Girls Will Be Boys by Laura Horak

Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn made lasting impressions with their cinematic cross-dressing, but these performances of the 1930s came at the end of a long wave of more than 400 American films featuring women dressed as men. After a decade in film archives, Laura Horak finds that cross-dressed women in films made between 1908 and 1934 were not automatically seen as transgressive: in the 1910s they were considered wholesome and lent respectability to the young film industry. She explores how and why that perception changed in the 1920s and early 1930s, and how cinema shaped the representation of lesbian identity, from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement.