Eileen Percy in Her Honor the Mayor, 1920. The suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified shortly before the film’s release.
ONCE WOMEN won the vote they would make a clean sweep of corruption. This plank of the female suffrage platform was also a hope expressed in films like Thanhouser’s The Woman in Politics (1916), directed by W. Eugene Moore. Mignon Anderson played Dr. Beatrice Barlow, a city health inspector. She writes a report condemning a tenement owned by the mayor (Arthur Bauer) and is promptly discharged. With more revelations up her sleeve, she threatens the downfall of the city’s entire political machine. The mayor tries to jail her. When this fails, she is lured to a sanitarium and kept prisoner. She is rescued, of course, and the mayor imprisoned, but the story paid eloquent tribute to the growing power of women—even before they won the vote.1
The National Woman Suffrage Association was started by Susan B. Anthony in 1869, but for many years female suffrage was not a burning issue. People thought it an excellent idea, but they did nothing about it.
“The suffrage movement was completely in a rut in New York state at the opening of the twentieth century,” wrote Harriot Stanton Blatch. “It bored its adherents and repelled its opponents. Most of the ammunition was being wasted on its supporters in private drawing rooms and in public halls where friends … heard the same old arguments.”2 The years 1896–1910 came to be known as “the doldrums.” But if the suffragists made no progress, their opponents were active, not least in the film business. Most of the pictures about suffragettes laughed at the whole idea of votes for women as raucously as any bystander at a suffragist parade.
A typical example was released by Pathé in 1908. A Day in the Life of a Suffragette was just a split-reel cops-and-suffragettes comedy, but the synopsis illustrates the attitude women had to fight: “Women are as good as men, they are often better than men: why should they stand the cruel oppression of the stronger sex? Thus a crowd of common women are making speeches and drunk with their own words and getting up to battle pitch, they start forth into the street armed with banners rapidly made and screaming revolutionary songs. They march against a police patrol, who are endeavoring to bar the way. The female onslaught is so powerful that the poor policemen fall sprawling on the ground, and as the female wave sweeps over their prostrate bodies they have reason to regret their rash attempt. Encouraged by their first success, our suffragettes go on their way, their numbers getting bigger at every street turn, until things take an alarming aspect; the militia is called out, and after a comic struggle between women and soldiers, the whole female force is marched into custody and locked up for the night. The next morning, the subdued women are seen coming out of jail and meekly following their husbands on their way back to their domestic duties.”3
The guffaws this sort of thing attracted came not only from men. Many women were implacably opposed to their own enfranchisement. “Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote,” wrote Mrs. Grover Cleveland in the Ladies’ Home Journal. “The relative positions to be assumed by men and women in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.”4
The American suffrage movement emerged from its paralysis with victories in Washington state in November 1910 and California in 1911, but then was split by crippling disagreements. Two leaders held the various factions together—the veteran Carrie Chapman Catt and Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of the great pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They had organized the Women’s Political Union in 1907.
Both had spent time in England, but had left before witnessing the British suffragettes’ exploitation of violence.5 Impatient with conventional methods, the British women had begun provoking police reprisals to embarrass politicians and to force them to take action on the suffrage question.
The approach in America was peaceful. Slide shows and dramatic sketches had helped to win California. There was even a stage play, How the Vote Was Won. Mrs. Blatch organized parades, and the 1912 New York City parade was filmed by the new newsreel companies and distributed around the country.
“Women who usually see Fifth Avenue through the polished windows of their limousines … strode steadily side by side with pale-faced, thin-bodied girls from the sweltering sweat shops of the East Side,” reported the Baltimore American. “The sight of the impressive column of women striding five abreast up the middle of the street stifled all thoughts of ridicule … all marched with an intensity and purpose that astonished the crowd that lined the streets.”6
The following month there appeared the first important suffrage film, Votes for Women, directed by Hal Reid. The headline “ANNA SHAW AND JANE ADDAMS IN PICTURES” told the industry that the leading figures of the National Woman Suffrage Association were cooperating on a film at the Reliance studios. Reliance had put the idea to the suffragists, and their first reaction was that a moving picture might injure the dignity of their cause. But Hal Reid was a good salesman, and they soon realized that it could prove powerful propaganda. The idea appears to have been with the ladies for a year before they finally made up their minds.7
Among the other suffrage leaders who took part in this long-lost picture were Inez Milholland, Harriet May Mills, president of the New York State League, Mrs. Mary Beard, and Mrs. L. H. Ozedam.8 Max Eastman also assisted. The story was written by Mary Ware Dennett, secretary of the New York State League, Mrs. Harriet Laidlaw, and Mrs. Frances Bjorkman, all of whom played in the film, together with Florence Maule Cooley, who would write the next suffrage production.
