Destructive Women
and Little Men:
Masculinity, the New Woman, and Power in 1910s Popular Media
by Carolyn Kitch, Northwestern University
ABSTRACT: During the 1910s, the final decade of the suffrage
drive, women's social, economic, and professional opportunities seemed
to broaden dramatically at the same time that political leaders and
psychologists decried the "feminization" of manhood. The spectre of
a world in which domineering women emasculated powerless men inspired
a visual motif that ran throughout popular culture: the pairing of large
women and tiny men. Through humor, explosive notions were discussed
but then dismissed. This rhetorical analysis, which draws on hegemony
theory, explores the symbolic cultural work of such imagery in mass
media, especially magazines, at a pivotal moment in American gender
relations.
During the early decades of the twentieth century, American
women's social, political, and economic opportunities seemed to broaden
dramatically. More and more young women entered higher education and
the professions (1),
while Progressive-era reform work and the women's-club movement offered
a chance for married women also to enter the public sphere.
At no time did lasting change in gender roles seem more
likely than in the 1910s, the final decade of the suffrage drive. The
vote was not the only potential gain for women during this era: radicals
who called themselves "feminists" pushed for reforms in the institution
of marriage, the American popularity of the works of Freud prompted
a public acknowledgement of women's sexuality, and a new birth-control
movement enabled women to express that sexuality more freely and safely.
The same period saw extensive public discourse on the
role of men in American society as well. This national preoccupation
with masculinity--what historian John Higham called "a muscular spirit"
in America (2)--was
a response partly to women's advances and partly to racial and ethnic
population changes due to massive waves of immigration. New organizations
such as the Boy Scouts embraced President Theodore Roosevelt's vision
of the "strenuous life" to help boys and men avoid becoming "over-civilized."
Experts in the new social science of psychology believed that athletics
and outdoor adventure would help to remove young men from the "feminizing"
influence of overbearing mothers and female schoolteachers. (3)
During the 1910s, Americans' hopes for, and anxieties
about, changing gender roles were frequently debated in magazine and
newspaper articles. These concerns also provided a recurrent theme for
visual communication. The spectre of a world in which domineering and
destructive women emasculated weak and powerless men inspired a distinctive
motif that ran through various forms of popular culture: the pairing
of large (though usually beautiful) women and little, often tiny, men.
While this motif was always presented as a joke, it never was only a
joke.
Literature, Methodology, and Theory
There is a rich and interdisciplinary body of scholarship
on gender imagery in the mass media throughout the twentieth century,
though more attention has been paid to late-twentieth-century media.
With regard to major historical works that have included visual media
culture, historian Lois Banner and film scholars Molly Haskell and Marjorie
Rosen have taken a long view of the century, while literary scholar
Martha Banta, film scholar Sumiko Higashi, and suffrage historian Alice
Sheppard have focused on imagery of its early decades.
(4) Banner and Banta, the
only authors to have considered imagery across cultural forms and themes,
take all of American culture as their landscape. This article concentrates
its analysis on mass-distributed visual culture during a single decade,
the 1910s, the peak of suffrage agitation and the peak of the big woman-little
man theme, exploring the symbolic work of this motif at a pivotal moment.
Indeed, the time period is crucial to understanding the
meaning of this image. In terms of the "methodology" of this research,
the period was not the lens through which the imagery was found; instead,
the imagery itself revealed the cultural importance of one decade. This
article grew out of a separate project on gender imagery over a 35-year
period. Its subject is less the outcome of a purposeful hunt than the
striking surprise that surfaced, over and over again, in one temporal
slice of a broader survey of media.
The discussion offered here attempts to make sense of
this discovery through a process of rhetorical analysis, which embraces
the notion that media texts (including visual communication) can be
"read" as a system of signs. It builds on the theoretical work of W.
