).

The role of a salesgirl in a department store became an especially popular one among

stars in the late 1920s. Saleswomen were paid less than clerical workers and they worked

long hours in difficult working conditions, often under rigid discipline (Benson 1986,

pp. 134–138, 181–187), but such factors were largely ignored by films in which the

department stores were used as locations of consumerism and romance. As poor working

girls located at the center of consumer culture, the salesgirl provided an ideal screen role

Journal of Gender Studies 75

for the stars to represent a working-class New Woman who transcended the barriers of

class. In real department stores managers were trying through training and discipline to

erase the signs of their salesgirls’ working-class origins and to apply the veneer of middle-

class culture (Benson 1986, pp. 5, 131, 230). In film department stores the star in the role

of the salesgirl showed that, as a New Woman, the girl with a working-class background

could win the upper-class man by remaining her ‘natural’ self.

The identification of many women in white-collar work as middle-class had been

encouraged by mass production and the increased standardization of clothes, which had

partially democratized fashions and made it difficult, according to contemporary observers,

to distinguish affluent middle-class women from secretaries or saleswomen. However, the

chances for white-collar girls to achieve a middle-class income and style of life were small

and they had good reason to believe that they could only realize their middle-class

aspirations, if at all, through marriage. Most unmarried white-collar women from all classes

said that they preferred marriage over a career and regarded their work as a temporary state

in their lives prior to marriage. The critique of marriage that had been common among

feminists prior to World War I was rarely heard after it as it was undercut by the proponents

of ‘companionate marriage’. More women were getting married, they were marrying

younger, and it was entirely rational for them to perceive their economic positions to be

dependent on the men they married (Scharf 1980, p. 41, Cott 1987, pp. 147–149, 156–160,

189–191). However, in accord with the norm of disinterested love, it was inappropriate for

a woman to consider a man’s socio-economic position when choosing a mate.

Disinterested love

The ideal of disinterested love developed together with the link between romance and

consumerism. It has been promoted since the early twentieth century as love was

increasingly equated with personal happiness and the affirmation of the self. Love in the

nineteenth century had more often been represented as a dangerous emotion with tragic

consequences, and marriage had been viewed principally as an economic transaction.

Love was now ideally free of economic considerations, but its pursuit was conducted

within and through the conditions and means provided by the consumer society. More

particularly it was conducted through the new institution of dating which was intimately

tied to consumerism (Bailey 1988).

Romantic love was presumed to cut across and transcend class divisions, and dating

appeared to offer greater possibilities for class mingling. It was evident that working-class

men lacked the means to buy the expensive goods deemed necessary for the ideal-typical

romance, and with the continued restraints on the occupational mobility of women, it was

clear that a woman had to make a good marriage if she was going to partake of the joys of

consumerism (Illouz 1997). Marriage into riches was the prize awarded to many of the

working-class heroines (who were far more numerous than working-class heroes) of cross-

class romances. However, the theme of disinterested love took central place in the

romances that led to marriage or at least the promise of marriage. Money and social status

were not supposed to interfere with the romantic sentiment, and choosing a partner solely

on these grounds was presented as improper (Sharot 2010).

The variations in the cross-class romance plots with respect to disinterested love were

linked to representations of the films’ heroines, from the heroines who retained

characteristics of the ideal Victorian woman to the different types of New Woman,

including the flapper (on the range of silent movie heroines see Higashi [1978] and Ryan

[1982]). In those cross-class romance films starring film stars with already established

76 S. Sharot

personas, the variations in the representations of the heroines were, in turn, linked to the

stars’ personas. Three female stars who appeared in cross-class romance films will be

considered here: Mary Pickford, Colleen Moore, and Clara Bow. Special attention will be

given to four films that were distributed in 1926–1927 when all three stars had recognized

personas: My best girl with Mary Pickford, Irene and Orchids and ermine with Colleen

Moore, and It with Clara Bow. In all of these films the stars played working girls in major

venues of consumerism – department stores, the fashion business, and luxury hotels.