“It opens with a scene showing the visit of the suffrage workers to a miserable family in a filthy tenement house,” said Moving Picture World. “The tenement house belongs to a haughty senator who will not listen to the arguments of the cause. They learn that he is engaged to marry an estimable lady and they think that by enlisting her with the cause that they can eventually win him over to their way of thinking. In this idea they are correct, for the senator’s fiancee succeeds in converting him and in making him an enthusiastic advocate of their principles.… The picture ends with the enormous suffrage parade, which recently took place on Fifth Avenue.”9
The film was released as a regular Reliance two-reeler; moreover, the State Leagues of the NAWSA planned to use it in their campaign. “One of the significant facts in connection with this picture, is that some of the ladies who appear in it, at one time were to be classed as antagonistic to the moving picture.”10
Moving Picture World commended the suffragists with only a hint of patronage. “They are not at all amateurish, as one might expect, but to the contrary they play their parts in a thoroughly natural manner.”11
Kay Sloan has recorded the success of the film: “In New Jersey, the Women’s Political Union brought Votes for Women into the state and secured its exhibition in many moving picture shows. In the Midwest, the Des Moines, Iowa, suffrage club showed the film in a small river front park near a bandstand where nightly concerts were given during Fair Week. Literally thousands of people saw the picture … Shown in nickelodeons, fairs and churches, the movement’s first melodrama impressed suffragists with its versatility and its ability to reach wide audiences.”12
It is a cultural crime that a film as important as this to American social history has been allowed to disappear.
The Edison Company made a Kinetophone talking picture under the auspices of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1913, but it was taken off the screen by the suffragists themselves. Presented at the Colonial Theatre in New York in April 1913, it aroused derision from the men and shocked comment from the women. Mrs. Frances Maule Bjorkman: “Never shall I forget my emotions when that talking-picture abomination began to work. As the different women got up to speak they went up and up till they looked about twenty feet tall. My! I don’t wonder the men jeered. And now they’ll probably go to their graves thinking that suffragists really look like that.”13
EIGHTY MILLION WOMEN WANT A 1913 film about female suffrage, Eighty Million Women Want—produced by the Uneek [sic] Film Company, featuring Emmeline Pankhurst and Harriot Stanton Blatch—sounds like the fantasy of an overenthusiastic social historian. Yet in the 1970s, I heard that just such a film was available on 16mm from a Los Angeles rental company called Film Classic Exchange. I spent an inordinate sum of money purchasing a copy and having it shipped to my home in England. When the package arrived, I eagerly tore the film out of its wrapping and projected it. I have seldom been more disappointed. The entire thing was incomprehensible. (Politics in England have always been so different from those in America!) It was invisible, too—a pale dupe, which maddened me since the original 35mm had obviously been of excellent quality. But worse than the quality was the content. What looked like a routine thriller had been given a suffragist aura merely by the inclusion of Votes for Women sashes and a soundless address by Emmeline Pankhurst14 (from which the titles had been removed). I put it away and forgot about it.
Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst confronts Boss Kelly in Eighty Million Women Want, 1913.
I researched all the other chapters of this book—political corruption, gangsterism, immigration—before returning to female suffrage. Then I looked at the film again. Suddenly, it made sense. It had no more cinematic virtue than before, but as a document of its time it was remarkable.
The film became known as What Eighty Million Women Want.15 The story was credited to suffragist Florence Maule Cooley. I wrote to Pat Loughney at the Library of Congress to see if anything had been deposited for copyright purposes, and he discovered the original shooting script and was kind enough to send me a photocopy. What an excellent piece of work, I thought; the product of a seasoned professional. And then I recalled an interview I had conducted in 1966 with Mrs. Ad Schulberg, the widow of B. P. Schulberg, one of the most prominent producers of the silent era. I remembered her mentioning a film her husband had written for the suffragettes; could this be the one? I hunted through the trade papers, but could find no confirmation. Finally, I did the obvious thing and replayed the interview tape. Mrs. Schulberg had even mentioned the title of the film.
