The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, the Body, and Commodities in the 1920s by Jane Nicholas (review)

In recent years, a growing scholarly attention has been given to the 1920s, and in particular to its most vibrant manifestation, the Modern Girl. As scholars have noted, women’s bodies, appearance, and consumer practices, as well as new forms of popular culture such as film, automobiles, and jazz, became more than just whimsical by-products of modernity, but crucial agents in the construction of its meanings. Groundbreaking works such as Alys Eve Weinbaum, et al., eds., The Modern Girl around the Globe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) contributed to the internationalization of this field by pointing to the global aspects of the Modern Girl phenomenon and the active role women played in the international workings of modernity. Jane Nicholas’ book, The Modern Girl is an important addition to this body of scholarship. Focusing on English-Canada, Nicholas brings a national case study that shed light on North American histories of the Modern Girl and her performance of modernity.

Nicholas’ main contribution is her focus on the working-class girl as the main force behind the Modern Girl phenomenon. While Nicholas rightly notes that Modern Girls crossed class lines, her attention to the role of working-class women in the construction of feminine modernities provides an important revision to previous interpretations of the Modern Girl as a privileged middle-class college student. Nicholas illuminates the crucial role working-class girls played as consumers, not just workers, in the new economy and situates them at the centre of her story. Without disregarding the limitations class posed in accessing consumer goods, Nicholas shows that these women nevertheless managed to carve a position of influence that challenged both class and gender hierarchies. Weaving class analysis into the story of the Modern Girl helps to understand the complexity of this phenomenon, particularly in the North American context.

The book’s first three chapters analyze the cultural landscape that gave rise to a new consumer culture and the production of feminine modernities, while the remaining three look at specific types or manifestations of the Canadian Modern Girl. In Chapter 1, Nicholas explores the terrain that produced the Modern Girl’s body and its meanings. As Nicholas rightly points out, commodities, and especially cosmetics and fashion, were crucial to the development of modern culture that offered women “new ways of appearance, performing, disciplining, and destroying their bodies based on elusive promises of pleasure, change, and success.” (38) In this chapter and throughout the book, Nicholas shows how women’s bodies became a site of liberation and power, and at the same time also of objectification and oppression. Young women had to negotiate between these two ends, and in the process were able to shape the meanings of the Modern Girl, both to themselves and in popular culture.

The second chapter moves its attention from commodities to how media, particularly women’s magazines, provided the main arena where notions of modernity were discussed, explained, and sometimes contested. Advice columns in popular magazines offered women critical information on how to negotiate the increasingly complicated consumer scene while simultaneously normalized the Modern Girl. Nicholas provides some very interesting close readings of these columns and popular ads. However, her analysis takes for granted the authenticity of readers’ letters and disregards the intimate connections between advertisers and magazine content in the 1920s. Moreover, it would have been helpful to receive more information on these magazines’ readership and numbers to better understand the workings of class politics and the influence these magazines had beyond their targeted white, middle-class audiences.

Chapter 3, which moves beyond the image of the Modern Girl to discuss actual women who embraced the look, offers the most nuanced analysis in the book. Pointing to the inherent relationship between the Modern Girl and the modern urban landscape, Nicholas provides a more localized perspective of the global style of the Modern Girl, showing how she encapsulated gender, class, and racial anxieties in this period. According...