Sloman's view that Minter was "the best looking youngster but the lousiest actress" is a little severe but she was certainly only moderately talented and her looks were only such as to appeal to the (enormous) hebephile market tha Pickford was already so succesfully exploiting. She can still evidently make the truncheon twirl (like that of the Irish policeman in the film) of many a male viewer.
What I find interesting in this film is its edge of social satire not because it is very penetrating - it is not - but because it is so peculiarly women-centred (something Sloman may have had litte sympathy with). The understaning of the absolute centrality of the question of "the servant problem" to early twentieth-century life is very accurate and very important from a feminine point of view. It dominated - as the film shows - the lives of the wealthy housewives and it equally dominated the lives of working-class or poorer women who depended heaviy on this sector - the alternaives were far grimmer - for respectable and not necessarily overly exploitative - it depended on the employers - employment. The whole story turns round this one factor in a way that is really very interesting and might provoke thought in one half of the population at any rate (the ones not too voyeuristically interested in the "girly" charms of Mary Minter).
Note that there is another element of role-reversal in the situation that is very deftly sprung on the audience half way through the film (a revelation carefully delayed by the clever narrative structure). Pretty little Minter is doing work in the film that was intended for a black woman.
The writer is not "Joseph" but Josephine Daskam Bacon also known as Josephine Dodge or Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon or Josephine Seldon Bacon about whom it is difficult to find any information (feminist redisoceries of women writers is a saldy selective business which tends to ignore those who do not quite fit its political agenda) but she was a prolific and versatile writer whose works seems invariably to have focused on wome's issues.
I am being careful with my terminology because Daskam Bacon does not seem to have been a feminist and may have been an anti-feminist but, if so, an anti-feminist from a strongly "feminine" point of view - we need a word to describe this category - a defender of "womanly values". I do not know what her connection was with Josephine Jewell Dodge (February 11, 1855 - March 6, 1928), a notorious anti-suffargist and founder of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage but also - note - an educator of importance and a leader of the day nursery movement (you see why we need a word for such women) but I think there was one. Presumably her mother, Anne Loring 1850-1900, had some connection to have named her Josephine Dodge).
At any rate Josephine Dodge Daskam seems to have belgonged to this same catgory of strong women with pronounced "feminine" but not really feminist views and yet do battle against the double standards of society, quite often with mordaunt humour. Her Fables for the Fair: Cautionary Tales for Damsels not Yet in Distress (1901) are well worth reading.
"I do not believe in women's suffrage. Why? Because a woman can n more do a man's work than a man can do a woman's. There has never ben a first-clas woman writer...I write second-class stuff myself.....ad, whille women have been first-class mothers, I defy you to mention a man who has ever really been a first-class mother."
This is Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon speaking, not Josephine Jewell Dodge. She herself never had children and is even quoted as saying that women who wrote boks should ot have children. She was author inter alia of Which Is the Greater Woman, Home Builder or Brain Worker? which aimed to "pint otu some fallacies of the Suffragette Movement"
This all helps to understand the context in which this film is written a context where to quote Jewell Dodge "tariff reform, fiscal policies, international relations, those large endeavors which men now determine, are foreign to the concerns and pursuits of the average woman. She is worthily employed in other departments of life, and the vote will not help her to fulfill her obligations therein." It comes really as no surprise that this film should be the work of the woman who wrote Scouting for Girls.
It is moreover a very cleverly written script, containing as it does a flashback within a flashback (and at one point even a flashback within a flashback within a flashback), that handles a complicated scenario with very considerable skill. Mrs. Bacon may have written "second-class stuff" but she wrote suprisingly good second-class stuff.
Whether Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon thoguht Mary Miles Minter was cute is not known.....