- Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture by Catherine Keyser, and: Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space by Alice Fahs
New books by Catherine Keyser and Alice Fahs add to the burgeoning field of scholarship on women's presence in the periodical marketplace of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Keyser's Playing Smart offers a close analysis of key figures from urban "smart magazine" culture in the period between World War I and World War II. She interrogates how Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Jessie Fauset, and Mary McCarthy, among others, adopted ironic stances to manipulate and critique the confining gender, class, and racial stereotypes that were on display within the pages of mass-market magazines. In Out on Assignment, Fahs paints a broader picture of women's professionalization as employees of turn-of-the-century urban newspapers. She shows how newspaper women created a vogue style of female publicity as they participated in adventurous, gender-defying reportage and, paradoxically, served in some of the most conventional and traditionally feminine journalistic roles, such as writing for the society pages of the New York dailies. Despite their differences in subject matter and approach, together Keyser and Fahs contribute invaluable insights into how women crafted professional and public identities in the pages of American periodicals at the turn of the twentieth century.
Keyser's starting point is the work of female "urbane sophisticates" (2) who published in and about influential middlebrow magazines, including Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, from the 1920s to the early 1940s. Keyser argues that these women—themselves "smart" in multiple senses of the word—used humor to "respond to the fantasies" of modern female life envisioned by such publications (2). The magazines, which boasted substantial circulations and widespread cultural influence, advanced materialism, sexuality, and superficiality as the core attributes of sophisticated American womanhood. Working both with and against these values, female humor writers "played smart" by deploying irony and theatricality to deconstruct the restrictions that the magazines placed on women. Keyser unpacks how "smart" woman writers "adopted the deceptive air of triviality associated with these middlebrow publications to expose the anxieties riddling modern hierarchies of class identity, gender norms, and even literary reputation" (7). [End Page 209]
Working at a time when women had, in some sense, already established a firm presence in the public sphere of print yet had not entirely controlled the terms of that presence, these authors constructed an irony-laden "smartness" to explore the boundaries of their paradoxical position. The "smart" woman was, at heart, something of a fantasy fabricated by popular American culture; she was witty, worldly, and wise. "Smartness" was "a modern territory of feminine ideals that could be uncomfortably familiar and unduly confining" in terms of how it described the behavior of the idealized young, urban woman. But smartness, in terms of physical attractiveness, fashion, "sexuality, [and] detachment," was also an ironic "pose . . . deliberately adopted" by the women in Keyser's study as they formulated a public personality and provided corresponding commentary about the instabilities of contemporary America and of modernity itself (6). "Smartness" thus serves as a rich metaphor for describing what women like Millay and Parker achieved in their most caustic and satirical writing. Female magazine writers (and women writing about magazine culture) took on the role of the "smart girl" as a humorous pose, a curtain behind which they could smile and wink knowingly, and in the process they took greater control of their own identities. In other words, they used American "smart" magazines to play double with the very idea of smartness (2).
Playing Smart traces the fluidity between middlebrow print culture and the aesthetic agenda and stylistic experimentation of high modernism; indeed, Keyer's...