upcoming: Shaping Visions in U.S. American Magazines: Women Illustrators and the Visual Culture of Femininity, 1890-1920 (De Gruyter) // also have a look at my essays on sewing machines, urban DIY art, and green gentrification // experience in international project and event management in the creative industries and Higher Education Supervisors: Ruth Mayer and Christina Meyer Address: Hanover, Niedersachsen, Germany
Throughout her career at the Hearst syndicate, early-twentieth-century comic starlet Nell Brinkle... more Throughout her career at the Hearst syndicate, early-twentieth-century comic starlet Nell Brinkley churned out lavishly illustrated cartoons of conspicuously beautiful women who strive for employment, public-sphere participation, and, of course, the vote. What renders Brinkley’s work such interesting material for analysis within political contexts of consent and dissent is her ‘strategy:’ Brinkley conveyed potentially provocative early-twentieth-century feminist messages in a visually ‘appealing’ manner to an increasingly diverse and certainly also critical mass audience, while, at the same time inviting for a young female readership’s identification and political emancipation. I therefore read Brinkley’s narrative graphic art as a distinctively appealing visual means for the encouragement of feminist political emancipation. Her work thereby takes up a complex middle role: whereas its visual narrative embraces objectifying feminine beauty ideals, her textual narrative challenges these same contemporary expectations on feminine beauty and behavioral norms by the female characters’ actions and plotlines of emancipation. I further contend that Brinkley’s work, situated between feminine visual appeal vs. feminist political appeal, i.e. between visual attraction and political manifestation, expands conceptions of mass culture’s political efficacy. Her strategically politically low-key narratives of emancipation provide not only alternative ideas about distinctively ‘visual’ female agency and identity performances in emancipatory contexts. What is more, her visual work defuses potentially radical feminist messages, and thereby follows strategies of “progressive middlebrow” women writers who “attempted to establish a middle ground,” which allowed them to “combine their activism and literary production” (Harker, America 20). Brinkley recognized the potential of women’s mass print as a platform and projection sphere for ideas of female agency and identity performances and impacted upon a young female readership within a socially acceptable middle sphere that invited for their identification and emancipation, while also fulfilling readerly desires of (visual) entertainment and thereby certainly clinging to commercial imperatives of serial publishing conventions. In my thesis I therefore provide new insight on the political possibilities of mass culture by reading mass appealing, syndicated, serially, and commercially published newspaper illustrations as progressive liberalist middlebrow, i.e. as a sphere where a young female audience could question or claim authority over its individual life experiences and political demands.
Paper presented at the Symposium of the Network for American Periodical Studies, 2019
Rose O’Neill’s 1896 cover illustrations of the ‘new woman’ for the humor magazine Up to Date prov... more Rose O’Neill’s 1896 cover illustrations of the ‘new woman’ for the humor magazine Up to Date provide a rare glance at how the turn-of-the-century ‘new woman’ was circulated in a periodical medium that was, for a change, not a women’s, but a humor magazine. As my analysis of these vividly colorful covers as well as a cross-reading of the humorous publication context reveal, also and especially within a decidedly ‘timely’ humor magazine, the presentation of the ‘new woman’ (as a phenomenon born from the periodical press itself) was from the beginning strongly imbued with notions of time, its passing, and, most of all, with the market-driven urge of publishing ‘on time.’ Printed on the covers of an intricately time-imbued humor magazine that, judging by its name, prided itself on its topicality and therefore followed economic impulses of covering ‘up-to-date’ topics and of publishing always ‘on time,’ the ‘new woman’ in Up to Date constituted not so much a sociopolitical being – yet neither was she ridiculed on these covers. Rather, as a strategic component of covers that exhibited a strong visual focus on ‘looks’ and fashion, the ‘new woman’ was presented here as a new-fangled, temporary, ‘funny fashion’ herself that not only replied to commercial cover-girl conventions of the magazine market, but that the humor magazine could also tap into for her current comic potential that would be superseded by the next (temporary) cover of funny social or political phenomena of the day.
DGfA (Deutsche Gesellschafts für Amerikastudien), 2019
At a time when illustrator Charles Dana Gibson cherished the ‘girl,’ and when New Women paced, te... more At a time when illustrator Charles Dana Gibson cherished the ‘girl,’ and when New Women paced, tennis racket in hand, fast-forward into the twentieth-century on the pages of early-20th-century mass magazines, the illustrations of Jessie Willcox Smith were stopping the time – at least visually. The illustrator whose harmonious mother-child scenes were circulated nationwide throughout women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, or Woman’s Home Companion dressed her protagonists in voluminous Victorian dresses, seating them in wicker chairs and serene settings. I argue that, just like the florid, ornate patterns on the armchairs and wallpapers that decorate these quaint domestic scenes, the women in Smith’s illustrations take on roles of mere decorative ornaments in scenes that were never meant to celebrate the Cult of True Womanhood and according roles, but are rather constructing True Womanhood as a decisive look and style that can be attached (and disposed of) like a fashion accessory. Acted out against a temporal context and within a modern mass medium that had started to embrace the New Woman long ago, Smith’s illustrations can then be read as an outright staging or re-enactment of the Cult of True Womanhood for purely aesthetic and, as must be added, commercial reasons. Since Smith consciously employed past visual imaginations of femininity as mere theatrical props for the commercial stylization of the ‘True Woman’ in modern commercial culture, my analysis then also sheds light onto how even seemingly modern and popular visual imaginations of the New Woman were always also pieced together from elements of the ‘True Woman,’ thereby re-enacting earlier ideas of femininity across the spectra of time, commerce, and mass media.
In her advertisements for Ivory Soap circulated nationwide in women’s mass magazines, such as Cos... more In her advertisements for Ivory Soap circulated nationwide in women’s mass magazines, such as Cosmopolitan or Scribner’s, female illustrator Alice Beach Winter repetitively depicted mothers who confront their daughters with civilizatory practices that aim at priming them for future domestic tasks.
In my talk I will then show how the female illustrator is decisively taking part in the ‘management’ of feminine role drafts and young girls’ life trajectories. I argue that, in her advertisements, Winter is spelling political ideas of progressivist reform and hygiene in a highly trivialized manner: the context of commercial advertising illustrations is then not only literally ‘whitewashing’ an underlying political agenda of preempted domestication, where Winter ‘blue-prints’ one future for young girls. Also, I will read Winter’s advertisements as strikingly hybrid spheres where political discourses of progressivist social reform and hygiene are being trivialized through seemingly innocuous childhood imagery in a commercial context.
With her illustrations for Ivory Soap, Winter not only brought ideas of ‘proper’ child-rearing and practices of domestication (often in class-sensitive visual environments) to the fore. As I want to add and argue here, in the context of progressivist hygiene reform and the Comstock Law, Winter also conveyed underlying sociocritical messages for child welfare. After all, next to illustrating advertisements or children’s stories for mass publications like Collier’s, Century, Scribner’s, Metropolitan, or Cosmopolitan, Alice Beach Winter was above all a cartoonist and yearlong contributor and art editor for the radical socialist little magazine The Masses where, as the “Norman Rockwell of the Left” (Jones 12), she was known for her sentimental cartoons that criticized child labor or advocated birth control. Reading across the divides of mass and little magazines, as well as social critique and commerce, this contribution therefore argues that Winter indeed participated in the circulation of progressivist propaganda in possibly projecting certain demands for child welfare and ideas of ‘adequate’ child-rearing in contexts of hygiene and child-targeted progressivist reform into her advertisements for mass magazines known for addressing women and mothers.
