Universal Women

Mark Garrett Cooper is an associate professor of English and film and media studies and the director of the Moving Image Research Collections at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Love Rules: Silent Hollywood and the Rise of the Managerial Class.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2011."Meticulously researched and graced with numerous rare stills and frame enlargements, this is a superb, impassioned, detailed examination of how women flourished at Universal during the silent era and how it all came crashing down when the talkies began.  Essential."--Choice "A meticulous and probing institutional history attuned to the hierarchies of gender. Cooper identifies a set of truly significant questions regarding the early access of women to directorial positions in silent cinema and the abrupt curtailment of that access."--Diane Negra, author of Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom"Deftly illuminates the intended and unintended consequences of institutional formation, change, and decision making at the dawn of the classical Hollywood studio system."--The Journal of American History "With rigorous focus, admirable economy, and wide-ranging research, Cooper outlines a sophisticated strategy for investigating how and why Universal Studios hired women as directors and then stopped doing so. This is the book we have been waiting for."--Kay Armatage, author of The Girl from God's Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema "A stellar analysis of women filmmakers' rise and fall within the context of the Universal Film Manufacturing Company."--Enterprise & Society