Mary Pickford

Film historians have differed in their emphases on the facets of Mary Pickford’s star

persona. Lary May (1980, pp. 119–126) emphasizes how Pickford’s film roles represented

a fundamental break from the Victorian conceptions of girls and women. He notes that, in

her earliest years as a film actress under D.W. Griffith, Pickford played traditional

Victorian heroines, emphasizing purity and dependency on males. After she left Griffith,

Pickford’s heroines, including her young girl and adolescent roles, displayed feistiness,

rebelliousness and independence, elements which the Victorians had repressed. Her wide

range of roles included girls who faked a pregnancy to protect another (Tess of the storm

country, 1914), and having an illegitimate child (Hearts adrift, 1914). Gaylyn Studlar

(2001), in comparison, interprets the Pickford persona as infused with Victorian values

and as an alternative to the sexually assertive New Woman and flapper which became

prominent in the 1920s. Although the feisty girls played by Pickford rebelled against

Victorian norms of feminine refinement, they were not overtly sexualized and did not

present a challenge to gender distinctions regarding sexuality.

Pickford was one of a number of female stars during the teens with a physically

childlike image, and she achieved her major stardom by playing adolescents and childlike

women before she appeared as a pre-adolescent child in The poor little rich girl (1917).

The films in which Pickford played sexually active full-grown women, such as Mistress

Nell (1915), in which she played Nell Gwynne, and Madame Butterfly (1915) were heavily

costumed historical dramas and set in foreign lands. When she played an American,

Pickford was more typically from the working or poor class, ‘an urban guttersnipe, half

savage, half angel, dressed in tatters, living from hand to mouth, untamable’. She was

an angel with a dirty face whose courage, perspicacity, and good heart were rewarded by

the discovery of wealthy relatives or the love of a decent, wealthy man (Higashi 1978,

pp. 43–47, Whitfield 1997, p. 123, Brownlow 1999).

Pickford played a pre-adolescent girl in only seven of her 52 feature films (Tibbets

2001), but the enormous success of the films in which she played a child made the child

role an integral part of her star persona. It has been suggested that the enormous popularity

of Pickford in her little-girl roles arose from nostalgia for an idealized innocent age that

was no more. A somewhat less generous interpretation is provided by Studlar (2001) who

speculates that Pickford’s masquerade as a child may have provided a more acceptable

erotic object to men who felt threatened by sexually assertive flappers. For many women

and girls who wished to assert their independence but who felt uncomfortable with the new

sexuality, Pickford provided a ‘comforting “asexual” figure of freedom’ (Higashi 1978,

pp. 48–49). May (1980, p. 125) does not address the question of sexuality in Pickford’s

persona as directly as Studlar, but he acknowledges that, although the Pickford persona

was not prudish, it was sexually innocent (see also Basinger 1999, p. 44). It was not until

Pickford made her first sound film, at the age of 36, that she broke away from the star

persona that she had cultivated in the silent period. In Coquette (1929) she plays a

Journal of Gender Studies 77

flirtatious flapper, her hair is styled in a bob of light curls, and she wears a low-cut evening

gown. She continued to play a woman with a sex life in her three last films, but in this new

persona Pickford could not compete with the new stars and she retired from films.

For many years, Pickford’s girlish persona was reinforced off-screen by the prominent

presence of her mother who chaperoned her and acted as her moral guardian. In public,

Pickford wore demure clothes and she did not drink or smoke (Whitfield 1997, p. 128).

Pickford’s persona was not damaged by her divorce from Owen Moore and marriage to

Douglas Fairbanks who also divorced in order to marry her. There was some criticism of

their behavior, but criticism was soon drowned by the public celebration of a couple who

appeared perfectly suited to each other and radiated happiness. Pickford said that she and

Fairbanks led ‘just an old fashioned sort of life’ (deCordova 1990, p. 123). Their home,

Pickfair, ‘resembled an innocent doll’s house’ (May 1980, p. 145), and their lifestyle was

mindful of the proprieties. Dinners at Pickfair were alcohol-free, somewhat formal affairs,

and dances were waltzes or the two-step rather than the ‘jazz’ type (Whitfeld 1997,

pp. 225–271). In 1922, in response to scandals involving stars, Photoplay enjoined the

stars to behave themselves and singled out Pickford as the best example for them to follow

(deCordova 1990, p. 124).

