Women's Pages Research Articles

Book Review: Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space by Alice Fahs

Out on Assignment: Newspaper and the Making of Modern Public Space. Alice Fahs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 376 pp. $37.50 hbk.A rare photograph in Alice Fahs's book Out on Assignment shows five in late Victorian attire seated together in front of desk cluttered with papers and photographs and other newsroom miscellanea. Congenial and confident, the form tableau, with two leaning an elbow on the desk as they meet the camera's gaze, while another clutches the arm of the woman next to her in sisterly fashion and yet another holds kitten.Writers for the York World, the were all well-known in their day. What is remarkable about the photograph now, however, is that it calls into question historiographical assumptions about female journalists of the past who, if remembered at all, are presumed to have been brash and brassy tokens in field that was not simply male dominated but macho. The photograph illustrates Fahs's main point-that there was community of independent women writing for large urban newspapers and that together they created a new engagement between and public life, one centered around active participation and observation. Yet because of low regard for the sensational press, controversy as historical organizing principle, and sexism itself, all but few have been forgotten.Fahs, historian at the University of California, Irvine whose research examines the intersections of print culture, race, gender, and public space, provides an engaging and thorough look at many of these women, based on close reading of their work and other archival sources. Focusing on journalists working between roughly the mid-1880s through the 1910s, she shows how newspaper work was integral to increasing participation in the workplace generally, their expanded travel experiences, and their sense of adventure. As she writes, If the tropes of 'innocence' and an 'averted gaze' had structured Victorian selfhood, now 'experience' and an alert, forthright, all-seeing gaze reorganized ideas of what constituted appropriate knowledge for newspaper women.The book's organization underscores the interrelatedness between newspaper work and lives. The first chapter notes that between 1870 and 1900, the recorded number of working as reporters and editors increased from total of 35 to 2,193, and that did not include paid for specials on rates (freelancers). Many came to York from the South and West, driven by sense of adventure and the need for paid employment. The latter was particularly true during the economic downturn of the early 1890s, when such as Elizabeth Jordan found themselves supporting their families. Some were New Women-privileged, educated, and mostly white-while others were Bachelor Girls whose narratives focused on frugally feminine independent existence. Meanwhile, journalists such as Rose Pastor Stokes were working class, and African American such as Victoria Earle Matthews, Fannie Barrier Williams, Gertrude Bustill Mosell, and, of course, Ida B. Wells made name working for race papers. As group, newspaper were so visible that Margherita Arlina Hamm wrote regular column titled Among the Newspaper Women for the York Journalist beginning in 1891.Of course, many were relegated to the women's pages, the focus of Fahs's second chapter. Not surprisingly, many resented the segregation and limitation of women's topics (household hints, fashion, and recipes) and the ridicule of being called the hen coop. It is humiliating to do no work worth being taken seriously, wrote Anne O'Hagan, beauty editor of the York World. Moreover, some writers made healthy professional salary advising other to be domestic-a point that is troubling from feminist perspective. However, others used the space to explore progressive womanhood, using women's page space to create an ongoing public discussion that helped readers see new possibilities. …

