Copyright (c)
2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Introduction
In the summer of 1998, Time magazine asked on its cover, "Is
Feminism Dead?" The question stood out against a black background under the
disembodied heads of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and . . .
the television sitcom character Ally McBeal. The cover story nostalgically
remembered the 1970s as an era when "feminists made big, unambiguous
demands of the world. They sought absolute equal rights and opportunities for
women, a constitutional amendment to make it so, a chance to be compensated
equally and to share the task of raising a family. But if feminism of the 60s
and 70s was steeped in research and obsessed with social change, feminism today
is wed to the culture of celebrity and self-obsession." The article
proclaimed that "[t]oday's feminists want to talk sex, not cents" and
concluded that "much of feminism has devolved into the silly . . . a
popular culture insistent on offering images of grown single women as frazzled,
self-absorbed girls."[1]
In the "unambiguous" decade it recalled, Time itself had published a 1972 special issue that introduced "The New Woman" and devoted more than 100 pages to the movement, covering the day-to-day realities of ordinary women's lives as well as women's entry into the professions. It named women's rights activists its "Women of the Year" for 1975, spotlighting working women.[2] Just seven years later, however, a cover story announced "The New Baby Bloom," a trend in which "Career women are opting for pregnancy." As proof of this trend, its cover showed a beamingly pregnant actress Jaclyn Smith, whom the magazine called "Charlie's Angel turned Madonna."[3]
By the late 1980s, the magazine reported that "some look back wistfully at the simpler times before women's liberation" and proclaimed, "[feminine clothing is back; breasts are back; motherhood is in again."[4] In 1990, it published a special issue about young women who hoped "to achieve their goals without sacrificing their natures." This message was reinforced by ads from the issue's single sponsor, Sears. Displaying her bracelets, one young ad model said, "Sparkle comes from within. But a little outside help couldn't hurt." Another, cuddling her toddler at home, bragged, "I'm a senior partner in a very successful enterprise. My family."[5]
This seemingly drastic shift in media portrayals of women's lives was one theme in Susan Faludi's 1991 book Backlash, in which she analyzed cultural reactions to the gains of the women's movement.[6] She noted that mass media outlets such as Time contributed to as much as reported on the "backlash" against feminism. Ironically, the book's success drew as much attention to the "failure" of feminism as it did to the role of mass media in helping that process along, and in 1992 the magazine had Faludi on its cover, with an article that explained "why many women turned against feminism in the 1980s." The article took little note of real women, focusing instead on the popular culture imagery discussed in one part of Faludi's book and presenting it as evidence of cultural change itself. This sleight-of-hand occurred even in the "good news" sidebar collage of "Feminist Images"—a group of "successful independent women who found new answers and a vital balance"—which included television and movie characters (including Murphy Brown, Roseanne, and Thelma and Louise).[7]
The same conflation of popular culture imagery and women's realities characterized the 1998 issue that pronounced feminism "dead" and feminists consumed by silly self-absorption. Gone were the ordinary women worried about work and childcare; instead, the article's opening anecdotes featured rock singer Courtney Love and a host of actresses caught up in "[f]ashion spectacle, paparazzi-jammed galas, and mindless sex talk," with television character Ally McBeal as the Newest New Woman. A companion piece focused on today's teenagers, asking "What do the girls really want?" (a play on Spice Girls lyrics) but then analyzed young female characters on television, in the movies, and in song lyrics, interviewing only three actual girls (two of them about what they thought of television characters). "In an age in which image is often mistaken for both message and directive," the writer mused, "can girls truly tell if they're making up their own minds, even as they sing about telling people what they want?" The cover story concluded: "What a comedown for the movement."[8]
How did this happen—in the media and presumably in American society? Why were women themselves to blame? Why did the "death" of feminism make the cover of a national magazine? And why did its cover feature a succession of "types" and generations of women, represented by just their heads?
These questions are at the heart of this book, which examines what we think of as a modern-day issue by searching for its historical roots. It attempts to shed light on how women's visual and verbal media imagery evolved through the second wave of the American women's rights movement (and how and why that movement supposedly died) by revealing a very similar media story about women during the first wave. It argues that media stereotypes of women first emerged not in mass media from the 1970s to the 1990s but in mass media of the first three decades of the century. The women's heads that floated ominously on Time's 1998 cover were types arranged in a pattern, from older, matronly activists to the dangerous but beautiful radical to the cute, skinny, sexually free girl. The same types appeared in the same order on magazine covers of the early twentieth century, during the peak and the aftermath of the suffrage movement.