The role of a stock-girl in a department store in My best girl was a departure for

Pickford. The films that Pickford made immediately prior to it were more typical of her

oeuvre: as a young girl in Sparrows (1927), a story of mistreated orphans; as a tomboy of

the tenements in Little Anne Rooney (1925); and as the heroine of the costume dramas

Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924) and Rosita (1923). As the 1920s progressed

Pickford became increasingly aware that, although her fans adored her in her little girl and

adolescent roles, her image and appearance, with her long skirts and long hair with golden

curls, was seen by many as increasingly old-fashioned. Pickford had become the most

popular star in film history, but her stardom had passed its peak and she had been

overtaken in the box office by stars, such as Colleen Moore, who represented the New

Woman, particularly in the form of the flapper. In 1925 Pickford asked readers of

Photoplay to suggest possible screen roles, adding that she did not want to be in costume

pictures, ‘but only those dealing with the problems of the average American girl’. She did

not heed the answers of her fans, who suggested such roles as Cinderella, Anne of Green

Gables, Alice in Wonderland and Heidi (Eyman 1990, p. 162, Whitfield 1997, p. 241), but

chose instead a role that was closer to the roles played by Colleen Moore who had

overtaken Pickford as the number-one box office attraction.

My best girl provided a setting of consumerism, but it is significant that Pickford

played a stock-girl rather than a salesgirl and that the store was of the ‘five-and-ten-cent’

type rather than one catering to higher socio-economic strata. A distinction had now been

made in department stores between the shopgirl and the saleswoman. The shopgirl was

characterized as unskilled and poorly educated, often from a lower-class immigrant

background. In contrast there was the newly professionalized saleslady, and a number of

middle-class, college-educated women had been persuaded to enter this work. The shop-

girl was increasingly relegated to backstage jobs in bargain stores (Benson 1981, Todd

1993, pp. 244, 247–250), and it was the shopgirl rather than the saleswoman that was

appropriate to Pickford’s star persona.

Pickford had already appeared in films with a focus on cross-class romance, but their

settings and narratives were very different from that of My best girl. In The eternal grind

(1916), a lost film, she played a sewing machine operator who attracts the boss’s son who

helps her to influence his father to improve the conditions of the workers. The film

apparently included realistic images of sweatshop factory conditions and tenement life, but

78 S. Sharot

it was criticized at the time for its implausible plot (Brownlow 1999, pp. 120–121). The

film is an example of what Steven Ross (1998, pp. 48–55) has called the ‘social problem’

film which often focused on the inhumane working conditions of women and children, the

weaker sectors of the working class. The cross-class romance theme was presented in a

much lighter vein in Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley (1918), but in this film the cross-class

romance makes little progress. The settings of the film are not those of consumerism, and

the film confirms that happiness for the working-class girl was to be found within her

own class. Almost a decade later in My best girl (1927), in the consumerist setting of the

department store, disinterested love overcomes class obstacles. Throughout most of

the film Maggie, the Pickford character, is unaware that her co-worker, Joe the stock-boy,

is the son of the owner.

Pickford’s most successful films had been those in which she played the sweet,

innocent, lovable little girl who endears herself even to the hard-hearted, and whose

spirited initiative overcomes all obstacles. Shorn of her long dangling curls, Pickford in

My best girl plays a young woman rather than a child, but she appears in the first scene

looking little different from many of the poor adolescent roles of her earlier films. We are

first shown her legs and feet in dirty stockings and worn shoes, overloaded with pans

which she keeps dropping, and having her petticoat fall. She is, however, the only level-

headed and responsible member of her otherwise dysfunctional family. Her father lacks

authority, her mother leaves the dirty dishes in order to enjoy herself at funerals where she

can have a good cry, and her sister is a floozy with a boyfriend in trouble with the police.