Finally, in allowing for political readings within mass-appealing, serially, and commercially published advertisement illustrations, this contribution also seeks to shed light onto how early female magazine illustrators were indeed ‘drawing’ and thereby managing ideas of proper child-rearing and motherhood, as well as imaginations of children’s life trajectories. The project thereby provides new insight in the overlapping and mutually inspiring cultural spheres of childhood illustrations across little and mass periodicals, commerce and social critique.
paper held at the PGF (postgraduate forum) conference //#Digital Futures//, Uni Duisburg-Essen, N... more paper held at the PGF (postgraduate forum) conference //#Digital Futures//, Uni Duisburg-Essen, Nov. 8-10 2018
This advertisement for Ivory Soap from the June 1911 issue of Cosmopolitan does not only instrumentalize an (ivory-)white soap for purposes of ‘whitewashing’ and ‘Americanization’ and thereby spells ideas of progressivist reform and hygiene. Also, by presenting a mother who primes her daughter for domestic tasks by confronting her with concomitant civilizatory practices, illustrator Alice Beach Winter ‘blue-prints’ one future for the girl. With illustrations such as this, Beach Winter not only brought child-rearing (mainly in working-class environments) to the fore but, in the context of progressivist hygiene reform and the Comstock Law, also conveyed underlying sociocritical messages for child welfare. Indeed, next to illustrating advertisements or children’s stories for mass publications, Beach Winter was above all a cartoonist for the socialist ‘little’ magazine The Masses where she also spelled ideas of child welfare by criticizing child labor or advocating birth control.
In this context, illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith’s illustration for Ivory Soap in the mass domestic magazine Redbook can also be read along a political agenda of preempted domestication. Her depiction of ‘cute’ children who “[b]egin the day right,” however, decisively trivializes disciplinary processes: by letting her children march adult-like in unison on what appears like a conveyor belt, she provides these adults-in-the-making with a predetermined life trajectory towards daily (work) regimes, where their proper ‘functioning’ relies upon the rehearsal of civilizing practices.
Employing a complex methodological framework of close-reading visuals as texts, and texts as visual narratives, this contribution demonstrates how female magazine illustrators were involved in the pragmatic management and ‘drawing’ of children’s roles and life experiences. The project thereby provides new insight in the overlapping and mutually inspiring cultural spheres of childhood illustrations across avant-garde and mass-periodicals, commerce and social critique. Digitally archived, many of these illustrations also deserve scholarly attention because the possibilities for political readings within mass-appealing, serially, and commercially published magazine illustrations have yet to be explored.
My presentation situates the cartoons and comic serials by early-twentieth-century graphic artist... more My presentation situates the cartoons and comic serials by early-twentieth-century graphic artist Nell Brinkley within their context of emerging new gender roles for women. I argue that Nell Brinkley's graphic art thereby takes up a complex middle role where the roles she imagines for her female protagonists oscillate between values of True and 'New' Woman. I further contend that this vagueness or ambiguity is intricately linked to the publication format and therefore replies to the conventions of commercially, serially, and mass published newspaper supplements.
paper held at the 65th Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA): /... more paper held at the 65th Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA): //American Counter/Publics//, Freie Universität Berlin, May 24-27, 2018
Throughout her career at the Hearst syndicate, early-twentieth-century comic writer Nell Brinkley churned out lavishly illustrated cartoons of conspicuously beautiful women who strived for public-sphere participation. What allows for a reading of Brinkley’s oeuvre as a form of political counter-publics within contexts of consent and dissent is her ‘strategy:’ Brinkley conveyed potentially provocative early-twentieth-century feminist messages in a visually ‘appealing’ manner to an increasingly diverse mass audience, while at the same time invoking a young female readership’s identification and political emancipation, thus establishing a ‘counter-public’ through mass-market address. Intricately set between consent and dissent, Brinkley’s narrative graphic art can be read as a distinctively mass appealing visual means for the encouragement and manifestation of feminist political emancipation.
Her work takes up a complex middle role: whereas its visual narrative embraces objectifying feminine beauty ideals, her textual narrative challenges these same contemporary expectations on feminine beauty and behavioral norms by the female characters’ actions and plotlines of emancipation. I further contend that Brinkley’s work, situated between feminine visual appeal and feminist political appeal, i.e. between visual attraction and political manifestation, expands conceptions of mass culture’s political efficacy.
Her politically low-key narratives of emancipation will be read as strategical launching pads for alternative ideas about distinctively ‘visual’ female agency and identity performances. At the same time, Brinkley’s visual work defuses potentially radical feminist messages, and thereby follows strategies of “progressive middlebrow” women writers in the sense of Jaime Harker.
My presentation aims to provide new insight on the political possibilities of mass culture by reading mass appealing, syndicated, serially and commercially published newspaper illustrations as a generative sphere where a young female audience could question, reflect upon, or claim authority over its individual life designs and political demands. Moreover, in recognizing the potential of women’s mass print as a platform for the simultaneous address of ideas and demands of various consenting or dissenting (counter-)publics, my presentation will question popular ideas of early mass cultures as standardized and streamlined means of address.
presentation (with Florian Groß) for: Tag der Philosophischen Fakultät. Leibniz Universität Hanno... more presentation (with Florian Groß) for: Tag der Philosophischen Fakultät. Leibniz Universität Hannover. 24. November 2016.
presentation at workshop: Cultural Dimensions of the Anthropocene. Leibniz Universität Hannover. ... more presentation at workshop: Cultural Dimensions of the Anthropocene. Leibniz Universität Hannover. 18. Juni 2016.
conference paper for the Fifth American Studies Leipzig Graduate Conference: Urban America Mediat... more conference paper for the Fifth American Studies Leipzig Graduate Conference: Urban America Mediating City Space as Place. American Studies, Leipzig. 2. April 2016.
presentation at workshop on The American City: Joint Workshop of the Seminars “Progressivism and ... more presentation at workshop on The American City: Joint Workshop of the Seminars “Progressivism and the American City“ (Ruth Mayer, Hannover) and “Urban Landscapes of Modernity“ (Svenja Fehlhaber, Osnabrück). Leibniz Universität Hannover. 16. Januar 2016.
Hipster Culture: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives, 2021
Twenty-first century popular culture has given birth to a peculiar cultural figure: the hipster. ... more Twenty-first century popular culture has given birth to a peculiar cultural figure: the hipster. Stereotypically associated with nerd glasses, beards and buns, boho clothing, and ironic T-shirts, hipsters represent a (post-)postmodern (post-)subculture whose style, aesthetics, and practices have increasingly become mainstream. Hipster Culture is the first comprehensive collection of original studies that address the hipster and hipster culture from a range of cultural studies perspectives.