Most scholars today are wary of what sociologist Gaye Tuchman called in 1978 "the reflection hypothesis" in which "the mass media reflect dominant societal values."[9] They caution that media imagery—including Time's "news" reporting—is prescriptive rather than descriptive and that much is left out of the picture of American life they paint. In one of the first scholarly historical works on stereotypes of ideal womanhood, Mary P. Ryan warned that such images "must not be confused . . . with the actual life experience of women."[10]
As cultural theorists note, however, the media create as much as reflect reality, and their process of "selection and interpretation" is historically significant. "In a society as a whole, and in all its particular activities," wrote Raymond Williams in 1961, "the cultural tradition can be seen as a continual selection and re-selection of ancestors."[11] Indeed, what is so striking about Time's treatment of feminism over the past three decades is that Time itself has so often covered the subject in terms of other popular culture imagery and that it pronounced feminism dead based on a shift in imagery, a new "popular culture insistent on offering images" that seem silly. In this evolving story, media imagery is not a "reflection" of the news; it is the news.
How mass media have pictured American women throughout the twentieth century—setting into place a visual vocabulary of womanhood that now seems natural—is the subject of this book, which seeks to understand how media imagery works to create, transform, and perpetuate certain cultural ideals rather than others. While the central question of this study is why, and how, feminism is recurrently pronounced alive and dead in mass media, this book is not only about women's imagery. It is also about men's imagery and about how gender tensions are resolved in media through an ideal of middle-class family life that seems (to us now) to be "typically" American. It argues that current media definitions of, and debates about, femininity, masculinity, class status, and Americanness have their origins in media of a century ago.
Though this study considers other forms of public communication, its focus is the American magazine. Magazines were the first truly mass medium in the United States, though they did not become large-scale operations until the 1890s, a century and a half into their existence. Like other industries, the magazine business grew rapidly between the close of the Civil War and the Progressive Era. In 1865, there were nearly 700 titles with a total circulation of about four million; forty years later, in 1905, there were some 6,000 magazines with a total audience of sixty-four million, averaging four magazines per household. By the same year, ten American magazines had readerships in excess of half a million, and the Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post each had passed the million mark.[12] It was also during this period that technological advances in engraving and printing enabled the high-quality mass-reproduction of artwork on magazine covers, first in two colors and then in four.[13]
The Journal, the Post, and other new titles such as Munsey's, McClure's, and Cosmopolitan existed in a symbiotic relationship with other aspects of mass culture.[14] When increasingly conglomerate corporations needed to launch major advertising campaigns in order to create demand for mass-produced goods, they found that magazines were the best way to reach a wide audience.[15] In turn, it was the financial base of national advertising that enabled magazine publishers to lower cover prices to ten and fifteen cents, pulling in huge numbers of readers from the swelling U.S. population and thus creating the broad consumer base corporate interests needed.[16] In its new alliance with American manufacturers, magazine publishing became, in fact, two businesses: that of selling magazines to readers and that of selling readers to advertisers.
Before either transaction could be made, magazines had to get readers' attention. Key to that accomplishment was the cover, which declared the magazine's personality and promise. It also made a statement about the intended reader. Most magazines did not vary their cover designs until the 1890s, when the cover became a selling tool. Though photography was beginning to appear regularly in turn-of-the-century newspapers, the majority of magazines continued to use illustration on their covers because they were dealing in ideals rather than reality. The face of a woman could represent both a specific type of female beauty and a "style" that conveyed model attributes—youth, innocence, sophistication, modernity, upward mobility. (Chapter 3 explores how images of women were also used to convey the opposite, or loss, of these values.)
The illustrators who created the earliest such cover ideals developed distinctive styles that helped form individual magazines' editorial identities. Editors sought illustrators who had what Ladies' Home Journal artist Alice Barber Stephens called "a strong personality."[17] Most often that personality emerged through a "signature" type of woman's face, often identified by the artist's name. "The 'ideal American women' of [James Montgomery] Flagg and Charles Dana Gibson," note magazine historians John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, "became not only their trademarks but national institutions."[18] In 1915, when Irving Berlin wrote a song about a young man pining away for the ideal "girl," his title located her where most Americans would expect to find her—on the magazine cover.