Their ramshackle, untidy house is in contrast to the luxurious, tastefully furnished house of

Joe’s parents who are represented as distinguished and reserved.

At no point in My best girl does the Pickford character show any interest in wealth. Her

desire is for a simple family life which is demonstrated when she looks with Joe in a shop

window displaying a middle-class family seen sitting in a lounge with a sign – ‘You

Furnish the Girl, We Furnish the Home’. Maggie’s response is: ‘It must be wonderful to

spend an evening like that after supper’. Maggie’s absence of cultural capital is

demonstrated in a scene in Joe’s house in which she shows her lack of table etiquette, but

this is unimportant to Joe whose appreciation of her fine qualities are reinforced when,

following her discovery of his identity, he witnesses her successful plea to a judge to free

her sister from a charge. After Joe’s father tells Maggie that her marriage to Joe could ruin

his career, she attempts to sacrifice her love by pretending to Joe that she was only after his

money. She smears lipstick on her mouth, tries to puff a cigarette, and dance to the record

‘Red hot mama’. Joe and his father look on, recognizing that it is only an act, and Maggie

finally breaks down, stating her love for Joe.

Colleen Moore

Colleen Moore became a major star when, beginning with the film Flaming youth (1923),

she played exuberant, lighthearted flappers. Between 1917 and 1923 she had played a

variety of roles in some 30 films, including a number of waifs, pre-sexual children or

gamin roles similar to those of Mary Pickford. She had become a well-known featured

player, but it was Moore’s flapper roles that enabled her to became, according to film

exhibitors, the top female attraction of 1926 and 1927 (Negra 2001, p. 46). Moore was the

wholesome flapper with the boyish look: flat-chested, hair cut short and straight, and

wearing short skirts and low-heeled shoes. Her flapper characters were liberated in

appearance and in social behavior, but there was no suggestion of sexual allurement or that

she would act immorally.

Journal of Gender Studies 79

Moore’s persona in her flapper period included the New Woman’s liberation from

Victorian restrictions. Her characters danced the Charleston, smoked in public and drank

cocktails, behaviors which, as Moore herself put it, nice girls had not done before (Landay

2002, p. 228). However, the temporary independence and limited sexual experimentation

of her characters were always confined within the traditional forms of romance and

marriage. Moore’s flapper films followed the formula of almost all flapper films of the

1920s: a previously reserved girl seeks out and experiences to some degree a freedom-

loving lifestyle, and after escaping the sexual advances of an undesirable man she

abandons the lifestyle to settle down in marriage with an appropriate partner. Although

some of Moore’s flapper films included daring elements in their plots, Moore’s comic

performance style distanced her from any implication of illicit sexuality. The comic tone

indicated that her ‘bad’ behavior was a masquerade of a basically ‘good’ girl. She was a

safe flapper who appealed not only to young would-be flapper spectators but also to their

parents (Ross 2000, 2001).

Moore’s persona provided a bridge between the spunky child/woman, pretty but

sexually reticent, persona of Pickford and the sexually outgoing persona of Clara Bow.

Prior to her screen test for her first flapper role, Moore cut her long, curly hair into a

Dutch bob, an act which distanced her from the Pickford component of her persona.

However, as one contemporary journalist observed, Moore was a flapper ‘who contrives

to disguise her flapperish appeal with the sweetness of the eternal maiden’ (quoted in

Zeitz 2006, p. 233). That Moore’s persona during her flapper period was not a complete

departure from that of Pickford was indicated by the manufacture of dolls designed in

Moore’s likeness. Turning Moore into a doll gave her the image of a child, an image that

was invoked by some of her earlier film roles, and this association was strengthened

when Moore’s doll collecting and dollhouse construction and furnishing became well-

known in the late 1920s (Hastie 2001).

In the presentation of her persona off-screen, Moore provided a model for how a

flapper should look and how a conventional woman should behave. An array of cosmetic

products, including lipstick, perfume, and compacts, were manufactured with the Colleen

Moore imprint and designed with a shamrock to signify her Irish heritage (Negra 2001).

