The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (review)

The New Woman as the most recognizable emblem of female modernity has been subject of numerous studies in the last decades. The current volume, edited by Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, follows in the steps of two highly influential and much cited collections: Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (edited by Katharina von Ankum, 1997) and The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (edited by Alys Eve Weinbaum et al., 2008). The contributors to The New Woman International not only engage in productive dialogues with the extant scholarship, but also break new ground. In a field that seems to be so thoroughly researched, the originality of their approaches is truly impressive.

It is worth noting how the editors define the “international” aspect of the project. For one, the geographic scope of the study is radically extended by the inclusion of case studies set in different national traditions around the globe (United States, Germany, India, Czechoslovakia, Spain, and China). At the same time, however, the collaborators in this project believe that the transcendence of national and cultural borders has been crucial to the rise of the New Woman. The New Woman, they claim, both as a visual representation and as an agent of modernity, has been shaped by ideas’, aesthetic practices’, and people’s moving easily across national boundaries. And the visual mass media (film, film stills, posters, advertisements, and photographic reproductions in newspapers and magazines) have played a major role in facilitating the global advance of the New Woman and in complicating her gender, ethnic, and racial characteristics.

Seven out of the sixteen essays could be considered of particular relevance to German studies, and these are good examples of how the New Woman, especially in the early twentieth century and throughout the Weimar period, epitomizes a destabilized, fluid, or complexly constructed identity. In many of the studies, the subjects are even hard to pin down as “belonging,” strictly speaking, to any particular country or national tradition, and open up instead different ways of defining and redefining the term “international.” For instance, in her exploration of film stills found in box office programs, posters, and magazines, Vanessa Rocco studies the 1920s publicity images of actresses who have become “internationalized symbols” of the New Woman: Louise Brooks (an American émigré to Germany who also filmed in France), Marlene Dietrich (a German actress with huge success in Hollywood), and also, albeit briefly, Anna May Wong (the first Asian American star, filming predominantly in Europe). Lisa Jaye Young introduces the term Tiller effect, referring to the Tiller Girls, a Manchester-based dance group wrongly perceived as American, whose rhythmic seriality and mythologized “Amerikanismus” was emulated widely in German advertising, avant-garde photography, and other vernacular imagery of the 1920s. The internationalization of visual influences can be traced to an even earlier period, before World War I, as Despina Stratigakos demonstrates in her study of photographs in the Wilhelminian popular press that recorded female pioneers and adventurers from around the world in decidedly “nonfeminine” pursuits. And Brett M. Van Hoesen revisits photomontages published in the Weimar popular press that embody the spirit of what she calls “postcolonial cosmopolitanism,” an inherently contradictory feature of works by Hannah Höch and Marianne Brandt that embraces both the spectacle of internationalism and a critical stance toward colonialism.

Several of the contributions to the volume undertake a close analysis of well-known works and personalities, with the task of reconfiguring various historical aspects of the New Woman’s representations and actual forms of being. Matthew Biro directs our attention to Hannah Höch’s Weimar photomontages and reads them as responses to the new modes of simultaneous seeing and reading and of distracted perception promoted by illustrated media. Elizabeth Otto investigates the effect of the recently [End Page...