Her various permutations were the first mass media stereotypes. "The strength of a stereotype," explains Teresa Perkins, "results from a combination of three factors: its 'simplicity'; its immediate recognisability [sic] (which makes its communicative role very important), and its implicit reference to an assumed consensus about some attribute or complex social relationships. Stereotypes are in this respect prototypes of 'shared cultural meanings.'"[19] Norman Rockwell gave the same explanation, recalling the lesson he learned when he began his career in the second decade of the century: "The cover must please a vast number of people (no matter how: by amusing, edifying, praising; but it must please) . . . it must have an instantaneous impact (people won't bother to puzzle out a cover's meaning)."[20]
Magazines paid well for artists who could make such an impact. In 1903, Collier's offered Charles Dana Gibson $1,000 apiece for 100 drawings, and other artists soon earned similar rates.[21] They earned even more, and gained additional fame, when the publishing companies reprinted their artwork and sold it to readers by mail order, as the old Life[22] did for Gibson and Good Housekeeping did for Jessie Willcox Smith. Top illustrators were "[b]illed as heroes" by their magazines, in which they were interviewed and where they received fan mail;[23] in the era that is now considered "the golden age of illustration," they had the status that would later be accorded to movie stars and athletes.
Advertisers of the day capitalized on this fame by hiring the same illustrators "to add luster to their product[s]."[24] During World War I, so did the U.S. government, for which illustrators lent their "signature" images to recruitment and fundraising posters. The sophisticated couples drawn by J. C. Leyendecker for the covers of the Saturday Evening Post also peopled his ads for Arrow Collar shirts. Smith's devoted mothers and adorable children, who appeared on every Good Housekeeping cover for sixteen years, also could be seen in her work for Ivory Soap. Coles Phillips's "Fadeaway Girls" blended into hosiery ads as well as the covers of Life. Howard Chandler Christy's "Christy Girl," who debuted in Scribner's, appeared on war posters to urge young men to enlist. The "Gibson Girl," who graced the pages of Life and Collier's, resurfaced on items from scarves to wallpaper and became the subject of plays and songs.
Particularly in the work of Norman Rockwell and J. C. Leyendecker, magazines offered visions of manhood as well as womanhood, and these ideals are discussed in the following chapters. Yet they emerged in ways that confirm historian Michael Kimmel's belief that—even while "[m]asculinity and femininity are relational constructs [and] the definition of either depends on the definition of the other"—cultural "definitions of masculinity are historically reactive to changing definitions of femininity."[25] When male figures appeared on covers, it was in response to ideas first inscribed in female figures.
Indeed, as the above examples suggest, feminine images dominated popular artwork of this era. These pictures conveyed ideas about women's natures and roles, but they also stood for societal values. The faces and figures of women had served this purpose in American culture long before the arrival of mass media. In early public art such as statues, flags, and coins, "the female body recurs more frequently than any other: men often appear as themselves, as individuals, but women attest to the identity and value of someone or something else," writes Marina Warner.[26] America itself has traditionally been depicted as a woman, in forms from Indian princess to Greek goddess.[27] So too has American progress. Since the seventeenth century, writes Mary P. Ryan, "different ideal types of femininity have marked America's growth from peasant to 'post-industrial' society."[28]
In her study of American imagery from 1876 to 1919, Martha Banta contends that, during this period of great societal change, "the woman as image [emphasis hers] was one of the era's dominant cultural tics. . . . However masculine the political and commercial activities that controlled 'the main world,' the images dominating the turn-of-the-century imagination were variations on the figure of the young American woman and permutations of the type of the American Girl." These symbols, Banta contends, embodied concerns about race, sexuality, consumption, and patriotism.[29]
Banta's point was illustrated—literally—on the covers of the era's popular magazines, where an idealized woman was used to signify broader concepts that spoke to an emerging American identity. That identity was both inclusive and exclusive, collective and "typical"; it was defined in terms of the shifting center of the country's demography. Illustration historian Susan Meyer notes that magazine cover art "provided the public with its first image of American ideals. . . . [T]he thousands of immigrants pouring into the country each day would find . . . prototypes after which they could pattern themselves."[30]
America's population growth, much of it from the massive waves of immigration in the years just around the turn of the century, was transforming the nature and needs of media audiences. In their quest to deliver vast audiences to their advertisers, the new magazines departed from the editorial format of the nineteenth century's most influential publications (such as Scribner's and Harper's), which published literary material for small but elite readerships who were urban, well educated, and affluent. Mass circulation magazines, by definition, served a more geographically and economically diverse readership, including new arrivals to the country and rural Americans who aspired to urbanity.[31] Their editorial content included practical advice (on housekeeping, fashion, health, and other matters), news of the world, and human interest features. The magazines also published fiction by respected authors and reproductions of fine artwork as part of their expressed mission to elevate the public.
