Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

During the turn-of-the-last-century, the American Girl archetype permeated American mass culture as an icon of modern female sexuality and a tool of manipulation, redefining and reinforcing male-dominant gender roles. The American Girl was a mass-produced phenomenon utilized most effectively in the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal, the unpretentious and affordable magazine that appealed to American middle-class. My examination of the Journal, between the years of 1889 and 1917 – the tenure of its most influential editor, Edward W. Bok – is an investigation into the development and distribution of American women’s identities through the mass print media at the turn of the last century. My study is a consideration of the American Girl who goes to college: the College Girl. These young women, who pursue higher education, are presented in mass-media as commodities for consumption by an interested public. My paper argues that, displayed on the covers and within the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal, the use of the College Girl was as a benign character whose purpose is to assuage rising anxieties of gender roles that were being blurred because of women’s increased activity in the public sphere, the call for women’s suffrage, and their desire for higher education (whether they finish college was irrelevant).