J. T. Mitchell and E. H. Gombrich, who found meaning not in isolated
images, but rather in "iconology," an understanding of how visual symbols
make meaning in patterns. (5)
Yet this analysis also considers the imagery against
its historical backdrop (a process journalism historian Marion Marzolf
called a "content assessment," in contrast to a quantitative content
analysis limited to the artwork itself). (6)
That aspect of the study draws on the work
of historians who have focused on the visual-media representation of
either femininity or masculinity, as well as historians of gender in
this era. (7)
The study further draws on the theoretical groundwork
of Antonio Gramsci, whose notion of hegemony has become a popular scholarly
lens through which to view mass-media texts--and is particularly useful
in explaining the mixed messages in American media about gender roles
and relations during the 1910s. Gramsci refined Marxist theory by contending
that the consent of a populace is not enforced by some monolithic power;
rather, the widespread acceptance of certain ideas and conditions seems
to be a choice freely made by the majority of people in a society. In
the hegemonic process, controversial or troubling opinions are not suppressed,
but are aired in ways that weaken their message. (8)
Inscribed in the motif discussed here were serious political
issues. Yet because they were cast as comedic, these images, and the
messages they contained, were meant to be read as absurd. Through humor,
explosive notions were discussed but then diffused. The big woman-little
man pairing motif was a way of both acknowledging and dismissing the
New Woman at the height of her cultural strength, during the culmination
of the "first wave" of the American women's rights movement. This article
contends that what seems to modern eyes to be a funny historical curiosity
was in fact a patterned and pointed commentary on gender relations,
as well as broader tensions, in early-twentieth-century America.
New National Media and the Emergence of the Motif
The era of the "New Woman"--roughly the 1890s through
the 1920s--coincided with the emergence of several mass media in America.
Advances in printing technology enabled magazine publishers to use two-,
and then four-color art on their covers at the same time that a new
revenue base from national advertising enabled them to afford to print
and distribute their products to a truly mass audience. The same printing
process affected another medium of this era, sheet music: the notes
and lyrics to songs were printed with illustrated covers, and hit tunes--churned
out by Tin Pan Alley songwriters and popularized through nationwide
chains of vaudeville theaters--sold millions of copies apiece. By the
first decade of the new century, Americans nationwide were able to see
movie "shorts" in nickelodeons and, beginning in the early 1910s, feature-length
films in movie theaters. The fourth influential medium of this era,
poster art, also became a form of mass communication with America's
entry into World War I.
In all of these media, the figures and faces of women
were never merely about womanhood itself; they were also about broader
social or political concerns. The specific motif of large women and
little men emerged from the pen of America's most famous magazine illustrator
as soon as the construct of a New Woman was first articulated in the
popular press, during the 1890s. Charles Dana Gibson, whose work appeared
in Life (9) and
Collier's, envisioned the New Woman as beautiful, upper class,
and extremely haughty, someone who cowed and frightened men.
Though the Gibson Girl is often hailed by historians as
one of the first representations of the independent woman, her independence
was frequently presented in the form of cold and cruel power over men.
Gibson's beauties quite literally played with men. In a drawing published
just after the turn of the century and titled "Summer Sports" (Figure
1), three young women flew what first appeared to be kites, but
actually were figures of tiny men, suspended on strings high in the
air. In a 1903 illustration ironically titled "The Weaker Sex" (Figure
2), a tiny, pleading man was examined, under glass, by four beauties
who poked at him with a knitting needle. Gibson's cover for the Valentine's
Day issue of Life that year (Figure 3) featured
a statuesque woman juggling small male escorts, whose airborne poses
formed the magazine's title.
Other Gibson illustrations showed men being physically
threatened or otherwise bullied by their wives; a young woman not even
noticing that she had stepped on, and flattened, a man on a walking
path; and a little girl who had gleefully harnessed her little brother
as one would a horse.(10) Such
scenarios referenced turn-of-the-century men's anxieties about women's
economic as well as sexual power. At the same time, they made fun of
strong women, and of men who would tolerate them.
Of the various threats the New Woman posed to the American
status quo, the prospect of sex-role reversal--masculinized women and
feminized/emasculated men--was the easiest and funniest to handle through
visual communication. By 1910, this possibility was delineated in a
New York Evening World cartoon (Figure 4) that
showed a woman and a man "as they were," "as they are," and "as they
will be": through these three stages, they reversed body types and clothing,
culminating in a brawny, cigar-smoking woman and a thin-waisted, fan-holding
man saying, "Oh, Piffle!" (11)
Emasculated Men in Film
The little man in the middle frame of the New York Evening
World cartoon bore a striking resemblance, in dress and pose, to the
film persona of actor Charlie Chaplin (even though this illustration
preceded Chaplin's arrival in American film). Though Chaplin was British,
the character through which he gained almost instant fame in America
expressed American as well as European fears. Beginning in the early
1910s, the actor played a "little tramp" and assorted other powerless
men who blundered his way through modern life and pined away for women
who seemed out of his grasp.
Chaplin gave human form to what historian Virginia Smith
calls the "Funny Little Man" in graphic design, who was "distinctively
an early twentieth-century creation, resulting from its economic system
and functioning in its devastated, fragmented, and flunctuating society."
(12) Other
historians have similarly explained the appearance of this character
type in popular culture in terms of larger societal concerns, and as
having to do primarily with modernity. Film scholar Sumiko Higashi argues
that during this era "'[t]he little man' became a familiar figure in
a mechanized and standardized society which signalled the end of the
era of rugged individualism."(13)
Writing about literature of the era, C. Wright Mills saw the little
man as a symbol of the loss of individualism in the face of corporatization:
The nineteenth-century farmer and businessman were
generally thought to be stalwart individuals--their own men, men
who could quickly grow to be almost as big as anyone else. The twentieth-
century white-collar man . . . [was] the small creature who is acted
upon but who does not act, who works along unnoticed in somebody's
office or store, never talking loud, never talking back, never taking
a stand. (14)
Even so, the Funny Little Man was also a comment on the
New Woman. In her examination of the portrayal of suffragists in silent
films, Kay Sloan argues that their plots "capitalized on sexual politics
in America" at a time when "[t]he suffrage debate set loose sexual apprehensions
that extended far beyond the ballot and shook the roots of masculine
and feminine identity." In early movies, "[a]udiences saw rebellious
wives hurling food at their cowering husbands, women slugging each other
over election returns, suffragists forcibly dressing men in diapers,
and female sheriffs pretending to hang their terrified husbands." (15)
Even the more endearing characters created by Chaplin
were unflattering references to women. Writing about big woman-little
man pairings in films of this era, Molly Haskell contends that this
imagery from male creators suggested their "[a]mbivalence toward women,
if not misogyny." She cites the characters of Chaplin and Buster Keaton,
for whom a love interest "was never a 'realistic' partner, with defects
like their own, but the most beautiful and exquisite of creatures .
. . . they created a situation which could only lead to disappointment,
and a woman who . . . could only reflect the shallowness and vanity
of all women." (16) The
befuddled romantics of early American film were updated versions of
Charles Dana Gibson's pin-pricked man under the magnifying glass.
Pleading Suitors on Sheet-Music Covers
Men's desperate hopes to win the favor of women superior
to them were a comic theme in music as well as film of the day. Popular-song
lyrics told the tales of hopeless suitors who lost their money and their
manhood to women, and the illustrations on their sheet-music covers
featured a parade of tiny men.
On the cover of a song titled "We All Fall" (Figure
5), little men who represented a woman's marriage choices (from
the old rhyme: rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer,
Indian chief) sought the favor of a well-dressed woman whose attention
seemed to be elsewhere.(17)
Similarly, tuxedoed gents on their knees appealed
to a larger woman, perched above them on a pile of coins, on "The High
Cost of Loving" (Figure 6). (18)
Such drawings represented the New Woman as mercenary.
Though she appeared pretty and even sweet, the "girlie" on the sheet-music
cover shown in Figure 7 kept her miniature, gift-bearing
suitors on strings (like Gibson's kite-flyers), and the lyrics made
the point perfectly clear: "One little girl makes your bankbook a sight,/And
though your rent's overdue,/Still you buy diamond rings,/Oh, what wonderful
things/One little girlie can do." (19)
Historian James McGovern characterized the popular-culture
"girl" of the American 1910s as "a determined pleasure-seaker,"(20)
and these songs reinforced that notion. What's more, they suggested
that what this golddigger offered in return for money was pleasure for
men, in the form of sex. One song title--the cover of which showed a
woman dropping one little man while stepping on another (Figure
8)--more than suggested this bargain: the man who failed to please
the modern woman knew that "Somebody Else Is Getting It." (21)
Big Women and Tiny Men in Magazine Illustration
Men's perception of a shift in the balance of sexual power
emerged even in the art of magazines that claimed to be "feminist,"
such as the Socialist magazine The Masses, which existed for six years
during the 1910s. In an issue of that magazine published in 1913 (the
same year that the works of Freud were popularized in America) the artist
John Sloan retold the story of creation through a series of sketches,
shown in Figure 9, that portrayed a giant Eve
who alternately protected and endangered (offering the dangerous apple
to) a tiny Adam. In her psychoanalytical study of Sloan's images of
women, Janice Coco notes that "the artist's identification with his
female subjects consisted of both admiration and fear."(22)
Yet these images, like those in mainstream magazines, also made women's
sexual power ridiculous. Sloan's Eve was not only large, but unkempt
and overweight; his Adam was not only small, but frazzled and pathetically
childlike.
