Maternal Stars of the Silent Screen: Gender, Genre, and Photoplay Magazine

[para. 1]: "My ongoing research, driven by archival praxis, has been grounded in life writing, women’s studies, modernism, and popular culture. After becoming a mother in the late 1990s, I was increasingly invigorated by and eager to contribute to the bourgeoning field of motherhood studies, and I began to filter my scholarship through a maternal lens. My most recent project is a monograph about modernist mothers, and in one of the chapters I examine celebrity journalism—specifically, the fan magazine Photoplay of the early twentieth century. In surveying how silent-film stars who were also mothers are profiled, I aim to enhance our understanding of the ways women straddle the boundaries of public and private spheres at the nexus of gender and genre. In my essay here, I touch on some of the key facets of this longer work.One of the first two periodicals devoted to followers of American cinema, the monthly Photoplay Magazine was launched in August 1911.1 Asserting that the movie or fan magazine “was very much a magazine genre in its own right,” Anthony Slide defines it as “fundamentally a film- and entertainment-related periodical aimed at a general fan, an average member of the moviegoing public who more often than not was female” (11). The genre is part of the broader field of celebrity journalism developing in the 1880s and 1890s, which Charles L. Ponce de Leon calls “a new form of reportage that expressly focused on public figures, evoking interest in them as ‘personalities’”(43). Within a decade of its appearance, Photoplay was recognized as the leading publication for celebrity profiles. These auto|biographical pieces are a salient resource for investigating how popular periodicals constructed and responded to maternal ideologies of the day."