Lois Weber's "Activist Cinema" Tracing the Female Worker in Shoes through Changing Streetscapes

The ethics that prescribed the movement, visibility, and behaviour of women in public spaces was strongly challenged at the turn of the century when women increasingly integrated into the workforce in cities. Women not only became more visible in the public space on their way to and back from work, but also became widely active in leisure, which included loitering, aimless wandering, and hanging out in public spaces, such as parks, in addition to cinema-going and shopping. This sociological phenomenon transformed not only public space but also cinematic aesthetics that reflected those public spaces. This paper focuses on Lois Weber’s progressive film Shoes (1916), which is a strong example to discuss this new visibility of women in the public space. The film not only represents the underpaid female labour, but also tackles the bourgeois ethics imposed on lower class women and the ways in which their increasing visibility in the public space challenged those ethics.