"Exercizing a woman's privilege" sounds like "making sure she'll never work in this town again."

Here's an interesting detail:

At the peak of her popularity, several film studios offered her a contract but she declined them all until widely respected New York-based French director, Maurice Tourneur, proposed she appear in the lead role as a sophisticated patrician in his 1917 silent film, Barbary Sheep. She also may have consented to films because she no longer had the protection of her Broadway employers Henry B. Harris, who died on the Titanic in 1912, and Charles Frohman, who perished on the Lusitania in 1915.

I mean, what are the odds? More:

Continuing to play roles of elegant society women, Ferguson was quickly dubbed "The Aristocrat of the Silent Screen", but the aristocratic label was also because she was known as a difficult and sometimes arrogant personality with whom to work

What did I tell you?