Aspeers: Emerging Voices in American Studies, 2018
Whether it allowed for women’s employment, mass production and consumption of ready-to-wear fashi... more Whether it allowed for women’s employment, mass production and consumption of ready-to-wear fashion, encouraged their creative individuality through sewing patterns, accompanied them into the public sphere, or triggered their sociopolitical emancipation in protest marches: the sewing machine played a decisive part in women’s experience of American modernity, mass culture, class, and (feminist) emancipation. Within symbiotically related experiences of modernity and mass culture, this paper reads the sewing machine as feminine modernity’s very ‘motor’ that allowed for a distinctively feminine experience of modernity in New York City. It took up a complex middling position that oscillated along the public versus private sphere continuum, (class-biased) roles of producer and consumer, and, in a bidirectional movement, at once expanded and enforced women’s spatial and socioeconomic boundaries. Emanating from theoretical frameworks of separate spheres and modernity in a gender context, I analyze this cultural artifact’s representation. By examining contemporary sewing machines’ designs and patterns of use as implied by trade cards and other forms of advertisement that targeted women of varying class, economic, and family status backgrounds in the modern era, the central role this machine played can come to the forefront.
The present paper attempts to grasp the class-consciousness and meaning inherent in parks in the ... more The present paper attempts to grasp the class-consciousness and meaning inherent in parks in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and contemporary New York City by studying the examples of early Central Park and the High Line.
It discusses the planning of Central Park for anticipated patterns of use by an emerging elite in New York City, foreshadowing the economic inequalities of the Gilded Age, and sets these findings against the High Line Park in the light of contemporary gentrification. Furthermore this paper contends that both Central Park and the High Line Park take up complex middle roles between allowing for all residents’ recreation in the democratic venture of a ‘people’s park’ and, on the other hand, driving out poorer residents and visitors before, during, or after the park’s creation (by eviction or displacement due to gentrification, or due to other reasons) and thereby highlighting the city’s rising socio-economic imbalance. This analysis is supported by evidence found in the two parks’ planning, design, patterns of use, and park rules (written or unwritten). Moreover, theoretical frameworks of power structures and the metaphor of parks as ‘stages’ where performances of society and class take place, following Heath Massey Schenker, underline the analysis. Finally, the paper discusses possibilities of finding a middle way between green gentrification and the (financial) recreation of all social classes.
In this blog article, I examine representations of womanhood in American mass and avantgarde maga... more In this blog article, I examine representations of womanhood in American mass and avantgarde magazines published between 1880 and 1920.
This article has been written for the blog of the Women's History Network, a national association and charity for the promotion of women’s history and the encouragement of women and men interested in women’s history established in 1991. The WHN has provided me with a generous travel grant to attend 2019's Symposium of the Network of American Periodical Studies in Newcastle.
Dancing in the Streets
Als Jane Isabel Butzner als Neunzehnjährige das erste Mal aus der U-Bahn... more Dancing in the Streets
Als Jane Isabel Butzner als Neunzehnjährige das erste Mal aus der U-Bahn Station an der Christopher Street in das New Yorker Greenwich Village, trat, war sie laut eigenen Worten „verzaubert“. Sie verbrachte einen ganzen Nachmittag in den kleinen Straßen, hinter deren vielen Ecken sich ihr eine bunte Mischung aus inhabergeführten Handwerksläden, Antiquariaten, italienischen Eiscafés, kleinen Galerien sowie den für die Gegend typischen Sandsteinhäusern eröffnete. Diese Unregelmäßigkeit, das Kleine im Großen, faszinierte sie so nachhaltig, dass sie kurz darauf, nicht einmal 500 Meter von besagter U-Bahn Station entfernt, in das Viertel zog. Die nächsten 33 Jahre ihres Lebens machte sie das Village zu ihrem Zuhause und auch zum Dreh- und Angelpunkt ihrer einflussreichen Ideen zur Stadtentwicklung...
Throughout her career at the Hearst syndicate, early-twentieth-century comic starlet Nell Brinkle... more Throughout her career at the Hearst syndicate, early-twentieth-century comic starlet Nell Brinkley churned out lavishly illustrated cartoons of conspicuously beautiful women who strive for employment, public-sphere participation, and, of course, the vote. What renders Brinkley’s work such interesting material for analysis within political contexts of consent and dissent is her ‘strategy:’ Brinkley conveyed potentially provocative early-twentieth-century feminist messages in a visually ‘appealing’ manner to an increasingly diverse and certainly also critical mass audience, while, at the same time inviting for a young female readership’s identification and political emancipation. I therefore read Brinkley’s narrative graphic art as a distinctively appealing visual means for the encouragement of feminist political emancipation. Her work thereby takes up a complex middle role: whereas its visual narrative embraces objectifying feminine beauty ideals, her textual narrative challenges these same contemporary expectations on feminine beauty and behavioral norms by the female characters’ actions and plotlines of emancipation. I further contend that Brinkley’s work, situated between feminine visual appeal vs. feminist political appeal, i.e. between visual attraction and political manifestation, expands conceptions of mass culture’s political efficacy. Her strategically politically low-key narratives of emancipation provide not only alternative ideas about distinctively ‘visual’ female agency and identity performances in emancipatory contexts. What is more, her visual work defuses potentially radical feminist messages, and thereby follows strategies of “progressive middlebrow” women writers who “attempted to establish a middle ground,” which allowed them to “combine their activism and literary production” (Harker, America 20). Brinkley recognized the potential of women’s mass print as a platform and projection sphere for ideas of female agency and identity performances and impacted upon a young female readership within a socially acceptable middle sphere that invited for their identification and emancipation, while also fulfilling readerly desires of (visual) entertainment and thereby certainly clinging to commercial imperatives of serial publishing conventions. In my thesis I therefore provide new insight on the political possibilities of mass culture by reading mass appealing, syndicated, serially, and commercially published newspaper illustrations as progressive liberalist middlebrow, i.e. as a sphere where a young female audience could question or claim authority over its individual life experiences and political demands.
Paper presented at the Symposium of the Network for American Periodical Studies, 2019
Rose O’Neill’s 1896 cover illustrations of the ‘new woman’ for the humor magazine Up to Date prov... more Rose O’Neill’s 1896 cover illustrations of the ‘new woman’ for the humor magazine Up to Date provide a rare glance at how the turn-of-the-century ‘new woman’ was circulated in a periodical medium that was, for a change, not a women’s, but a humor magazine. As my analysis of these vividly colorful covers as well as a cross-reading of the humorous publication context reveal, also and especially within a decidedly ‘timely’ humor magazine, the presentation of the ‘new woman’ (as a phenomenon born from the periodical press itself) was from the beginning strongly imbued with notions of time, its passing, and, most of all, with the market-driven urge of publishing ‘on time.’ Printed on the covers of an intricately time-imbued humor magazine that, judging by its name, prided itself on its topicality and therefore followed economic impulses of covering ‘up-to-date’ topics and of publishing always ‘on time,’ the ‘new woman’ in Up to Date constituted not so much a sociopolitical being – yet neither was she ridiculed on these covers. Rather, as a strategic component of covers that exhibited a strong visual focus on ‘looks’ and fashion, the ‘new woman’ was presented here as a new-fangled, temporary, ‘funny fashion’ herself that not only replied to commercial cover-girl conventions of the magazine market, but that the humor magazine could also tap into for her current comic potential that would be superseded by the next (temporary) cover of funny social or political phenomena of the day.
