Slotted to premier on Christmas week, Famous Players’s Cinderella (1914) was marketed as a child-friendly fantasy for the whole family whose cutting-edge cinematography would bring to life the popular fairytale of rags-to-riches girlhood. However, Cinderella was foremost conceived as a vehicle for rising star Mary Pickford. Pickford had built a reputation playing ingénues since her early days at Biograph; yet only in 1913 did she cease starring in shorts and graduate to feature-length productions. Set on proving her acting skills, Pickford portrayed Cinderella not as a fictional archetype, but as an everyday adolescent girl from the Progressive-era. The imaginary figure was further humanized by Pickford’s trademark warmth and childlike mischief, characteristics clearly displayed in the scenes where she interacts with her evil stepfamily.

The film was also aware of audiences’ dissatisfaction with trite trick cinematography. For sake of optical wonder, previous versions of Cinderella - such as George Méliès’s 1899 protean rendition - had reduced the tale of female transformation to its magical components, consequently evacuating the female protagonist of any psychological depth. In James Kirkwood’s five-reeler, however, trick cinematography is used to make visible the adolescent girl’s inner world: split-screens show Cinderella wistfully remembering an earlier encounter with the Prince (Pickford’s real-life husband, Owen Moore); while double-exposures visualize her horrible nightmare, conjured up in the afterglow of the forbidden ball.

Lastly, Cinderella’s box-office success cemented Pickford as “America’s sweetheart.” However, since Cinderella would be adapted over 30 times throughout the teens, one might question why was Pickford’s version the most applauded. Were adolescent girls watching these productions? And did Kirkwood’s adaptation of Perrault’s fairytale resonate with immigrant girls who could be familiar with European folktales?

Researching movie-goers’ inquiries, letters, and stars’ biographies published in trade and fan press from the Teens (such as Moving Picture World and Photoplay) may offer some valuable clues. It may also be helpful to look at other extant versions of Cinderella, such as Thanhouser’s (1911), starring another popular young star, Florence LaBadie.

Yellamma Gangadhar is a young woman who relies on a wheelchair for mobility. Her film tells the story of abandonment by her parents at a bus station in Bangalore, India, subsequent help from the Leonard Cheshire home in the city, and the college education she acquired with great difficulty. The struggle featured in the film is access discrimination. She describes the necessity of climbing 25 stairs with paralyzed legs every day for three years to gain access to higher education because classes were held only on the second floor of the building.

Yellamma is a filmmaker in the Young Voices project of the Leonard Cheshire Disability Global Alliance. The Alliance was founded after World War II by a highly decorated British bomber pilot who devoted his later life to charity. Young Voices uses mass media to raise awareness of the needs of disabled persons globally and to encourage member nations to adopt, ratify, and implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Young Voices stories include children and youth with many forms of disability in rural and urban settings around the world. The first-person accounts relate problems of social exclusion, lack of knowledge, and access discrimination in transportation, public buildings, education, and employment.

In the years before D. W. Griffith made The Birth of a Nation (1915), the epic film that debuted on the 50th anniversary of the Civil War, he produced 11 Civil War films in which he mastered the art of filmmaking and storytelling. These have surprising relevance to the history of girls. A comparison of Griffith's portrayal of heroic girls in Swords and Hearts (1911) and The House with Closed Shutters (1910) with the depiction of traditional Victorian girlhood in The Birth of a Nation, sheds light on the role that changing ideals about girlhood played in Griffith's historic film. Griffith replaced the agency of the girls who donned soldiers' uniform in both Swords and Hearts and The House with Closed Shutters with portrayals of girlish helplessness in The Birth of a Nation. By representing the catastrophic threat that free black men with equal rights posed to the virtue of girls like Little Sister in The Birth of a Nation, Griffith was able to rationalize white supremacy and patriarchal rule.

In the years before D. W. Griffith made The Birth of a Nation (1915), the epic film that debuted on the 50th anniversary of the Civil War, he produced 11 Civil War films in which he mastered the art of filmmaking and storytelling. These have surprising relevance to the history of girls. A comparison of Griffith's portrayal of heroic girls in Swords and Hearts (1911) and The House with Closed Shutters (1910) with the depiction of traditional Victorian girlhood in The Birth of a Nation, sheds light on the role that changing ideals about girlhood played in Griffith's historic film. Griffith replaced the agency of the girls who donned soldiers' uniforms in both Swords and Hearts and The House with Closed Shutters with portrayals of girlish helplessness in The Birth of a Nation. By representing the catastrophic threat that free black men with equal rights posed to the virtue of girls like Little Sister in The Birth of a Nation, Griffith was able to rationalize white supremacy and patriarchal rule.

Zeffrey 'Andre' Williams, a Rhythm and Blues performer, born in Chicago in 1936, is best known as co-writer and producer of songs such as "Shake a Tailfeather" by the Five Dutones. After moving to Detroit in his teens, he befriended the owners of Fortune Records. Among the recordings he released on that label in 1957 was "Jailbait," one of two solo singles in which he talked over a funky rhythm.

The slang term jailbait appeared in the US in the 1930s, and captured the awareness of the legal significance of age that had percolated through popular culture by the early decades of the 20th century. It is not just underage girls look sexually attractive that makes them jailbait, but that they also express sexual desire, something that experts argued was a normal feature of adolescence. Acting on that desire, however, was not. Girls might walk free from age-of-consent prosecutions, as Williams laments, but working-class girls at least would have suffered consequences in the juvenile justice system.

Among the other pop music performers who have recorded songs titled jailbait or which deal with the age of consent are Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, Eric Clapton, ABBA, Dragon, Motley Cru, and Aerosmith.

This 25-second "kinetoscope" shot on Vitagraph's roof-top studio in New York City by Thomas A. Edison Inc. in 1898/1899, sheds light on shifting notions of girlhood at the turn of the 20th century. In Victorian children's stories, a father who buried his head in a newspaper was a standard trope that spoke of paternal preoccupation with the pressing demands of the world beyond the home at the expense of a sad yet submissive daughter. Tricking father into thinking that a fly is tickling his neck, the middle-class girl in this short narrative reveals a number of different profound social forces at work at the dawn of the modern age: the erosion of paternal authority and the ascendance of an active, assertive, and imaginative girlhood.

The mischievous boy who was as devilish as he was delightful had appeared widely in literature (e.g., Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn), American genre painting, and popular culture (including Edison's 1904 films based on the turn-of-the-century cartoon character, Buster Brown). However pervasive among boys and as a symbol of boyhood, there was no counterpart among representations of girls in American culture. This film of the female troublemaker reveals the ways in which girls were expanding their boundaries as well as the growing acceptance of a broader range of roles for girls, including comedy. Little Mischief's prank not only tickled her father, but turn-of-the-century viewers.