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82 “St. Valentine’s Number” Charles Dana Gibson R Tall,distant,elegant,andwhite,withapertnose,voluminousupswepthair,corseted waist, and large bust, the Gibson Girl, as rendered by Charles Dana Gibson in his pen-and-ink drawings of the American girl, offered a popular version of the New Woman that both sanctioned and undermined women’s desires for progressive sociopolitical change and personal freedom at the turn of the century. Although some of Gibson’s images pointedly depict the need for progressive reform, he did not endorse women’s political organizing.Indeed,he said that“in a mass of women, you lose entirely the irresistible appeal of the individual.”Gibson portrayed women who engaged in public politics as humorless,severe,and portly,but by presenting women as interacting with men in an unchaperoned environment or as engaging inphysicalactivity,hepromotedameasureof women’spersonalindependenceand sexual freedom, which many women used to sanction their own reform efforts. His series The Education of Mr. Pipp (1899), in which a diminutive Mr. Pipp is dragged about Europe’s clothiers and jewelers by his two statuesque Gibson Girl daughters, proved widely popular. In 1899 Gibson was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters and in 1902 to the Society of Illustrators.As it turned out, the period between 1900 to 1905 was arguably his most successful.1 Life, Feb. 5, 1903, cover. ...

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