The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (review)

Two important trends in American culture studies come together effectively in Carolyn Kitch's The Girl on the Magazine Cover. The benefits of interpreting periodicals' cultural work in historical context will hardly be surprising to readers of this journal. But Kitch's focus on the cover illustrations of some of America's most influential magazines takes her book into productive new areas of interpretation made especially accessible via the seventy-five photographs of periodical and poster art included in the book.

Although her introduction and epilogue consider present-day publications, the bulk of Kitch's study examines covers published between 1895 and 1930. Connecting trends in those illustrations to larger social patterns, she presents a series of case studies of artists whose work was closely identified with particular magazines. Chapter 1, for example, analyzes a series of "tableaux" illustrations created by Alice Barber Stephens for the Ladies' Home Journal in 1897 and connects the women depicted there with American visions of gendered domesticity and consumerism from that era. Chapter 2 offers comparative analyses of illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson, Harrison Fisher, and Howard Chandler Christy. Kitch relates "types" like the Gibson girl to the social aspirations of a growing national class of readers intent on achieving and displaying wealth, but also caught up in complex contests over the meaning of American femininity—as expressed in such gender-altering moves as women's growing college enrollments. Chapter 3 looks critically at images of playful vamp figures created by James Flagg (for Judge) and Coles Phillips (for Life) in the first part of the twentieth century; Kitch in turn associates those images with emerging concerns about American masculinity, which she argues were being countered by illustrations of forceful male figures in J. C. Leyendecker's drawings for the Saturday Evening Post. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to alternative magazines such as The Woman Citizen, The Masses, and The Crisis, thereby bringing issues of social class and race productively into the picture. The full force of that chapter's role in the book is made even clearer through contrast with Chapter 5's review of patriotic imagery in posters circulating during World War I: here many of the same artists (e.g., Christy, Fisher, Leyendecker) examined earlier in the book reappear as participants in the crucial propaganda campaign supporting the war effort. Chapter 6's incisive treatment of flapper figures and Chapter 7's overview of family scenes from 1920s publications such as McCall's, Good Housekeeping, and the Saturday Evening Post are similarly complementary, surveying a range of stereotypes closely tied to developments on the shifting American social landscape. Kitch's next chapter, exploring links between advertising imagery and the figures created by artists who did double duty as cover illustrators and ad designers, may well be her best. There she brings together such disparate yet closely related icons as the Arrow Collar Man and the appealing children from Ivory Soap advertisements. By demonstrating links between magazine art (whether editorial or advertising) and ideological goals such as racial purity and imperial dominance, Kitch makes clear the role that analysis of visual imagery from periodicals can play in cultural critique.

In her final "Epilogue and Discussion" chapter, Kitch herself acknowledges (and thereby blunts) a few weaknesses imbedded in her own project. For one thing, as she points out, her chronological approach does sometimes suggest that the imagery she analyzes developed in a "neat" "progression" rather than in an uneven way, full of "messy representational contradictions" (182). Similarly, by organizing most of her discussion around individual artists as creators of visual "types" for particular magazines, she leaves out of her frame both some important illustrators and key images created by...