Finding Edith Eaton

Since her critical recovery in the early 1980s, Maude has been celebrated as the first Asian North American writer and as an early, authentic Eurasian voice countering yellow peril discourse through sympathetic literary representations of diasporic Chinese subjects. Eaton, a half-Chinese, half-English writer who wrote under variants of the pseudonym Sin is best known for Mrs. Spring Fragrance, her 1912 collection of Chinatown stories, and for the stories and uncollected journalism reissued in the 1995 collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Recent discoveries of unknown works by made by Martha J. Cutter, Dominika Ferens, and June Howard have begun to complicate our scholarly understanding of both her biography and her oeuvre. Late one night in 2006, I typed Eaton's name and her best-known pseudonyms (Sui Sin Far and Sui Seen Fah) into the search bar of Google Books. Instantly, a link came up (one that is, alas, no longer there) to a story signed Edith Eaton that appeared in the April 1909 issue of Bohemian Magazine. Alaska Widow is not mentioned in Ferens's detailed bibliography, in Annette White-Parks's biography, or in the collection White-Parks co-edited with Amy Ling. It is also uncharacteristic of Eaton's works. Unlike the stories collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, many of which are set in North American Chinatowns and/or feature Eurasian children, this story takes up the cultural dynamic produced by the Alaska gold rush and the Spanish-American War, and it features a child born to a Native American mother abandoned by a Caucasian adventurer father who later dies in the Philippines. Alaska Widow is also unlike most of the works published after 1898 in that it is signed Edith Eaton without any parenthetical reference to her pen name. Because Alaska Widow is so different from other works by Eaton, it made me wonder: How many other unknown stories by exist, and how might they challenge scholars' understanding of the author? In the years actively published (1888-1914), US print culture changed profoundly. The number of newspapers and periodicals quadrupled. While nascent mass newspapers cultivated advertising dollars by becoming politically neutral and purportedly objective, many periodicals marketed themselves to niche audiences organized by class, age, gender, aesthetics, vocation, and other categories. Together Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Ind Other Writings have made available to scholars only about fifty (mostly Chinatown-themed) publications by Eaton. My archival research, combined with contributions from other scholars, including Cutter, Ferens, and Howard, has uncovered nearly two hundred additional texts of diverse genres, themes, styles, and politics published in more than forty different Canadian, United States, and Jamaican periodicals between 1888 and 1914. (1) In her early career, between 1888 and 1896, placed signed poetry and fiction in small-circulation Montreal publications such as the Dominion Illustrated and Metropolitan Magazine. She also filed regular, unsigned journalistic contributions (primarily about Montreal's Chinatown) and sent impassioned letters to the editor (signing herself E. E.) about racist policies toward the Chinese in Canada to two local newspapers: the Montreal Daily Witness and Montreal Daily Star. In addition, she filed stories about smallpox outbreaks, fires, and murders from northern Ontario, where she worked as a stenographer from 1892 to 1893. Between 1896 and 1897 she wrote daily society and women's page news for Jamaica's Gall's Daily Newsletter. But recognized early on that it would be almost impossible to earn a living publishing fiction in Canada. In 1896, therefore, she began to submit Chinatown stories, signed Sui Seen Far, to periodicals in the United States--the fin de siecle little magazines Fly Leaf and Lotus, as well as the regional emigration magazine Land of Sunshine and popular magazine Short Stories. …

Should She, or Shouldn't She, Pursue a Career in Journalism?

This qualitative study uses textual analysis and the lens of true womanhood to analyze twenty-eight articles by or about female journalists that appeared in U.S. magazines from 1887 to 1930. The research argues that the nineteenth-century characteristics that defined true womanhood—purity, piety, domesticity, and submissiveness—were reimagined in order to encourage—or discourage—white women from pursuing a career in journalism. Discussions were framed in terms of three narratives—didactic, cautionary, and celebratory—and this may have affected the way that women viewed their career and relationships with male and female colleagues The ensuing discourse worked to protect the male-dominated newsroom and contain aspiring female journalists by preventing their advancement beyond society reporting and the women's pages.

‘I shut my eyes and picture our place’: gardens, farm landscapes and working-class dreams in 1930s–1940s south-eastern Australia

In spring 1937, ‘Peanuts’ wrote to the ‘Women's Bureau’ of the Weekly Times, a rural newspaper in south-eastern Australia: I would love to take you folk who are not fortunate enough to live in the ...

