| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Martha H. Patterson. Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 230. $35.00.
Martha H. Patterson undertakes an engaging and thought-provoking analysis of the Gibson Girl, a ubiquitous figure in early twentieth-century U.S. popular culture. The Gibson Girl, Patterson argues, was both a visual icon and a literary trope through which women authors could explore, critique, and reinforce surprisingly varied ideas about "New Womanhood." Through her careful scholarship and deft synthesis, Patterson shows how "New Woman" authors, as well as the characters they created, exposed, and exploited the possibilities and anxieties raised by changing cultural attitudes about gender, race, ethnicity, science, and economics. These shifts, at whose implications the emblematic and overdetermined image of the Gibson Girl could only gesture, emerge in Patterson's cultural and textual analysis as major forces that marked the turn into the twentieth century and continue to reverberate today.	1
A discussion of the Gibson Girl's cultural influence frames Patterson's study of fiction by eight "New Woman" writers. Patterson constructs a somewhat slippery relationship between the Gibson Girl and the New Woman that reflects the complexity of both figures. Like the New Woman, the Gibson Girl was created, deployed, and consumed by a variety of artists, publishers, and readers, and Patterson makes a compelling case that many of the cultural anxieties of the period surrounding gender, consumerism, race, ethnicity, class, politics, and sexuality marked the production and reception of the Gibson Girl image and the diverse New Woman texts that emerged in this moment. After a chapter on the visual iconography of the Gibson Girl, Patterson explores the ways in which seven female authors engaged with the ideas the Gibson Girl embodied and disseminated. Each chapter analyzes the Gibson Girl/New Woman as she was refracted through the lenses of race (Margaret Murray Washington and Pauline Hopkins), economics (Edith Wharton), Asian ethnicity (Sui Sin Far), region (Mary Johnston and Ellen Glasgow), and sexuality (Willa Cather).	. . .

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