In the more mainstream Life, the graphic device begun
by Charles Dana Gibson at the turn of the century continued to make
regular appearances in the art of other illustrators during the 1910s.
Indeed, due in large part to this brand of humor, these years were the
peak period for the weekly magazine's circulation, around 100,000 at
the start of the decade and at nearly half a million at the decade's
end.(23)
On the 1912 cover shown in Figure 10, a well-dressed
woman again played with little men, quite literally: they were wooden
toys, game pieces she could move around at will. Another cover published
that year, drawn by James Montgomery Flagg (Figure
11), depicted man as a trained monkey on rope, asking readers in
its title, "Has This Ever Happened to You?"
One illustrator actually specialized in drawing big women-tiny
men scenarios for Life covers. The cover girl of Coles Phillips was
a heartbreaker, often a golddigger as well, who emasculated men.(24)
She was having, as the title (25)
of the cover drawing shown in Figure
12 revealed, "The Time of Her Life": on an alarm clock, a woman
could pick and choose among two dozen little suitors who represented
aspects of manhood (the scholar, the soldier, the dapper gentleman).
Similar Phillips covers showed a young woman trying to
choose among suitors, who were symbolized by playing cards ("Discarding
from Strength," Figure 13); faces on a wall
calendar ("Dates," Figure 14); checkerboard
spaces representing strategic options of money, love, royalty, and religion
("Her Move," Figure 15); and the gifts her various
boyfriends had given her ("Know All Men by These Presents," Figure
16). Others pictured the woman as a coldly elegant butterfly pursued
by tiny men with nets ("The Butterfly Chase," Figure
17) or a pretty girl-spider in whose web little men had become entangled
("Net Results," Figure 18). (26)
As lovely as Phillips' cover girls appeared, each
of them was, in her own way, destructive: at best, her elusiveness or
greed was emasculating; at worst, she entrapped and then consumed, destroyed,
or disposed of men.
War's Reversal of the Meaning of the Motif
The big woman-little man motif would survive in American
media for another decade, but the messages inscribed in this symbol
changed dramatically during World War I. As the radical sentiments (Socialism
and feminism) that had briefly caught the public imagination in the
early 1910s were replaced by patriotism, the spectre of the powerful
woman faded and a rugged masculinity emerged in popular culture.
In magazine illustration, more and more men appeared:
the covers of the era's widest-circulation magazine, The Saturday Evening
Post, featured the work of both J. C. Leyendecker (best known as the
creator of an advertising image, the "Arrow Collar Man"), who drew the
fashionable man of the new century, and a young Norman Rockwell, who
created a new kind of American family ruled by athletic boys and businessman-fathers.
In film, plots turned to war themes in which strong American men rescued
helpless women threatened by "Huns." Song titles, too, referred to war
and wistful romance: between 1917 and 1918, Irving Berlin's subject
matter swung from "Whose Little Heart Are You Breaking Now?" to "I'm
Gonna Pin a Medal on the Girl I Left Behind." (27)
The lyrics of "Oh, What Wonderful Things One Little
Girlie Can Do" were rewritten to praise the American Girl who "gladly
gives ev'rything . . . . For the old Red, White and Blue." (28)
American media increasingly included female characters
of devoted sweethearts, caring nurses, and sacrificing mothers--women
who were the beneficiaries or admirers (thus the objects) of men's courage,
rather than the agents of their destruction.
