Carolyn Kitch
Autor von The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media
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Carolyn Kitch is associate professor of journalism at Temple University and author of The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media
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Though it reads more like a scholarly book, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Carolyn Kitch notes which social changes may have influenced the development of the cover girl image between 1890s and 1930s. Especially interesting is the piece on the origin of an image of young skinny girl who uses her sexual charms to get material gifts. The book traces societal attitudes to the place of women in the public sphere, motherhood, female sexuality and gender roles.
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Examining the 1890s, Kitch writes, “As the American Woman’s sphere widened and her opportunities grew in real life, she was increasingly portrayed in popular culture as a girl. In the new century, a group of male illustrators would rise to fame and fortune by showing the public what that new American Girl looked like” (pg. 36). Summarizing the era of the Gibson Girl, Kitch writes, “If magazine messages about a young woman’s ‘place’ (figurative and literal) in society were mixed during the first decade of the twentieth century, they were extremely complicated by the second” (pg. 54). Kitch writes, “In its [the twentieth century’s] second decade – the time when the word ‘vamp’ was first applied to women – the image of the bad woman prevailed in American popular culture, emerging simultaneously in magazine art and the new medium of film” (pg. 56). Kitch turns to images of men, writing, “Building that man’s confidence – and resolving the crisis of masculinity, a paradox in which the business world that supported the Post made its reader feel small – was the primary goal of editor George Horace Lorimer” (pg. 69).
Kitch writes of images from the war, “World War I posters are well-traveled territory in media history research and in popular memory of twentieth-century visual communication. What is rarely discussed, however, is the extend to which their gender-specific messages (about both femininity and masculinity) were informed specifically by magazine art” (pg. 101-102). She continues, “They were a powerful invocation of visual icons whose meaning was already in place” (pg. 102). Turning to the postwar years, Kitch writes, “The flapper was an ordinary woman having an extraordinary moment, one that was made possibly by the new morality of a postwar youth culture and by leisure products” (pg. 121). Further, “The symbol of the flapper represented the real life experience of only some American youth, yet the idea of her spread quickly across the country. In the decade that began with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, she redefined American women’s freedom as sexual rather than political” (pg. 122).
Discussing the power of image, Kitch writes, “Many readers could not tell the difference between editorial and advertising pages” (pg. 160). Further, “During this era photography was used to document ideas, people, and products, while illustration was used to idealize them. [Jessie Willcox] Smith’s work for Kodak was evidence of this tactic – even when the idealized product was a camera!” (pg. 169). In this way, “viewed collectively and in hindsight, the advertising art created by the era’s major illustrators underscores the importance of commercial context in analyzing media imagery” (pg. 181).… (mehr)