Lois Weber’s Uneasy Progressive Politics: The Articulation of Class and Gender in Where Are My Children?

After decades of oblivion the status of Lois Weber’s production has emerged as one of the most important in American cinema of the 1910s. Indeed, recent historical research has made clear that by 1915 Weber had become a popular celebrity whose work was as distinctive as that of Griffith and De Mille. In her most famous and successful films, Weber tackled some of the controversial issues of the period which she treated in a moral fashion. Where Are My Children? (1916) is the first of four films dealing with birth control while Shoes (1916), for example, deals with underpaid female labor. In both cases, as in other films, Weber’s social discourse develops along a dual axes, that of gender and class. Though she didn’t consider herself strictly a feminist, she thought of her work in line with that of activists and reformers, including feminists such as Margaret Sanger and Jane Addams. It is interesting to note that well before current debates around essentialism and anti-essentialism, Weber was well aware, like many feminists of the time, that women’s condition as gendered subjects was not unique and universal, but intimately related to their class