She advised her fans, however, not to exaggerate in applying beauty products, and in

interviews she presented herself as subservient to her husband and as a woman who tried to

be a model housewife (Zeitz 2006, p. 235). Thus, although Moore was packaged as the

typical flapper and was tagged ‘The Modern Girl’, these representations were countered by

emphases on her virtuous behavior, her modesty, and, finally, her domesticity.

Unlike her flapper films, in which Moore played the daughter of upper-middle-class

parents, the cross-class romance films required that Moore play a character from a poor or

working-class background. Moore’s character in the film Irene (1926) is the daughter of

a poor Irish family living in a tenement building. After scenes that establish her awk-

wardness, naivety and innocence, Irene attracts Donald, the son of a wealthy family when

she delivers curtain samples to their mansion. From this point the film’s narrative relates,

at first comically and later in a more serious glamour mode, the transformation of a poor

Irish girl into a woman who can be accepted in the rich WASP family. We are shown little

of the training by which Irene is successfully transformed into a model, and the film

advances to an extended fashion fête sequence, shot in two-color Technicolor, in which

Irene, the center of the fête, models the clothes with poise and grace. In earlier scenes,

Irene had satirized the behavior of the upper class by imitating the affectations of Donald’s

fiancée, and, by her antics, had made fun of fashion. She now appears as a society girl and

as a model who epitomizes the glamour of fashion.

80 S. Sharot

Although Irene has undergone successful glamorization she remains a modest girl with

no aspirations to be part of the upper class. Back at the tenement, sitting on the fire escape

and unaware that Donald is present and listening in the apartment, Irene admits to her

mother that she loves him and laments that he is not ‘an iceman or a motorcycle cop’. After

hearing this statement of disinterested love, Donald reveals his presence and the film ends

with the couple embracing.

Moore’s character in Irene displays no ambition for class mobility, and her

transformation into a woman suitable as a wife for a rich WASP is accomplished, despite

her awkwardness and mishaps, by the financial clout of the rich WASP. In comparison

with Irene, Colleen Moore’s character in Orchids and ermine, Pinki, articulates her desire

for wealth at the beginning of the film. Working as a clerk in a shack of a cement company,

she looks out enviously at a wealthy woman seated in a car wearing fine clothes, and she

states to a young black girl: ‘Some day I’ll quit the cement yard, marry a millionaire, and

you’ll be my maid’. In reply to a proposal from a worker she says: ‘The man I marry may

get me dusty, but it’ll be gold dust’. Despite this and similar wisecracks, Pinki has neither

the appearance of, nor does she act like, a gold digger, and the strategy of the film is to

show that a Colleen Moore character, whatever she might say, could only conform to

disinterested love and thereby be awarded by wealth.

The Moore persona is evident when Pinki applies for a job as a switchboard

receptionist in a luxury hotel on 5th Avenue and gets the job because, unlike the other

applicants, she is dressed plainly and the boss does not want any ‘chiffon girls’. Her

character is juxtaposed with Ermintrude, who is employed by the hotel to sell flowers in its

lobby. Ermintrude dresses in a crude imitation of the rich and boasts of a millionaire friend

who takes her out in a Rolls Royce when, in fact, he is a chauffeur. It is Ermintrude who

uses her charms on a guest of the hotel whom she believes is Richard Tubor, an heir to an

oil fortune when in fact he is Tubor’s valet. The real Tubor swaps his identity with his valet

during his stay at the hotel in order to avoid ‘money-mad women’. Tubor falls for Pinki

and, unaware that he is rich, Pinki decides ‘that a poor girl can be happy, but a happy girl

isn’t poor’. Pinki is even happier when she is persuaded by Tubor that he is rich and

he buys her ‘Real Orchids, Real Ermine’, but she demonstrates her disinterested love

yet again when he is mistakenly arrested as an imposter: ‘Couldn’t you see it was you

I wanted, not clothes or money?’ After the identities are cleared up, the film ends with the

newly-married couple traveling to Tubor’s home.

