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The American Girl Goes to War
Women and National Identity in U.S. Silent Film
by Liz Clarke
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Book Presentation:
During the 1910s, films about war often featured a female protagonist. The films portrayed women as spies, cross-dressing soldiers, and athletic defenders of their homes—roles typically reserved for men and that contradicted gendered-expectations of home-front women waiting for their husbands, sons, and brothers to return from battle. The representation of American martial spirit—particularly in the form of heroines—has a rich history in film in the years just prior to the American entry into World War I. The American Girl Goes to War demonstrates the predominance of heroic female characters in in early narrative films about war from 1908 to 1919. American Girls were filled with the military spirit of their forefathers and became one of the major ways that American women’s changing political involvement, independence, and active natures were contained by and subsumed into pre-existing American ideologies.
About the Author:
LIZ CLARKE is an assistant professor in communication, popular culture and film at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. She has published articles in Camera Obscura and Feminist Media Histories, as well as papers in edited anthologies New Perspectives on the War Film and Martial Culture, Silver Screen: War Movies and the Construction of American Identity.
Press Reviews:
"Documenting the many heroic women who populated war films of this era, Liz Clarke shows the strength and vitality of female characters onscreen, while remaining attentive to the key role that white femininity played in narratives of American national identity during this period. Framing her analysis within a rich cultural context, Clarke show how essential cinema was to evolving ideas about both nationhood and femininity in the first decades of the twentieth century."
— Shelley Stamp
"Brock prof’s new book explores women, war and silent film," by Amanda Bishop
— The Brock News
"This exciting, well-researched work crosses multidisciplinary boundaries and will be of value to those interested in cinema, gender studies, propaganda, history, and political science. Recommended for academic libraries."
— Library Journal
New Books Network: New Books in Women's History interview with Liz Clarke
— New Books Network: New Books in Women's History
See the publisher website: Rutgers University Press
> On a related topic:
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German Ways of War (2022)
The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War Films
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World War II in American Film and Media
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Search and Clear (1988)
Critical Responses to Selected Literature and Films of the Vietnam War
Dir. William J. Searle
Specters of War (2012)
Hollywood's Engagement with Military Conflict
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