List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Spectacular Modern Woman
1. The Status of the Woman-Object
Part I. The Modern Scene
2. The City Girl in the Metropolitan Scene
3. The Screen-Struck Girl in the Cinematic Scene
4. The Mannequin in the Commodity Scene
Part II. Modern Appearing Women
5. The Beauty Contestant in the Photographic Scene
6. The "Primitive" Woman in the Late Colonial Scene
7. The Flapper in the Heterosexual Leisure Scene
Conclusion: Feminine Identity and Visual Culture
Notes
Bibliography
Index
How the "modern appearing woman" inaugurated a new relation between female identity and visual culture.
Liz Conor completed her Ph.D. in women's studies at La Trobe University. She is an Australia Research Council postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English at the University of Melbourne.
Providing an overview of the evolution of the modern woman who
emerged in the 1920s, Conor (Univ. of Melbourne, Australia) shows
that woman emerging from underneath clothing—first her legs, then
her hands, and finally her torso. As modern women moved into the
city, these urbanized women became more of a spectacle because of
the availability of varied clothing styles and makeup—and images
designed to make them want to purchase more feminine objects. These
objects would allow them to cover and disguise unsightly and
unpleasant female characteristics: menstruation, body hair, body
odor. Not surprisingly, Conor focuses her discussion of colonialism
on Australia, where Aboriginal women were considered less beautiful
than white women. She ends with a discussion of the flapper as the
representation of the emancipated urban woman, an image that
pervaded the 1920s and came to represent the Jazz Age. Conor points
out that even when the time came for women to more toward
reinvention on their own terms, that emancipation continued to move
in the direction of a spectacle meant to attract the opposite sex.
Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections.
*California Institute of the Arts , 2005may CHOICE*
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