DGfA (Deutsche Gesellschafts für Amerikastudien), 2019
At a time when illustrator Charles Dana Gibson cherished the ‘girl,’ and when New Women paced, te... more At a time when illustrator Charles Dana Gibson cherished the ‘girl,’ and when New Women paced, tennis racket in hand, fast-forward into the twentieth-century on the pages of early-20th-century mass magazines, the illustrations of Jessie Willcox Smith were stopping the time – at least visually. The illustrator whose harmonious mother-child scenes were circulated nationwide throughout women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, or Woman’s Home Companion dressed her protagonists in voluminous Victorian dresses, seating them in wicker chairs and serene settings. I argue that, just like the florid, ornate patterns on the armchairs and wallpapers that decorate these quaint domestic scenes, the women in Smith’s illustrations take on roles of mere decorative ornaments in scenes that were never meant to celebrate the Cult of True Womanhood and according roles, but are rather constructing True Womanhood as a decisive look and style that can be attached (and disposed of) like a fashion accessory. Acted out against a temporal context and within a modern mass medium that had started to embrace the New Woman long ago, Smith’s illustrations can then be read as an outright staging or re-enactment of the Cult of True Womanhood for purely aesthetic and, as must be added, commercial reasons. Since Smith consciously employed past visual imaginations of femininity as mere theatrical props for the commercial stylization of the ‘True Woman’ in modern commercial culture, my analysis then also sheds light onto how even seemingly modern and popular visual imaginations of the New Woman were always also pieced together from elements of the ‘True Woman,’ thereby re-enacting earlier ideas of femininity across the spectra of time, commerce, and mass media.
In her advertisements for Ivory Soap circulated nationwide in women’s mass magazines, such as Cos... more In her advertisements for Ivory Soap circulated nationwide in women’s mass magazines, such as Cosmopolitan or Scribner’s, female illustrator Alice Beach Winter repetitively depicted mothers who confront their daughters with civilizatory practices that aim at priming them for future domestic tasks.
In my talk I will then show how the female illustrator is decisively taking part in the ‘management’ of feminine role drafts and young girls’ life trajectories. I argue that, in her advertisements, Winter is spelling political ideas of progressivist reform and hygiene in a highly trivialized manner: the context of commercial advertising illustrations is then not only literally ‘whitewashing’ an underlying political agenda of preempted domestication, where Winter ‘blue-prints’ one future for young girls. Also, I will read Winter’s advertisements as strikingly hybrid spheres where political discourses of progressivist social reform and hygiene are being trivialized through seemingly innocuous childhood imagery in a commercial context.
With her illustrations for Ivory Soap, Winter not only brought ideas of ‘proper’ child-rearing and practices of domestication (often in class-sensitive visual environments) to the fore. As I want to add and argue here, in the context of progressivist hygiene reform and the Comstock Law, Winter also conveyed underlying sociocritical messages for child welfare. After all, next to illustrating advertisements or children’s stories for mass publications like Collier’s, Century, Scribner’s, Metropolitan, or Cosmopolitan, Alice Beach Winter was above all a cartoonist and yearlong contributor and art editor for the radical socialist little magazine The Masses where, as the “Norman Rockwell of the Left” (Jones 12), she was known for her sentimental cartoons that criticized child labor or advocated birth control. Reading across the divides of mass and little magazines, as well as social critique and commerce, this contribution therefore argues that Winter indeed participated in the circulation of progressivist propaganda in possibly projecting certain demands for child welfare and ideas of ‘adequate’ child-rearing in contexts of hygiene and child-targeted progressivist reform into her advertisements for mass magazines known for addressing women and mothers.
Finally, in allowing for political readings within mass-appealing, serially, and commercially published advertisement illustrations, this contribution also seeks to shed light onto how early female magazine illustrators were indeed ‘drawing’ and thereby managing ideas of proper child-rearing and motherhood, as well as imaginations of children’s life trajectories. The project thereby provides new insight in the overlapping and mutually inspiring cultural spheres of childhood illustrations across little and mass periodicals, commerce and social critique.
paper held at the PGF (postgraduate forum) conference //#Digital Futures//, Uni Duisburg-Essen, N... more paper held at the PGF (postgraduate forum) conference //#Digital Futures//, Uni Duisburg-Essen, Nov. 8-10 2018
This advertisement for Ivory Soap from the June 1911 issue of Cosmopolitan does not only instrumentalize an (ivory-)white soap for purposes of ‘whitewashing’ and ‘Americanization’ and thereby spells ideas of progressivist reform and hygiene. Also, by presenting a mother who primes her daughter for domestic tasks by confronting her with concomitant civilizatory practices, illustrator Alice Beach Winter ‘blue-prints’ one future for the girl. With illustrations such as this, Beach Winter not only brought child-rearing (mainly in working-class environments) to the fore but, in the context of progressivist hygiene reform and the Comstock Law, also conveyed underlying sociocritical messages for child welfare. Indeed, next to illustrating advertisements or children’s stories for mass publications, Beach Winter was above all a cartoonist for the socialist ‘little’ magazine The Masses where she also spelled ideas of child welfare by criticizing child labor or advocating birth control.
In this context, illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith’s illustration for Ivory Soap in the mass domestic magazine Redbook can also be read along a political agenda of preempted domestication. Her depiction of ‘cute’ children who “[b]egin the day right,” however, decisively trivializes disciplinary processes: by letting her children march adult-like in unison on what appears like a conveyor belt, she provides these adults-in-the-making with a predetermined life trajectory towards daily (work) regimes, where their proper ‘functioning’ relies upon the rehearsal of civilizing practices.
Employing a complex methodological framework of close-reading visuals as texts, and texts as visual narratives, this contribution demonstrates how female magazine illustrators were involved in the pragmatic management and ‘drawing’ of children’s roles and life experiences. The project thereby provides new insight in the overlapping and mutually inspiring cultural spheres of childhood illustrations across avant-garde and mass-periodicals, commerce and social critique. Digitally archived, many of these illustrations also deserve scholarly attention because the possibilities for political readings within mass-appealing, serially, and commercially published magazine illustrations have yet to be explored.
