Abstract
In the late 1920s, a college sophomore reflected on her movie experiences, “I cannot remember ever having been without a movie house so that this enterprise can be called a guiding factor in my life.” Educators, social scientists, and parents feared this exact response, but the young woman did not explain how movies “guided” her. By the 1920s, teenage girls accepted movies as part of their everyday lives and mentioned them frequently in letters, diaries, and yearbooks. But teenagers, and especially teenage girls, did not always respond in ways prescribed by adults—moviemakers among them. They adapted movies and movie culture to their lives in unique, “teenage” ways.1
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Notes
This quote comes from a series of motion picture autobiographies collected by sociologist Herbert Blumer in the late 1920s as part of the Payne Fund studies. These previously unpublished autobiographies are reprinted in Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie, and Kathryn H. Fuller, Children and the Movies: Media Lnfluence and the Payne Fund Controversy (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 246.
Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1976), 77.
Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1974]), 124–39
Leora M. Blanchard, Teen-Age Tangles: A Teacher’s Experiences with Live Young People (Philadelphia: The Union Press, 1923), 32–33
Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javonavich, 1956 [1929]), 264–68
Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965 [1937]), 176
“What Students Think of Movies,” Photo-Era Magazine (January 1929): 49; “What Students Think of Movies,” Photo-Era Magazine (February 1929): 102–3; Alice P. Sterner, Radio, Motion Picture, and Reading Interests: A Study of High School Pupils (New York: Teachers College, Columbia Univ., 1947), 69
Marion Edman, “Attendance of School Pupils and Adults at Moving Pictures,” The School Review 48 (December 1940): 755–56
Edgar Dale, How to Appreciate Motion Pictures: A Manual of Motion-Picture Criticism Prepared for High-School Students (New York: Macmillan Company, 1933).
Sarah MacLean Mullen, How to Judge Motion Pictures: A Pamphlet for High School Students (New York: Scholastic Corporation, 1934)
Sarah MacLean Mullen, How to Organize a Photoplay Club (New York: Scholastic Corporation, 1934)
Lea Jacobs, “Reformers and Spectators: The Film Education Movement in the Thirties,” Camera Obscura 22 (January 1990): 30
Mary Allen Abbott, “A Sampling of High-School Likes and Dislikes in Motion Pictures,” Secondary Education 6 (March 1937): 821
Paul Cressey, “The Motion Picture Experience as Modified by Social Background and Personality,” American Sociological Review 3 (August 1938): 516–25
James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986)
Harold Teen; Georganne J. Scheiner, Signifying Female Adolescence: Film Representations and Fans, 1920–1950 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 68.
Are These Our Children? (RKO, 1931); Wild Boys (Warner Brothers Studio, 1932); David Considine, The Cinema of Adolescence (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1985), 158.
Considine, The Cinema of Adolescence, 13–31; Richard Shale, The Academy Awards Index: The Complete Categorical and Chronological Record (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 286.
James R. Parish, Great Child Stars (New York: Ace Books, 1976), 191–95
Norman Zierold, The Child Stars (London: MacDonald, 1965), 102–3
Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 1–74
David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993)
Letter to Frances Turner, September 9, 1920. Despite industry efforts to encourage the popularity of “film” and “cinema,” the appellation “movie” became popular by 1915 as a noun. Its popularity as a verb never spread. Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, eds., Dictionary of American Slang, 2d sup. ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), 346.
Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 3.
Brooke Hanlon, “All the Boys,” in Frances Ullmann DeArmand, ed., When Mother Was a Girl: Stories She Read then (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1964), 70
OGS, Mary, September 22, 1934; OGS, Sharon, Summary, November 11, 1957; OGS, Rebecca, May 5, 1937 (Maytime was released in 1937); Earl T. Sullenger, “Modern Youth and the Movies,” School and Society 32 (October 4, 1930): 460
Lucille Vaughan Payne, “Sunday Afternoon,” in Bryna Ivens, ed., Nineteen from Seventeen (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1952), 154.
Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 260–90
Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988)
John Modell, Into Ones Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989)
Fuller, At the Picture Show, 115, 150–67; Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: Univ. of N. Carolina Press, 1984), 46–118.
Scheiner, Signifying Female Adolescence; Lisa Lewis, Gender, Politics, and MTV: Voicing the Difference (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1990), 151–52
Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1986), 19.
Leo Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, The Movie Makers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1970 [1941]), 409–11.
Margaret Farrand Thorp, America at the Movies (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939), 69–98
Miriam Hansen, “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Specta-torship,” Cinema Journal 25 (Summer 1986): 6–32
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© 2004 Kelly Schrum
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Schrum, K. (2004). “A Guiding Factor in My Life”. In: Some Wore Bobby Sox. Girls’ History and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73134-3_6
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