The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media

by Carolyn Kitch

From the Gibson Girl to the flapper, from the vamp to the New Woman, Carolyn Kitch traces mass media images of women to their historical roots on magazine covers, unveiling the origins of gender stereotypes in early-twentieth-century American culture.

Kitch examines the years from 1895 to 1930 as a time when the first wave of feminism intersected with the rise of new technologies and media for the reproduction and dissemination of visual images. Access to suffrage, higher education, the professions, and contraception broadened women's opportunities, but the images found on magazine covers emphasized the role of women as suffrage was reduced to spending, sexuality to sexiness, and a collective women's movement to individual choices of personal style. In the 1920s, Kitch argues, the political prominence of the New Woman dissipated, but her visual image pervaded print media.

With seventy-five photographs of cover art by the era's most popular illustrators, The Girl on the Magazine Cover shows how these images created a visual vocabulary for understanding femininity and masculinity, as well as class status. Through this iconic process, magazines helped set cultural norms for women, for men, and for what it meant to be an American, Kitch contends.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, History, American History

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 2001

About the author

Dr. Carolyn Kitch is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Journalism in the Department of Journalism and the Media and Communication Doctoral Program of Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. She also has been a Faculty Fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Temple. She has authored, co-authored, or co-edited five books: Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage (University of Illinois Press, 2020), co-edited with Linda Steiner and Brooke Kroeger; Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (Penn State University Press, 2012); Journalism in a Culture of Grief (Routledge, 2008), co-authored with Janice Hume; Pages from the Past: History and Memory in American Magazines (University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Additionally she has published more than 70 journal articles, book chapters, and reviews and is a member of the editorial boards of 11 scholarly journals. During her 21 years at Temple, she has taught undergraduate and graduate classes on media history, media and social memory, gender and media, visual communication, journalism theory, magazine journalism, and cultural studies. Previously she taught at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and worked as a magazine editor and writer for McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and Reader’s Digest.

Reviews

[b bb bbbb bbbbbbbb · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of the book is a quick assessment of select artwork from magazines, it only gets down to some moderate analysis in the final chapter.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just started this - have to read it for a Visual History class. Seems interesting.

[Ruth Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was pretty interesting, although I wish there had been even more because the author’s descriptions and observations of covers not included were intriguing too. (The book was well illustrated though, probably 50-60 covers reproduced.)

The author made the important point that, in the visual vocabulary of the era, magazine illustrations were meant (and, I think, understood by readers) to idealize the subject, but photography was understood to record a subject neutrally and that photographing a subject served to “prove” that it existed as it appeared. And, that was why African American periodicals like The Crisis (NAACP) used photography instead of artists’ illustrations. One purpose of magazines like The Crisis was to assert the dignity of Black people and photography was the medium that gave the message “These are real people” instead of the message “This is what you should aspire to be.”

[Rebecca Dunbar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.

[MM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid, interesting study -- always use this in my gender/media classes.

[Katie J Schwartz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I used this as research for a paper...it wasn't very helpful or interesting.