Perhaps nowhere was this symbolic reversal more apparent
than on World War I posters, which (ironically) were drawn by the same
illustrators who dominated magazine art of the era.(29)
Seen by millions of people all across the United States, (30)
these posters featured oversized women as emblematic of the strength
not of American women, but rather of America itself, along with the
American ideals of justice, liberty, and compassion. In this ideological
role, large women helped rather than hurt little men. Indeed, despite
their size, they were secondary, not primary, characters in visual imagery.
The symbolic meaning of the big female-little male characters
in J. C. Leyendecker's "Weapons for Liberty" poster (Figure
19) was doubled through costuming. In this allegorical scene, the
crowned, flag-wrapped woman was Liberty, while the kneeling little boy
protected Liberty through preparation. The smaller figure provided the
action of the picture. What's more, dressed as a Boy Scout, he represented
an organization that strove to protect future men from "feminizing"
influences.
A second example was Alonzo Earl Foringer's "The Greatest
Mother in the World" (Figure 20), one of the
most reprinted posters of the war. Depicting a man who was not only
tiny, but blinded, helpless in the arms of a woman at least five times
his size, this image was one of the most extreme examples of the size-reversal
device in American art, yet it was also one of the least threatening
to men. This giant woman's power was not sexual; instead, it was altruistic,
spiritual (suggested by her upward gaze), and, most of all, maternal.(31)
The New Woman in wartime was recast as a mother, an
old role in which a woman's size and power were (temporarily) acceptable.
The Ridiculous New Woman of the 1920s
Around 1920, visual imagery in popular culture began to
feature a very different interpretation of the New Woman. A relaxing
of tensions about women's potential power was evident in a cover drawn
by Coles Phillips for the November 18, 1920 issue of Life, marking the
first Presidential election in which women nationwide were eligible
to vote (Figure 21). Titled "A Mere Slip of
a Girl," it showed an embarrassed New Woman who had slipped and fallen.
In magazines and films, the newest New Woman was a flapper,
a "free" woman who, rather than using sexuality to overpower men, used
sex appeal to win their approval. In film, the flapper character popularized
by actress Clara Bow was often a "career girl," though one with little
professional identity or economic independence. Film historian Patricia
Erens notes that Bow
played a manicurist, usherette, waitress, cigarette
girl, taxi driver, swimming instructor, and salesgirl. Interestingly,
her jobs always brought her into contact with men.As a manicurist
in Mantrap (1926), she worked in a barber shop. Even as a salesgirl
in the lingerie department, she was visited by more men than women
buyers. Also, these jobs provided ample opportunities for touching
members of the opposite sex. (32)
Movie flappers of the 1920s behaved outrageously but only
hinted at promiscuity; they were "always chaste at heart . . . they
preserved their virginity until marriage," writes historian Mary Ryan.(33)
Molly Haskell concurs that the flapper "was not as
naughty as she seemed, but rather a disturber of the peace, redeemable
by marriage." (34)
On the covers of Life, Judge, and other humor magazines,
flappers appeared regularly in the work of illustrator John Held, Jr.
Held envisioned this brand of New Woman not as a predator, but as a
silly girl who danced the night away. Even more telling of her inconsequentiality,
Held's excessively thin flapper had little physical presence.
The artist occasionally used the big woman-little man
motif, sometimes in ways that mimicked the evilness of women in 1910s
imagery--for instance, the physically violent young woman on the cover
of a 1923 Judge issue shown in Figure 22. Yet
unlike earlier versions of the destructive woman, Held's fighting girl
was unglamorous and clearly ridiculous, as was his pointy-toed socialite
who "launched" her older, balding date in Figure
23. Both scenes stressed the apolitical self-absorption of the modern
girl. The only truly oversized women in Held's visual world were overweight
ones, such as the grotesquely muscular woman (whom no man would want
anyway) in Figure 24. (35)
Discussion
The visual motif of the destructive woman and her tiny
male victim lost its popular-culture currency at essentially the same
moment that American women won the right to vote. While these developments
at first seem contradictory, they were in fact complementary. Despite
the achievement of suffrage, by 1920 (and for another half a century),
the fundamental social, economic, and sexual relations between American
men and women remained much the same as they had been in the nineteenth
century.
