From prim parlor maids to fashionably dressed ladies, Charles Dana Gibson captured the spirit of the American woman in his charming, turn-of-the-century illustrations. This collection includes nearly 200 of his finest, design-ready works.

An innocent seduction? Gibson Walker was appalled when Chloe Madsen came to work for him. He'd only agreed to employ her as a favor—he had no time to baby-sit an innocent small-town girl. So why was he finding himself tormented by Chloe's shy beauty—and infuriated that she didn't even notice him? Chloe didn't dare notice Gib. She was already engaged, and only in New York for the summer. Besides, Gibson Walker was exactly the sort of man mothers warn their daughters about: sinfully gorgeous and determinedly single! Seduce her? Gib was tempted. Resist him? Chloe had to! But when fate threw them together it soon became a question of who was seducing whom….

Challenging monolithic images of the New Woman as white, well-educated, and politically progressive, this study focuses on important regional, ethnic, and sociopolitical differences in the use of the New Woman trope at the turn of the twentieth century. Using Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Girls" as a point of departure, Martha H. Patterson explores how writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Margaret Murray Washington, Sui Sin Far, Mary Johnston, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather challenged and redeployed the New Woman image in light of other “new” conceptions: the "New Negro Woman," the "New Ethics," the "New South," and the "New China." As she appears in these writers' works, the New Woman both promises and threatens to effect sociopolitical change as a consumer, an instigator of evolutionary and economic development, and (for writers of color) an icon of successful assimilation into dominant Anglo-American culture. Examining a diverse array of cultural products, Patterson shows how the seemingly celebratory term of the New Woman becomes a trope not only of progressive reform, consumer power, transgressive femininity, modern energy, and modern cure, but also of racial and ethnic taxonomies, social Darwinist struggle, imperialist ambition, assimilationist pressures, and modern decay.

Examines the symbols that defined perceptions of women from the turn of the century through the end of World War I and how they changed women's role in society.

2 dolls and 24 costumes re-create the turn-of-the-century charm of the Gibson Girl. For doll collectors and fashion historians.

DIVA visual history about how feminist artists have appropriated and incorporated the signification of the pin-up genre within their own work./div

The public image of the college woman of the Progressive Era was transformed from that of a homely, sexless oddity, doomed to spinsterhood, to that of a vibrant, attractive, athletic young woman, who would eventually marry. This study shows how the many popular representations of student life at women's colleges during that time not only described the college woman, but also helped to constitute her. Paper edition (unseen), $13.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructions of Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comic Strips addresses this gap in scholarship, serving as the first sustained examination of the ways childhood was depicted and theorized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comic strips. By drawing from and building on histories and theories of childhood, comics and Progressive Era conceptualizations of citizenship and nationhood, Lara Saguisag demonstrates that child characters in comic strips reinforced and complicated notions of who could claim membership in a modernizing, expanding nation"--

In Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century the question of what it meant to be modern was a heated topic of debate. Focusing on interior design, fashion and photography, as well as on painting and architecture, this study casts fresh light on the vital role of the arts in these debates. The 'new' art and literature was crucial in defining a distinctive Viennese modernity while at the same time challenging preconceptions about modern urban life. Many artists and writers produced work that questioned and undermined oppositions between city and country, interior spaces and panoramic views, masculinity and femininity. Issues of gender and the representation of the body were particularly important in establishing professional identities for some of Vienna's most prominent figures, including the Secessionist painters Gustav Klimt and Carl Moll, designers such as Adolf Loos and Emilie Flöge, as well as the poet and feuilletonist Peter Altenberg. Intellectual life in turn-of-the-century Vienna has often been characterised as a retreat from the public sphere. This book demonstrates how - even in its ostensibly most private manifestations - Viennese Modernism involved a highly performative set of practices aimed at an international audience.

In this eye-opening book, New York Times science writer Gina Kolata shows that our society's obsession with dieting and weight loss is less about keeping trim and staying healthy than about money, power, trends, and impossible ideals. Rethinking Thin is at once an account of the place of diets in American society and a provocative critique of the weight-loss industry. Kolata's account of four determined dieters' progress through a study comparing the Atkins diet to a conventional low-calorie one becomes a broad tale of science and society, of social mores and social sanctions, and of politics and power. Rethinking Thin asks whether words like willpower are really applicable when it comes to eating and body weight. It dramatizes what it feels like to spend a lifetime struggling with one's weight and fantasizing about finally, at long last, getting thin. It tells the little-known story of the science of obesity and the history of diets and dieting—scientific and social phenomena that made some people rich and thin and left others fat and miserable. And it offers commonsense answers to questions about weight, eating habits, and obesity—giving us a better understanding of the weight that is right for our bodies.