Women's place at the Fourth Estate: Constraints on voice, text, and topic

In this paper I examine the position of women as news reporters and editors – as journalistic authors and animators – in relation to their male counterparts, and consider changes in news coverage as their numbers increased in the newsroom over the past 50 years. I compare profession-internal guidelines which encapsulate gender ideologies pervasive in the larger culture – starting with a popular 1959 career guide – alongside journalistic genre forms, using as specific examples ‘women's pages’ and ‘page one’ in the New York Times. The change from a backgrounded position on the ‘women's pages’ to greater visibility in more prestigeful news contexts is indexed through macropragmatic factors such as byline (who is entitled to be recognized by name) and story topic (what counts as salient in the journalist's world), both of which can be viewed in terms of their nonreferential index value within the community of journalists. Profession-internal critiques suggest that despite increased opportunities for women over time, the place of women at the Fourth Estate is still limited – and the discourse-level evidence supports that, affording a potential explanation for more global gender disparities in news media coverage.

Dorothy Jurney

Dorothy Jurney was a groundbreaking women's page editor at several newspapers and a long-time advocate for women in journalism. She began her career during the depression after graduating from Northwestern University, and after working on the news side of newspapers during World War II, she moved back to the women's section. She went on to redefine the content of the sections at the Miami Herald and the Detroit News Press and was called the “godmother of the transformation of the women's page” by the Washington Press Club Foundation. She retired as an assistant managing editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1975 and then conducted several studies on the lack of women in positions of power at newspapers. Thus, she was a “first” in a number of areas although she was denied numerous opportunities because of her gender.

The Burden of Being First: Carol Sutton and the Courier-Journal

Carol Sutton was a groundbreaking women's page editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal in the 1960s. She went on to become the first female managing editor of a major metropolitan daily newspaper. It led to her being named one of Time magazine's women of the year in 1976. After less than two years as the managing editor, she was removed from the position but remained at the newspaper. She then worked on minority recruitment projects.

Conrad's Critique of the Serial Romance: Chance and The Rover

Conrad's Critique of the Serial RomanceChance and The Rover Susan Jones Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 10. The New York Herald, 21 January 1912, Magazine Section, p.1. [End Page 288] It has become a critical commonplace to refer to the success of Chance (1913) as a turning point in Joseph Conrad's career as a writer. The novel secured his reputation in the United States and brought him economic success for the first time in his life. Chance's serialization in the women's pages of the Sunday Magazine section of the New York Herald (see figure 10) between January and June 1912 was preceded by a lively marketing campaign that advertised its author's promise to write especially for women. Installments of the serial text were sandwiched between advertisements for hair care, dress design, and domestic appliances; articles on the suffragist movement; and marriage schools for young ladies. The serial's accommodation to this context was confirmed by its narrative focus upon a woman and its several references to contemporary feminist ideas, while the choice of the English countryside and London as settings underscored Conrad's desire to change the public's image of him as a writer of the sea exclusively. The book versions of Chance were a roaring success, published first by Methuen in London in 1913 and then by Doubleday in the United States in 1914, where it was aggressively marketed by Alfred Knopf (see Karl 746–47). In May 1914 a Chicago bookseller who had never previously taken more than two hundred orders for a Conrad novel received orders for twelve hundred copies.1 The phenomenon has baffled modern critics, who mourn the fact that Conrad found popularity in his lifetime, not with the protomodernist Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim, but with what they consider an inferior romance for women. "Why should Chance, of all his novels, have been so successful?" asks Cedric Watts (84). By way of answer, Watts [End Page 289] proposes that Conrad's attempt to write a popular romance resulted in a text that, though weak, was far from populist and whose success was entirely due to American-style marketing for women. Taking issue with this view, the following essay argues that a close examination of the manuscript, serial, and typescript revisions for the book version reveals both the experimental nature of Chance and the complexity of Conrad's resistance to the demands of market forces.2 I have argued elsewhere that in order to understand Chance fully it is necessary to look closely at the transition from manuscript to serial, during which Conrad's text metamorphosed from a short sea tale into a novel-length romance.3 Writing to Pinker in June 1913, Conrad himself suggested a rift in the continuity of subject matter between the original sea tale and the topical romance, which "was written in 1907 and the rest of the novel in 1911–12. And it did not belong to that novel—but to some other novel which will never be written now."4 While Chance's subject matter did indeed change at the serial stage, this essay focuses on the later stages of the text's evolution. The most radical changes to Chance, it will be seen, were made rapidly during the last revisions from serial to book, in an intense period of writing that took place between 11 May and 18 June 1913.5 At this time, Conrad's innovations in the narratorial framing of the story led him to a new and recognizably modernist interpretation of romance, one that incorporates a critique of serialization itself. Although Conrad courted popular journals for the serialization of his late works, the texts he offered them can be seen to make a double critique of the visual content and popularist mode of such magazines. First, he draws attention to the reductive stereotyping of women in the illustrations that accompanied both serial fiction and advertisements. In Harper's Magazine or the Pictorial Review, writers such as Thomas Hardy and Conrad appeared alongside sentimental romances by Baroness Orzcy, Marjorie Bowen, or Marie Corelli, installments of which were often framed by beauty and fashion...

