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The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media by Carolyn Kitch. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001, 264 pp., $45.00 hardcover, $18.95 paper.
Nell Brinkley and the New Woman in the Early Twentieth Century by Trina Robbins. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2001, 147 pp., $28.00 paper.
Feminist media critic Susan Douglas helped us understand and sort through the mass-mediated gender images of the 1950s through the 1980s in her marvelous book, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (1994). Carolyn Kitch, in her work The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media, does similar gender work for the much-less-scrutinized years 1895 to 1930, looking at images of women in magazine illustrations and advertisements for mass-circulation magazines. Trina Robbins, in her work, Nell Brinkley and the New Woman in the Early Twentieth Century hones in on one particular woman whose illustrations both simultaneously challenged and sometimes reified notions of the "American girl."
Kitch, who is a former senior editor of Good Housekeeping and associate editor of McCall's, does a careful job showing how 35 years of profound changes in the American landscape, from 1895-1930, are reflected and resisted by the girl on the magazine cover, "the first mass-media stereotype." The Gibson Girl. The Christy Girl. The Fisher Girl. The All-Americaii Girl. Upswept hairdos. Heart-shaped faces. Ivory skin. Pointed chins and wide brows. Here she is, gazing coyly into the reader's eyes or wrapped in the arms of a Gibson man-swept away on the beach or giggling with her female companions. Even as these girls at times challenged stereotypes-by graduating, rowing a canoe, repairing a car, or wearing a sailor's uniform-they remained the subject of the gaze and American hegemony. During some periods they reconfirmed the stereotypes. These magazine covers are not just about what it meant to be a female at the turn of the century; they revealed tensions and contradictions in the political and social climate, what it meant to be male, or African American, or working class.
They also can be read, as Kitch does, against a backdrop of suffrage, of white middle-class women demanding education, of leaving the private sphere for the...