| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago. By Lauren Rabinovitz. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. xvi, 233 pp. Cloth, $49.00, isbn 0-8135-2533-0. Paper, $19.00, isbn 0-8135-2534-9.)

At the turn of the century, women in such cities as Chicago gained a new mobility in public spaces at just the moment that motion pictures became a significant part of the modern urban landscape. Many social historians and film critics have noted the importance of early motion pictures to women, but this fascinating and innovative book by Lauren Rabinovitz shows us how close and complex this relationship was. Rabinovitz argues that motion picture films and theaters gained social meaning in part by depicting and shaping the role of women in public. Placing motion pictures in a context of other new public spaces—the international exposition, the department store, the amusement park—Rabinovitz reveals that cinema drew upon and extended social and visual practices developing across the city in order to interpret and regulate women's increased public presence. As cinema staged and shaped emerging gender hierarchies, it also developed a social salience with urban audiences. The result for women, argues Rabinovitz, was a new visual agency that was nevertheless contained within certain ways of seeing and being seen. Women became spectators but also spectacles for a less-regulated male gaze. . . .

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