In the US, once the Nickelodeons had emerged between 1905 and 1907, their audience seems to have been mixed. Women and children probably constituted about half of the audiences and they might even have been the majority of visitors. Richard Abel relates, for example, that in New York, women often went with their children to the Nickelodeon after or during shopping, as these venues were handily located in the shopping districts (Abel 1999: 48). A substantial difference between cinema and many other entertainments was that cinema was consumed by members of both sexes, while football, other sports, drinking and music.
