The modern girl around the world: A research agenda and preliminary findings

Gender and History

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 245-294

  Barlow, Tani E ^a   Yue Dong, Madeleine ^a   Poiger, Uta G ^a   Ramamurthy, Priti ^a   Thomas, Lynn M ^a   Eve Weinbaum, Alys ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GENDER;

EID: 33645093165     PISSN: 09535233     EISSN: 14680424     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2006.00382.x     Document Type: Article

References (122)

1. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
2. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)
3. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999)
4. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998)
5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
6. Paul Bairoch, 'Globalization Myths and Realities: One Century of External Trade and Foreign Investment', in Robert Boyer and Daniel Drache (eds), States Against Markets: The Limits of Globalization (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 173-92;
7. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)
8. Frederick Cooper, 'What is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian's Perspective', African Affairs 100 (2001), pp. 189-213.
9. For Japan, see Miriam Silverberg, 'The Modern Girl as Militant', in Gail Bernstein (ed.), Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 239-66,
10. and Miriam Silverberg, 'The Cafe Waitress Serving Modern Japan', in Stephen Vlastos (ed.), Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 208-25. Silverberg's path-breaking essays on the moga in Japan, which analyse the ambiguity of moga in debates of the 1920s and 1930s, have inspired the work of our group.
11. See also Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
12. Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
13. For the United States, see Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986)
14. Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998)
15. Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999)
16. Angela J. Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000).
17. For China, see Shu-mei Shih, 'Gender, Race and Semicolonialism: Liu Na'Ou's Urban Shanghai Landscape', Journal of Asian Studies 55 (1996), pp. 934-56.
18. For Africa, see Ilsa M. Glazier Schuster, New Women of Lusaka (Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1979).
19. For India, see Reena Mohan, Of Wayward Girls and Wicked Women: Women in Indian Silent Feature Films (Mumbai: Majlis, 1996).
20. For Europe, see Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)
21. Atina Grossmann, 'Girlkultur, or thoroughly Rationalized Female?' in Judith Friedlander (ed.), Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 62-80;
22. Katharina von Ankum (ed.), Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
23. Richard Wilk, 'The Local and the Global in the Political Economy of Beauty: From Miss Belize to Miss World', Review of International Political Economy 2 (1995), pp. 117-34, here p. 124.
24. The analysis of globalisation that our collaboration proposes is only possible by combining the regional and linguistic expertise of a coordinated group of scholars. No one person could handle the multiple languages and specific historical contexts that such research demands. To pay more than lip service to the diversity of contexts and cultures at play, studies of globalisation, like ours, must involve regional and disciplinary specialists who agree to bring their knowledge to bear on a single problem or a shared set of questions. Members of our group work in Chinese, German, English, French, Hindi and Swahili.
25. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (1904-5; repr. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976)
26. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. John Cummings (1947; repr. New York: Herder & Herder, 1972)
27. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, tr. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (1962; repr. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989)
28. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert Hurley (1978; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1980)
29. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982)
30. Bruno Latour, We Have never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter (1991; repr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
31. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)
32. Donald Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
33. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity;
34. Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, tr. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992)
35. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
36. Jean and John Comaroff (eds), Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)
37. Brian Larkin, 'Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities', Africa 67 (1997), pp. 406-40;
38. Dilip Goankar, 'On Alternative Modernities', Public Culture 11 (1999), pp. 1-18;
39. Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)
40. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
41. For other approaches to plural modernities, see Bruce M. Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
42. Tani Barlow (ed.), Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997)
43. Tani Barlow, 'Eugenic Woman, Semi-Colonialism and Colonial Modernity as Problems for Postcolonial Theory', in Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed Esty (eds), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005)
44. Antoinette Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London: Routledge, 1999)
45. James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)
46. Lin Chun, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism: A Critical Commentary (unpublished book manuscript)
47. Andrew Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
