Displaying Women

Displaying Women explores the role of women in the representation of leisure in turn-of-the-century New York. To see and be seen--on Fifth Avenue and Broadway in Central Park and in the fashionable uptown hotels and restaurants--was one of the fundamental principles in the display aesthetic of New York's fashionable society. Maureen E. Montgomery argues for a reconsideration of the role of women in the bourgeois elite in turn-of-the-century America. By contrasting multiple images of women drawn from newspapers magazines private correspondence etiquette manuals and the New York fiction of Edith Wharton Henry James and others she offers a convincing antidote to the long-standing tendency in women's history to overlook women whose class affiliations have put them in a position of power. . Language: English