The Modern Girl Around the World

Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization

Alys Eve The Modern Girl around the World Research Group, Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, Tani Barlow, Alys Eve The Modern Girl around the World Research Group, Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, Tani Barlow, Tani E. Barlow

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780822343059, 9780822342991
• eBook ISBN: 9780822389194
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

During the 1920s and 1930s, in cities from Beijing to Bombay, Tokyo to Berlin, Johannesburg to New York, the Modern Girl made her sometimes flashy, always fashionable appearance in city streets and cafes, in films, advertisements, and illustrated magazines. Modern Girls wore sexy clothes and high heels; they applied lipstick and other cosmetics. Dressed in provocative attire and in hot pursuit of romantic love, Modern Girls appeared on the surface to disregard the prescribed roles of dutiful daughter, wife, and mother. Contemporaries debated whether the Modern Girl was looking for sexual, economic, or political emancipation, or whether she was little more than an image, a hollow product of the emerging global commodity culture. The contributors to this collection track the Modern Girl as she emerged as a global phenomenon in the interwar period.

Scholars of history, women's studies, literature, and cultural studies follow the Modern Girl around the world, analyzing her manifestations in Germany, Australia, China, Japan, France, India, the United States, Russia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Along the way, they demonstrate how the economic structures and cultural flows that shaped a particular form of modern femininity crossed national and imperial boundaries. In so doing, they highlight the gendered dynamics of interwar processes of racial formation, showing how images and ideas of the Modern Girl were used to shore up or critique nationalist and imperial agendas. A mix of collaborative and individually authored chapters, the volume concludes with commentaries by Kathy Peiss, Miriam Silverberg, and Timothy Burke.

Contributors: Davarian L. Baldwin, Tani E. Barlow, Timothy Burke, Liz Conor, Madeleine Yue Dong, Anne E. Gorsuch, Ruri Ito, Kathy Peiss, Uta G. Poiger, Priti Ramamurthy, Mary Louise Roberts, Barbara Sato, Miriam Silverberg, Lynn M. Thomas, Alys Eve Weinbaum

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Modern Girl as Heuristic Device: Collaboration, Connective Comparison, Multidirectional Citation
• 2. The Modern Girl Around the World: Cosmetics Advertising and the Politics of Race and Style
• 3. From the Washtub to the World: Madam C. J. Walker and the ‘‘Re-creation’’ of Race Womanhood, 1900–1935
• 4. Making the Modern Girl French: From New Woman to Éclaireuse
• 5. The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa
• 6. Racial Masquerade: Consumption and Contestation of American Modernity
• 7. All-Consuming Nationalism: The Indian Modern Girl in the 1920s and 1930s
• 8. The Dance Class or the Working Class: The Soviet Modern Girl
• 9. Who Is Afraid of the Chinese Modern Girl?
• 10. ‘‘Blackfella Missus Too Much Proud’’: Techniques of Appearing, Femininity, and Race in Australian Modernity
• 11. The ‘‘Modern Girl’’ Question in the Periphery of Empire: Colonial Modernity and Mobility among Okinawan Women in the 1920s and 1930s
• 12. Contesting Consumerisms in Mass Women’s Magazines
• 13. Buying In: Advertising and the Sexy Modern Girl Icon in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s
• 14. Fantasies of Universality? Neue Frauen, Race, and Nation in Weimar and Nazi Germany
• Concluding Commentaries
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index