The Complicated and Forgotten Legacy of America’s First Woman Director
My whole life, I’ve considered myself a pretty well rounded and knowledgeable film fan. From the Best Picture winners and the Star Wars franchise to the odd Hungarian or even Tunisian film. However, when it comes to Lois Weber, I was completely blindsided. Though not given the same praise as her contemporaries, she was one of the most popular filmmakers during the 1910s and took the opportunity to make what she felt were important films. Her name may not be familiar to you but her accomplishments are impressive.
Born into a Pennsylvania Dutch family, Lois Weber began working in Hollywood with her husband in 1907 and quickly became one of the most prominent director-screenwriters in Hollywood. Her and her husband’s status as a married middle class couple that worked together enhanced their reputation for highbrow features. They produced short films until 1914 when they made The Merchant of Venice which is the first American feature directed by a woman. By 1916 they were hired by Universal Pictures and became a household name. Though just because she sought to make films the public would see did not mean she shied away from controversial subjects.
Weber made a series of high profile and often deeply controversial films on social issues of the day, including capital punishment in The People vs. John Doe (1916), drug abuse in Hop, the Devil’s Brew (1916), poverty and wage equity in Shoes (1916), antisemitism in The Jew’s Christmas (1913) and contraception in Where Are My Children? (1916) and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1917) which was based on the arrest of Margaret Sanger.
Lois Weber’s Suspense
Weber believed in the medium’s narrative and dramatic power and often talked about cinema as a tool for political change. Pretty soon her name was placed alongside silent film greats like DW Griffith and Cecil B DeMille and like them, pioneered many now common film techniques like the split screen. In 1916, she was the first and only woman elected to the Motion Picture Directors Association and when she negotiated a new contract with Universal, she became the highest paid director in Hollywood.
Unfortunately, when her marriage ended, many people assumed that her husband had been the creative driving force (even though he never directed again after their divorce) and so her career declined sharply. She still continued to work but not for the same money or popularity in her prime. Many critics became bored by her moralistic film style with one writing, “Why does Miss Weber dedicate herself, her time and her equipment to the construction of simple sermons?” in 1921. Her career significantly dimmed in the 20s and by 1939 she was dead and forgotten until many feminists revisited her work in the 1970s including Where Are My Children?.
Where Are My Children? (1916) tells the story of Judge Walton and his wife. The judge desperately wants a child but his wife has secretly been having abortions. When their maid’s daughter is seduced by Mrs. Walton’s brother and becomes pregnant, Mrs. Walton tells her brother which doctor to go to. Unfortunately, the girl dies from a botched abortion and when Judge Walton prosecutes the doctor, he discovers that his wife has been a patient. At the end, his wife realizes she can never have children because of her history of abortions and the two are condemned to a life of loneliness.
Unlike other directors of her time like DW Griffith, Weber did not try to hit you over the head with her ideology. In fact, she encouraged debate within her film. Her film based on Margaret Sanger ends with an intertitle that reads “What do you think?” Her opinion appears to be very complex. While she seems to oppose abortion, she also seems to be in support of birth control. Weber’s cinema is there to arouse an intellectual experience in the viewer. She does this through crosscutting. One scene in particular compares the plight of working class mothers to that of the uppercrust who choose not to have children. The working class mothers are tired, often placed in dangerous situations, and overwhelmed while the upper class live without a care in the world. Weber brings the conversation of class into this story of gender and shows that they are inextricably linked.
And even though Weber condemns abortion in all forms, she hardly lays blame on the women who get them. According to Weber, the men are mainly to blame. When the maid’s daughter, Lilian, gets an abortion, it is only because her malicious seductor forces her to as he practically drags her to the clinic. She may be tormented by this unborn child but she is not the villain of the scenario, he is. Even the upper class friends of Mrs. Walton who often get abortions are not entirely to blame. Dr. Malfit (aptly named) is made to be the biggest villain of the piece. He regularly aids the upper class women to get rid of their children but unlike another more well meaning doctor shown at the beginning of the film, Dr. Homer, who is arrested for disseminating birth control information, does not care about what happens to lower class women. The only lower class woman who sees him ends up dying.
Although, for how good this movie is, it’s feminism is tainted by a very problematic but unfortunately very common ideology at the time: eugenics. Eugenicists believed that birth control could be used to decrease the population of undesirables. These ideas have been closely followed by racist, classist, and sexist ideology. The fact that Weber only talks about birth control as an option for working class women is disheartening, but not surprising. Other lauded feminists of her day like Margaret Sanger purported the same hurtful ideas. So while it is important to be grateful to Weber for laying the path for other women, we should look at her place as a starting point that we can grow and evolve from.
