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The popular imagination of early Hollywood is often a caricature: a boys’ club of powerful moguls and mustachioed directors, with actresses existing as glamorous but ultimately powerless commodities. This image, however, is a profound historical distortion, one retroactively applied from the later Studio System era. The truth is that the silent film era, particularly its first two decades, was a unique and unprecedented period of creative and commercial opportunity for women. Before the industrial consolidation of the 1920s rigidified hierarchies and codified gender roles, Hollywood was a frontier town, and on this new artistic and economic landscape, women were not…