Both Go West, Young Women! and Precocious Charms are concerned with how Americans viewed themselves via Hollywood. Both successfully add to the scholarship on gender and the American film industry, and both could be well used in the classroom.

Hilary A. Hallett offers the early film industry as a real and imagined destination for young women, as evidenced by the title – a feminist take on the famous Horace Greeley imperative. Powerful women in the early film industry demonstrated what “women-made women” could think and do (70). She explains, “Go West, Young Women! explores the implications of the motion picture industry's development and then measures how the emotions generated by Hollywood's birth influenced the sexual revolution to come” (25). In the first half of the book, “Along the Road to Hollywood,” Hallett relates the atypical power of women in the theater and then on (and behind) the screen. She shares observations by Simone de Beauvoir on the actress as vanguard, and argues that the transformation of heretofore anonymous girls into film stars, screenwriters, etc. made them “emblematic” of new possibilities for women. The fabulously paid and powerful Mary Pickford features prominently. Hallett offers wonderful detail on writer Louella Parsons's role in spreading the word of Hollywood's woman-centered industry.

The second half of the book “plunges readers into the tumultuous postwar scene that shaped Hollywood's crystallization as a symbol of the City of Angels” (103). Hallett connects the rise of postwar “Hollywood” to Frederick Lewis Allen's famed “revolution in manners and morals.” Here she asserts that a Hollywood bohemia emerged, a space where traditional gender roles were tested and broken, making Los Angeles a destination even for girls who realized that they may not end up on the screen. Pickford's divorce and quick remarriage in 1920 created no public outcry, while Gloria Swanson questioned matrimony both on and off the screen. This bohemian idyll ended following the Fatty Arbuckle scandal. In 1921, the corpulent, popular comedian was accused of killing actress Virginia Rappe by sexually assaulting her at an alcohol-infused “orgy,” leading to a series of trials and an extended public discussion of Hollywood morals. In this half of the book, Hallett offers readers somber insight into the anti-Semitism that fueled many of Hollywood's critics. She also includes an extended analysis of the Arbuckle–Rappe scandal, and with it fascinating detail on the actions of the General Federation of Women's Clubs to curb the “movie menace.”

Hallett offers an elegantly written book that is something of a synthesis of the scholarship on gender and the silent-film industry that has been published in the last twenty years. Some of the major points made by Hallett – the power of women behind the screen, the creation of a bohemian culture – are not as new as her tone suggests (the sources are in her notes, however). But a book emphasizing how women were the vital center of the new industry – from spectator to actor to producer to publicist – is new. She does a wonderful job mining memoirs, and the question she poses is excellent: how did these powerful women in the American film industry influence the “revolution in manners and morals” and the ambitions of young women outside southern California? The answer to this question, alas, is muted. We hear little from the female consumers themselves, which seems odd because there is a great deal of scholarship on early film reception. Still, this wide-ranging book offers unusual depth at several key moments (Hollywood publicists, anti-Semitism, the Arbuckle scandal) and could be well used in graduate classes in film studies, women's studies, and American history.

Gaylyn Studlar's Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema offers an exploration of the meanings of “performing girlhood” during Hollywood's classical era by analyzing six stars with specific “talents”: Mary Pickford (silent comedy), Shirley Temple (dancing and singing), Deanna Durbin (operatic singing), Elizabeth Taylor (beauty), Jennifer Jones (“ ‘serious’ emotional acting”), and Audrey Hepburn (fashion). She borrows the term “juvenation,” which is “the creative practice of communicating with a readership via the medium of youthfulness,” to describe the functions of these onscreen “girls” who were sometimes child actors and sometimes grown women (1, italics in original). Studlar's overall argument is that cinematic “girlhood” in each case created a locus through which American social, cultural, psychological, and sexual dilemmas could be addressed. Studlar successfully blends theory and history in a readable volume useful for students of history as well as film studies.

She begins with Mary Pickford, whose diminutive stature, sausage curls, and uncanny talent allowed her to play younger well into her twenties. Often her character's sufferings end when her true worth is recognized and validated by marriage to a worthy man, thus the onscreen child becomes an onscreen woman. Studlar argues that this “liminality” (“is she an untouchable child or a marriageable, sexual woman?”) gave Pickford room to act in her films in ways a grown woman could not (33). Studlar writes that

Studlar analyzes the pedophilic gaze to a greater degree for Shirley Temple. Even here, however, she argues that, more importantly, Temple's characters were uniquely suited to the historical moment of the Depression: the adorable child who convinces an adult male – and, by extension, all adult males – that the role of father is worthy, even for “tough” men. On the screen, Studlar argues, Temple could dissipate cultural tensions through a child's ability to elide “the differences between old and young, masculine and feminine, black and white, the past and the present, progressive and conservative, the sexual and the asexual, poor and rich” (87).

Deanna Durbin, the adolescent with the voice of a classically trained adult soprano, was a box-office star from 1936 to 1949. In this chapter, Studlar offers the theory that the voice is an extension of female sexuality, a “double for the female genitalia,” but, once again, she also offers historical context: Durbin belonged to the cohort about to be identified as “teenagers” and she offered a post-Depression generation “locked out of access to formal education” a kind of “democratization of ‘good music’” (97). In her provocatively titled chapter on Elizabeth Taylor, “Velvet's Cherry,” Studlar examines Taylor's earliest screen roles (1943–44) and argues that Taylor's adult-like facial beauty complicated reading her as an innocent child. But Studlar plays down an erotic reading of National Velvet (1944), and instead casts her discussion of Taylor in the context of a sexually tense late Victorian fascination with innocent girlhood as captured in English painting, such as the unsettling Cherry Ripe (Millais, 1879).

Jennifer Jones was the mother of two when she was cast as a fourteen-year old French peasant girl in Song of Bernadette (1943). The film proved that Jones could “act young” and so she did in a number of melodramas and women's films in the 1940s, most famously in Duel in the Sun (1946). Jones portrayed youth, but not innocence. During a historic moment when “adolescent femininity was under intense cultural scrutiny focused on sexuality,” Jones portrayed characters suffering from a sexually driven hysteria that could manifest in physical illness or hallucination (161). Here Studlar offers the student a brief breakdown of “hysteria” in its Freudian context and in its use in film and feminist theory. If bosomy, 1950s female sexuality was freighted with hysteria, its antidote was the elegant, slender Audrey Hepburn, who was a “hybrid blending of innocence and sophistication” (203). “Sophistication” was signified by Hepburn's association with high fashion. Hepburn was a “fashion commodity,” her makeover film Sabrina (1954) timed to open during Givenchy's spring collection, her rail-thin body (twenty-inch waist!) ideal for the New Look. By remaining thin, Hepburn played “young” into her mid-thirties. Her tension was between her image as a representative of “anti-elitist youthfulness” and “haute couture icon,” as you could not comfortably be both by the mid-1960s (234).

Ultimately Studlar finds no single answer to the question why American audiences gravitated toward “juvenated” stars, and there are moments when her analysis takes on a life of its own and moves too far from the question at hand. But the interdisciplinary journey is worth the ride, and this book is far more teachable than its title would suggest. Her positioning of clearly articulated theory alongside cultural and historical questions makes this volume extremely useful for graduate and undergraduate students. One (probably obvious) caveat: students need to see examples on the screen. It is one thing to read that Shirley Temple's performances could be read as sexual (“I'm no pedophile!”), and quite another to view a Temple film. It's hard to miss.

In sum, both of these volumes illustrate the benefits and dangers of cultural history: both offer the reader fascinating questions and content, and both demonstrate how difficult it is to pinpoint the ultimate meanings for the consumer.