Scholars of women's history offer varying interpretations
of why the early U. S. women's-rights movement collapsed and the seeming
promise of the New Woman dissipated during the 1920s. Some attribute
the failure of first-wave feminism to women's reduced educational and
professional opportunities after World War I, and/or to the political
conservatism during the war that stamped out political radicalism in
the United States. Others blame female activists' sole focus on suffrage
at the expense of other, more important reforms that would have increased
women's economic power. Still others contend that women's "freedom"
was transformed by commercial interests into individual narcissism in
an age of mass-produced goods.
Whatever one's explanation, the waning of the New Woman
was strongly suggested, and most likely furthered, by the symbolic use
of women in popular visual culture. Popular-culture references to sex-role
reversal suggested real public discomfort about the possibility of change
in the relations between American men and women. In this sense, such
imagery was evidence of one part of the hegemonic process, in which
dissenting ideas are aired rather than suppressed. Various types of
media accomplished this not in isolation from one another, but together--creating
an iconology, a patterned shorthand, through which political and social
issues were debated.
Yet this imagery also illustrates the second part of the
hegemonic process through which the status quo is maintained: cultural
tensions were publicly discussed in such a way that they were ultimately
dismissed. The big woman-little man motif was a joke expressed through
"humorous" media that self-consciously diffused the explosive power
of its subject matter.
With the passing of the threat of the New Woman (and other
political challenges of the 1910s) came a similar passing of the broad
popularity of humorous media of the era. The slapstick comedy of early
silent film gave way to longer features on more complex themes, while
American humor magazines rapidly lost readership to broader-circulation
titles, such as The Saturday Evening Post and McCall's, that focused
on family life.
The big woman-little man motif departed magazines and
film during the 1920s, but it would resurface half a century later,
during the second wave of the American women's movement. On television,
which had taken over magazines' role as America's most popular mass
medium, shows featured a genie and witch who, with a nod of the head
or a twitch of the nose, could control their men's careers (and even
make them disappear). In films of the 1970s, Woody Allen created characters
quite similar to Chaplin's, insecure little men who pleaded in vain
with cooly glamorous women. As the likelihood of women's "liberation"
again seemed real, mass media again portrayed women as a danger to men--yet,
at the same time, spoofed that danger.
Conclusion
This article has attempted to closely examine a single
visual motif, which in itself may seem of only comic interest, as symbolic
of larger historical issues that were important in their day and that
have continuing meaning today. In doing so, it makes several suggestions
for communication scholars' future research: that in our analyses of
media texts, we consider humor as not merely relief, but social commentary
with lasting power; that we analyze the visual dimensions of media not
just as adjuncts to the written word, but as powerful communication
in and of itself; and that we look across different types of popular
culture for patterns that may offer valuable context for our studies
of specific media.
This analysis serves, in other words, as a case study
whose significance should be understood as broader than the particular
visual device it examines. It also calls for a way of re-visioning mass
media imagery as iconology that reveals deeper commentary on American
life--as a collective text through which historians might better understand
pivotal political and cultural moments of the past.
NOTES
1 Women comprised 35 percent of all college
students in 1890 and nearly half in 1920; the percentage of professionals
who were female rose from 35 to 44 percent between 1900 and 1920 (Nancy
F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism [New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1987], 148, 350n4). Back
2 John Higham, "The Reorientation of American
Culture in the 1890s," in Writing American History: Essays on Modern
Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 82. Back
3 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America:
A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 121. Kimmel notes
the rise in the proportion of female schoolteachers (from 66 percent
in 1870 to 80 percent in 1910) and quotes a report in which educators
worried about the effect of the "feminization" of schools. Back
4 Lois Banner, American Beauty (New York:
Knopf, 1983); Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of
Women in the Movies (New York: Penguin Books, 1973); Marjorie Rosen,
Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies & the American Dream (New York: Coward,
McCann & Geoghegan, 1973); Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea
and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press,
1987); Sumiko Higashi, Virgins, Vamps, and Flappers: The American Silent
Movie Heroine (Brattleboro, VT: Eden Press Women's Publications, 1978);
Alice Sheppard, Cartooning for Suffrage (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1994). Back
5 W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Images,
Text, Ideology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986);
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 9.
Back
6 Marion Marzolf, "American Studies--Ideas
for Media Historians?" Journalism History 5, no. 1 (Spring 1978), 15.
