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"A More Innocent and Permissible Face:" Gender, Clara Bow, and the Hollywood Studio System, 1922-1933

Purkiss, Sam Bruce
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4908-4490
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1650630783930714

Abstract Details

2022, Master of Arts, Miami University, History.
In 1928, Clara Bow was the most famous actress in Hollywood, receiving over 33,727 fan letters in the month of May alone. By 1933, however, she had left Hollywood forever amid a flurry of scandal for a quiet domestic life with her new husband in the desert town of Searchlight, Nevada, never to return to the spotlight on-screen. Bow’s incredibly short but productive career highlights the difficulties of being a woman in the Hollywood Studio System. Through a mix of digital and physical sources, this thesis illustrates the way the burgeoning studio system controlled its female stars in an attempt to craft the most marketable possible woman: primarily through film fan magazines writing about Bow and her scandals, contractual agreements about morality, and tailoring on-screen roles for women.
Kimberly Hamlin (Advisor)
Erik Jensen (Committee Member)
Bruce Drushel (Committee Member)
80 p.
Film Studies; Gender; History
gender; film; femininity; Clara Bow; Hollywood; Studio System; patriarchy

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Purkiss, S. B. (2022). "A More Innocent and Permissible Face:" Gender, Clara Bow, and the Hollywood Studio System, 1922-1933 [Master's thesis, Miami University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1650630783930714

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Purkiss, Sam. "A More Innocent and Permissible Face:" Gender, Clara Bow, and the Hollywood Studio System, 1922-1933. 2022. Miami University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1650630783930714.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Purkiss, Sam. ""A More Innocent and Permissible Face:" Gender, Clara Bow, and the Hollywood Studio System, 1922-1933." Master's thesis, Miami University, 2022. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1650630783930714

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

miami1650630783930714
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© 2022, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License "A More Innocent and Permissible Face:" Gender, Clara Bow, and the Hollywood Studio System, 1922-1933 by Sam Bruce Purkiss is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by Miami University and OhioLINK.
Release 3.2.12