My presentation situates the cartoons and comic serials by early-twentieth-century graphic artist... more My presentation situates the cartoons and comic serials by early-twentieth-century graphic artist Nell Brinkley within their context of emerging new gender roles for women. I argue that Nell Brinkley's graphic art thereby takes up a complex middle role where the roles she imagines for her female protagonists oscillate between values of True and 'New' Woman. I further contend that this vagueness or ambiguity is intricately linked to the publication format and therefore replies to the conventions of commercially, serially, and mass published newspaper supplements.
paper held at the 65th Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA): /... more paper held at the 65th Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA): //American Counter/Publics//, Freie Universität Berlin, May 24-27, 2018
Throughout her career at the Hearst syndicate, early-twentieth-century comic writer Nell Brinkley churned out lavishly illustrated cartoons of conspicuously beautiful women who strived for public-sphere participation. What allows for a reading of Brinkley’s oeuvre as a form of political counter-publics within contexts of consent and dissent is her ‘strategy:’ Brinkley conveyed potentially provocative early-twentieth-century feminist messages in a visually ‘appealing’ manner to an increasingly diverse mass audience, while at the same time invoking a young female readership’s identification and political emancipation, thus establishing a ‘counter-public’ through mass-market address. Intricately set between consent and dissent, Brinkley’s narrative graphic art can be read as a distinctively mass appealing visual means for the encouragement and manifestation of feminist political emancipation.
Her work takes up a complex middle role: whereas its visual narrative embraces objectifying feminine beauty ideals, her textual narrative challenges these same contemporary expectations on feminine beauty and behavioral norms by the female characters’ actions and plotlines of emancipation. I further contend that Brinkley’s work, situated between feminine visual appeal and feminist political appeal, i.e. between visual attraction and political manifestation, expands conceptions of mass culture’s political efficacy.
Her politically low-key narratives of emancipation will be read as strategical launching pads for alternative ideas about distinctively ‘visual’ female agency and identity performances. At the same time, Brinkley’s visual work defuses potentially radical feminist messages, and thereby follows strategies of “progressive middlebrow” women writers in the sense of Jaime Harker.
My presentation aims to provide new insight on the political possibilities of mass culture by reading mass appealing, syndicated, serially and commercially published newspaper illustrations as a generative sphere where a young female audience could question, reflect upon, or claim authority over its individual life designs and political demands. Moreover, in recognizing the potential of women’s mass print as a platform for the simultaneous address of ideas and demands of various consenting or dissenting (counter-)publics, my presentation will question popular ideas of early mass cultures as standardized and streamlined means of address.
presentation (with Florian Groß) for: Tag der Philosophischen Fakultät. Leibniz Universität Hanno... more presentation (with Florian Groß) for: Tag der Philosophischen Fakultät. Leibniz Universität Hannover. 24. November 2016.
presentation at workshop: Cultural Dimensions of the Anthropocene. Leibniz Universität Hannover. ... more presentation at workshop: Cultural Dimensions of the Anthropocene. Leibniz Universität Hannover. 18. Juni 2016.
conference paper for the Fifth American Studies Leipzig Graduate Conference: Urban America Mediat... more conference paper for the Fifth American Studies Leipzig Graduate Conference: Urban America Mediating City Space as Place. American Studies, Leipzig. 2. April 2016.
presentation at workshop on The American City: Joint Workshop of the Seminars “Progressivism and ... more presentation at workshop on The American City: Joint Workshop of the Seminars “Progressivism and the American City“ (Ruth Mayer, Hannover) and “Urban Landscapes of Modernity“ (Svenja Fehlhaber, Osnabrück). Leibniz Universität Hannover. 16. Januar 2016.
Hipster Culture: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives, 2021
Twenty-first century popular culture has given birth to a peculiar cultural figure: the hipster. ... more Twenty-first century popular culture has given birth to a peculiar cultural figure: the hipster. Stereotypically associated with nerd glasses, beards and buns, boho clothing, and ironic T-shirts, hipsters represent a (post-)postmodern (post-)subculture whose style, aesthetics, and practices have increasingly become mainstream. Hipster Culture is the first comprehensive collection of original studies that address the hipster and hipster culture from a range of cultural studies perspectives.
Aspeers: Emerging Voices in American Studies, 2018
Whether it allowed for women’s employment, mass production and consumption of ready-to-wear fashi... more Whether it allowed for women’s employment, mass production and consumption of ready-to-wear fashion, encouraged their creative individuality through sewing patterns, accompanied them into the public sphere, or triggered their sociopolitical emancipation in protest marches: the sewing machine played a decisive part in women’s experience of American modernity, mass culture, class, and (feminist) emancipation. Within symbiotically related experiences of modernity and mass culture, this paper reads the sewing machine as feminine modernity’s very ‘motor’ that allowed for a distinctively feminine experience of modernity in New York City. It took up a complex middling position that oscillated along the public versus private sphere continuum, (class-biased) roles of producer and consumer, and, in a bidirectional movement, at once expanded and enforced women’s spatial and socioeconomic boundaries. Emanating from theoretical frameworks of separate spheres and modernity in a gender context, I analyze this cultural artifact’s representation. By examining contemporary sewing machines’ designs and patterns of use as implied by trade cards and other forms of advertisement that targeted women of varying class, economic, and family status backgrounds in the modern era, the central role this machine played can come to the forefront.
The present paper attempts to grasp the class-consciousness and meaning inherent in parks in the ... more The present paper attempts to grasp the class-consciousness and meaning inherent in parks in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and contemporary New York City by studying the examples of early Central Park and the High Line.
It discusses the planning of Central Park for anticipated patterns of use by an emerging elite in New York City, foreshadowing the economic inequalities of the Gilded Age, and sets these findings against the High Line Park in the light of contemporary gentrification. Furthermore this paper contends that both Central Park and the High Line Park take up complex middle roles between allowing for all residents’ recreation in the democratic venture of a ‘people’s park’ and, on the other hand, driving out poorer residents and visitors before, during, or after the park’s creation (by eviction or displacement due to gentrification, or due to other reasons) and thereby highlighting the city’s rising socio-economic imbalance. This analysis is supported by evidence found in the two parks’ planning, design, patterns of use, and park rules (written or unwritten). Moreover, theoretical frameworks of power structures and the metaphor of parks as ‘stages’ where performances of society and class take place, following Heath Massey Schenker, underline the analysis. Finally, the paper discusses possibilities of finding a middle way between green gentrification and the (financial) recreation of all social classes.
In this blog article, I examine representations of womanhood in American mass and avantgarde maga... more In this blog article, I examine representations of womanhood in American mass and avantgarde magazines published between 1880 and 1920.
This article has been written for the blog of the Women's History Network, a national association and charity for the promotion of women’s history and the encouragement of women and men interested in women’s history established in 1991. The WHN has provided me with a generous travel grant to attend 2019's Symposium of the Network of American Periodical Studies in Newcastle.
Dancing in the Streets
Als Jane Isabel Butzner als Neunzehnjährige das erste Mal aus der U-Bahn... more Dancing in the Streets
Als Jane Isabel Butzner als Neunzehnjährige das erste Mal aus der U-Bahn Station an der Christopher Street in das New Yorker Greenwich Village, trat, war sie laut eigenen Worten „verzaubert“. Sie verbrachte einen ganzen Nachmittag in den kleinen Straßen, hinter deren vielen Ecken sich ihr eine bunte Mischung aus inhabergeführten Handwerksläden, Antiquariaten, italienischen Eiscafés, kleinen Galerien sowie den für die Gegend typischen Sandsteinhäusern eröffnete. Diese Unregelmäßigkeit, das Kleine im Großen, faszinierte sie so nachhaltig, dass sie kurz darauf, nicht einmal 500 Meter von besagter U-Bahn Station entfernt, in das Viertel zog. Die nächsten 33 Jahre ihres Lebens machte sie das Village zu ihrem Zuhause und auch zum Dreh- und Angelpunkt ihrer einflussreichen Ideen zur Stadtentwicklung...