Forgotten Feminist: Women's Page Editor Maggie Savoy and the Growth of Women's Liberation Awareness in Los Angeles

Forgotten Feminist: Women's Page Editor Maggie Savoy and the Growth of Women's Liberation Awareness in Los Angeles

Science, Advocacy, and "The Sacred and Intimate Things of Life": Representing Motherhood as a Progressive Era Cause in Women's Magazines

Science, Advocacy, and "The Sacred and Intimate Things of Life":Representing Motherhood as a Progressive Era Cause in Women's Magazines Jennifer Burek Pierce (bio) Motherhood has a long tradition of sentimentality in the United States and an even longer tradition of politicization. These perspectives on motherhood created a tension that played out on the pages of women's magazines during the Progressive Era. During these years, reformers called attention to little acknowledged risks involved in childbearing. Dissonance between the real and the idealized was strongly reflected in coverage of the Maternity and Infancy Act of 1921, a measure designed to reduce recently-documented death rates for pregnant women and new-born children.1 Advocates for the Act contrasted the number of preventable deaths and injuries resulting from childbirth with the nation's prosperity and benevolence in the face of other compelling needs.2 A continuing stream of articles about women's reproductive health, in tandem with reform efforts, focused public attention on what had been a personal matter. Motherhood, popularly understood as the individual effort of caring for one's own children and described before Congress as one of "the sacred and intimate things of life,"3 acquired a collective aspect that united women to lobby for government aid. As the maternal became political, women's magazines reflected a tension between popular romanticized notions of motherhood and personal realities of child bearing, changing the ways these periodicals engaged their readership. Even as mass circulation women's magazines featured Jessie Willcox Smith's idyllic domestic images on their covers, their pages told stories of women's fatal hemorrhages and infections that cost the lives or health of their children. Conversely, specialty publications created to support political aims began to focus on mothering, a theme that had not been part of their discourse in preceding years. As they asked [End Page 69] their readers to reconsider the experience of motherhood, women's magazines published articles and images that engaged issues differently than they had before. Politics and the legislative process began to feature in mass circulation magazines, while advocacy-oriented titles came to acknowledge the emotional associations of motherhood in their pages. These alterations were neither instantaneous nor absolute. Instead, these editorial shifts constitute tangible evidence of the alliances women were forming in support of maternal health legislation. Activism on behalf of the Maternity and Infancy Act brought together suffragists and club women, many of whom would have been in different political camps in the debate over suffrage. This convergence of their readerships' views meant women's magazines would, if not actually close the gap between differing editorial directions, then at least begin to resemble one another more nearly in their coverage of this issue. Simultaneously feminine and feminist in their reportorial stances, women's magazines advocated for legislation to redress the risks inherent in reproduction before pre-natal care, antibiotics, health insurance, or hospital births. Mass circulation and specialty periodicals alike during the 1920s promoted the issue of maternal health, each adapting their characteristic tenor to this new subject. This adaptation involved negotiating tensions among magazine identity, motherhood's cultural resonances, and women's recently gained right to vote. The effects of that negotiation varied by publication venue, with a popular title like Good Housekeeping ardently urging activism and the militant Woman Citizen softening its image, both invoking motherhood as a newly political matter. These periodicals aligned in their re-creation of maternity as a public and scientific matter, altering their own identities as they sought to change the conditions in which women gave birth and raised their children. Motherhood and Magazines Transformed: Sites of Activism in Print Women's magazines have been thought to mirror their times rather than beckon their readers toward more egalitarian futures, but this perspective is complicated by Progressive Era publications on maternal and child health. Most historiography of popular women's magazines has emphasized the conventional content of women's periodicals.4 A focus on children and family, albeit complicated by unacknowledged ideologies, is sometimes cited as exemplifying this orientation.5 Commonly criticized as alike in their presentations of sentimental, status quo, or consumer-oriented material, American women's magazines from the early twentieth...