Clara Bow

Like Colleen Moore, Clara Bow also played flapper roles, but with her mass of bobbed

hair, plucked eyebrows, bow lips with dark lipstick, generous breasts, and wiggle walk,

she was the sexy flapper. Unlike Moore, Bow’s characters did not display hesitancy or

self-consciousness in their flapper behavior. Her characters were sexually calculating in

their pursuit of men, and her performance style conveyed sensual pleasure in her drinking,

smoking, and wearing revealing clothes (Ross 2000). The film It took Bow’s stardom to

the top and confirmed her persona; as the ‘It girl’ she became ‘the ranking Jazz baby of the

Jazz age’ and the ‘foremost symbol of sex’ of that period (Stenn 2000, p. 87). However,

Bow’s persona, the physically exuberant, sexually charged flapper, had been developed in

her previous films, particularly The plastic age (1925), Dancing mothers (1926), and

Mantrap (1926), and it had been reinforced by the reporting of Bow’s numerous affairs

off-screen (Stenn 2000, pp. 52–96, Felando 2004).

Journal of Gender Studies 81

Bow had come from a poverty-stricken Brooklyn background, but in films such as The

plastic age, Dancing mothers, and My lady of whims (1926) she played a wild young

flapper from the upper-middle class. Bow’s boundless energy and aggressive physicality

were on prominent display in It in which she embodied the working-class flapper who is

confident of, and ready to exploit, her sexual charms. The term ‘It’ had been coined by

Elinor Glyn who wrote a novel with that title and also made a personal appearance in the

film. In her novel the male character was the one with It, and although Glyn redefined the

term to embrace women as well as men, her heroines retained elements of the Victorian

lady; they responded in a submissive and passive way to the aggressive sexuality of the

males. The attraction of the Clara Bow character in the film It was, in contrast, based on

independence, strength, vivacity, and a determination to satisfy her desires. The character

attains her goal by using the tactics of ‘female’ trickery: impersonation, deception,

duplicity, and disruption (Landay 1998, pp. 78–81).

Although Bow’s behavior is far removed from the moral standards of the Victorian

lady, her working-class flapper is constrained by morality to a greater extent than her

upper-middle-class flappers in her previous films. Mobility out of her class requires that

she conforms to the rules of morality by which the wealthy man will judge her before he

promises marriage. Her character, Betty Lou, sells lingerie in a department store, and she

focuses her desires on Waltham, the new boss of the store. When Waltham comes to

inspect the department in which Betty Lou works, he is the inadvertent object of her

sexualized gaze (‘Sweet Santa Claus, gimme him!’). The film then goes on to show Betty

Lou’s ultimately successful attempts to satisfy her acquisitive desire. For Betty Lou, a

working girl, the acquisition of the boss will provide her with the means to actualize the

fantasies of consumer culture.

Unlike the Pickford and Moore characters, the Bow heroine pursues Waltham with

single-minded determination, but although she never considers that Waltham’s wealth is a

hindrance to their romance and marriage, it is evident that it is the man she desires rather

than his money. Waltham, on his part, is attracted to Betty Lou precisely because of her

class, which allows her, unlike his rich, well-mannered fiancée, to act in an unreserved and

highly physical manner. In one scene Betty Lou persuades Waltham to join her in the

amusements of Coney Island including a large inclined turntable called the ‘social mixer’.

As they are tossed together by the machine, the class barrier between them is broken and

Betty Lou demonstrates that, in marked contrast to Waltham’s undemonstrative fiancée,

she is a flapper who is fun to be with. Betty Lou understands, however, the rules of sexual

propriety and this is demonstrated when she responds to Waltham’s kiss with a slap which,

as we gather from her subsequent expression, is a performance intended to show him that

he can only acquire her by marriage. The need to conform to the traditional limitations on

premarital interaction is confirmed by the piteous state of Betty Lou’s roommate, an

unmarried mother.

