The film is remarkable for its non-judgemental attitude toward Eva. An advertising poster for the film described it as: “Three eventful weeks in the life of a half-Slave Shop Girl, driven to sin through no fault of her own.” Weber attacked social inequity and backward ideas, not the people who were victims of them.

She who dares

Her more controversial film that year, Where Are My Children?, deals with birth control and abortion, at a time when both were illegal. The story begins with a district attorney prosecuting a man who has been charged with promoting ‘indecent literature’, a pamphlet with information about contraception. As an introductory title card says: “All intelligent people know that birth control is a subject of serious public interest.” Not all. Her home state of Pennsylvania banned the film as “not fit for decent people to see”. Other states were more lenient, and the movie was Universal Pictures’ most successful film of the year.

As advanced as Weber’s thinking was, in some ways Where Are My Children? is wildly out of touch today. The plot centres on the attorney’s wife, who leads her frivolous society friends to an abortion doctor, the clumsily named Dr Malfit, and has an abortion herself. The title cards moralise about her selfishness in not having children, which was considered a middle-class woman’s duty (Weber and Smalley’s only child had died as an infant five years before.) ‘Ill-born’ children are the cause of crime, the characters believe, an opinion Weber seems to endorse. But she was a trailblazer simply by bringing the birth-control conversation out of the shadows.