“He was making $35 a week as a cub reporter,” she said. “Then he met the man [P. S. Harrison] who edited a little paper called Film Reports. B. P. became the assistant editor. Mrs. Pankhurst approached him and he did the scenario for Eighty Million Women Want. I think he got $50 a reel, and it meant a great deal to us.”16
The plot is essentially a detective story, exposing the system of machine politics. The sleuth is female, and the remedy is votes for women.
A young lawyer, Travers (Ronald Everett), finds everything about his fiancée, Mabel (Ethel Jewett), irresistible, except for her politics. Boss Kelly (George Henry) decides to put Travers on his payroll. And though the young lawyer is sorely tempted, he puts his integrity first and denounces the boss.
Now we meet Ruth, whose boyfriend, Arthur, is injured by the district leader’s automobile. Ruth brings the case to Travers, who assures Arthur he will win. But the boss intercedes with the judge, who owes his position to the boss and who rules in favor of the district leader. Arthur is shattered.
Mabel offers her services to the Suffragist Cause and is presented with a sash by Harriot Stanton Blatch, president of the Women’s Political Union. The suffragists are denounced in the press by Boss Kelly. Their great English leader, Mrs. Pankhurst, on a lecture tour of the United States, pays the boss a call. When he refuses to listen she gives him such a tongue-lashing one can almost hear her.
The suffragists plant a spy as Kelly’s secretary, and Mabel learns that Travers is secretly on Kelly’s payroll after all. She is livid. Realizing the only way to win her back is to go straight, Travers has a row with Kelly—witnessed, through a keyhole, by the caretaker.
While his henchmen are diverted at the window by the spectacle of the grand suffragist parade, Kelly works alone—and is shot and wounded by Arthur. The caretaker implicates Travers, who finds himself in jail. Kelly is not seriously hurt and is soon back in action, issuing the names of absent voters to his gangsters. Mabel creeps to his office door, armed with a camera, and takes close-range photographs of the fingerprints in the thick dust of the door panels. Securing thumb prints of all the suspects, she identifies Arthur as the culprit and takes her evidence to the only straight politician in the picture, the district attorney. Travers is released; Arthur takes his place. His girlfriend, Ruth, weeps and takes off her Votes for Women sash. Mabel stops her, saying, “We must fight for right.” (Schulberg’s script added “and accept justice,” but this was dropped.)
Travers foils the gangsters in their attempt to vote, and Kelly is confronted with evidence of his misconduct. He grins—he’s been through all this before—and produces his checkbook. But this is, as a title puts it, “the District Attorney the Boss couldn’t buy,” and Kelly is arrested.
Election day; at Kelly’s headquarters, the gangsters are dismayed by his defeat. But at suffrage headquarters, victory after victory—“Erie County, 10,000 for the amendment,” “New York 21st Assembly District, 3,000 for the amendment.” Joy is unconfined.
Kelly is brought before the judge—the same judge he fixed the last time—and is found guilty.
Mabel at last accepts Travers’s proposal of marriage. They are about to kiss when they turn to the camera, stare in astonishment, and burst into laughter. Fade-out.
The film is a workmanlike production for 1913. It verges on the improbable only in its scene of Mabel photographing close-ups of thumb prints à la Faurot with a snapshot camera—a difficult task even today. Otherwise it is an absorbing, well-acted, and illuminating production. It moves rapidly from place to place, often without any continuity shots. When Mabel offers to track down the men whose names are on the blotter, we see her leaving suffrage headquarters and walking straight into Travers’s office without intervening titles, or shots of her traveling in a limousine or walking up stairs, as was the practice in 1913. One suspects that this was because director Will Lewis forgot to shoot them—he was trained on Imp one-reelers—rather than because there was any particular daring in the editing.
The sets are a trifle crude; the ambience of Kelly’s campaign headquarters is suggested with a few American flags, a desk, and a picture. But look further and some intriguing flourishes become apparent. Boss Kelly has a sleek Negro as an aide, with stovepipe hat and tail coat, who vets all his phone calls and keeps a wary eye on the gangsters. He did not appear in Schulberg’s script. Kay Sloan, in an article in American Quarterly,17 suggests that this was a racist touch, reminding audiences that while black men had the vote, white women did not.