48. James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meaning of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 14.
49. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)
50. Rofel, Other Modernities
51. Holly Wardlow, '"Hands-Up"-ing Buses and Harvesting Cheese-Pops: Gendered Mediation of Modern Disjuncture in Melanesia', in Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern, pp. 144-72.
52. Our larger project, an edited volume, juxtaposes an array of Modern Girl-inspired studies in different locales, and is thus part of an ongoing project that works to displace the privileging of a singular European modernity.
53. Isaac Schapera, 'Premarital Pregnancy and Native Opinion: A Note on Social Change', Africa 6 (1933), pp. 59-89, p. 87.
54. Questions about our use of 'girl' have emerged every time we have presented this paper (someone even struck out 'girl' and wrote 'woman' on all the posters announcing our presentation at the University of Washington campus). The troublesome-ness of the term 'girl' is one reason we like it. 'Girl' signifies the contested status of women who lie outside childhood and outside contemporary social codes and conventions relating to marriage, sexuality and motherhood and is a preferable theoretical alternative to the overdetermined category 'woman'.
55. Michel Foucault, 'Technologies of the Self', in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 16-49, p. 18. Foucault defined 'technologies of the self' as those 'which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality'.
56. Peiss, Hope in a Jar, and Davarian Baldwin, 'Chicago's New Negroes: Race, Class, and Respectability in the Midwestern Black Metropolis 1915-1935', unpublished PhD thesis (New York University, 2002), show in their ground-breaking work that black beauty products were also sometimes marketed to white ethnics, especially in the Jewish press. For the purposes of this article we have focused on the white and black press only.
57. The Arbeiter Illustrirte Zeitung, which was directed at Communist workers and was no longer published in Germany after the Nazi rise to power in 1933, featured the Modern Girl, or neue Frau, in articles and photographs, but contained hardly any cosmetics ads. On neue Frauen among workers, see Eric Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), ch. 6;
58. Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
59. Compared to elite magazines such as Young Companion, lower-class tabloids such as Luobinhan (Robin Hood) and Fuermosi (Sherlock Holmes) rarely contained cosmetics ads, so we do not consider them in this article.
60. Since the mid-nineteenth century, 'coloured' has been a common racial designation used to refer to the descendants of mixed marriages and sexual liaisons between Europeans, African peoples indigenous to the Cape region, and enslaved peoples brought from Southeast Asia, South Africa, Madagascar, West Africa, East Africa and elsewhere during the Dutch colonial period. After 1948, South Africa's apartheid regime deployed 'coloured' along with white/European, Bantu/African and Asian as one of its four racial categories. Beginning in the 1970s, Black Consciousness and some other progressive political activists rejected these categories, arguing that all non-whites should identify as black.
61. We have drawn on the pan-Indian English-language press mentioned, primarily because of the difficulty in accessing the vernacular Indian popular presses from afar. However, we know from preliminary perusal and discussions with feminist scholars who are familiar with the archives of popular magazines and newspapers in Marathi, Hindi and Telugu that the history of commodity advertising in each of those locales varies and is complex in its deployment of 'modern' and 'traditional' women's imagery.
62. On the role of advertising in the expansion of US business abroad, see Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity;
63. James P. Woodward, 'Marketing Modernity: The J. Walter Thompson Company and North American Advertising in Brazil, 1919-1939', Hispanic American Historical Review 82 (2002), pp. 257-90.
64. German Pond's ad, Microfilm Collection, Reel 41, J. Walter Thompson Collection, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.
65. See especially Roberts, Civilization without Sexes;
66. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)
67. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997), pp. 99-100.
68. On the United States, see Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, especially pp. 140-63;
69. for Germany, see Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), especially pp. 81-91.
70. Our caution stems from objections to the term 'Asianisation' that we encountered at an international workshop on 'The Modern Girl, Asia, and Beyond,' Ochanumizuo University, Tokyo, September 2004. We recognise that the politics of assimilation under Japanese imperialism also took place under the rubric of 'Asia' and the project of 'Asianising' bodies in Japanese colonies. On the possibilities and problems of visual identification of and with 'Asianness', see also Valerie Steele and John S. Major, China Chic: East Meets West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)
71. Patricia Laurence, Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003).
72. See Linda Gertner Zetlin, Beardsley, Japonisme and the Perversion of the Victorian Ideal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
73. See works cited in note 3 as well as Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)
74. Petro, Joyless Streets;
75. Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)
76. Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
77. Peiss, Hope in a Jar, pp. 39-43;
78. Sarah Berry, 'Hollywood Exoticism: Cosmetics and Color in the 1930s', in David Dresser (ed.), Hollywood Goes Shopping (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 108-38, here p. 109.
79. For toiletries ads in the United Kingdom, see Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 119-67;
80. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995)
81. for Germany, see David M. Ciarlo, 'Rasse konsumieren: Von der exotischen zur kolonialen Imagination in der Bildreklame des Wilhelminischen Kaiserreichs', in Birthe Kundrus (ed.), Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003), pp. 135-79.
82. For the German example of Lilienmilchseife, see Manfred O. Hinz, Helgard Patemann and Arnim Meier (eds), Weiss auf Schwarz: 100 Jahre Einmischung in Afrika: Deutscher Kolonialismus und afrikanischer Widerstand (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1984), p. 57.
83. David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 143.
84. For example, see Cao Xueqin and Gao E, Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chuban she, 1998), p. 38
85. The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry, tr. Arthur Waley (New York: Grove Press, 1996), pp. 21, 48.
86. Sumit Guha, 'Skin color preferences in South Asia', E-post, 22 March 2002, available at , accessed 25 February 2005.
87. Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 104.
88. Guha, 'Skin color preferences in South Asia'.
89. The meaning of 'tropical', for example, shifted from a preoccupation with climatic factors to those that were man-made. In the process, physiological explanations of racial difference could be addressed scientifically and through the civilising mission of British imperialism. Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
90. In contemporary times, the attention to skin colour borders on the obsessive. Indian matrimonial ads inevitably specify the desire for 'fair' brides and the market for skin lighteners has expanded at a rate of more than 20 per cent a year since the late 1990s.
91. Please note that in China, skin colour was not the primary or single focus of racial discourse and nationalisation. This could provide an explanation for the lack of emphasis on whitening by bleaching in Chinese advertisements compared to what we have seen in other parts of the world.
92. Jean Comaroff, 'Medicine, Colonialism, and the Black Body', in John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (eds), Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 215-33
93. Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), esp. chs 1-2.
94. Isaac Schapera, Married Life in an African Tribe (New York: Sheridan House, 1941), p. 46
95. Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 222.
96. Peiss, Hope in a Jar, pp. 39-43, 92
97. Apex ad, Bantu World, 7 July 1934.
98. Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, pp. 158-9.
99. On the long and varied history of African-Americans serving as potential role models and mentors for black South Africans, see, Tim Couzens, '"Moralizing Leisure Time": The Transatlantic Connection and Black Johannesburg (1918-1936)', in The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H I E Dhomo (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985), pp. 82-124
100. Veit Erlmann, '"A Feeling of Prejudice": Orpheus M. McAdoo and the Virginia Jubilee Singers in South Africa, 1890-1898', in African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 21-53
101. James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
102. Amanda Denise Kemp, "Up from Slavery" and Other Narratives: Black South African Performances of the American Negro (1920-1943)', unpublished PhD thesis (Northwestern University, 1997).
103. Although Madam C. J. Walker herself refused to manufacture skin bleach, following her death in 1919 the Walker Company began to market a lightening product called 'Tan-Off', as we discuss shortly. On Madam C. J. Walker, see Gwendolyn Robinson, 'Class, Race, and Gender: A Transcultural Theoretical and Sociohistorical Analysis of Cosmetic Institutions and Practices to 1920', unpublished PhD thesis (University of Illinois, Chicago, 1984)
104. Noliwe M. Rooks, Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 3
105. Perry Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (New York: Scribner, 2001)
106. Peiss, Hope in a Jar, pp. 108-14, 203-37
107. Baldwin, 'Chicago's New Negroes', unpublished manuscript.
108. Matthew Frye Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
109. Pompeian Beauty Powder ad, Cape Times, 4 November 1925.
110. Quote from Donald S. Cowling, 'Will the Vogue for Tan Last?', Printers' Ink Monthly, August 1929, p. 31.
111. Also see Marie Du Bois, 'What is Sun-Tan Doing to Cosmetics?', Advertising and Selling, 12 January 1929, pp. 19-20, 62, 64
112. Marie Du Bois, 'The Sun-Tan Mode Arrives: What it is Doing to a Score of Industries', Advertising and Selling, 1 May 1929, pp. 28, 76, 78, 80
113. Berry, 'Hollywood Exoticism', p. 117.
114. Leipziger Illustrirte, 5 May 1927, p. 644;
115. 23 June 1927, p. 920.
116. On Nivea and the Nazis, see Ulrike Thoms, 'Dünn und dick, schön und häaßlich: Schönheitsideale und Körpersilhouette in der Werbung 1850-1950', in Peter Borscheid and Clemens Wischermann (eds), Bilderwelt des Alltags: Werbung in der Konsumgesellschaft des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995), pp. 242-81, here pp. 260-62
117. Rainer Gries, Produkte als Medien: Kulturgeschichte der Produktkommunikation in der Bundesrepublik und der DDR (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2003), pp. 467-86.
118. More generally on contradictory Nazi attitudes, see Dagmar Reese, 'Straff, aber nicht stramm - herb, aber nicht derb': Zur Vergesellschaftung von Mädchen durch den Bund Deutscher Mädel im sozialkulturellen Vergleich zweier Milieus (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1989)
119. Irene Guenther, Nazi Chic? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2003)
120. Dagmar Herzog, 'Hubris and Hypocrisy, Incitement and Disavowal: Sexuality and German Fascism', Journal of the History of Sexuality 11 (2002), p. 3-21, here p. 12.
121. Berry, 'Hollywood Exoticism', pp. 119-26.
122. During the 1920s and 1930s, Tan-Off was, in some markets, the Walker Company's bestseller. Peiss, Hope in a Jar, p. 11s3.