ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how women were depicted in the popular press before the arrival of the infamous Gibson Girl through the exploration of one publication, Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. Women who fell outside of the piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity attributes were depicted as someone whom few would want to be. Women working outside of the home were not typically depicted as genteel and upper class like those participating in volunteerism, leisure, or church activities. A woman would not vote for something impure, if she could vote. In that milieu, life must have looked and felt very different for women and men at the turn of the twentieth century, but depictions of women continued to evoke and inscribe a simpler time. While women's roles did expand in the public sphere, however, the activities depicted were limited to consumer culture and leisure activities.
