Book Review

Canada and the United States

Before the days of television, mass circulation magazines were primary agents of normative gender imagery for most Americans. In their advertisements and, even more, on their covers, The Saturday Evening Post, McCall's, The Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and others provided a steady flow of highly visible images of men, women, and children. This book by Carolyn Kitch focuses on cover depictions of women from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, when magazine readership was at its peak and American society was experiencing the first wave of feminism and the appearance of the New Woman.

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Typical nineteenth-century magazines had modest circulation and staid and static covers. The new, mass-circulation magazines that emerged around 1890 sported two-color, then four-color, pictorial covers that changed with each issue. These covers, perhaps inspired by the contemporary popularity of the poster, were designed to attract attention, identify the character of the magazine, and give a note of novelty to each issue. They also led to a number of highly successful artistic careers. Most principal illustrators of the period figure in Kitch's account; many built their reputations on magazine covers. Well into the age of photography, artists continued to dominate cover illustration, revealing the imaginary or "what if" aspect of covers, dedicated more to depicting ideals than realities. Like the television series that later supplanted them and the greeting cards that flourished along side them, most magazine covers illustrated plausible fictions.

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