Spectacular Modern Woman

Liz Conor completed her Ph.D. in women's studies at La Trobe University. She is an Australia Research Council postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English at the University of Melbourne.

• List of IllustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Spectacular Modern Woman1. The Status of the Woman-ObjectPart I. The Modern Scene2. The City Girl in the Metropolitan Scene3. The Screen-Struck Girl in the Cinematic Scene4. The Mannequin in the Commodity ScenePart II. Modern Appearing Women5. The Beauty Contestant in the Photographic Scene6. The "Primitive" Woman in the Late Colonial Scene7. The Flapper in the Heterosexual Leisure SceneConclusion: Feminine Identity and Visual CultureNotesBibliographyIndex

"Providing an overview of the evolution of the modern woman who emerged in the 1920s, Conor (Univ. of Melbourne, Australia) shows that woman emerging from underneath clothing—first her legs, then her hands, and finally her torso. As modern women moved into the city, these urbanized women became more of a spectacle because of the availability of varied clothing styles and makeup—and images designed to make them want to purchase more feminine objects. These objects would allow them to cover and disguise unsightly and unpleasant female characteristics: menstruation, body hair, body odor. Not surprisingly, Conor focuses her discussion of colonialism on Australia, where Aboriginal women were considered less beautiful than white women. She ends with a discussion of the flapper as the representation of the emancipated urban woman, an image that pervaded the 1920s and came to represent the Jazz Age. Conor points out that even when the time came for women to more toward reinvention on their own terms, that emancipation continued to move in the direction of a spectacle meant to attract the opposite sex. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections."—K. Gale, California Institute of the Arts , 2005may CHOICE