Money, Food and Fashion: Connecting Hollywood to Women’s Domestic Lives, 1920s-1950s
There is a scene in Gold Diggers of 1933 in which three aspiring (and broke) showgirls sharing a small apartment in the city use a set of fireplace tongs to steal a bottle of milk from a neighbor’s window ledge and, later, swap
the only good dress they own between them from one roommate to another so she can go out and check the theatrical agencies for work. This scene distills a set of topics with a unique cultural importance for women – as labor, food, and affordable (yet still
aspirational) clothing could be a daily struggle or a form of identity. How might any aspect of money/food/fashion, help us connect women’s spectatorship during the classical Hollywood period to cinema’s impact upon their domestic lives? How women acquired
or spent (or experienced the lack of) money; how they fed themselves and/or the families dependent upon their labor; what they wore (including movie-inspired fashions) – these form the active circuit from Hollywood to the lives of real women, from movie stars
to fans to consumers.
In her study of interactive participation encouraged by classical-era movie magazines, for example, Marsha Orgeron notes that Hollywood imbued its corporate ideology into training its female fans to “become actively involved with movie culture and to, in the
process, negotiate their identities beyond their everyday, lived experiences” (8). However, this panel will instead center our attention
on the everyday. If, as Jackie Stacey’s study of British women’s relationship to 1940s-50s female stars concludes, “commodity consumption” (1994) is the connection between the industry and women, then we intend to ask: what commodities,
what consumption? From sources onscreen and off, we find the ways in which women’s economic relationship to the necessities of food and clothing in their everyday lives moves beyond discourses of fantasy and escapism to the relatable, practical realism of
ideas that women could take home and actually use – across transformative decades of domestic life.
Research lenses could include, but are not limited to:
Please send a 250-word proposal to Lorrie Palmer ([log in to unmask]), including bibliography (3-5 sources) and brief author bio.