This content combination was an early example of the ways in which twentieth-century mass culture would systematically blur the boundaries between "high" and "low" culture. It further instructed readers in upward mobility, showing them the lifestyles of the rich and fueling what Miles Orvell calls an "aesthetic of imitation" that "became the foundation of middle-class culture."[32] Magazines themselves were symbols of this process. In the middle-class home, "[t]he display of magazines signaled the couple's attainment and aspirations," notes Richard Ohmann; at the same time, "[t]he visual presentation of the magazine announced its own status as an elegantly made commodity that would grace a modern parlor."[33]
In the decades around the turn of the century, the two chief components of the upwardly mobile "aesthetic of imitation"—culture and consumption—were the province of women, who were homemakers, magazine readers, and shoppers. And both concepts were inscribed in the figures of women in popular culture imagery. More specifically, they were discussed through the idea of a "New Woman" who stood for change in women's lives and change in America.
While she represented societal change, the image of the New Woman varied significantly from the 1890s to the 1920s, expressed through a series of "types." Because these images appeared at particular times and in a particular order, they functioned not just as individual icons but rather as a symbolic system that visual theorists call "iconology." In this view, wrote Ernst Gombrich, an image "cannot be divorced from its purpose and requirements of the society in which the given visual language gains currency"—in other words, from its social, economic, and historical context—nor can its meaning be divorced from other images in the surrounding culture.[34]
Viewed over time, the New Woman offers a study in iconology. As a cultural construct, she conveyed opportunities for upward social and economic mobility while she also embodied fears about downward mobility, immigration, and the urbanization and corporatization of the lives of white American men. And she conveyed new social, political, and economic possibilities for womanhood. At many historical moments, she seemed merely to "mirror" what was happening in society. Yet she (and the visions of masculinity that accompanied her) also served as a model for that society and as a cultural commentator through whom certain ideals came to seem "natural" in real life.
Between 1895 and 1930, the roles and status of American women underwent widespread discussion and some profound transformations. It was during these years that the Progressive reform and women's club movements enabled middle-class women to enter the political arena; that women made the final push for, and achieved, suffrage; that women entered college and the workforce, including new professions, in significant numbers;[35] that the American popularity of the works of Freud prompted an acknowledgment of women's sexuality; and that a new birth control movement enabled some women to express that sexuality more freely and safely.
It was also during this era when the term "feminist" first came
into use. Women who described themselves with this word agitated for reforms
broader than suffrage. Some of these activists were urban radicals and
socialists, but feminism had a broader base as well. The reply to the answer to
the title question "What Is Feminism?" in a 1914 Good Housekeeping
article presumed readers' familiarity with the subject. The female writer's
answer was similar to (and perhaps more generous than) replies to that question
in mainstream media today:
There was even broader support for the drive for women's suffrage, organized through the National American Woman Suffrage Association and other groups, which was at its peak and was widely discussed in the press. Though it still met with resistance from some women as well as men, the campaign that had begun with a handful of radicals at Seneca Falls in 1848 had gained momentum and nationwide support by the 1910s. Suffrage united women in an effort that, at least temporarily, transcended geography, race, and class: though they tended to organize separately from white middle-class women, African American women and working-class women were active participants in this cause.