The narrative of It links female sexual initiative to class transcendence, but it manages

to do this without breaking the cross-class romance norm of disinterested love. The

promise of marriage provides the conventional romantic ending, but Bow’s performance

in the film, which communicates more knowing sexuality than indicated by the narrative

alone, suggests that marriage would not dampen Bow’s sexually charged character

(Felando 2004). Bow’s persona made it appear unlikely that the reward of her character’s

disinterested love would transform the flapper into a conventional wife.

82 S. Sharot

Conclusions

The personas of the female film stars of the 1920s represented different versions of the

New Woman and all were located within a culture of consumerism. The fashion and

beauty dimensions of consumer culture largely centered on the bodies of women, and it

was the female stars, both on and off-screen, who provided exemplars of those dimensions.

The public display of the female body, largely for the gaze of men, was already prevalent

on the American stage in the 1890s when chorus girls became a major ingredient of

musical shows (Banner 1983, pp. 180, 185), and by the early 1920s nudity was not

uncommon, especially in revues (Latham 2000, pp. 105, 118). There were, of course, far

greater restraints on the display of the female body in Hollywood films, and of the three

stars discussed here only Clara Bow was frequently positioned as an object of the male

gaze, although men were also shown to be the object of her gaze. When Bow as Betty Lou

the salesgirl makes her boss the object of her gaze, her response is appropriate to the

department store in which, like the movie theater, the (female) consumer is expected to

look, desire, and to experience pleasure through fantasies of acquisition (Orgeron 2003).

A study in the 1920s of young film-goers found that boys in their mid-teens admitted to

their pleasure in gazing at actresses on the screen, and we may assume that such pleasures

were also common among adult males, but it was girls and women who were believed to

be the ones fascinated with the spectacle of stars. Although adult men constituted about

one-third of the American movie audience, the image of movie fandom in the 1920s was

overwhelmingly feminine. Male fans had been common among film fans prior to World

War I when they were represented as interested in the technical aspects of film-making.

They were marginalized and discouraged by the promoters of the 1920s fan magazines

who sought to attract more consumer product advertising by emphasizing their female

readership. The many fan magazines of the 1920s increased their coverage of what were

considered women’s interests: romance and marriages of the stars, advice on etiquette,

the stars’ clothing, on and off-screen, and recipes from the stars’ kitchens (Fuller 1996,

pp. 116–119, 142–145, 188–189).

Although nearly all the stars played roles across the class spectrum, from upper or

upper-middle society women to poor working-class girls, their personas carried class

associations. Constance Talmadge was ‘the epitome of the privileged flapper’ (Haskell

1987, p. 80), and Gloria Swanson took ideals of consumerism to exotic heights (Higashi

1978, pp. 142–177). The personas of Mary Pickford, Colleen Moore, and Clara Bow

tempered the image of ‘the star as special’ with that of ‘the star as ordinary’. They all

provided models of consumption and were paid to endorse a range of items, especially

those associated with beauty and fashion (Fuller 1996, pp. 156–159, Addison 2000,

pp. 18–22, Barbas 2001, pp. 38–39, 52–53, 78–81). At the same time they were

promoted as working women who, in the cases of Mary Pickford and Clara Bow, had risen

from poor backgrounds to fame and wealth. Pickford said that she liked to see her own sex

achieve and was ‘proud to be one of . . . the girls who earn their own living’ (May 1980,

p. 119).

The persona of Mary Pickford, which was established in the 1910s, diverged from the

docile image of the Victorian ideal, but her muted, reticent sexuality distanced her from

the flapper image. Although Pickford’s working-girl role in My best girl provided an

opportunity to follow in the mold of the flapper stars who also played working girls, her

character was shown to be quite unlike a flapper. Unlike flapper characters who appear to

be independent of any family of origin (we are told nothing of the families of the flapper

characters in Orchids and ermine and It), Maggie, the Pickford character, is embedded in

Journal of Gender Studies 83

a family that is dependent on her. Maggie’s level-headedness is contrasted with her

coquettish and irresponsible sister who dresses and acts like a flapper. Unlike most film

flappers, who did not show any aspiration to motherhood, Maggie expresses her desire for

a conventional, middle-class family life, and her remoteness from the flapper image is

made evident in the scene near the end of the film when her exaggerated pretense at being a

flapper fails to convince any of the characters.

