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American cinema of the silent period tried to satisfy the tastes of female audiences by a
repertoire of genres, dominated by David W. Griffith's melodramas. These films promoted and
reinforced traditional outlooks of masculinity and femininity, somewhat against the visible female
dominance of professional and public life. Meanwhile, the West Coast was dominated by a society of
active women, professionals and, most often, singles, who embodied the paragon of the "New
Western Woman”. 4 The term “New Woman” appeared as early as 1895, along with a wave of
modernity and urbanisation, being used in the description of female identity and experience which
did not fit into Victorian standards. Yet, it gained significance only at the beginning of the 20th
century, by which time a first generation of middle‐class women had been formed, who preferred
professional and/ or political careers to marriage and family life, their careers being fostered by
social reforms.
Their active stance transformed working women and female American urban inhabitants into
persons craving pleasure and play, offered by commercial entertainment. Quickly, these women
became a dominant part of the Californian cinematic audience. The young white female became the
ideal and the most craved for viewer by the production machinery of Hollywood; the machinery
trying to grab her attention precisely by the contestation and re‐definition of gender patterns. Hallett
draws our attention to the fact that the first stars, such as Pearl White and Mary Pickford were an
inspiration for “The New Women”. This was because these figures permitted women to identify
themselves with figures economically independent from men, freed from the restrictive domestic
sphere and the duties related to it. The great variety of articulate actresses and the leading roles they
enacted, earned Hollywood the label of "a land where the worship is not of the hero but of the
heroine”. 5 Parallel to the development of Hollywood and the expansion of the production system,
women as both creators and viewers of the cinema became gradually more and more marginalised.
The film profiles of the American “New” women were, however, found by critics to be “indecent
and sexually immoral”; 6 although, according to the then critics, being immoral, sexual and
provocative, they were so attractive and influential that they quickly found followers among the so
called “problem girls”. 7 Social workers applied this term to young women whose independence,
manifested in their looks and manners, as well as free participation in popular culture made these
women evade any institutionalised supervision.
Together with the commercialisation of fashion and the development of the cosmetics industry,
the conventions of one's looks and dress were broken, which allowed average people to recognise
“the good girls” and “the bad girls”. Suddenly, as one observer said, “the way the women dress
today, they all look like prostitutes”. 8 Simultaneously, critical voices were increasing in the press and
media, warning against the consequences of the “too liberated” film images of femininity. Against
these warnings, the female audience flocked to cinemas “exploring where their gathering freedoms
might lead”. 9 The success of film productions from the early 1920s, telling of liberated women as well
as females similar to them, raised waves of opposition, demanding Hollywood to respect moral
principles. Nevertheless, no repression could have reversed the growth in output or halt the
emancipation process of the “Girls Going West” who, on arriving in Californian cities, became
participants in film culture.
Mary Pickford and Jadwiga Smosarska as “new women” of the early cinema
A similar process changing society and acceptable conduct occurred in Poland, although the
changes took different courses and had different speeds in the three different partitions of the then
occupied Poland. Their consequences became felt particularly strongly after World War One ended
and Poland regained independence.