THE SPECTACULAR MODERN WOMAN: FEMININE VISIBILITY IN THE 1920s

With the rise of mass media, photography, and movies, a woman's visibility became a mark of her modernity, and the result was at once liberating and confining, given the many narrow conceptions of what it meant to be a modern woman.

Liz Conor has a Ph.D. from La Trobe University in women's studies. She has been editor of Metro and Australian Screen Education, and is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Studies Department at the University of Melbourne.

In The Spectacular Modern Woman, Liz Conor illustrates how technological advances in image reproduction transformed Western industrial societies into visual or "ocularcentric" cultures with significant and complex consequences for women's lives. With the rise of mass media, photography, and movies, a woman's visibility became a mark of her modernity, and the result was at once liberating and confining, given the many narrow conceptions of what it meant to be a modern woman. Focusing on the city girl in the metropolitan scene, the "Screen Struck Girl" in the cinematic scene, the mannequin in the commodity scene, the beauty contestant in the photographic scene, the "primitive" woman in the late colonial scene, and the flapper in the heterosexual leisure scene, Conor shows how women's roles were intimately tied to the visual culture of the day.