Elizabeth Ewen (died 2012) was a scholar of women's history, immigration, and film. She was among the first feminist historians to write about early American cinema. [1] Ewen was a professor of American Studies at the State University of New York at Old Westbury (SUNY). [2]
Noted film historian Robert Sklar described Ewen's 1980 article, “City Lights: Immigrant Women and the Rise of the Movies,” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, as 'the first significant writing by a historian on early American cinema to follow the author's and [Garth] Jowett's books.” [3] Ewen's book, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, examined the role of cinema in the lives of immigrant girls and women in New York City's Lower East Side. [4] Filmmaker Ellen Noonan has explained that the book was the inspiration for the 1993 documentary Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl. [5]
Elizabeth Ewen authored several books with her husband, media historian Stuart Ewen, [6] and her colleague Rosalyn Baxandall, [7] [8] including Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (1992), [9] Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (2000), Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality (2006). [10]
Ewen's work is frequently cited by contemporary historians. [11] [12]
Elizabeth Ewen died May 29, 2012, in Manhattan, New York. [13]