In my ongoing research on women’s historical contribution to Swedish film culture, an important discovery regarding women’s agency has been the number of women who were active in cinema management early on in the twentieth century. Many of these women owned or managed one or several cinemas during a short period of time in the 1910s or 1920s, and then moved on to another business, or left the workforce due to changed circumstances (such as marriage or retirement), but some of them maintained a long career in film exhibition, lasting well into the sound era. Since the formation of a Swedish cinema culture coincided with the campaigns for women’s suffrage and women taking up an increasingly large share of the waged workforce, the women who made their way into cinema exhibition in the first decades of the century should be understood within the context of first wave feminism, the women’s movement of the nineteenth century which reacted against women’s exclusion from or marginalization in politics, economy, and society.1 This essay builds on previous findings regarding women cinema owners and managers in the silent era, in order to discuss the methodological issues involved in researching these (largely) unknown women and why an investigation of their agency is important, despite the scarcity of available documentation.