Where Are My Children? (1916)
A district attorney who publicly prosecutes a doctor for distributing birth-control information is privately devastated to learn that his own wife has been secretly terminating her pregnancies to preserve her social life, leaving the couple childless and alone.
Directed (though uncredited on screen) by Lois Weber with her husband Phillips Smalley, Where Are My Children? tackled birth control and abortion at a time when the Comstock laws made even discussing them a crime, using Weber’s social-problem-picture format to smuggle a startlingly frank argument past the censors. It was added to the National Film Registry in 1993.
Background
Where Are My Children? is a 1916 silent film generally credited to Lois Weber and her husband Phillips Smalley, with Weber as the central creative force. It tackled birth control and abortion at a time when the Comstock laws made even discussing them a crime, using Weber’s social-problem picture format to present its argument. The film stars Tyrone Power Sr. as the district attorney and Helen Riaume as his wife. It was added to the National Film Registry in 1993. The film runs about sixty-four minutes and remains a notable example of early American cinema engaging controversial social questions.
What to watch for
Look for the film’s two-part structure: a district attorney publicly prosecutes a doctor for distributing birth-control information, and his own wife’s secret actions surface in his private life. The film uses courtroom and domestic scenes to make its argument, moving between the public and private worlds of its characters. Weber’s social-problem framing is visible in the blunt intertitles and in the way the story puts an ethical argument at its center. The film’s position on its subject was contested in its time, and viewers should consider the moral framing of the period while watching it. The ending brings the couple’s private grief into focus.
