For the love of pleasure: women, movies and culture in turn-of-the century Chicago

Abstract

One of the most readable books on early cinema I have ever encountered. . . . Rabinovitz ably brings together a wealth of information about the exciting era of social change that marked the beginning of U.S. cinema. --Gaylyn Studlar, author of This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age. The period from the 1880s until the 1920s saw the making of a consumer society, the inception of the technological, economic, and social landscape in which we currently live. Cinema played a key role in the changing urban landscape. For working-class women, it became a refuge from the factory. For middle-class women, it presented a new language of sexual danger and pleasure. Women found greater freedom in big cities, entering the workforce in record numbers and moving about unchaperoned in public spaces. Turn-of-the-century Chicago surpassed even New York as a proving ground for pleasure and education, attracting women workers at three times the national rate. Using Chicago as a model, Lauren Rabinovitz analyzes the rich interplay among demographic, visual, historical, and theoretical materials of the period. She skillfully links cinema theory and women's studies for a fuller understanding of cultural history. She also demonstrates how cinema dramatically affected social conventions, ultimately shaping modern codes of masculinity and femininity. Lauren Rabinovitz is a professor of American studies and film studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943-71, co-author of the award-winning CD-ROM The Rebecca Project, and co-editor of Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War.

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