At the same time, Progressive Era reform work literally moved women into the public sphere and brought women of different social and economic classes together. Kathryn Kish Sklar maintains that between 1890 and 1920 "[t]he crucial significance of women within American grass-roots democracy was never better demonstrated."[37] Through settlement-house work and other social welfare work, some college-educated women created new professions based in reform.[38] But most female reformers were clubwomen, members of groups such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the National Consumer's League, the Children's Aid Society, the National Congress of Mothers (later the PTA), and the Pure Food Association. By 1910, the General Federation of Women's Clubs had nearly a million members.[39]
These activists "defended the new ways in an old language,"[40] justifying their commitment to public work in maternal rhetoric that had reverberations throughout the twentieth century. Often this rhetoric appeared in popular women's magazines, and it tied "modern" women to the Victorian era's "cult of true womanhood" defined by "four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity."[41] Nancy Cott explains that "[m]any women involved in club or reform activities were the first to say that their 'outside' interests were really undertaken in the service of the home, though on a larger scale."[42]
Such a strategy could be put to radical uses, as with upper- and middle-class women claimed to be "protecting" their "weaker" working-class sisters by joining them in the labor agitation of the Women's Trade Union League. Yet other maternalist reform was reactionary, undertaken in the era when President Theodore Roosevelt (himself a Progressive reformer) publicly expressed concern over the decline in fertility rates among native-born white women in the face of increasing immigration.[43] Reformers urged middle-class women to make childbearing a priority while also making the goal of "assimilating immigrants into 'American' culture a vital part of their child welfare work."[44] These objectives were realized in settlements and in Mothers' Clubs at the same time they filled the pages of magazines.
Their nativism dovetailed with popular culture warnings about the virility of white manhood. Historians including Joe Dubbert and Peter Filene see this phenomenon of the century's first two decades as a "crisis of masculinity."[45] According to this theory, white men not only were threatened by the aggressiveness of the New Woman, who was invading their territory in education and business; they also had lost their sense of mastery in a changing workplace that was increasingly bureaucratic and in cities that were increasingly crowded and nonwhite.
"Experts" in the new field of psychology, who authored magazine articles and popular books, believed that the crisis of masculinity could be resolved through a "rugged" physical life and the acquisition of money and consumer goods, a combination of strength and status. Organizations such as the Boy Scouts and rough sports such as football became popular ways of socializing boys and young men into the rugged ideal and of removing them from the "feminizing" influence of mothers and female schoolteachers.[46] The call for a more hardy American masculinity reached a fever pitch in the years immediately preceding World War I. The ideal was cast in terms of both the outdoorsman and the businessman—with both notions embodied in the figure of the suburban father.
By the 1920s, changing ideas about both femininity and masculinity had culminated in a revised and highly commercialized prototypical American family ideal. The urbanization and corporatization of America spawned exclusively white suburbs, a retreat from the city that brought about a "reprivatization of women's lives," writes Margaret Marsh.[47] At the same time, the popularization of Freudian psychology and the availability of birth control had led to increasingly "great expectations" of marriage, notes Elaine May, including sexual fulfillment and a "companionate" relationship between spouses.[48]
Women's duties within the home were changing as well. Popular magazines, borrowing from Progressive Era rhetoric, described housework as "domestic science" and homemakers as "domestic engineers." Despite the arrival of electricity in most American homes by the mid-1920s, homemakers spent fifty-three hours per week doing housework.[49] Motherhood became a similarly professional and full-time endeavor guided by the advice of psychiatrists and pediatricians. Those trends (reinforced in magazines) support the argument of Ruth Schwartz Cowan, who dates the "feminine mystique" to this era: "Whatever it was that trapped educated American women in their kitchens, babbling at babies and worrying about color combinations for the bathroom, the trap was laid during the roaring 20s, not the quiet 50s."[50]
How did this particular evolution of women's roles and women's lives occur? What happened to the New Woman? Why did the achievement of suffrage and the new movement called feminism "fail" in producing lasting change? These are among the central questions of American women's history. They are also the same questions that Time magazine asked about feminism when it pronounced its death in 1998.
Many women today believe that feminism is in fact still alive, no matter what Time says. Similarly, a number of historians contend that neither the suffrage movement nor the first wave of feminism failed, arguing that their gains continued to benefit and influence women in the middle decades of the century.[51] Yet neither wave of the movement truly transformed women's social and economic status, particularly in terms of family life. In both eras, the political promise of a New Woman dissipated while the concept remained evident in popular culture.
Imagery in 1920s mass media, which included movies as well as magazines, suggested that the New Woman had undergone a remarkable evolution—from a serious-minded college (or working) woman to a carefree, scantily clad "flapper" who existed to wear modern clothes, have fun, and, ultimately, catch a man who would support her. "The flapper symbolized a solipsistic, hedonistic, and privatized femininity, a gay abandonment of social housekeeping, women's organizations, and dogged professionalism," writes Mary P. Ryan.[52]
The transformation of first-wave American feminism from a collective movement to a matter of personal style involved a thorough redefinition of early feminist goals: a redirection of women's societal participation from voting to spending, a recasting of sexuality as silly sexiness, an educational shift away from reform and toward consumerism. The close parallels between media imagery and the actual behavior of Americans enabled media of the era to "report" these changes as reality. But these redefinitions were, to a great extent, constructed and articulated in mass media themselves.
