Sunday, April 3, 2011

The Movie-Going Public Sphere - Jennifer

After spending time this semester learning about the nineteenth-century public sphere in another course I was pleasantly surprised to see the public sphere idea again in Ross's Working Class Hollywood. I found Ross's idea that the movie industry helped expand the public sphere for women. Women previously seen walking alone, especially at night were taken to be prostitutes, but with the new medium of movies women could and would go alone to movie theaters. As Ross tells us, with the emergence of movie theaters all across the country public space was redefined, especially for women. What I found to be the most interesting was not just women, but mother's and the new possibilities movie theaters gave them. For some mother's the movie theater was a place where they could go with their children to entertain both themselves and their children for a day at the movies. In other cases, however, the movie theater became like a nanny where mothers sent their children for the day to spend a day away from their children, either at home or running errands around town. It may sound strange to us now to think of mother's shipping their children to the movies on a summer day when school is out so they can have time to themselves for chores or leisure, but doesn't this still go on? On a day when schools all over Pittsburgh were cancelled because it was so cold outside I stood outside of a movie theater waiting to get in because parents were dropping their children off at the movies so they would not have to have them around the house for the day. I'm sure the same happens all summer, parents rotating between the mall, pool, and movies, as well as I'm sure many of us loath seeing the massive groups of teens swarming the movie theater on a Friday night. It seems the silliness of shipping children off to the movies is nothing new, it just doesn't occur to us as much now because we have so many more places for children to be shipped to now, as opposed to a hundred years ago when the movie theater was one of the few safe and entertaining places to let a child spend a hot summer afternoon.

There was another part of Ross's portrayal of women's use of the new movie theater rich public sphere. Ross writes that women who missed the frequent balls and dances of her pre-marriage days would often go alone, with her children, or with other women, most frequently other sisters, to the movies. Ross brings into question the loss of thrills from a woman's life before she is married, the balls and dances where she is most often with her soon to be husband, but does not mention the movies as a place where she would then go with her husband. It seems a woman of the early twentieth century went to the movies with just about anyone but her husband. Now this may just be an oversight of language, or the fact that Ross is speaking of a woman's afternoon trips to the movies when her husband would be working, but the correlation between her enjoyments before her marriage that seemed so seeped in the company of a man seemed to be missing the same man when discussion of her place in the new movie theater experience is discussed.

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