Scenes of Destruction and Beauty

This essay addresses a surprising convergence of women, cinema, and forest conservation in the 1910s and ’20s. I tell the story of a short nonfiction “woman’s redwood film” produced in 1919 to anchor a larger analysis of women’s shifting roles in the public sphere. Women’s clubs played a prominent role in the early American conservation movement; women were also influential in the silent-era film culture of Humboldt County, California. I show how these two roles came together briefly in the sponsorship of an educational film by the Women’s Save-the-Redwoods League. While the league continued to use nontheatrical film in the 1920s, its women’s auxiliary receded into the background. The marginalization of women in conservation thus bears similarities to the marginalization of women in the film industry as both enterprises became more powerful. Additionally, both cinema and conservation were shaped by the era’s virulent white supremacism, though in different ways.