‘Women's pages’ in Kenya's newspapers: implications for the country's development

Newspapers in Kenya are written for men, and about the affairs of men, whereas women remain invisible in relation to the serious issues of the day. But there have been efforts to cover women's issues, and to sell newspapers to Kenyan women. These have taken the form of having separate and detached ‘women's pages’ slotted into the main newspapers. The supplements are filled with stereotyped roles of domesticity, beauty, and fantasy, thus denying women's productive role in society. This article analyses the negative and stereotyped portrayal of women in the Kenyan print media, and considers what implications this has for the country's development.

Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric: Images of Women in American Yiddish Socialist Dailies, 1918–1922

Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric:Images of Women in American Yiddish Socialist Dailies, 1918–1922 Rachel Rojanski (bio) The Yiddish press in the United States came into existence with the beginning of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe and soon became, like any other foreign language press, a very important immigrant institution. 1 It encompassed a wide range of newspapers and periodicals, including not only monthlies and weeklies but also dailies, several of which were already appearing at the turn of the century. Almost all the Yiddish dailies reflected their own ideological tendency, ranging from Orthodox to Zionist to socialist, and they were, to some extent, intended to advance the interests of these groups and parties and to support their political struggles.2 Nonetheless, scholars—following the pioneering studies of Robert E. Park and Mordechai Soltes—have largely agreed that Yiddish newspapers in the United States were not merely a tool to advance various ideologies; they were also important agents of acculturation and Americanization for Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe.3 At the end of World War I, by which time Jewish immigration to the United States had begun its decline, there were five Yiddish dailies in the United States. Each attempted in its own way to deal with all aspects of Jewish immigrant life: politics, culture, social and economic activities, and even family matters. They aspired to help create the profile of the American Jew and to shape the image of Jewish immigrant society. Three important figures in the American Yiddish world—the poet Jacob Glatstein, the journalist and critic Shmuel Niger, and the journalist and editor Hillel Rogof—eloquently (though somewhat nostalgically) recalled these aims in the opening essay to a book marking the seventy-fifth anniversary [End Page 329] of the Yiddish press in the United States: "The Yiddish newspaper gave the immigrant a face. It made him a socialist, a Zionist, or a supporter of diaspora nationalism. But generally it made him a proud American Jew. . . . The newspaper in Yiddish was the stock market of ideas and of ideals. It shaped Jewish life."4 Thus, an examination of how the Yiddish press discussed Jewish women, the ways in which it tried to appeal to them and to mold their image, will reveal how it viewed their place and their roles in eastern European Jewish immigrant society in the United States and will also tell us much about their status in that society. In the following pages, I will examine the image of immigrant women in the Yiddish socialist dailies in the United States as they were depicted in four different arenas: the public sphere, the workplace, the world of writing, and the family. The dailies I will discuss are the two socialist newspapers: Di tsayt, published from August 1920 to April 1922 by the Labor Zionist movement, Poalei Zion; and the much more successful Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward), founded in 1897, which was the most important Yiddish newspaper in the United States and also the most widely circulated foreign language newspaper in the country.5 I have chosen to discuss these dailies both because their editors and writers exerted a strong influence on the Jewish public scene, adhering to progressive, liberal views and using the papers to achieve public and political aims, and because, unlike the other Yiddish dailies, they had special pages for women. Since it is impossible to draw a full comparison between these two papers because of Di tsayt's short life, the bulk of material presented is drawn from the Forverts with relevant insights from Di tsayt. Since they published regular women's pages dealing with a range of issues beyond simple housekeeping and health matters, both socialist dailies viewed the status of Jewish women in the spirit of the progressive ideologies they represented. Yet, the content of the women's pages, and especially their rhetoric, also had a great deal in common with the view of women's status and role prevalent in what was still a rather conservative eastern European Jewish immigrant society.6 In order to explain this, [End Page 330] I shall argue that although the Yiddish press used traditional images of Jewish women as mothers and housewives, its portrayal...