Grün gehört zu einer funktionierenden Stadt dazu. Für die Amerikanistin Annabel Friedrichs gibt e... more Grün gehört zu einer funktionierenden Stadt dazu. Für die Amerikanistin Annabel Friedrichs gibt es genügend Beispiele, wie Gärten eine Stadt verschönern und verbessern können. Auch beim Ihmezentrum sieht sie viel Potenzial.
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Her work thereby takes up a complex middle role: whereas its visual narrative embraces objectifying feminine beauty ideals, her textual narrative challenges these same contemporary expectations on feminine beauty and behavioral norms by the female characters’ actions and plotlines of emancipation. I further contend that Brinkley’s work, situated between feminine visual appeal vs. feminist political appeal, i.e. between visual attraction and political manifestation, expands conceptions of mass culture’s political efficacy.
Her strategically politically low-key narratives of emancipation provide not only alternative ideas about distinctively ‘visual’ female agency and identity performances in emancipatory contexts. What is more, her visual work defuses potentially radical feminist messages, and thereby follows strategies of “progressive middlebrow” women writers who “attempted to establish a middle ground,” which allowed them to “combine their activism and literary production” (Harker, America 20). Brinkley recognized the potential of women’s mass print as a platform and projection sphere for ideas of female agency and identity performances and impacted upon a young female readership within a socially acceptable middle sphere that invited for their identification and emancipation, while also fulfilling readerly desires of (visual) entertainment and thereby certainly clinging to commercial imperatives of serial publishing conventions.
In my thesis I therefore provide new insight on the political possibilities of mass culture by reading mass appealing, syndicated, serially, and commercially published newspaper illustrations as progressive liberalist middlebrow, i.e. as a sphere where a young female audience could question or claim authority over its individual life experiences and political demands.
As my analysis of these vividly colorful covers as well as a cross-reading of the humorous publication context reveal, also and especially within a decidedly ‘timely’ humor magazine, the presentation of the ‘new woman’ (as a phenomenon born from the periodical press itself) was from the beginning strongly imbued with notions of time, its passing, and, most of all, with the market-driven urge of publishing ‘on time.’
Printed on the covers of an intricately time-imbued humor magazine that, judging by its name, prided itself on its topicality and therefore followed economic impulses of covering ‘up-to-date’ topics and of publishing always ‘on time,’ the ‘new woman’ in Up to Date constituted not so much a sociopolitical being – yet neither was she ridiculed on these covers. Rather, as a strategic component of covers that exhibited a strong visual focus on ‘looks’ and fashion, the ‘new woman’ was presented here as a new-fangled, temporary, ‘funny fashion’ herself that not only replied to commercial cover-girl conventions of the magazine market, but that the humor magazine could also tap into for her current comic potential that would be superseded by the next (temporary) cover of funny social or political phenomena of the day.
In my talk I will then show how the female illustrator is decisively taking part in the ‘management’ of feminine role drafts and young girls’ life trajectories. I argue that, in her advertisements, Winter is spelling political ideas of progressivist reform and hygiene in a highly trivialized manner: the context of commercial advertising illustrations is then not only literally ‘whitewashing’ an underlying political agenda of preempted domestication, where Winter ‘blue-prints’ one future for young girls. Also, I will read Winter’s advertisements as strikingly hybrid spheres where political discourses of progressivist social reform and hygiene are being trivialized through seemingly innocuous childhood imagery in a commercial context.
With her illustrations for Ivory Soap, Winter not only brought ideas of ‘proper’ child-rearing and practices of domestication (often in class-sensitive visual environments) to the fore. As I want to add and argue here, in the context of progressivist hygiene reform and the Comstock Law, Winter also conveyed underlying sociocritical messages for child welfare. After all, next to illustrating advertisements or children’s stories for mass publications like Collier’s, Century, Scribner’s, Metropolitan, or Cosmopolitan, Alice Beach Winter was above all a cartoonist and yearlong contributor and art editor for the radical socialist little magazine The Masses where, as the “Norman Rockwell of the Left” (Jones 12), she was known for her sentimental cartoons that criticized child labor or advocated birth control. Reading across the divides of mass and little magazines, as well as social critique and commerce, this contribution therefore argues that Winter indeed participated in the circulation of progressivist propaganda in possibly projecting certain demands for child welfare and ideas of ‘adequate’ child-rearing in contexts of hygiene and child-targeted progressivist reform into her advertisements for mass magazines known for addressing women and mothers.
Finally, in allowing for political readings within mass-appealing, serially, and commercially published advertisement illustrations, this contribution also seeks to shed light onto how early female magazine illustrators were indeed ‘drawing’ and thereby managing ideas of proper child-rearing and motherhood, as well as imaginations of children’s life trajectories. The project thereby provides new insight in the overlapping and mutually inspiring cultural spheres of childhood illustrations across little and mass periodicals, commerce and social critique.
This advertisement for Ivory Soap from the June 1911 issue of Cosmopolitan does not only instrumentalize an (ivory-)white soap for purposes of ‘whitewashing’ and ‘Americanization’ and thereby spells ideas of progressivist reform and hygiene. Also, by presenting a mother who primes her daughter for domestic tasks by confronting her with concomitant civilizatory practices, illustrator Alice Beach Winter ‘blue-prints’ one future for the girl. With illustrations such as this, Beach Winter not only brought child-rearing (mainly in working-class environments) to the fore but, in the context of progressivist hygiene reform and the Comstock Law, also conveyed underlying sociocritical messages for child welfare. Indeed, next to illustrating advertisements or children’s stories for mass publications, Beach Winter was above all a cartoonist for the socialist ‘little’ magazine The Masses where she also spelled ideas of child welfare by criticizing child labor or advocating birth control.
In this context, illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith’s illustration for Ivory Soap in the mass domestic magazine Redbook can also be read along a political agenda of preempted domestication. Her depiction of ‘cute’ children who “[b]egin the day right,” however, decisively trivializes disciplinary processes: by letting her children march adult-like in unison on what appears like a conveyor belt, she provides these adults-in-the-making with a predetermined life trajectory towards daily (work) regimes, where their proper ‘functioning’ relies upon the rehearsal of civilizing practices.
Employing a complex methodological framework of close-reading visuals as texts, and texts as visual narratives, this contribution demonstrates how female magazine illustrators were involved in the pragmatic management and ‘drawing’ of children’s roles and life experiences. The project thereby provides new insight in the overlapping and mutually inspiring cultural spheres of childhood illustrations across avant-garde and mass-periodicals, commerce and social critique. Digitally archived, many of these illustrations also deserve scholarly attention because the possibilities for political readings within mass-appealing, serially, and commercially published magazine illustrations have yet to be explored.
