The Girl On The Magazine Cover: The Origins Of Visual Stereotypes In American Mass Media

The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media

From the Gibson Girl to the flapper, from the vamp to the New Woman, Carolyn Kitch traces mass media images of women to their historical roots on magazine covers, unveiling the origins of gender stereotypes in early-twentieth-century American culture.Kitch examines the years from 1895 to 1930 as a time when the first wave of feminism intersected with the rise of new technologies and media for the reproduction and dissemination of visual images. Access to suffrage, higher education, the professions, and contraception broadened women's opportunities, but the images found on magazine covers emphasized the role of women as consumers: suffrage was reduced to spending, sexuality to sexiness, and a collective women's movement to individual choices of personal style. In the 1920s, Kitch argues, the political prominence of the New Woman dissipated, but her visual image pervaded print media. With seventy-five photographs of cover art by the era's most popular illustrators, The Girl on the Magazine Cover shows how these images created a visual vocabulary for understanding femininity and masculinity, as well as class status. Through this iconic process, magazines helped set cultural norms for women, for men, and for what it meant to be an American, Kitch contends. From Library Journal It seems that each time the American woman begins to veer toward feminism, mainstream magazines put her back in her "proper" place, portraying her as wife, mother, and consumer. Kitch (journalism, Temple Univ.) traces the early development of this trend, beginning in the 1890s with Alice Barber Stephens's "American Woman" series and ending 30 years later with the ideal families depicted by Norman Rockwell and Jessie Willcox Smith. In between, she considers such influential icons as the flapper, the vamp, the nurse, the "girl graduate," and Charles Dana Gibson's eponymous representation of womanhood, who is tellingly called a girl, not a woman. Kitch places each of these stereotypes in context, not just historically but also within the avowed agenda of the artist or editor. In the last chapter, she discusses the dual role of prominent illustrators who worked simultaneously for magazines and advertisers; this shared imagery, Kitch asserts, "created a blueprint for the routine blurring of editorial and advertising messages in mass media." This engaging, insightful study is recommended for most libraries. Susan M. Colowick, North Olympic Lib. Syst., Port Angeles, WA Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review "[An] engaging, insightful study." -- Library Journal Review Kitch's book examines a wide variety of stereotypical images of womanhood. Her copious knowledge of the publishing industry and her thought-provoking argument make this book a must-read for anyone interested in media or gender studies. This unusually well-crafted book will hold the attention of a wide audience, and belongs in all academic and public libraries.--ChoiceThrough her insightful readings of cover art from magazines . . . Kitch illuminates a fascinating and important moment in American cultural history, when national advertising combined with national magazines to articulate and commercialize a new and uniquely American sense of identity. . . . Kitch has seamlessly integrated her historical analysis of visual stereotypes with a wide range of relevant theoretical perspectives, including feminist theory, gender studies, art history, and the cultural history of advertising. . . . Kitch's analysis offers a fresh perspective on the well-worn terrain of women's service magazines.--Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly[A] thoughtful and eminently readable account of how women fared in this once popular form of American culture.--American Historical ReviewCarolyn Kitch's book represents a valuable new way of looking at and understanding the significance of images of women in mass circulation magazines. Written in a lucid, enter