As American leisure developed between 1890 and 1920, the working class found themselves open for the first time to entertainment as a commodity. Film became a huge attraction for workers and their families. Silent movies appealed particularly to ethnic audiences who did not need to understand English to follow plots. Patrick Mullins, a film scholar, estimated “about one third of all New York City nickelodeons were ethnic-owned or operated.”^[1] One film historian estimated that by 1910, more than 25 percent of New Yorkers attended movies weekly and that 43 percent of Chicagoans were swept up into the Nickelodeon craze.^[2] Cinema served as a bridge between middle- and upper-class progressive reformers and the working-class people they wanted to reform.

Middle-class reformers hoped to use the huge influence film held over the working-class to disseminate their message. A new genre of film emerged during the Progressive era in hopes that behavior of the lower classes could be shaped through idealized depictions by the people who produced the films. These social problem films, as they have been labeled, targeted questions like temperance, eugenics, child labor, white slavery, and of course, suffrage. Film scholar Kay Sloan suggested that the genre emerged as “reformers realized that film had the capacity to solve problems, to suggest solutions that would contain disorder and push forward moderate change.”^[3] Certainly, woman suffragists latched onto this idea of moderate change. They situated suffrage as nonthreatening and approachable in their campaign because they could gain support more quickly than if they proposed the sort of radical equality that early suffrage pioneers had proposed.