| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media. By Carolyn Kitch. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xiv, 252 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2653-7. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-4978-2.)

The book starts out promisingly enough. Carolyn Kitch is interested in that representational cycle in which media images of a "new woman"—independent, confident, defiant in the face of existing gender roles—devolves into a new "new woman" who sees feminism as outdated and pinched and finds true liberation and control through consumerism and a return to family life. Noting how the second wave was declared "dead" by the late 1980s (and really, really finished in 1998 when Time asked "Is Feminism Dead?" and showed on its cover the evolutionary decline from Susan B. Anthony to Ally McBeal), Kitch argues that we can see a nearly identical pattern from the 1890s to the 1920s. Kitch maintains that the first enduring national stereotypes of the various "types" of American women appeared on the covers of mass-circulation magazines, and she traces the transformation of this "new woman" over time by analyzing the work of the era's most successful illustrators, including Alice Barber Stephens, Charles Dana Gibson, and James Montgomery Flagg, among others. . . .

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