The Chinese American artist Marion Wong acted in, produced, and directed her own films during this era, starting when she was barely out of her teens. Her 1916 debut, The Curse of Quon Gwon: When The Far East Mingles With the West, is considered by some to be the first authentic depiction of the Chinese American experience on film. As her grand-nephew later marveled, “How did this 20-year-old woman get this idea? … She wrote the script, directed the film, played the villainess and she was the producer. She raised the money!”

In fact, the greater abundance of female creators and power players during this time made a great deal of sense since, in pre-1930s America, women made up 60–83 percent of the cinema audience—higher even than the 51 percent of moviegoers that women accounted for in 2018, the most recent year measured by the Motion Picture Association of America. Before behind-the-camera roles were as firmly defined as they are now, there was a strong tradition of actor-producers. Many female actors who were dissatisfied with the roles being written for them by men became writers and directors themselves, and began production companies to make their own films.

During the silent era, cinema was generally viewed as a fringe medium, an eccentric hobby, not something meant to last or make any real money. In such a context, and given that a lot of men were away fighting in World War I during this period, women had the space and freedom to express themselves through this new art form.

Within a decade after the end of the war, however, “talkies” were coming about, in part through the technology of the “boom microphone” (invented, not incidentally, by a woman, Dorothy Arzner). Wall Street caught the whiff of money and began investing, consolidating the studios into fewer and more powerful structures. It was during this transition that women were ousted from positions of power in production and behind the camera—as is still the case now, investors were interested primarily in backing companies controlled by men.

At this point, the supposed danger of women in Hollywood was not just that they were seen as ignorant about how to run a business but also that many of the works they produced had radical, feminist themes that, as the media scholar Patricia Di Risio writes in the anthology Silent Women, “question[ed] and expand[ed] cultural understandings of gender.” In the same anthology, the director and screenwriter Melody Bridges notes that scripts from this period, particularly those by women, “were much more permissive and liberal than [contemporary viewers] might imagine. There were films that explored sexual orientation, cross dressing, birth control, abortion, and even nudity.” In 1915 Lois Weber produced, wrote, and directed Hypocrites, which, in the screenwriter and director Pieter Aquilia’s words, “brazenly” presented “female nudity on celluloid.” As a result, it “sparked riots in New York and … was banned in some parts of the United States.”