This is precisely the case Susan Faludi has made about the role of mass media in the "backlash" against the second wave of the American women's movement. Indeed, the very same media redefinitions of the meaning of the New Woman in media of the first three decades of the century can be seen in Time's treatment of feminism during the last three decades.
Tracing the visual representation of this transformation is the goal of this book. Its subject is a broad period of history and a vast body of media, and the visual and verbal texts discussed here are clearly selective, not exhaustive. Yet all of the images were chosen through extensive research into their biographical, institutional, and historical contexts—that is, the artists, the magazines, and the culture and politics of the era. A range of primary sources from the artists' own era as well as secondary sources (the work of other historians) were used to "read" the imagery with regard to those contexts.
Studying mass media requires "a kind of intellectual bricolage" (to borrow T. J. Jackson Lears's description of his own history of advertising).[53] That is true of this work, which draws on scholarship in the fields of history, literature, and sociology as well as communication; it is theoretically grounded in visual and rhetorical theory as well as cultural studies.[54] Methodologically, it is less a "content analysis" (in which certain specific elements are quantified within a given text) than what journalism historian Marion Marzolf called "content assessment"—a process of "reading, sifting, weighing, comparing and analyzing the evidence in order to tell the story."[55]
The following chapters survey the emerging "types" of womanhood and manhood in the new century, visions that appeared on magazine covers between 1895 and 1930. Each image or set of images is discussed in terms of its institutional setting (the magazine's editorial and advertising pages as well as its audience) and its historical moment. Two of the chapters, 5 and 8, explain how these stereotypical ideals that emerged in magazines moved easily into and among other aspects of American popular culture.
Chapter 1, "From True Woman to New Woman," deals with middle- and working-class aspirations during the earliest period of New Womanhood, the 1890s. It takes a very specific focus, a yearlong series titled "The American Woman," drawn for the Ladies' Home Journal by Alice Barber Stephens throughout 1897. These were Victorian images, showing women in corseted, neck-to-floor dresses, with serious expressions on their faces. Yet they were symbolically transitional for three reasons: they depicted women both inside and outside the home; they suggested the close relationships between and among women that characterized nineteenth-century society but were to a great extent lost in the modern era; and they included representations of upper-, middle-, and working-class women, conveying a fluid and inclusive notion of class. These illustrations—and their editorial and advertising context in the Journal—defined the first-generation New Woman as both a proper homemaker and a modern shopper.
Chapter 2, "The American Girl," examines the eponymous creation of Charles Dana Gibson, one of the best-known images of American womanhood ever drawn, and her successors in cover art. The Gibson Girl rose to national fame in the pages of Life and Collier's during the opening years of the twentieth century. This tall woman with an aristocratic bearing and an upswept hairdo was upscale and aloof, representing the lifestyle to which the "rising" classes might aspire. The Gibson Girl spawned imitations that also came to be known by the names of their creators: the Fisher Girl, drawn by Harrison Fisher for the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies' Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan; and the Christy Girl, drawn by Howard Chandler Christy for Scribner's and other titles during the 1900s and 1910s. Fisher's "girl" was less haughty and more blushingly pretty than Gibson's, somehow demure and sensual at the same time. The Christy Girl seemed friendly, perky, and approachable. Both of them played sports and went to college during an era journalist Dorothy Dix called "the Day of the Girl."[56]
Their evil opposites are discussed in Chapter 3, "Dangerous Women and the Crisis of Masculinity," which surveys images of modern women as beautiful but dangerous creatures who overpowered and used men. In various forms of popular culture of the 1910s, including Broadway revues, sheet music, and film, the New Woman was shown as a temptress and a golddigger. The same theme surfaced in magazine illustration. James Montgomery Flagg drew "vamps"—young women with saucy expressions, bare shoulders and legs, and provocative poses—for the covers of Judge and Life. The latter magazine also featured the work of Coles Phillips, known for his "Fadeaway Girls," slim young women whose dress patterns merged with their backgrounds. Though they were beautiful, they were often cruel: one of Phillips's recurring motifs was that of a vain young woman surrounded by tiny men, depicted as bugs caught in her web, as small suitors bearing gifts, as little faces she crossed off on a calendar.
