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BOOK REVIEW

Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco (eds.), The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011. 345 pp., ISBN 978-0-472-07104-3, cloth, $75.00.

Reviewed by Judy Suh.

Many books in the last decade have explored the New Woman in visual culture, building on the important established work on her history in drama and literature.  Another exciting development in feminist and modernist studies of the New Woman has been the increasing focus on minority groups and locations outside of Europe and the United States, from Cherene Sherrard-Johnson’s Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (Rutgers UP, 2007), to Dina Lowy’s The Japanese ‘New Woman’: Images of Gender and Modernity (Rutgers UP, 2007), Martha H. Patterson’s Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915 (U of Illinois P, 2005), Hu Ying’s Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899-1918 (Stanford UP, 2000), and Marianne Kamp’s The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (U of Washington P, 2008). Elizabeth Otto’s and Vanessa Rocco’s collection of essays on photography and film is a welcome addition to both of these developments: the already substantial body of work that investigates the New Woman first and foremost as a visual image and icon, and the constructive push for a comparative and cosmopolitan framework for this figure.

The editors have organized the essays into four chronological and thematic sections. Part 1 begins with the 1870s and extends to the late 1910s; Part 2 covers photography in the 1920s; Part 3 inquires into mass media in the 1920s; and Part 4 focuses on the 1930s and after. The book’s historical scope enables readers to trace important changes in images of the New Woman in tandem with dramatic advances in media and industrial technology located at the intersections of the most important social and political changes in the modernist era. Throughout, the authors stand at the meeting point of new media studies, cosmopolitanism, and cultural studies, and illuminate the simultaneously local and global contexts of their subjects. As a whole, the essays offer competing images of the New Woman as she helped to form positions and strategies around questions of sexual freedom, labor, consumerism, and imperialism. The advent of fascism and modifications in imperial and capitalist systems appear as important themes throughout, forming a coherent collection.  This coherence is especially remarkable given the international scope of the essays.

Otto and Rocco explain in their foreword that the New Woman, both celebrated and reviled, was a “global phenomenon” (viii), and “the desire for New Woman role models in this pursuit of liberation was a transnational one, not the realm of a particular nation or culture” (x). In other words, the New Woman was a significant means for artists and spectators to negotiate the terms of mobility, progress, and modernity in many cultural contexts. In this collection, struggles for political and sexual liberation are studied alongside new forms of consumerism, and as a result, the New Woman necessarily takes on contradictory associations and meanings. The subjects cover a wide spectrum of artistic forms, from popular culture to high art, and a wide range of media: newspapers, magazines, photography, and film. The editors have done excellent work in creating a consistent set of questions to frame the New Woman as a social phenomenon that arose along with the development of new media across the globe.

As a scholarly cosmopolitan project, the book is somewhat weighted towards Central Europe, especially Germany. Part 2 is almost entirely centered on the work of Marianne Brandt and Hannah Höch, and two additional essays investigate mass media images in Weimar Germany. Nonetheless, the collection’s cultural scope is ambitious and impressive. Rather than resting on a smorgasbord model of multiculturalism, the book attends to the figure’s fascinating border crossings. Even in those essays that focus on transatlantic and European locations, the ways in which the New Woman provided a means for understanding and negotiating modernity’s new global dispensation are foregrounded.  The New Woman thereby emerges as a truly multifaceted figure.

In Melody Davis’ essay on “The New Woman in American Stereoviews,” for example, the New Woman is studied as an export from Britain who travels to the U.S., and eventually to Europe. In other essays, such as Brett M. Van Hoesen’s “Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism” and Lisa Jaye Young’s “Girls and Goods: Amerikanismus and the Tiller-Effect,” the New Woman’s complicated identifications with European colonialism and American Fordism are central. In these essays, the New Woman as a “visual promulgator of Western, transnational commercial culture” (Young 266) emerges. In Jan Bardsley’s essay, “The New Woman Exposed: Redefining Women in Modern Japanese Photography,” the New Woman in Japan is similarly charged with negotiating pre-existing boundaries between public and private spaces, but with the added task of self-legitimation in a national context where this figure was largely considered a “foreign import” (39). Gianna Carotenuto’s “Domesticating the Harem” also analyses the redrawing of private-public boundaries by elite New Women, but in the context of emergent anti-colonial nationalism. Her emphasis on self-orientalization in images circulated at home and abroad shed light on an international political charge that could otherwise be missed.

All of the essays resonate in another sense as well. Many techniques employed by artists, photographers, and filmmakers emerge as valuable objects of further examination. Remarkably similar techniques of collage, montage, framing, and composition create a polyvalence and instability of meaning with regard to gender and sexuality. One of the most interesting consequences of reading this book is the shift it creates from a valorization of monolithic categories of opposition (to capitalist and imperial hegemony), to the underexplored forms of agency at the complex intersections of commerce, fashion, politics, and representation. Essays that perform this shift particularly well are Martha H. Patterson’s “Chocolate Baby, a Story of Ambition, Deception, and Success’: Refiguring the New Negro Woman in the Pittsburgh Courier,” which elaborates on sensationalistic images of chorus girls and their relationship to social transgression and civil rights protest in the Harlem Renaissance.  Similarly successful is Matthew Biro’s “Hannah Höch’s New Woman,” which brilliantly expands on Walter Benjamin’s famous ideas in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to analyze Höch’s critical embodiment of distraction as a mode of reading and seeing. Also notable is Kristine Harris’ “Modern Mulans,” which contemplates the star system, the historical situation of war, and reception of the New Woman in Chinese film. Harris shifts our attention from what might otherwise be read as conservatively reassuring conclusions in twentieth-century Mulan films in which the protagonist returns to domestic life, to the considerable disruptions effected by her journeys.

This book will appeal to a wide range of scholars and readers. Individual essays might be assigned in traditional modernist studies classrooms. For instance, I assigned Carotenuto’s “Domesticating the Harem” alongside E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India this past semester in a course on British modernism to give students a view of early twentieth-century Asian feminism that directly competes with Forster’s blinkered representations of elite Indian women. The result was a productive discussion of the limits of liberal humanist critiques of Empire, and for a few of my students, an opportunity to experiment with periodicals research. For readers interested in feminist modernism and popular culture, the editors have assembled truly stellar examples of new methodologies in book history, periodical studies, global modernisms, film studies and multimedia studies.