Letters from a well-known woman: domesticity and professionalism in Mary Pickford’s ‘Daily Talks’ (1915–1917)

ABSTRACT

In the mid-teens of the twentieth century, when cinema had just reached its status as ‘big business’, one of the silent screen’s most prolific and powerful stars, Mary Pickford, addressed her large and growing audience through a syndicated celebrity advice column, ‘Daily Talks’ (1915–1917). These columns, often in the form of ‘letters’, reveal how Pickford’s star image was in the midst of being constructed and adjusted both textually (in the columns and other print publications) and visually (in her films and photographic material in wide circulation). They also illustrate how early forms and discourses of movie star celebrity culture addressed serious matters such as gender politics in the largest sense and reflected on and conversed with social, political and economic trends in contemporary culture. As such, the discourse in ‘Daily Talks’ attempts a precarious balance between Pickford’s working-class girl origins and her successful businesswoman stature, between proto-feminist or progressive attitudes on gender and work and a peculiar a-feminist, conservative reflex, which would become increasingly at odds with her own career and private life.

KEYWORDS:

• Mary Pickford
• stardom
• celebrity columns
• gender
• professionalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Anita Loos-scripted Douglas Fairbanks satire from 1916 reminds us that the notion of celebrity (and success) was indeed strongly associated with having one’s ‘picture in the papers’.

2. For example, Goop.com by Gwyneth Paltrow and Not that Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham, 2014.

3. This type of production is labelled ‘quasi’-independent, because the films were financed, distributed and released through regular established companies such as Paramount and First National.

4. For Welter the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ meant piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. But as several studies have shown, this cult was more flexible and negotiable than it would appear from Welter’s strict definition. If the model’s notion of feminine virtue is redefined as centring on (Christian) faith, compassion, self-sacrifice and domesticity (Hart 2004) it becomes more palatable and modern.

5. Susan K. Harris (1990) has suggested that, with regard to sentimental or domestic fiction, the powerful fantasies of emancipation that make up the books’ middles are more important and lasting than their conservative and patriarchal endings. Perhaps this is true also for the serial queens’ temporary emancipation and Pickford’s progressive stances.

6. In Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp’s (2004) periodisation.

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Anke Brouwers

Anke Brouwers teaches film at the University of Antwerp and at KASK (School of Arts) in Ghent, Belgium. Her research interests include cinematic narration, silent cinema, adaptation and children’s cinema. She has published in Quarterly Review of Film and Video and Film International, and has contributed to edited collections and conference proceedings. She is a regular contributor to the online cinephiliac platform Photogénie (now Cinea).