Universal Women

Using Universal Film Manufacturing Company as a case study in institutional history and practice, Mark Garrett Cooper asks how and why did at least a dozen women gain access to the director's chair at Universal over the 1910s only to be excluded by the end of the decade, leaving Lois Weber the only working female director at Universal from 1920 until 1982. In Universal Women, Cooper, by exploring how gender and genre formation operated at Universal, enriches our understanding of that major paradigm shift in the early U.S. film industry. In this insightful, interdisciplinary study, Cooper argues that Universal's business structure, practice, and culture encouraged gender and genre experimentation until the late 1910s; thereafter Universal “made women directors disposable by insisting that their films be womanly” (p. xxix). Cooper outlines how the shifts in the 1910s from shorts to feature films and from the director-unit system to the central producer system—with its attendant changes in administrative and accounting practices—as well as the emergence of the “woman's feature” genre all contributed to the redefinition of directing as man's work by decade's end

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