Modernism and the Marketplace: The Case of Conrad's Chance

This essay addresses the issue of modernism's troubled but dependent relationship to periodical marketing. It extends current critical perspectives by emphasising the role of textual studies in recovering the important transformation of modernist fiction from serial to book versions of the text. Focussing on Joseph Conrad's first economically successful novel, Chance, which initially appeared in serial form in the women's pages of the New York Herald Sunday Magazine in 1912, the essay shows how Conrad's fundamental revisions from serial to book (1913) contributed to its status as modernist romance. The discussion illustrates Conrad's complex response to feminist politics in this novel, his ironisation of the reductive homogeneity of popular visual representations of women, and his questioning of the relationship between gender and genre. The essay argues that in the revisions for the book Conrad poised the finished text between marketable romance and a critique of the serial romance itself.

Resources for Telling the Stories of Contemporary Women's Page Editors

This is the eighth in a series of articles on archival collections of interest to mass communication historians. Readers of Journalism History are invited to suggest collections that they would like to see appear in future articles, and the editors would welcome volunteers to write such articles.

Newspapers' transition from women's to style pages

After nearly a century of publishing explicitly named women's pages, US newspapers starting in 1969 and into the 1970s began renaming them ‘style’ or ‘lifestyle’ sections, theoretically meaning they were for a general audience. This research investigates industry discourse during this time to determine what those in newsrooms were thinking about this transition. Seventy-two articles from three newspaper trade publications from 1969 through 1975 reveal that editors and reporters were most concerned with including serious content in these sections and unconcerned with the names of the sections. In fact the women editors of these style pages, who dominated the discourse, indicated that even after renaming the sections industry insiders thought of them as for and about women. The analysis also revealed that newsroom constraints, particularly those placed on lower level staff by male editors, prevented women editors of these women's/style sections from constructing the pages they desired.

Uptake and genre: The Canadian reception of suffrage militancy

Synopsis From 1909 onward, the Canadian suffrage debate was heavily influenced by reports on suffrage militancy from Great Britain and the United States. Militancy played an influential role in Canadian suffrage history not through its practice–there was no Canadian militant campaign–but through an ongoing discussion of its meaning. Using Anne Freadman's notions of genre and uptake, this paper analyzes the discursive uptake of suffrage militancy—from news reports on front pages, to commentary on women's pages, to reviews of Emmeline Pankhurst's Canadian speaking engagements. The Canadian debate about militancy is a fertile site for drawing out the roles of genre and uptake in the political positioning of both suffragists and suffrage sceptics. Talk about militancy serves as a way to regulate the uptake of this particular genre of political action, whereby both sides tended to share the optimistic view that Canadian suffragists where not yet in need of militancy.

The Penney-Missouri Awards

This article examines the Penney-Missouri Awards competition, which was meant to raise the standards of women's pages by recognizing the sections that went beyond traditional content. Using interviews to look at the competition's history as well as framing analysis to examine the content of winning submissions, the study's findings over the period from 1960 to 1971 support a revision in the history of women's pages. While traditional women's pages filled with society, home, and wedding news appeared in many newspapers, some sections were progressive in their content and their writing style. Recognizing the differences among women's page editors at various newspapers helps to strip away the invisibility of women in journalism history and stresses the important role played by them in pressing for change.

