The American Girl Goes to War: Women and National Identity in U.S. Silent Film [Paperback]

During the 1910s, films about war often featured a female protagonist.  The films portrayed women as spies, cross-dressing soldiers, and athletic defenders of their homes—roles typically reserved for men and that contradicted gendered-expectations of home-front women waiting for their husbands, sons, and brothers to return from battle. The representation of American martial spirit—particularly in the form of heroines—has a rich history in film in the years just prior to the American entry into World War I.The American Girl Goes to Wardemonstrates the predominance of heroic female characters in in early narrative films about war from 1908 to 1919. American Girls were filled with the military spirit of their forefathers and became one of the major ways that American women’s changing political involvement, independence, and active natures were contained by and subsumed into pre-existing American ideologies.
 The American Girl Goes to Wardemonstrates the predominance of heroic female characters in in early narrative films about war. American Girls were filled with the military spirit of their forefathers and became one of the major ways that American women’s changing political involvement, independence, and active natures were contained by and subsumed into pre-existing American ideologies.
 LIZ CLARKE is an assistant professor in communication, popular culture and film at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. She has published articles inCamera Obscura and Feminist Media Histories, as well as papers in edited anthologiesNew Perspectives on the War Film andMartial Culture, Silver Screen: War Movies and the Construction of American Identity.
 List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 American Girls and National Identity
2 Fighting Femininity on Home Soil in Civil War Films, 1908–1916
3 The American Revolution and Other lÓ!