Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes by Hennefeld Maggie;

Author:Hennefeld, Maggie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film/History & Criticism, SOC010000, Social Science/Feminism & Feminist Theory
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2018-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Frothing(ham) at the Mouth

Beyond LADY IN THE BATHS’ reductive attribution of laughter to the film’s surface mockery, the most vocal anti-suffragette leaders often made absurd claims to silence and discredit feminist activism. The American clergyman and anti-suffragette orator Octavius B. Frothingham argued that women’s excess of “emotional intuition,” while ideally suited to the private sphere, “renders her essentially an idealist…. She can make no allowances for slowness…. Her reforms are sweeping. She would close all the bars and liquor saloons, and make it a crime to sell intoxicating drink.”31 In other words, woman is essentialized as both too delicate and too destructive for the public sphere, and her purported emotional fragility becomes the alibi for how she would inevitably overpower both civic rule and public life. Woman’s “alleged weakness, nervousness, and proneness to fainting would certainly be out of place in polling booths and party conventions.”32 Alice Duer Miller lambasts such blatantly contradictory logic in her poem, “If They Meant All They Said:” “And how tears heighten women’s powers! / My typist weeps for hours and hours: / I took her for her weeping powers— / They so delight my business hours.”33

More hyperbolically in suffragette film comedies, such as The Suffragettes’ Downfall; or, Who Said Rats? (1911), women are figured as simultaneously powerful enough to seize the reins of governance in one fell swoop and pathetically squeamish enough to relinquish them at the first sign of conflict or tension. In this film, a henpecked husband resegregates what had been his haven of a stag golf course by unleashing a cage of rats on his terrorized wife. As Duer Miller has put it, “Timidity in girls is nice. / My cook is so afraid of mice. / Now you’ll admit it’s very nice / To feel your cook’s afraid of mice.”34 While anti-suffragists (or “antis”) burlesqued the hysterical excesses of feminine force, suffragette humorists lampooned the aggravatingly apparent contradictions between popular caricatures of female delicacy and the necessities of enlisting women’s strenuous labor (both in the home, the industrial factory, and the commercial sphere). Moreover, both sides crafted popular comedy out of the humorous incongruities between conflicting yet ingrained cultural stereotypes about the conventions of femininity—particularly the ramifications of how these conventions might break down, give way, or erupt altogether.

The Reverend Walsh delivered fiery orations condensing these inconsistent (and sexist) philosophies before mass audiences for the Anti-Women’s Suffrage Organization:35

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