Throughout her career at the Hearst syndicate, early-twentieth-century comic writer Nell Brinkley churned out lavishly illustrated cartoons of conspicuously beautiful women who strived for public-sphere participation. What allows for a reading of Brinkley’s oeuvre as a form of political counter-publics within contexts of consent and dissent is her ‘strategy:’ Brinkley conveyed potentially provocative early-twentieth-century feminist messages in a visually ‘appealing’ manner to an increasingly diverse mass audience, while at the same time invoking a young female readership’s identification and political emancipation, thus establishing a ‘counter-public’ through mass-market address. Intricately set between consent and dissent, Brinkley’s narrative graphic art can be read as a distinctively mass appealing visual means for the encouragement and manifestation of feminist political emancipation.
Her work takes up a complex middle role: whereas its visual narrative embraces objectifying feminine beauty ideals, her textual narrative challenges these same contemporary expectations on feminine beauty and behavioral norms by the female characters’ actions and plotlines of emancipation. I further contend that Brinkley’s work, situated between feminine visual appeal and feminist political appeal, i.e. between visual attraction and political manifestation, expands conceptions of mass culture’s political efficacy.
Her politically low-key narratives of emancipation will be read as strategical launching pads for alternative ideas about distinctively ‘visual’ female agency and identity performances. At the same time, Brinkley’s visual work defuses potentially radical feminist messages, and thereby follows strategies of “progressive middlebrow” women writers in the sense of Jaime Harker.
My presentation aims to provide new insight on the political possibilities of mass culture by reading mass appealing, syndicated, serially and commercially published newspaper illustrations as a generative sphere where a young female audience could question, reflect upon, or claim authority over its individual life designs and political demands. Moreover, in recognizing the potential of women’s mass print as a platform for the simultaneous address of ideas and demands of various consenting or dissenting (counter-)publics, my presentation will question popular ideas of early mass cultures as standardized and streamlined means of address.
It discusses the planning of Central Park for anticipated patterns of use by an emerging elite in New York City, foreshadowing the economic inequalities of the Gilded Age, and sets these findings against the High Line Park in the light of contemporary gentrification. Furthermore this paper contends that both Central Park and the High Line Park take up complex middle roles between allowing for all residents’ recreation in the democratic venture of a ‘people’s park’ and, on the other hand, driving out poorer residents and visitors before, during, or after the park’s creation (by eviction or displacement due to gentrification, or due to other reasons) and thereby highlighting the city’s rising socio-economic imbalance. This analysis is supported by evidence found in the two parks’ planning, design, patterns of use, and park rules (written or unwritten). Moreover, theoretical frameworks of power structures and the metaphor of parks as ‘stages’ where performances of society and class take place, following Heath Massey Schenker, underline the analysis. Finally, the paper discusses possibilities of finding a middle way between green gentrification and the (financial) recreation of all social classes.
This article has been written for the blog of the Women's History Network, a national association and charity for the promotion of women’s history and the encouragement of women and men interested in women’s history established in 1991. The WHN has provided me with a generous travel grant to attend 2019's Symposium of the Network of American Periodical Studies in Newcastle.
Als Jane Isabel Butzner als Neunzehnjährige das erste Mal aus der U-Bahn Station an der Christopher Street in das New Yorker Greenwich Village, trat, war sie laut eigenen Worten „verzaubert“. Sie verbrachte einen ganzen Nachmittag in den kleinen Straßen, hinter deren vielen Ecken sich ihr eine bunte Mischung aus inhabergeführten Handwerksläden, Antiquariaten, italienischen Eiscafés, kleinen Galerien sowie den für die Gegend typischen Sandsteinhäusern eröffnete. Diese Unregelmäßigkeit, das Kleine im Großen, faszinierte sie so nachhaltig, dass sie kurz darauf, nicht einmal 500 Meter von besagter U-Bahn Station entfernt, in das Viertel zog. Die nächsten 33 Jahre ihres Lebens machte sie das Village zu ihrem Zuhause und auch zum Dreh- und Angelpunkt ihrer einflussreichen Ideen zur Stadtentwicklung...
Her work thereby takes up a complex middle role: whereas its visual narrative embraces objectifying feminine beauty ideals, her textual narrative challenges these same contemporary expectations on feminine beauty and behavioral norms by the female characters’ actions and plotlines of emancipation. I further contend that Brinkley’s work, situated between feminine visual appeal vs. feminist political appeal, i.e. between visual attraction and political manifestation, expands conceptions of mass culture’s political efficacy.
Her strategically politically low-key narratives of emancipation provide not only alternative ideas about distinctively ‘visual’ female agency and identity performances in emancipatory contexts. What is more, her visual work defuses potentially radical feminist messages, and thereby follows strategies of “progressive middlebrow” women writers who “attempted to establish a middle ground,” which allowed them to “combine their activism and literary production” (Harker, America 20). Brinkley recognized the potential of women’s mass print as a platform and projection sphere for ideas of female agency and identity performances and impacted upon a young female readership within a socially acceptable middle sphere that invited for their identification and emancipation, while also fulfilling readerly desires of (visual) entertainment and thereby certainly clinging to commercial imperatives of serial publishing conventions.
In my thesis I therefore provide new insight on the political possibilities of mass culture by reading mass appealing, syndicated, serially, and commercially published newspaper illustrations as progressive liberalist middlebrow, i.e. as a sphere where a young female audience could question or claim authority over its individual life experiences and political demands.
As my analysis of these vividly colorful covers as well as a cross-reading of the humorous publication context reveal, also and especially within a decidedly ‘timely’ humor magazine, the presentation of the ‘new woman’ (as a phenomenon born from the periodical press itself) was from the beginning strongly imbued with notions of time, its passing, and, most of all, with the market-driven urge of publishing ‘on time.’
Printed on the covers of an intricately time-imbued humor magazine that, judging by its name, prided itself on its topicality and therefore followed economic impulses of covering ‘up-to-date’ topics and of publishing always ‘on time,’ the ‘new woman’ in Up to Date constituted not so much a sociopolitical being – yet neither was she ridiculed on these covers. Rather, as a strategic component of covers that exhibited a strong visual focus on ‘looks’ and fashion, the ‘new woman’ was presented here as a new-fangled, temporary, ‘funny fashion’ herself that not only replied to commercial cover-girl conventions of the magazine market, but that the humor magazine could also tap into for her current comic potential that would be superseded by the next (temporary) cover of funny social or political phenomena of the day.
In my talk I will then show how the female illustrator is decisively taking part in the ‘management’ of feminine role drafts and young girls’ life trajectories. I argue that, in her advertisements, Winter is spelling political ideas of progressivist reform and hygiene in a highly trivialized manner: the context of commercial advertising illustrations is then not only literally ‘whitewashing’ an underlying political agenda of preempted domestication, where Winter ‘blue-prints’ one future for young girls. Also, I will read Winter’s advertisements as strikingly hybrid spheres where political discourses of progressivist social reform and hygiene are being trivialized through seemingly innocuous childhood imagery in a commercial context.