At the first screening of the film at the Bryant Theatre, New York, the print arrived two hours late, giving many reviewers an excuse to creep out. Harriot Stanton Blatch amused the audience with her remarks, apologizing for “the non-arrival of the man-made film which was supposed to have started for the showing in a man-made taxi some short time previous.” Accidents, she added, happen at times even to men, at which, reported Motography, “the back row lost its last male occupants.”18
W. Stephen Bush, in Moving Picture World, gave the film an enthusiastic welcome, even though he assumed the scenario to have been the work of a woman: “This feature is not only a most effective means of propaganda for the cause of Woman Suffrage, but it would, I am sure, be welcomed by any man who wants to give his patrons a high class offering with plenty of pathos and humor … Those who have looked upon the Votes-for-Women movement as the last refuge for old maids and cranks are due for a most pleasant and agreeable disillusionment. The heroine of the story, though a staunch enough suffragette, is womanly from top to toe.”19
Suffragist leaders Rose Winslow and Helen Todd appeared at the opening presentation on December 10, 1913, at Marcus Loew’s Circle Theatre, New York, and spoke after each show. For this was how the suffragists intended to use the film—to arouse interest in the struggle and then to explain it in detail afterward.20
No surviving film of this period is so outspoken about political corruption, and one must be grateful that at least this one survives—more or less intact.
The Germans stole a march on both British and Americans with a five-reel feature on the British movement, Die Suffragette (September 1913), written and directed by the Danish Urban Gad and featuring his wife, Asta Nielsen. Although shot in the conventional style of 1913, the film is distinguished by a vivid acting style most obviously from Nielsen. She plays the role realistically, yet with the extra strength required to convey her thoughts.
Nelly becomes infatuated with a handsome stranger on a boating lake. After a furious row with her father, she flees to her mother, Mrs. Panburne, leader of the suffragettes, who shows her the poverty and oppression of the slums and wins her to the cause.
Lord Ascue (Max Landa) proposes a law in Parliament ordering the mass arrest of suffragettes. One of the women has some old love letters from Ascue. Mrs. Panburne sends Nelly with these to persuade Ascue to withdraw the bill. In case she fails, she equips her with a bomb concealed in a bag. Nelly discovers Ascue is her mysterious stranger. She pleads with him to no avail and dutifully plants the bomb. But she cannot kill the man she loves, and she returns to warn him. This time, the servants refuse to let her in and the bomb goes off—just after Ascue leaves the room. In an ending that must have been as hard to accept then as it is now, Ascue introduces Nelly to his ministers not as a suffragette but as his fiancée, and after the title “the hand that guides the cradle guides the world” (note the subtle difference in the wording), we see the happy couple with a healthy crop of children.
As this is a German film, it has none of the documentary detail one might have expected from an English film. But judging from stills and reviews, the film showed a great deal of violence—window smashing, hunger-striking, and force-feeding. All this is missing from the surviving print, together with an anti-Semitic subplot in which Nelly is pursued by a man called Levy. What’s left is a bizarre tale in which the suffragettes are portrayed as though by caricaturists. Even Lord Ascue looks more like a Prussian officer than a British prime minister.
A German reviewer—female—who considered the suffragette movement “a historic blunder” nonetheless felt the film would be regarded as a cultural document by later generations. “The psychologically interesting point is the influence of the mother on the daughter, the drifting into a kind of trance, from the harmless, half-innocent, childlike state of her soul into political criminality, furthered through mass suggestion.”21 The drama, she added, was not successful in the provinces: “The German bourgeoisie does not read enough to be interested in the suffragette movement.”
The film was retitled The Militant Suffragette for America, and there was some trepidation that women might attack theatres showing it. But suffragettes dismissed it as “entirely harmless.”
I can find no record of the film having been shown in England, perhaps because, unlike America, suffragettes there had a record of violence. They carved up a cricket pitch; they might well demolish a theatre. But there is another possibility. The censors might have been anxious to avoid offending the distinguished Prime Minister, Lord Asquith.
