Art, the “New Woman,” and Consumer Culture

Ellen Todd uses art to reveal the shifting discourse of womanhood in the 1920s and 1930s. Examining the paintings of two urban realists, Kenneth Hayes Miller and Reginald Marsh, Todd finds a typology of female figures that both echo and remake contemporary images of womanhood. Like Christina Simmons, Todd uses these cultural representations to uncover contemporary debate about the sexual revolution and its revisions of gender. Moreover, Miller’s and Marsh’s paintings provocatively suggest the intertwining of the debates about the sexual revolution, the New Woman, and consumer culture. Miller’s matronly shopper suggests resistance to the feminist claims of his time; his female figures have a certain look of modernity, but they participate in public life solely through the contained and limited role of shopping. Marsh’s sirens embody a bolder version of modern womanhood and, at times, suggest a critical stance: Marsh comments on the manipulation of the erotic in advertising and film, and the shifting terms of sexual exchange and negotiation.