Displaying Women

This study explores the role of women in the representation of leisure in turn-of-the-century New York. To see and be seen was one of the fundamental principles in the aesthetic display of New York's fashionable society at the turn of the century. Women, in particular, embraced rituals of display, on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, in Central Park, at the Opera and in the fashionable uptown hotels and restaurants. The book argues for a reconsideration of the role of women in the bourgeois elite in 19th-century America. By contrasting multiple images of women drawn from newspapers, society and women's magazines, etiquette manuals and the New York fiction of Edith Wharton, the author offers an antidote to the long-standing tendency in women's history to overlook women whose class affiliations have put them in a position of power. The study seeks to make a contribution to social and cultural history, as well as to women's studies and literary criticism.