Colleen Moore had risen to top stardom as a freedom-loving flapper, but her flapper

characters remained sexually reticent and her basic innocence was emphasized even more

so in her cross-class romance films. In Irene her character includes the child-like features

of her earlier films, and although she undergoes glamorization, she remains modest and

unassuming. Her character in Orchids and ermine is more mature and she acts and talks

more like a flapper. However, although she might talk like a gold-digging flapper in the

intertitles, it is her modest appearance that gets her a job as a hotel receptionist and her

whimsical behavior that attracts the wealthy suitor. Moore’s character is contrasted with

the mercenary and sexually overt Ermintrude who is punished by ending up with the

wealthy man’s valet.

Clara Bow’s persona was in some respects not unlike that of the negative female

characters in the films of Pickford (Maggie’s sister) and Moore (Pinki’s friend

Ermintrude). In contrast with Pickford’s ‘child-woman’ and Moore’s androgynous look,

Bow was luscious-looking and far from reticent in her sexuality. However, in It Bow’s

character combined these characteristics with the knowledge that a sensible girl knew

exactly how far she should allow a man to go. Unlike the female characters that provide

negative comparisons with the heroines in My best girl, Irene and Orchids and ermine, the

negative female in It is modest in appearance and behavior. She is, however, an unwedded

mother and serves to provide the lesson that knowing how far to go in sexual behavior is a

pre-condition for the carefree lifestyle of the true flapper as epitomized by Clara Bow.

Although they differed considerably in their personas and in the characters they played

in the cross-class romances, the characters of all three stars conformed to the norm of

disinterested love. None of them pursued the men they desired because of their wealth. In

My best girl and Orchids and ermine there could be no question of mercenary motives

because the characters are unaware that the men with whom they fall in love are wealthy.

All the initiative in the cross-class romance in Irene comes from the wealthy suitor whose

insistence effects the transformation of Irene from an awkward waif into a glamorous

model. In It Waltham’s wealth is evident to Betty Lou, Bow’s character, but her desire for

the man rather than his money is conveyed by Bow’s performance style from her very first

look at him. The absence of a mercenary motive is shown when Bow’s character risks

ending the relationship when she seeks to take her revenge on Waltham after he has shown

his lack of faith in her by believing that she has a child. By her actions, Bow’s Betty Lou

demonstrates her virtues including, one has to presume, her virginity, and, like the

characters played by Pickford and Moore, it is for her virtues, including her disinterested

love, that Betty Lou is rewarded with a wealthy man.

All three stars mediated variations of the New Woman with a morality that remained

linked to Victorianism, and when they played working-class roles this mediation enabled

them to win the wealthy man. Their disinterested love was a precondition of their

successful romance, but the location of the romance within the sites of consumerism

conveyed the implicit message that it was the class difference among men that was

decisive for the position of women. The disinterested love of the women was a form of

exchange for the class and status that the men could give them, and in the consumer

society it was the wealthy man who provided the means for the ideal romance. The films

84 S. Sharot

confirmed that the freedoms of the New Woman were confined within a class system

linked to gender.

Notes on contributor

Stephen Sharot is Professor of Sociology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He is the author of four books and numerous articles, mostly in the sociology of religion. In recent years he has carried out research on the sociology of popular cinema, and he is now involved in research on representations of class, and the interaction of gender with class, in American cinema.

Selective filmography

Irene, 1926. Directed by Alfred E. Green. USA: First National Pictures. It, 1927. Directed by Clarence G. Badger. USA: Famous Players-Lasky. My best girl, 1927. Directed by Sam Taylor. USA: Mary Pickford Company. Orchids and ermine, 1927. Directed by Alfred Santell. USA: John McCormick Productions.

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