With her illustrations for Ivory Soap, Winter not only brought ideas of ‘proper’ child-rearing and practices of domestication (often in class-sensitive visual environments) to the fore. As I want to add and argue here, in the context of progressivist hygiene reform and the Comstock Law, Winter also conveyed underlying sociocritical messages for child welfare. After all, next to illustrating advertisements or children’s stories for mass publications like Collier’s, Century, Scribner’s, Metropolitan, or Cosmopolitan, Alice Beach Winter was above all a cartoonist and yearlong contributor and art editor for the radical socialist little magazine The Masses where, as the “Norman Rockwell of the Left” (Jones 12), she was known for her sentimental cartoons that criticized child labor or advocated birth control. Reading across the divides of mass and little magazines, as well as social critique and commerce, this contribution therefore argues that Winter indeed participated in the circulation of progressivist propaganda in possibly projecting certain demands for child welfare and ideas of ‘adequate’ child-rearing in contexts of hygiene and child-targeted progressivist reform into her advertisements for mass magazines known for addressing women and mothers.
Finally, in allowing for political readings within mass-appealing, serially, and commercially published advertisement illustrations, this contribution also seeks to shed light onto how early female magazine illustrators were indeed ‘drawing’ and thereby managing ideas of proper child-rearing and motherhood, as well as imaginations of children’s life trajectories. The project thereby provides new insight in the overlapping and mutually inspiring cultural spheres of childhood illustrations across little and mass periodicals, commerce and social critique.
This advertisement for Ivory Soap from the June 1911 issue of Cosmopolitan does not only instrumentalize an (ivory-)white soap for purposes of ‘whitewashing’ and ‘Americanization’ and thereby spells ideas of progressivist reform and hygiene. Also, by presenting a mother who primes her daughter for domestic tasks by confronting her with concomitant civilizatory practices, illustrator Alice Beach Winter ‘blue-prints’ one future for the girl. With illustrations such as this, Beach Winter not only brought child-rearing (mainly in working-class environments) to the fore but, in the context of progressivist hygiene reform and the Comstock Law, also conveyed underlying sociocritical messages for child welfare. Indeed, next to illustrating advertisements or children’s stories for mass publications, Beach Winter was above all a cartoonist for the socialist ‘little’ magazine The Masses where she also spelled ideas of child welfare by criticizing child labor or advocating birth control.
In this context, illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith’s illustration for Ivory Soap in the mass domestic magazine Redbook can also be read along a political agenda of preempted domestication. Her depiction of ‘cute’ children who “[b]egin the day right,” however, decisively trivializes disciplinary processes: by letting her children march adult-like in unison on what appears like a conveyor belt, she provides these adults-in-the-making with a predetermined life trajectory towards daily (work) regimes, where their proper ‘functioning’ relies upon the rehearsal of civilizing practices.
Employing a complex methodological framework of close-reading visuals as texts, and texts as visual narratives, this contribution demonstrates how female magazine illustrators were involved in the pragmatic management and ‘drawing’ of children’s roles and life experiences. The project thereby provides new insight in the overlapping and mutually inspiring cultural spheres of childhood illustrations across avant-garde and mass-periodicals, commerce and social critique. Digitally archived, many of these illustrations also deserve scholarly attention because the possibilities for political readings within mass-appealing, serially, and commercially published magazine illustrations have yet to be explored.
Throughout her career at the Hearst syndicate, early-twentieth-century comic writer Nell Brinkley churned out lavishly illustrated cartoons of conspicuously beautiful women who strived for public-sphere participation. What allows for a reading of Brinkley’s oeuvre as a form of political counter-publics within contexts of consent and dissent is her ‘strategy:’ Brinkley conveyed potentially provocative early-twentieth-century feminist messages in a visually ‘appealing’ manner to an increasingly diverse mass audience, while at the same time invoking a young female readership’s identification and political emancipation, thus establishing a ‘counter-public’ through mass-market address. Intricately set between consent and dissent, Brinkley’s narrative graphic art can be read as a distinctively mass appealing visual means for the encouragement and manifestation of feminist political emancipation.
Her work takes up a complex middle role: whereas its visual narrative embraces objectifying feminine beauty ideals, her textual narrative challenges these same contemporary expectations on feminine beauty and behavioral norms by the female characters’ actions and plotlines of emancipation. I further contend that Brinkley’s work, situated between feminine visual appeal and feminist political appeal, i.e. between visual attraction and political manifestation, expands conceptions of mass culture’s political efficacy.
Her politically low-key narratives of emancipation will be read as strategical launching pads for alternative ideas about distinctively ‘visual’ female agency and identity performances. At the same time, Brinkley’s visual work defuses potentially radical feminist messages, and thereby follows strategies of “progressive middlebrow” women writers in the sense of Jaime Harker.
My presentation aims to provide new insight on the political possibilities of mass culture by reading mass appealing, syndicated, serially and commercially published newspaper illustrations as a generative sphere where a young female audience could question, reflect upon, or claim authority over its individual life designs and political demands. Moreover, in recognizing the potential of women’s mass print as a platform for the simultaneous address of ideas and demands of various consenting or dissenting (counter-)publics, my presentation will question popular ideas of early mass cultures as standardized and streamlined means of address.
It discusses the planning of Central Park for anticipated patterns of use by an emerging elite in New York City, foreshadowing the economic inequalities of the Gilded Age, and sets these findings against the High Line Park in the light of contemporary gentrification. Furthermore this paper contends that both Central Park and the High Line Park take up complex middle roles between allowing for all residents’ recreation in the democratic venture of a ‘people’s park’ and, on the other hand, driving out poorer residents and visitors before, during, or after the park’s creation (by eviction or displacement due to gentrification, or due to other reasons) and thereby highlighting the city’s rising socio-economic imbalance. This analysis is supported by evidence found in the two parks’ planning, design, patterns of use, and park rules (written or unwritten). Moreover, theoretical frameworks of power structures and the metaphor of parks as ‘stages’ where performances of society and class take place, following Heath Massey Schenker, underline the analysis. Finally, the paper discusses possibilities of finding a middle way between green gentrification and the (financial) recreation of all social classes.
This article has been written for the blog of the Women's History Network, a national association and charity for the promotion of women’s history and the encouragement of women and men interested in women’s history established in 1991. The WHN has provided me with a generous travel grant to attend 2019's Symposium of the Network of American Periodical Studies in Newcastle.
Als Jane Isabel Butzner als Neunzehnjährige das erste Mal aus der U-Bahn Station an der Christopher Street in das New Yorker Greenwich Village, trat, war sie laut eigenen Worten „verzaubert“. Sie verbrachte einen ganzen Nachmittag in den kleinen Straßen, hinter deren vielen Ecken sich ihr eine bunte Mischung aus inhabergeführten Handwerksläden, Antiquariaten, italienischen Eiscafés, kleinen Galerien sowie den für die Gegend typischen Sandsteinhäusern eröffnete. Diese Unregelmäßigkeit, das Kleine im Großen, faszinierte sie so nachhaltig, dass sie kurz darauf, nicht einmal 500 Meter von besagter U-Bahn Station entfernt, in das Viertel zog. Die nächsten 33 Jahre ihres Lebens machte sie das Village zu ihrem Zuhause und auch zum Dreh- und Angelpunkt ihrer einflussreichen Ideen zur Stadtentwicklung...