Back
7 In addition to the authors already mentioned,
such scholars include Nancy Cott, who in her history of early feminism
(The Grounding of Modern Feminism) notes the perceived "danger" of women
in this era; Michael Kimmel, who traces masculine ideals based on that
threat (Kimmel, Manhood in America); and Virginia Smith, who documents
the emergence of what she call "the funny little man"--the same image
discussed in this paper--in primarily European poster art of the 1930s.
Back
8 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison
Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence
& Wishart, 1971), 80, 182. Back
9 This was "the old Life," a humor magazine,
not the photojournalism magazine of that title launched in 1936. Back
10 Ernest Earnest, The American Eve in
Fact and Fiction, 1775- 1914 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1974), 229-230; Vera McHenry Klein, Charles Dana Gibson: A Study
of an Artist as Social Historian, M. A. Thesis, California State University,
Northridge (1978), xviii, xix, 119-120. Back
11 "Man and Woman: As They Were, As They
Are, As They Will Be," New York Evening World (November 30, 1910), reprinted
in Sarah J. Moore, "Making a Spectacle of Suffrage: The National Woman
Suffrage Pageant, 1913," Journal of American Culture 20, no. 1 (Spring
1997), 97. Back
12 Smith, The Funny Little Man, 33. Back
13 Higashi, Virgins, Vamps, and Flappers,
170. Back
14 C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The
American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), xi-xii.
Back
15 Kay Sloan, "Sexual Warfare in the
Silent Cinema: Comedies and Melodramas of Woman Suffragism," American
Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Fall 1981), 417, 421, 436. She cites, as sources
for these plot lines, the films Calino Marries A Suffragette (Gaumont,
1912), When Women Vote (Lubin, 1907), The Suffragettes' Revenge (Gaumont,
1914), and Suffragette Sheriff (Kalem, 1912). Back
16 Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape,
69. Back
17 Joe Goodwin and George W. Meyer, "We
All Fall" (New York: F. B. Haviland, n. d. [ca. 1910s]), Alice Marshall
Collection, The Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg. Back
18 Alfred Bryan and George W. Meyer,
"The High Cost of Loving" (New York: Leo Feist, n. d. [ca. 1910s]),
Alice Marshall Collection. Back
19 Jack Yellin, Ira Schuster, and Jack
Glogau, "Oh, What Wonderful Things One Little Girlie Can Do" (New York:
Leo Feist, 1917), Alice Marshall Collection. Back
20 James R. McGovern, "The American Woman's
Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals," The Journal of American
History 55, no. 2 (September 1968), 325. Back
21 Andrew B. Sterling and Harry Von Tilzer,
"Somebody Else Is Getting It" (New York: Harry Von Tilzer Music Publising
Co., 1912), Alice Marshall Collection. Back
22 Janice Marie Coco, John Sloan and
the Female Subject, Ph. D. diss., Cornell University (1993), 18. Rebecca
Zurier interprets these images as evidence of male radicals' maternal
fixation, their desire for their women to mother them--an "Oedipal mode"
that served to reinforce the messages of free-love radical feminists
who saw motherhood as the greatest possible glory for a woman (Art for
the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 [Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1988], 8). Back
23 George H. Douglas, The Smart Magazines:
50 Years of Literary Revelry and High Jinks at Vanity Fair, The New
Yorker, Life, Esquire, and The Smart Set (Hamden, CT: Archon Books,
1991), 45-46; David E. E. Sloane, "Life," in American Humor Magazines
and Comic Periodicals, ed. David E. E. Sloane (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1987), 141-153. Back
24 Not all of Phillips' work was satirical;
he drew "straight" pretty-girl covers for a variety of magazines, including
Liberty, Collier's, McCall's, The Ladies' Home Journal, The Woman's
Home Companion, The Saturday Evening Post, and Good Housekeeping. Phillips
did more than five dozen covers for the latter magazine. For more on
this artist, see Michael Schau, "All-American Girl": The Art of Coles
Phillips (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1975). Back
25 All titles of Phillips' works mentioned
here were printed underneath his illustrations on Life covers, even
though they do not appear in the figures that accompany this article.