The fear of violence inspired the Imp three-reeler The Militant (1914), which was also set in England. While it did not attack the right of women to vote, it declared that the destruction of property, of homes, and of lives was the wrong way to achieve it.22
“Naturally there is much spectacularism in the picture with the crowds, the destruction of railroad tracks, the dynamiting of buildings and the raids on the meetings by police.”23
The film, directed by William Robert Daly, was partly shot in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York, which stood in for the East End of London.
Meanwhile, the anti-suffragist comedies continued. The Edison Company, which had made both pro- and anti-suffragist films in England in 1912 (How They Got the Vote; A Suffragette in Spite of Himself), released a two-reeler in 1914 called When the Men Left Town, written by Mark Swan and directed by C. Jay Williams. In this film the women win every office in the town election; they stop everyone smoking and drinking, and the men decide to leave them to it. The women are forced to remove garbage, deliver express packages, run the trolley system—only the trolley system refuses to operate. The women ask the men to return, and when they do, amidst great rejoicing, the women resign their offices.24
The irony was that in England, a few months after this film came out, women would be doing just these jobs while the men went to war. And when the same thing happened in America, many women worked so successfully on the trolley system that they were filmed on the job for the benefit of the suffrage movement.
In 1912 the Women’s Political Union collaborated with the Eclair company in producing a comedy of their own, Suffrage Wins Herbert (released as Suffrage and the Man), from a story by novelist and playwright Dorothy Steele, a member of the WPU. Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch appeared, together with many volunteers from the WPU and their male supporters.25
In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt adopted as a plank in his election platform. Woodrow Wilson did not, and he won, even though nearly a million women in six suffrage states had the vote. The day before Wilson’s inauguration in March 1913, a suffragist parade in Washington was subjected to brutal verbal and physical abuse when bystanders turned into assailants.
What is one to make of the Colonial Film Company’s one-reel special Suffragette Pageant and Tableau? It was released in March 1913, very soon after the event. The Colonial’s advertisement showed a photograph of the tableau on the south steps of the U.S. Treasury Building. It was very dignified and very pretty. But it was a bit like showing the troops at Gettysburg drilling and leaving out the battle.
“The women,” said a newspaper report, “had to fight their way from the start and took more than one hour in making the first ten blocks. Many of the women were in tears under the jibes and insults of those who lined the route.” Troops of cavalry were rushed into the city to bring under control what was very close to a riot. All this was filmed by newsreels and almost certainly by the Colonial Film Company, based in Washington. But it was tastefully removed, despite a public outcry over the disturbances which cost the police chief of Washington his job.26
YOUR GIRL AND MINE Under conditions of secrecy, Your Girl and Mine, the first large-scale suffragist film, went into production at the Selig Studio in Chicago. William N. Selig had signed Giles Warren, who had made pictures at Imp and Lubin, to direct, and then left for Europe for the summer, thus demonstrating how little the studio heads had to do with actual production.
Selig asked the trade press to maintain silence about the picture, but James McQuade of Moving Picture World leaked the news in September 1914. The film was made in collaboration with the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, of which Mrs. Medill McCormick was chairman. Mrs. McCormick, daughter of Senator Mark Hanna, proved to be the leading spirit for motion picture propaganda. “Ever since work was begun,” reported McQuade, “she has given her strong personal interest to the production. She personally engaged some of the leading members of the cast, bringing them on from New York and elsewhere. She is tireless in her work to make the big suffrage photoplay a success, and can be found almost daily at the Selig studio in conference with Director Warren.”27
Mrs. McCormick selected Olive Wyndham for the leading role, with John Charles as leading man; both were from the New York stage. Katherine Kaelred played a woman lawyer, and Grace Darmond played an allegorical role as Equal Suffrage.
The script, which was written by Gilson Willetts, was scrutinized by the Congressional Committee, which included Jane Addams and Dr. Anna Shaw, and they praised it highly. Dr. Shaw played in several scenes herself.28
“Realizing that the suffragists, like all other propaganda organizations,” said Mrs. McCormick, “spend most of their time in talking to themselves in public, I felt it was necessary to try and originate a means of really reaching the public. There is no opposition to woman’s suffrage in this country, because there is no argument of moment against it. The difficulty lies in not being able to reach the actual voters and to have them understand the reasons why women are working to be enfranchised. With this purpose in view I consulted with one of the greatest moving picture men in the country, and together we have worked out and produced one of the largest photoplays yet presented to the public.…” She added that it would be the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the suffrage movement.29
It seems curious now that the suffragists should have agreed to a man writing the scenario. But Gilson Willetts had had an enormous success with The Adventures of Kathlyn earlier in 1914, and the fact that this was a favorite serial of many suffragists perhaps guided the choice. He had experience, too, as a political writer. He ensured that the film would not preach, but would absorb every member of the audience, whether or not they knew anything about the suffrage question.
