Miss Lulu Bett (1921)
Treated as unpaid help by her sister's family, Lulu Bett is talked into a joking wedding with a visiting relative that turns out to be legally binding, and only after he is revealed to already have a wife does she find the nerve to leave and build a life of her own.
Miss Lulu Bett adapts Zona Gale’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and play, and its clear-eyed portrait of a woman refusing to remain her family’s unpaid drudge made it one of the more pointed screen treatments of women’s independence to arrive in the wake of suffrage.
Background
Miss Lulu Bett adapts Zona Gale’s novel, which she also turned into a play that won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. William Churchill deMille directed, and Lois Wilson plays Lulu, a woman treated as unpaid household help by her sister’s family. Milton Sills and Theodore Roberts appear in the cast. The story is one of the early screen treatments of a woman’s limited economic and domestic options in a small-town household.
What to watch for
The film sets up Lulu’s position through its family dynamics. She is expected to cook, clean and stay quiet while the household takes her labor for granted. The comic wedding plot, in which she is talked into a joking marriage to a visiting relative that proves to be legally binding, drives the second half. Pay attention to how the film builds her decision to leave, which comes only after she learns the man already has a wife, and to how the household reacts once it starts to lose her labor. The film is a frank look at economic dependence, and its quieter scenes of daily routine make its argument most clearly.