Back
26 Figures 17 through 20 are examples
of Phillips' signature "fadeaway girl," a young woman whose dress or
hair blended into the color or pattern of her background. This technique
"served to both camouflage and reveal her," notes Walt Reed (Great American
Illustrators [New York: Abbeville Press, 1979], 116). Back
27 David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: The
Composers, the Songs, the Performers, and Their Times (New York: Donald
I. Fine, 1988). Back
28 Yellen, Schuster, and Glogau, "Oh,
What Wonderful Things One Little Girlie Can Do." Their "patriotic" verse
was: Some little girls take a mighty big chance, One little girl led
the soldiers of France, Many a girl gladly gives ev'rything, Just for
her Country, her Flag and her King. And Miss America she'll do the same,
For the old Red, White and Blue, In the hour of need, Oh, what wonderful
deeds You little girlies can do. Back
29 This poster campaign was coordinated
by Charles Dana Gibson, who headed the government-appointed "Division
of Pictorial Publicity" under George Creel's Committee on Public Information
during the war. Magazine artists who did poster work included James
Montgomery Flagg, Howard Chandler Christy, Harrison Fisher, J. C. Leyendecker,
Norman Rockwell, and Gibson himself. Back
30 During 1917 and 1918, more than 20
million copies of some 2,500 recruitment and homefront-fundraising posters
were displayed in stores, at theaters, in train stations, and at post
offices across the U. S. This artwork is reprinted and analyzed in Walton
Rawls, Wake Up, America! World War I and the American Poster (New York:
Abbeville Press, 1988) and Joseph Darracott, The First World War in
Posters (New York: Dover, 1974). Back
31 The combination of spirituality and
maternity was especially significant. Joseph Darracott attributes the
wide appeal of this poster to "religious associations with the Virgin
and Child" (The First World War in Posters, xxii). Back
32 Patricia Erens, "The Flapper: Hollywood's
First Liberated Woman," in Dancing Fools & Weary Blues: The Great Escape
of the Twenties, ed. Lawrence R. Broer and John D. Walther (Bowling
Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990), 36.
Back
33 Mary P. Ryan, "The Projection of a
New Womanhood: The Movie Moderns in the 1920's," in Decades of Discontent:
The Women's Movement, 1920-1940, ed. Lois Scharf and Joan M. Jensen
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 119. Back
34 Haskell, From Reverence to Rape, 45.
Back
35 Held's work and life are surveyed
in Shelley Armitage, John Held, Jr.: Illustrator of the Jazz Age (Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987). Back
36 For more on these varying, and sometimes
overlapping, arguments, see: Estelle B. Freedman, "The New Woman: Changing
Views of Women in the 1920s," Journal of American History 61, no. 2
(September 1974), 372-393; Leslie Fishbein, "The Failure of Feminism
in Greenwich Village before World War I," Women's Studies 9 (1982),
275-289; Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "Two Washes in the Morning and a Bridge
Party at Night: The American Housewife between the Wars," in Decades
of Discontent, 177-196; Martin Pumphrey, "The Flapper, the Housewife
and the Making of Modernity," Cultural Studies 1 (May 1987), 179-184;
and Rayna Rapp and ELlen Ross, "The Twenties' Backlash: Compulsory Heterosexuality,
the Consumer Family, and the Waning of Feminism," in Class Race and
Sex: The Dynamics of Control, ed. Amy Swerdlow and Hanna Lessinger (Boston:
G. K. Hall, 1983), 93-107. Some historians maintain that first-wave
feminism did not "fail," but quietly continued through social-reform
activism; see, for instance, J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social
Feminism in the 1920s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987) and
Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Back
37 Judge's circulation peaked at a quarter-million
in 1923; Life lost half of its 500,000 readers between 1920 and 1922,
and by 1929 its circulation had fallen to 113,000 (Douglas, The Smart
Magazines, 46; Sloane, "Life," 150). In 1936, Life ended its existence
as a humor magazine, and the title was bought and repositioned as a
photojournalism magazine by Henry Luce. Back
38 These themes are explored more fully
in books by two scholars of contemporary media: Susan Douglas, Where
the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times
Books, 1994) and Bonnie J. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media
Culture, and the Women's Movement Since 1970 (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). Douglas notes the way in which (as in
the 1910s) women's political power was cast in mass media in terms of
sexuality that could be softened through stereotyping and ridicule:
"Since viewers had been socialized to regard female sexuality as monstrous,
TV producers addressed the anxieties about letting it loose by domesticating
the monster, by making her pretty and . . . by playing the situation
for laughs" (126, 137). Back
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