The Gibson Girl Goes to College: Popular Culture and Women's Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920

Abstract

DURING THE PROGRESSIVE ERA, NATIONAL MAGAZINES DEPICTED AMERICAN women as beautiful, charming, and fashionable, praising their health, athletic abilities, and intelligence. They celebrated these Women in the drawings and short stories of Charles Dana Gibson, Howard Chandler Christy, and Harrison Fisher. Artists portrayed the as tall, long-legged and graceful, with upswept hair, faintly pink cheeks, a provocative eye, and a cool, detached air. Their creation, the Gibson Girl, was a modern woman, unencumbered by bustles or convention. As Christy put it, the American girl ceased, finally, to be a hothouse flower. Furthermore, the was simply a type of Gibson Girl: lively, healthy, and energetic-part of the life cycle of American womanhood. Thus characterized, the educated female in the Progressive Era had seemingly travelled a long way from the days of her predecessor, the mannish college woman of the first generation of graduates, 1865-1890. By the turn of the century, women could have both higher education and social approval, symbolized by the connection of college life with the Gibson Girl, an American beauty.' Analysis of articles, features, and short stories in a wide range of periodicals, however, reveals a far less positive picture of women's higher education between 1890 and 1920. As Lois Banner has pointed out, the Gibson Girl was actually a conservative image of American womanhood. Her use in connection with girls demonstrated social anxieties about khe New Woman of the twentieth century. In identifying twentieth-century college women with Gibson Girls, popular culture seriously distorted both campus and postgraduate realities but quite accurately demonstrated the consternation with which most Americans regarded women's changing status. The heated controversy over women's higher education in the nineteenth century and the high visibility and achievements of the first women graduates raised