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As viewers, actresses, directors, and writers, women were centrally involved in cinema throughout the first half of the century — indeed film — going was the most important way in which women participated in the era's urban mass culture. However, the significance of women's early contributions has until now remained scant and dispersed, eclipsed in historical opinion formed through the texts of men.
In magisterial scale The Red Velvet Seat restores this film culture to visibility, using women's written accounts to understand the significance of cinema for them. Authors represented include birth control pioneer Marie Stopes, novelist Virginia Woolf, social reformer Jane Addams, Imagist poet H. D., New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner, black actress Fredi Washington, labor organizer Mary Heaton Vorse, psychoanalyst Barbara Low, suffragist Lillie Devereux Blake, and lesbian activist Barbara Deming.
Editorial essays set these writings, taken from a wide variety of sources including fashion magazines, daily newspapers, literary journals, parent monthlies, in a valuable historical context, revealing their links to internationalism, racism, and reformism, as well as to more traditionally feminine concerns – child-rearing, abortion, and shopping.
Antonia Lant teaches at New York University. She is the author of Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema.
Publication
Cloth: Sept. 2002
Paper: Sept. 2006
682 pages
Cloth
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 119 9
£60 / US$94.95 / CAN$125
Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 85984 722 0
£24.99 / US$39.95 / CAN$52
