ABSTRACT
In 1926, the film critic Iris Barry urged that the ‘one thing never to be lost sight of in considering the cinema is that it exists for the purpose of pleasing women. Three out of every four of all cinema audiences are women’ (Barry 1926: 59). The importance of the female patron had, in fact, long been recognized by the industry, and from the earliest days of moving pictures women had been courted as audience members. Their attendance at fairground film shows and penny gaffs was thought to confer an element of family respectability on the new entertainment form (although the presence of unmarried women simultaneously gave rise to moral concerns) (Shapiro Sanders 2002; Stamp 2000) and as the cinema negotiated its move upmarket during the 1910s, women were increasingly targeted through the creation of purpose-built venues, the provision of films deemed to have a ‘feminine interest’, and the emergence of a wealth of associated print media. The first film fan magazines appeared in Britain in 1911 and, as Jane Bryan has argued, these publications addressed a female readership to such an extent that, by the middle of the decade, they had effectively become a ‘sub-genre of the woman’s magazine’ (Bryan 2006: 191). By 1916 it was estimated that women made up over half of the British cinema-
going public (Hiley 1995: 162). While it is difficult to accurately ascertain audience composition during this period, there is little doubt that women did constitute a substantial, and growing, section of the cinema audience by the mid-1910s. Miriam Hansen has pointed out that after the First World War women became ‘the primary target of Hollywood’s publicity and products’ (1991: 18) and as American films began to occupy an increasing percentage of British screens in the post-war period, it can be safely surmised that these films and their stars made up a generous part of the viewing of British women cinema-goers.1 At the same time, however, domestic producers also recognized and made determined bids for female audiences, often seeking to entice them with products which could be recognized as distinctively British (through their literary, theatrical and historical sources, their filmmaking style, and their use of well-known British actors and/or British settings and location work, for example). This audience was, of course, by no means homogenous. In 1926, Marjorie Williams, a columnist for the trade paper Kinematograph Weekly, attempted to outline what she saw as the main groups of women cinema patrons:
a Mothers of the non-leisured class who are either employed in industrial centres or in bringing up their families.
