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Significant Shift From The 1910s To The 1920s

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Ewen and Ewen show that US film culture went through a significant shift from the 1910s to the 1920s. In the 1910s, movies and movie houses offered spaces and stories that spoke directly to working-class immigrants, and particularly immigrant women. By the 1920s, movies began telling very different stories to immigrant women. According to Ewen and Ewen, in what ways did movies in the 1910s speak to working class immigrants, and in what ways did movies start to tell different stories in the 1920s? Explain how this shift in movie culture relates to the concept of antiseptic electrical space. Through City of Lights: Immigrant Women and the Rise of the Movies, Ewen, Stuart, and Elizabeth Ewen argue that movies were a powerful medium of mass communication …show more content…

The industrial grime and noise were purified through electrical power, creating a clean and modern space that was free from the social and cultural pollution of city life. In the 1910s, cinema was a form of cultural resistance to the dominant culture, but by the 1920s, Hollywood had used it as a way to promote sanitised electronic spaces and the consumerist and heteronormative values of the dominant culture. …show more content…

While these books provided parents with information on how to raise healthy babies, they were also part of a larger social movement that aimed to control reproduction and create a "better" society based on eugenic ideals. She mentioned Galton's theory of eugenics placed great emphasis on the role of family in the reproduction of "race," and eugenic baby books used the family as a means to promote these ideas and reinforce racial and class hierarchies. They provided instructions to parents on how to select the "best" mate, based on physical and mental characteristics, and how to raise children to embody the eugenic ideal of the perfect American citizen. However, as Smith pointed out, eugenic baby books also perpetuated the myth of racial purity, which was used to justify discrimination and violence against non-white groups. They played a role in the creation and maintenance of racial categories, promoting the idea of a white racial identity while excluding non-white groups from the eugenic

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