The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (review)

Feminist, postmodern, and cultural studies theorists have long argued that from the beginning of modern capitalist, consumerist cultures in the late nineteenth century, women have been spectacles of objectified desire. Liz Conor explores the complexities of this thesis with regard to the 1920s, especially in the popular print media in Australia. She assumes, probably correctly, that the situations and trends she discusses in a provincial country existed in sites worldwide, as advertising everywhere found its major image of popular appeal in the young girl. That, for example, is the conclusion advanced independently by scholars involved in the interesting Modern Girl Around the World Project, centered at the University of Washington. They have found similar trends with regard to consumerism, modernity, and young women in a variety of locations. Indeed, as Conor argues, agreeing with their conclusion, the modern girl "was the first cultural figure to travel along the multidirectional, intersecting flows of transnational capital." (7)

Conor focuses on six cultural areas in Australia in the 1920s: the metropolis, the movies, commodity culture, beauty culture, the late colonial scene, and the heterosexual leisure scene. She also pays attention to types of the modern woman that appeared at this time, including the screen star, beauty pageant contestants, flappers, and mannequins. She has done a considerable amount of research in Australian periodicals, especially ones produced in Sydney and Melbourne, as well as a few in the United States and in England.

Yet theory rather than history drives her perspective, and she draws from the standard cast of theorists, mentioning literally scores along the way, including (in alphabetical order) Adorno, Althusser, Benjamin, Berger, Bhabba, Boudrillard, Debord, Foucault, Freud, Heidegger, Jay, Jameson, and the feminist heavies, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Theresa di Lauretis. The results are somewhat overwhelming for a historian like me, and her own difficulties in dealing with so many theorists are evident in an annoying tendency to repeat her conclusion again and again with slight variations: that the status of woman as object in modernity is shifting, multifaceted, and contradictory, as women asserted a claim to the new that was beyond any objectification visited on them. She writes that they strode down the streets, for example "encountering and negotiating the gaze of others," yet making themselves into individual spectacles—all of which resembled each other. (46)

Moreover, Conor fails to take into account theorists like Camille Paglia who have argued that, from Cleopatra to Mata Hari and Marilyn Monroe, women's greatest power has lain in their sexuality, viewed in terms of their ability to utilize objectification to gain independence and power through controlling men. I find this theoretical stance perverse, but given her theoretical inclusiveness, Conor should have given this idea its due.

The most innovative parts of the book involve Conor's discussions of the "mannequin" and of the flapper. The word "mannequin" referred both to female bodies made out of plastic that were employed as models in shop windows and to the real women who modeled clothes in such venues as designer shows and photographs in fashion magazines. Insofar as the mannequin was a lifeless and unchanging image, the figure demonstrated women's willingness to internalize the dictates of consumer culture to make themselves into spectacles of the self. Moreover, the flapper, independent and rebellious, was both a standardized image and an individualized one, as young women adopted a stance that made them both subjects of the gaze and objects of it.

Recently there has been much writing on adolescent women in the 1920s, including work by Grace Palladino on adolescence (Teenagers: An American History, 1985), and by Kelly Schrum (Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920-1945, 1996). The enormous vogue of adolescent and pre-adolescent pop stars like Britney Spears, in all probability, has inspired this work. Conor stands in this trend, although her adolescent woman emerges as a curiously static and theoretical creature, with an agency that is at best attenuated. And how...