Rosalind Fairlie is a wealthy heiress who marries what the synopsis described as “a spendthrift and a man of loose morals.” Just after the honeymoon, an aggressive creditor forces his way into their home and demands immediate payment. Ben Austin, the husband, turns to his wife and says, “Sorry, my dear, but you must pay my bills or they will seize your property”—for the law states that a woman’s possessions are controlled by her husband. Thus, Austin almost reduces his wife to beggary: “The law is on my side; I am absolute master here!”
Rosalind eventually attempts to flee her drunken spouse, taking her two small daughters, but the law orders them “returned to the roof of the father” and she is compelled by mother love to accompany them. She tries again when Austin dies and bequeaths the guardianship of the children to his unprincipled father, but she is arrested at the state line. A female lawyer, Eleanor Holbrook (Kaelred), takes her case.
“During the trial the subtitles are veritable bombs,” wrote James McQuade, “every one of them hitting the bull’s eye. Here are a few of them taken from the plea made before judge and jury by Eleanor Holbrook: “My client is charged with the crime of abduction, and the prosecution asks you to send her to the penitentiary because she has attempted to get back the children whom she bore, and whom her husband willed away without her consent.… If this mother’s act was a crime, then all mothers are potential criminals.”30
The jury returns a verdict of “not guilty,” and the judge finds the children’s grandfather unfit to be their guardian.
In Lois Weber (or Griffith) style, there were allegorical scenes, which McQuade thought incompatible with the dramatic sequences. But he declared that moving pictures like this one would accomplish more for the cause than all that eloquent tongues had done since the movement began.31
The New York premiere at the old Casino Theatre was a glittering occasion. “Silken banners of National Suffrage parties adorned the balconies, interwoven with American flags, and from every box scintillated the brains of the local organizations … while the orchestra seats, commendably crowded, held the army whose leaders sat in review.”32
Your Girl and Mine had its premiere in Chicago at the Auditorium on October 14, 1914. Just before the show, Major Funkhouser decided one of the scenes would have to go.
“Censorship as an institution,” declared Mrs. McCormick, furiously, “is medieval and undemocratic. As Major Funkhouser has exercised his power in this particular case, it is preposterous and officious of him to have cut the film. The scene which he has assumed [sic] to censure was a representation of the most convincing and realistic fight which I have ever seen staged. It showed a woman struggling with a man in the interest of her right. It was a splendid piece of acting, too—none of your stage claptrap about it.”33
The film was greeted by waves of applause every time it scored a propaganda point. The reviews were excellent, and Lewis J. Selznick arranged to have the picture distributed by the World Film Corporation. His ads placed his picture alongside that of Mrs. McCormick and by heading it “The Brains of Two Big Enterprises Have Combined” contrived to eliminate Selig and Giles Warren, who actually made it.34
Sadly, the picture was not a financial success. “The failure of Your Girl and Mine probably discouraged the suffragists,” wrote Kay Sloan. “While they continued to use theatres for their slide shows, the suffragists apparently made no other films.”35
In a sense, the film industry itself took up the cause. Herbert Brenon’s pacifist drama War Brides (1916) was propaganda for the suffrage movement. “It has as its very basis,” said Motion Picture News, “the demand of women for equal voting rights in national government whereby they can approve or veto the plunging of their country into war.”36
EVERY WOMAN’S PROBLEM In 1917, Mrs. Wallace Reid appeared in a kind of vision of the future—what might happen when women won the vote and achieved positions of prominence. She played in Mothers of Men along with the director Willis Robards (who would play De Treville in Douglas Fair-banks’s The Three Musketeers [1921]), and Hal Reid. The story was conceived in Hal Reid’s favorite style of overwrought melodrama and was written by him and the director. Considering his stand against capital punishment, it was a curious tale: the wife of a prominent lawyer is elected judge of the criminal court and has to sentence a man convicted of murder purely by circumstantial evidence. She does her duty; the man is hanged. She is elected governor, at which point her husband, a lawyer, is also convicted of murder on circumstantial evidence. “Torn between love and duty—to copy the language of the subtitle,” said Moving Picture World, “and admonished to stand firm for the good of the cause and show the world that the new brand of womanhood does not intend to be swayed by its heart in place of its head, the wife and governor refuses her husband a pardon and he is only saved from the rope by the confession of the real murderer.”37
Frame enlargements from Every Woman’s Problem, 1921—original version 1917. Mrs. Wallace Reid at home …
… and as a judge.