Imagery depicting such sex-role reversal was linked partly to the theories of Sigmund Freud, newly popular in America, and to debates about the "feminization" of American culture as women seemed to become more socially and politically powerful. But the image of the dominating woman had to do with more than gender tensions; she symbolized white manhood endangered, the possibility of "race suicide" in an era of immigration. To counter this dominating woman, a parallel set of images of manhood emerged in popular culture of the era, and they were articulated by J. C. Leyendecker for the covers of the Saturday Evening Post: the businessman, who exhibited a fashionable, moneyed sense of style, and the athlete, who embodied muscular ruggedness.
The political forces that supposedly threatened white manhood during the second decade of the century are explored in Chapter 4, "Alternative Visions," which considers types of womanhood that were represented in the population and yet were not regularly represented in mass-circulation magazines. This chapter examines the depiction of suffragists, immigrants, prostitutes, and African American women on the covers of three smaller-circulation magazines, the Woman Citizen, the Masses, and the Crisis—imagery that both challenged and reinforced the stereotypes in mainstream media.
This alternative imagery, along with the "crisis of masculinity," largely disappeared from American popular culture during World War I. Instead, men were strong and women were angelic on the war posters drawn by almost all of the era's top illustrators. This work is surveyed in Chapter 5, "Patriotic Images." Organized by Charles Dana Gibson, who served as director of the government-appointed, wartime Division of Pictorial Publicity, the illustrators created recruitment and relief appeals that were displayed in towns and cities throughout the country. This chapter explores the thematic similarities between the artists' editorial work and war work, as well as some telling contradictions.
Magazine imagery after the war depicted two primary versions of womanhood, seemingly opposite images that were in fact complementary. One was the "Flapper," the subject of Chapter 6, which focuses on the work of a single illustrator, John Held Jr. (though it also discusses the portrayal of flappers in movies). Held's cartoon characters, which appeared mainly on the cover of Life, inhabited a now-familiar picture of the "Roaring Twenties," when carefree women had nothing better to do than drink gin, neck in the backseats of cars, and dance all night. Paradoxically, this sexually free woman was almost asexual-looking in Held's drawings: she was flat-chested, skinny, and hipless, with awkwardly long legs and arms.
At the very same time, other media imagery suggested a return to motherhood and family happiness. The construct of a "new family" involved ideas about not just womanhood, but also manhood and childhood. Chapter 7, "The Modern American Family," examines the cover imagery and editorial context of three magazines whose circulations soared during the 1920s.
In the work of Neysa McMein, the exclusive cover artist for McCall's from 1923 to 1937, the woman of the 1920s was a self-possessed, mature New Woman, depicted as an individual in a modern world. Jessie Willcox Smith, Good Housekeeping's exclusive cover artist from 1918 to 1933, also drew female figures but featured mainly children, adorable cherubs who could have been any reader's child; in her illustrations, children came to stand for womanhood. And on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, boyhood came to stand for manhood. Continuing the masculine gender-construction work begun in the Post by Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell envisioned masculinity in the modern era. His subjects were emblematic of a new middle-class suburban lifestyle, based on an idealized version of the small town.
Chapter 8, "The Advertising Connection," documents this aspect of the careers of five of the cover artists, J. C. Leyendecker, Coles Phillips, Jessie Willcox Smith, Norman Rockwell, and Neysa McMein. This section reveals the extent to which "signature" magazine cover imagery traveled quickly into the broader commercial culture. It notes the thematic connections between each artist's editorial and advertising imagery, assessing the possible consequences of such message-blurring.
The concluding chapter provides a brief survey of media imagery of the rest of the century, drawing on the work of other scholars who have studied television portrayals of women. It notes the staying power of certain gender notions and the striking representational parallels of both "waves" of feminism—confirming journalism historian Catherine Covert's point that, when viewed through the lens of women's experience, the past is "marked by repeated episodes and recurring motifs."[57]
Raymond Williams argued that "it is with the discovery of patterns of a characteristic kind that any useful cultural analysis begins."[58] The significance of the artwork discussed in the following chapters has less to do with imagery than with iconology, with how mass media make meaning in patterns that develop in response to particular cultural tensions but have the potential to recur as those tensions resurface over time. The larger picture of the girl on the magazine cover helps us understand her daughters and granddaughters in mass media—and their continuing symbolic uses in American culture.