professor Emeritus Richard Abel recently contributed the essay, “‘My Goodness Gracious, Girls’: Women Writers on the Movies in US Newspapers, 1911-1920,” to Presences and Representation of Women in the Early Years of Cinema,1895-1920  (Angel Quintana and Jordi Pons, eds. Girona: Fundacio Museu del Cinema, 2018). 

In the 1910s, newspapers acted as conduits and filters for press material that could directly address a huge number of movie fans, and women writers were prominent as editors and columnists. Abel's essay divides their work into three categories: 1) "personality sketches," primarily of stars; 2) weekly movie pages with lots of photos and promotional columns; and 3) daily film reviews.