Abstract
This volume, edited by Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, is the result of the exhibition ‘Louise Brooks and the New Woman in Weimar Cinema’ and the conference ‘Exhibiting the New Woman: Louise Brooks, Amelia Earhart, and Marianne Brandt’, both held at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2007.
The question of the modern womanhood, debated in connection with the body, sexuality, equal rights, independence, self-determination, consumerism and visibility in the public sphere, is the theoretical focus of the anthology. Modern/New Womanhood has been a very hot topic in Media Gender Studies in the last 15–20 years. One can think of studies such as Katharina von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (University of California Press, 1997), Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media and Women in Interwar Society (Duke University Press, 2003), Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Indiana University Press, 2004) to name just a few. For the most part, this body of research concentrates on specific cultural-national contexts. Conversely, The New Woman International goes beyond national boundaries. The 16 essays collected here investigate different cultural experiences taking place in the United States, Germany, Japan and India. Through a diachronic perspective these essays also describe the changes of the female condition from the late 19th century to the First and the Second World War. The approach is similar to Weinbaum et al.’s The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity and Globalization.
An important strength of this rich anthology is that it broadens the scope of historiographical paradigms and encourages research on non-western forms of New Womanhood. Otto and Rocco consider the New Woman as a global visual phenomenon: ‘the New Woman’s representation may have shifted from time and place, but what remained constant was that it was through images that she was almost always identified’ (p. 6). The editors succeed in achieving a consistent and meaningful polyphony of modern femininity’s patterns, organizing the essays into four chronological and thematic sections. This choice guarantees a greater coherence through bringing into conversation very different experiences. The book clearly points out how the icons of modern femininity circulate, and how these figures are often considered as imported from foreign countries. So in ‘The New Woman exposed: Redefining women in modern Japanese photography’ Jan Bardsley mentions the perception of ‘westernized Japanese’ in relation to the Bluestockings group, while in ‘Postcolonial cosmopolitanism: Constructing the Weimar New Woman out of the colonial imaginary’ Brett M van Hoesen talks about the ‘asianization’ of the modern girl in Weimar advertising. Similarly, in ‘Girls and goods: Amerikanismus and the Tiller-Effect’ Lisa Jaye Young relates the mistaken belief in the American origin of the Tiller girls, associated with the New Woman in Germany in the 1920s. These issues underline the cultural otherness of modern femininity, explaining all the ambiguities and the continuous negotiations of this notion across historical contexts.
A further element of interest is the attention to the technological dimension. Editors Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco investigate the notion of the New Woman in relation to different media such as stereoscopes, photography, cinema and advertising and to various practices like photo-journalism, collage, photomontage. The emerging reproductive technologies of the 20th century impose radical changes in the aesthetic experience. The mode of representation made possible by the new media transforms the way reality is portrayed and, also in addition, new subjects, such as women, acquire visibility – with a widespread dissemination of images. According to the editors, the concept of new femininity and the image of the New Woman is firmly connected to modernity and media like photography and film. The book stresses that the representation of woman is also closely related to industrialization, urban life, consumerism, mobility, new opportunities and to the subversion of traditional values: the image of the New Woman holds an ambiguous status.
In relation to visual culture, The New Woman International also considers the work of female artists. Recovering Walter Benjamin’s works, in his article ‘Hannah Hoch’s New Woman: Photomontage, distraction and visual literacy in the Weimar Republic’ Matthew Biro explains how the distracted mode of perception of the new media may not only stimulate a better comprehension of reality but may also be used ‘for both revolutionary and reactionary ends’ (p. 125), as Hoch shows in her photomontage. In ‘Paris-Dessau: Marianna Brandt and the New Woman in photomontage and photography, from Garçonne to Bauhaus constructivist’ Elizabeth Otto demonstrates how the artist uses collage to portray women’s mobility and the female body as spectacle. Brandt uses this technique not only to express how the female image is publicly perceived, but also to talk about her private life. From this perspective, the impressive artistic assemblages of Marianne Brandt and Hannah Hoch perform an original female point of view. In these works, the New Woman is not only the object of representation, but an active agent. Therefore female subjects-artists can insert their point of view in the social imaginary and propose their own self-representation.
Through these case studies, the volume overturns a traditional male-oriented perspective and brings to the surface important work done by women. By focusing on visual culture the anthology shows how a truly interdisciplinary approach fosters new insights in historical media research and interpretation. For instance, in ‘Bad girls: The New Woman in Weimar film stills’ Vanessa Rocco debates how the images of divas Louise Brooks, Brigitte Helm and Marlene Dietrich were used in posters, advertising and the illustrated press. Though cinema itself proposes a specific point of view on woman to the female spectator, the relocation of divas’ film frames in a fashion magazine and their juxtaposition to other images of women may suggest, to the female reader-audience, alternative interpretations vis-a-vis cinema.
The New Woman International makes an important contribution to the fields of media and cultural gender studies. While feminist historians have meticulously studied the image of the New Woman and film scholars have tended to focus on specific national contexts, this anthology proposes a global approach to the topic while emphasizing the necessity of working on the mediascape of the time and not only on cinema. From a methodological perspective it thus pursues two lines of interdisciplinary research: it negotiates national and global meanings of the New Woman and it attests to the contribution of the different visual modern media in the dissemination of this powerful image. Overall, it also reaffirms the active role played by women – as artists and spectators – in this important historical moment.