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

In The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, the Body, and Commodities in the 1920s, Jane Nicholas contributes to a burgeoning international scholarship on gender and modernity by examining the ubiquitous image of the Modern Girl as she appeared in English Canada in the early twentieth century. The slim-hipped, short-skirted flapper was written about with admiration and dismay in the media. Her habits—hair bobbing, smoking, flirting, drinking, wearing cosmetics—were scrutinized as indications of either a bracing rejection of Victorian repression or a scandalous sexual licentiousness and immorality. Nicholas explores how advertisers and advice columnists encouraged a new normative standard of beauty, instructing Canadian women on how to purchase the right cosmetics and fashions to replicate the modern body. She traces the discourses surrounding the Modern Girl in Canadian newspapers, advertisements, and magazines like Maclean's and Saturday Night, demonstrating the deep connections between femininity and the commodity culture of the 1920s. While the Modern Girl seemed to challenge many social norms, Nicholas is careful to point out that this new female type did not cleanly break with older structures of power, instead reinforcing certain notions of white racial supremacy, male authority, and class privilege.

This is not exactly new ground to tread: the landmark Duke University Press collection The Modern Girl Around the World came out in 2008, and Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and Dan Malleck 's Consuming Modernity explored similar themes specifically within a Canadian context. The strengths of Nicholas's work lie not perhaps in mapping new theoretical space but in carefully reconsidering well-worn tropes in Canadian historiography including cultural nationalism and antimodernism. She argues, "The Modern Girl may seem too frivolous, too insignificant, too feminine, and too elusive to count in the serious business of Canadian history. She may well be (in part) all of those things, but that is exactly why she is significant" (15). The author displays great sensitivity in considering how the image of the Modern Girl affected the lives of real women. She does not condescend to her subjects, but demonstrates the powerful and resonant appeal of the Modern Girl for Canadian women of different classes, in cities and rural areas. The Calgary nurses who lost jobs for bobbing their hair and the many women who wrote letters to the "Dear Mab" advice column in Chatelaine were not simply manipulated by advertisers and the media, but actively navigating a new world where being modern was increasingly tied to one's appearance and consumer choices.

Nicholas has two overlapping goals in this project: on the one hand, she hopes to demonstrate how Canada was part of a larger, international process of modernization while at the same time emphasizing distinctly Canadian discourses of womanhood, beauty, and consumption. A discussion of the controversy over the display of nude art at the Canadian National Exhibition (cne) in 1927 nicely illuminates how a seemingly superficial debate over three paintings hanging in a gallery reveals much about English Canadian attitudes toward sexuality, patriarchy, and notions of high and low culture. Nicholson places the scandal within the larger contexts of the Canadian art world, the development of cinema, and the physical space of the cne. She contrasts the antimodern, masculinist landscapes of the Group of Seven with the exhibit's intimate portrayals of women in private, arguing that the Group's emphasis on remote, harsh terrains was a direct attack on the feminized and urban spaces associated with the Modern Girl. The heated debate over the appearance of the nudes should not be dismissed as a holdover of Upper Canadian prudery, Nicholson emphasizes: the reactions of audiences to the paintings reflected uneasiness over new ways of seeing the female body, and the unsettling power of feminine modernities.

Other chapters exploring advertising and women's bodies are slightly less successful in delineating just what was specifically Canadian about the Modern Girl. Nicholson...