The Modern Girl Around the World

During the 1920s and 1930s, in cities from Beijing to Bombay, Tokyo to Berlin, Johannesburg to New York, the Modern Girl made her sometimes flashy, always fashionable appearance in city streets and cafes, in films, advertisements, and illustrated magazines. Modern Girls smoked cigarettes; they wore high heels and sexy clothes. They applied lipstick and face creams and other cosmetics. Adorned in provocative attire, in hot pursuit of romantic love, Modern Girls appeared on the surface to disregard prescribed roles of dutiful daughter, wife, and mother. Contemporaries debated whether the Modern Girl was looking for sexual, economic, or political emancipation, or whether she was little more than an image, a hollow product of the emerging global commodity culture. The contributors to this collection track the Modern Girl as she emerged as a global phenomenon during the 1920s and 1930s.Scholars of history, women's studies, English, cultural studies, and area studies follow the Modern Girl around the world, analyzing her manifestations in Germany, Australia, China, Japan, France, India, the United States, Russia, and South Africa. Along the way, they demonstrate how the economic structures and cultural flows that shaped a particular form of modern femininity crossed national and imperial boundaries. At the same time, they highlight the gendered dynamics of interwar processes of racial formation, showing how images of the Modern Girl were used to shore up or critique racial formations. This volume concludes with commentaries by Kathy Peiss, Miriam Silverberg, and Timothy Burke. It's contributors include: Davarian L. Baldwin; Tani E. Barlow; Timothy Burke; Liz Conor; Madeleine Y. Dong; Anne E. Gorsuch; Ruri Ito; Kathy Peiss; Uta G. Poiger; Priti Ramamurthy; Mary Louise Roberts; Barbara Sato; Miriam Silverberg; Lynn M. Thomas; and, Alys Eve Weinbaum.