See also: “Exhibiting Women: Gender, Showmanship, and the Professionalization of Film Exhibition in the United States, 1900-1930” by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Karen Ward Mahar
As motion picture production became more capital intensive, beginning around 1917, and as fewer companies began to control an increasing percentage of the exhibition and distribution as well as the production business, as a preface to vertical integration, it became increasingly difficult for independent, sometimes family-run businesses to survive. We see this in the diminished number of women-headed production companies in the 1920s in contrast to the 1910s, and in the fact that those women who may have wanted to produce their own films either quit entirely, freelanced, or moved outside Hollywood—to regional and rural areas where they worked in modes such as educational, documentary, or ethnographic film, considered secondary to the main business of feature-length fiction film studio production.
A similar trend is evident in the history of women in exhibition. Itinerant husband-and-wife exhibitor teams like Fanny Cook and her husband Bert were able to successfully ply their trade during the first decade of the twentieth century. After motion pictures ceased to become just a fairground novelty, women continued on as owners and operators of storefront nickelodeons, beginning around 1906. Again, this confirms the trend: women participated in the new entertainment industry when it was still in its “cottage-industry phase,” when small businesses were able to be competitive. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Karen Ward Mahar, using trade journal listings from the period, conclude in their overview essay that women constituted a minority of theatre owners in the 1910s, but more may have been “uncredited” partners in family-run theatre businesses, or non-owner participants in the operation of theatres.
In another parallel with the production side, where hiring women writers and directors was part of a short-term business strategy to associate motion pictures with “respectability,” the presence of women in the exhibition side (as owners or box-office attendants) established motion pictures as “high-class” and “family friendly entertainment.” While women operating a small retail-style business was not considered unusual at the time, say Fuller-Seeley and Mahar, the few women projectionists at the time were treated as an anomaly; working with the technology of film projection, like operating film cameras, was considered masculine. But while female exhibitors disappeared in the 1920s from first-run theatres in major markets, they continued to own and operate smaller, regional second- and third-run theatres that required less capital and infrastructure to stay afloat.