Una experiencia de defensa de la salud en violencia contra las mujeres

The development of political responses to a problem needs for its construction as a social problem of a continuous epidemiological surveillance system available for the affected public and key decision makers. A women's health advocacy net based initiative was launched in November 2003. Every month the epidemic index of deaths (ratio of deaths in that month and median of deaths occurring the previous 5 years) due to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is published in a section called «Violence Alert» of e-leusis.net a women's web page. The objective was giving visibility to information contributing to shape the problem. from a population perspective. The initiative was introduced at the beginning to journalists and every month a press release with the index results and a comment on it is circulated. More than half of the months studied (January 2003-December 2004) were epidemic epidemic indexb ≥ 1.25). «Violence alert» has received 2330 visits since then, an average of 65 visits per week. The page attracted media coverage from radio, TV and newspapers.

The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (review)

Reviewed by: The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan Sally A. Hastings (bio) The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan. By Barbara Sato. Duke University Press, Durham, 2003. xiv, 241 pages. $59.95, cloth; $19.95, paper. Barbara Sato sets out to examine three new types of urban women—the modern girl, the housewife, and the professional working woman—that appeared in magazines, books, and movies of the interwar years, most especially in mass women's magazines. The modern girl, an icon of consumerism, sported bobbed hair and short skirts in advertisements for beer, wine, and cosmetics and figured prominently in the writings of leftist critics. The self-motivated middle-class housewife found herself reflected in the articles on family, cooking, housework, and clothing in the pages of women's magazines, but such publications also contained fiction and confessional articles that allowed her to imagine her life with romance and glamour. The professional working women in department stores and offices earned wages and operated in public rather than domestic space. In distilling her rich knowledge of interwar culture and her considerable grasp of secondary and theoretical literature into the limited space of a book, Sato uses a tight framework of a foundational essay and three substantive chapters, one on each of her three types of women, sandwiched between the brief introduction and the conclusion. The intersection of her immensely rich material with the finite structure of a book generates a number of contradictions and ambiguities. She writes about images of the feminine, representations of Japanese women, disparate discourses, and lively debates. Her conclusions, however, are about how the changes portended by the three types of imagined urban women affected the actions and thoughts of actual middle-class women. The contradictions and ambiguities arise from the conflation of the imagined with the actual, men's ideals with women's aspirations. Contradictions and ambiguities have, of course, the inherent potential to generate creative resolutions. Despite the seeming mismatch between evidence and conclusion, Sato succeeds in adding significantly to our understanding of gender in interwar culture. The ambiguities begin with the title. I could find no instance in the introduction or the first chapter of the three words "new Japanese woman" occurring in sequence. Careful reading suggests that Sato considers the "new" Japanese woman to be a challenge to the "Japanese woman," the prevailing monolithic stereotype of domestic gentleness. The new Japanese woman seems to share some characteristics with the so-called modern woman. Sato discusses in some detail the "new woman," a term that connoted a particular [End Page 499] group of well-educated literary women in the opening years of the twentieth century. Sato's primary subject, however, is a far broader range of women who lived somewhat later, after World War I rather than before. A number of activist women, including Hiratsuka Raichō, proudly identified with the status of "new woman." Were there women in the interwar years who self-identified as "new Japanese women"? Or is the title of the book a newly coined term? Ambiguities are apparent in the visual images, certainly among the riches of the book. There are four color plates, each showing an artist's rendition of an ideal woman. Three are from the covers of women's magazines and one is from an advertisement for a light bulb. The other 29 images include cartoons and photographs as well as additional material from women's magazines and advertisements. The four cartoons document a somewhat derisive male gaze. The stylized representation of women on magazine covers and in advertisements, often the products of male activity, were images designed to sell products to women and thus reveal what merchants of popular culture imagined women wanted to be—stylish, well coifed, perfectly made up, and bedecked with elegant jewelry. In the photographs, we see department stores, streets, and movie theaters that are identified by name, but the women who stare back at us from the page remain merely anonymous representations of types of women: modern girls, dance-hall dancers, showgirls, clerks, bus girls, elevator girls, and streetcar girls. The anonymity of the women in photographs parallels the absence of names...