The public execution from Every Woman’s Problem. (National Film Archive)
The film was remade once women had the vote (and the situation was slightly more plausible), under the title Every Woman’s Problem (1921). It survives in the National Film Archive in London, and I have seldom seen a more obvious example of title writers’ tyranny; in the first reel hardly a shot runs its full course without titles leaping in to advance the plot with elegant lettering and hamfisted prose (by M. G. Cohn and J. F. Natteford). The reason for the surfeit becomes apparent on close inspection of the action; a great deal, if not all, comes from the 1917 original. Since certain scenes had to be scrapped, the titles made up the shortfall. The man responsible for the mélange was Nat Levine, who began his career by distributing this picture.38
The Woman’s Party of a Western city offers a brilliant young lawyer, Clara Madison, the nomination for judge of the superior, court, which she wins, against the opposition of a yellow press editor (Hal Reid) and the city’s machine boss. When she marries a lawyer, Grant Williams (Robards), they implicate him in a bomb outrage.
Clara decides to resign, but her suffragist friends urge her to do her duty: “You must not give up your chance of being the first woman governor.” Even though she is pregnant, Clara agrees to struggle on. Popular indignation demands death for her husband as well as for two Italian bootleggers, and another judge duly passes the sentence.
Clara is not opposed to the death penalty—she rejected an appeal from a common criminal, despite his children and dying mother, and sentenced him to be hanged. But she is devastated by this dilemma. She carries on with her campaign, however, solemnly assuring the voters that if elected, she will not interfere with the course of justice. So, for the first time in history, a woman rules in the governor’s chair.
Clara allows a stay of execution and is attacked by the yellow press. The Woman’s Party urges her to stand firm. The application for a new trial is denied, and she must proceed with her task, even though her child is due.
A mob assembles at the prison gates, convinced the governor will break faith with the people and turn her husband loose. The sheriff decides to placate them by holding the execution in public.
These scenes are very striking, for the film people have assembled hundreds of workers, all looking shabby and down-at-the-heel, to pour into the prison yard, giving the scene a grim authenticity. Public executions must have looked exactly like this.* The Italian who made and threw the bomb confesses to a priest, but the priest cannot break faith any more than Clara. The plot takes a convulsive twist, as another priest holds up the ritual and climbs the scaffold to make one last appeal. The culprit breaks down, and Williams is free. (The crowd’s jubilation is very half-hearted.)
Williams is driven through streets packed with cheering people. The governor’s car drives up, and husband and wife embrace to the delight of the crowd. (Meanwhile, although the film does not tell us, they are presumably hanging the two Italians.)
And the film ends with a final example of its title writers’ art: “When the wounds of the heart are healed, its reward is the hours of peace and love that make life a thing of lasting beauty.”
By suggesting that women would do their duty just as pitilessly as men, the film made a better case for the abolition of capital punishment than for women as politicians. The propaganda, however, was anesthetized by the machine-gun titles.
Yet despite its flaws, Every Woman’s Problem has some worthwhile documentary scenes. Its exteriors were filmed in Oakland, California; Clara’s political rally is actually a wartime parade involving the Oakland National Guard and Young Ladies Institute!39 The wartime references were studiously ignored for the “remake,” in which the dates of letters, etc., are all 1921.
The main trouble with the film is that it isn’t a film; for the first half, it seems to show little but suffering people seated at desks. It grows more interesting when it moves out into the streets, but by no stretch of the imagination could any of it be called well made. The sad thing is that as one of the few surviving suffrage films, it is likely to become one of the most viewed.
* The last public execution in the United States was in Kentucky in 1936; it was carried out by a woman sheriff. (Courtesy of Geoffrey Bell)