Love at First Sight: The Velocity of Victorian Heterosexuality

Love at First Sight:The Velocity of Victorian Heterosexuality Christopher Matthews (bio) In mainstream twentieth-century culture, the phenomenon of love at first sight—as romantic trope, Hollywood staple, biochemical wonder—has resided squarely in the realm of what we might call a feminine epistemology. In his 1955 study of the "logical forms" people use to justify their actions, philosopher E. A. Gellner noticed that the "question [of] whether there is such a thing as 'love at first sight'" was "frequently and with interest discussed in the pages of women's journals"—if, that is, his "reading in dentists' waiting rooms [was] at all representative" (158). Mustering a masculine, vaguely scientific authority, Gellner bemoans the naivete of treating the topic as "an empirical question" (158) and, modeling the correct approach, demonstrates that on logical grounds love at first sight could never really exist. Not surprisingly, despite such a confident closing of the case, the culture of "women's journals" has continued to proliferate theories about love at first sight, in articles such as "Love at First Sight," "The Truth about Love at First Sight," and "Love at First Sight: Does It Really Exist?" in Glamour, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, Seventeen, and Teen throughout the 1980s and 1990s.1 Like romance generally, a familiarity with love at first sight has been marketed to (implicitly heterosexual) women as a necessity for emotional and sexual literacy: women's expertise at femininity, such marketing implies, requires a mastery of both the pleasurable romantic drama and the tricky empirical problems of acquiring a male mate. In the modern division of sexual labor, women are still addressed en masse as amateur specialists of the heart, practicing an inconsequential mastery in the antechambers of male professionalism. If we were to seek this mastery's genealogy, we might expect to arrive somewhere near the Victorian drawing room, that segregated space of women's discourse. But in nineteenth-century Britain, love at first sight in fact emerged as a question of masculine epistemology and sexuality. Understood as a specifically male experience of desire for [End Page 425] women, the pleasures and dangers of such love required men's attention, their affirmation or skepticism. While never a centerpiece of debate within the professions, love at first sight nonetheless gained a certain currency, and an aura of legitimacy, within male-centered segments of literary and visual arts culture of the mid-century—a culture that became an important resource for later narratives of scientific and psychological exploration. Beginning in the 1840s, love at first sight emerged as a valorized trope, particularly in compact literary and visual forms—lyric poetry, short fiction, and narrative painting—that could accommodate and/or mirror the accelerated intimacy of love at first sight. Short stories entitled "Love at First Sight," "The First Time I Saw Her," or "A First Love," as well as essays entitled "Falling in Love" and "Modern Love," appeared in major British and American periodicals from the 1840s to the 1880s.2 Those decades saw love at first sight represented similarly in poetry, from Arthur Hugh Clough's The Bothie of Toper-Na-Fuosich (1848) and "Natura Naturans" (1849) to Henry Austin Dobson's "Incognita" (1866) and Coventry Patmore's "The Girls of All Periods" (1878), as well as in Abraham Solomon's paintings entitled First Class—The Meeting: "And at First Meeting Loved" (1854).3 While such works typically put on display the irresistibly modest woman in public, the real object of their attention is the nature of the development, responsiveness, and moral valence of male desire. The attractive woman is not necessarily a static object—these narratives in part dramatize the procedures and ethics of sexual attraction between men and women—but mid-century portrayals of love at first sight most directly explore and celebrate the spectacle of male heterosexual desire, its origins and processes. Examining a shift from skepticism to valorization over the course of the century, I will argue that the trope of mid-century love at first sight constructs male heterosexuality as a performance of simultaneously instinctual and moral passion. Jeffrey Weeks has written of "the difficulty of finding either a noun or an adjective to act as...