1. By 1929, industry was spending $15 per year on advertising for every American. Between 1909 and 1929, expenditures for advertising in periodicals rose from $54 to $320 million; in newspapers, they rose from $149 to $792 million. Robert S. Lynd, "The People as Consumers," in Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934), p. 973. [BACK]

2. Richard Wightman Fox, "Epitaph for Middletown," in The Culture of Consumption , ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 105. [BACK]

3. Chapter 3 discusses some of these businesses; see Map 2 for their locations. [BACK]

4. Lois Scharf, To Work and to Wed: Female Employment, Feminism, and the Great Depression , Contributions to Women's Studies no. 15 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), p. 10. [BACK]

5. Lorine Pruette, ed., Women Workers through the Depression: A Study of White Collar Employment Made by the American Women's Association (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 96. [BACK]

6. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870-1936," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 245. Smith-Rosenberg points out that the discourse was used in arguments about the naturalness of gender and the legitimacy of the bourgeois social order. The new woman as mannish lesbian—the literary figure she describes—threatened a social order that by the 1920s privileged the heterosexual over the homosocial sphere of women. [BACK]

7. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); and Rayna Rapp and Ellen Ross, "The Twenties' Backlash: Compulsory Heterosexuality, the Consumer Family, and the Waning of Feminism," in Class, Race, and Sex: The Dynamics of Control , ed. Amy Swerdlow and Hanna Lessinger (New York: Barnard College Women's Center; Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), pp. 93-107. [BACK]

8. I make a distinction here between the category/designation "New Woman" and the historical phenomenon of the New Woman. Teresa de Lauretis's distinction between the fictional/discursive construct "woman" and "women"—"the real historical beings who cannot as yet be defined outside of those discursive formations, but whose material existence is nonetheless certain"—is useful. I want to be clear about my shifts from the discursive (i.e., representational) and hence social constructs to the historical exemplars of new women, even as the relationship itself may remain indirect: ''The relation between women as historical subjects and the notion of woman as it is produced by hegemonic discourses is neither a direct relation of identity, a one-to-one correspondence, nor a relation of simple implication. Like all other relations expressed in language, it is an arbitrary and symbolic one, that is to

say, culturally set up." Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 6-7. [BACK]

9. My "characterizations" here draw on Lynda Nead, "Representation, Sexuality, and the Female Nude," Art History 6 (June 1983), pp. 227-236; Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1985 ), pp. 157-158; Mary Poovey, ''Feminism and Deconstruction," Feminist Studies 14 (Spring 1988), pp. 51-65; and Joan Scott, "Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism," Feminist Studies 14 (Spring 1988), pp. 33-49. [BACK]

10. Tickner, "Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference," Genders no. 3 (Fall 1988), pp. 96-97. In her formulation of text and intertextuality , Tickner looks to Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text," in Image-Music-Text , ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); and Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (London: Macmillan, 1986). [BACK]

11. Scott, "Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference," p. 34; Tickner, "Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference," p. 97. [BACK]

12. In the introduction to their edited volume Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. xxiv, Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt speak about the value of reader-response criticism for its ability to see both male and female positions and historically changing interpretive communities. The notion of an "interpretive community" comes from the reader-response theories of Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); see also Catherine Belsey, "Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text," in Newton and Rosenfelt, pp. 52-53; and Scott, "Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference," p. 35. [BACK]

14. Nead, "Representation, Sexuality, and the Female Nude," p. 231. [BACK]

15. Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism vs. Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory," Signs 13, no. 3 (Spring 1988), p. 431; and Catherine Belsey, "Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text." There may be a contradiction between Belsey and Alcoff, though both are looking for some "agency" or way to effect political change. In this context, however, they are not thinking of the subject in terms of the artist but in terms of either a "reader" who recognizes himself or herself in a text (Belsey) or a feminist author trying to deal with woman as a concept (Alcoff). [BACK]

16. Griselda Pollock, "Van Gogh and the Poor Slaves: Images of Rural Labour as Modern Art," Art History 11 (September 1988), p. 409. In her work on Van Gogh, Pollock offers three distinct configurations in which to think about the artist, or what she refers to as the "author name." One is the "historically located producer," who works within structures of "artistic production, consumption and their attendant discourses" in specific ways that the art historian can make comprehensible. A second is the "effect of the texts" (presumably visual and verbal) to which the producer's name is attached, "a set of procedures, competences, effects, concerns, stylistics, etc.," that the author name designates at "the point of their consumption." Finally, there is the artist as a divided and "inconsistent" classed and gendered subject. He or she operates as an "intending agent," one engaged in a highly motivated practice, but within determining structures outside his or her control. The subject is thus "articulated through visual and literary codes of his or her culture" and in turn inscribes across them his or her "particular history and the larger social patterns of which all subjects are an effect." [BACK]

17. "Art, U.S. Scene," Time , December 24, 1934, pp. 24-25. [BACK]

18. For this range of responses, dependent on the focus of their studies, see Matthew

Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930 s (New York: Praeger, 1974); Patricia Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930 s (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1983); Patricia Hills and Roberta K. Tarbell, The Figurative Tradition and the Whitney Museum of American Art: Paintings and Sculpture from the Permanent Collection (New York and Newark, Del.: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with the University of Delaware Press, 1980), pp. 76-78, 82-84. [BACK]

19. Thomas Albright, "Street Artist of the Depression," San Francisco Chronicle , November 27, 1983, pp. 14-15; Hilton Kramer, "Marsh's Search for a Style," New York Times , June 24, 1979, sec. 2, p. 31; Kramer, "Miller's Art: City in a Dimmed Light," New York Times , January 17, 1970, p. 25; Kramer, "Reginald Marsh, New York Romantic,'' undated clipping from New York Times News Service; and Kramer, "The Unhappy Fate of Kenneth Hayes Miller," New York Times , March 11, 1979, sec. D, p. 31. [BACK]

20. For a study of gender in New Deal culture see Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). [BACK]

21. Melosh, Engendering Culture , has helped me to frame this account. [BACK]

22. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism . [BACK]

23. Poovey, "Feminism and Deconstruction," p. 58. Poovey distinguishes between a conservative recuperative practice and a historicized demystifying one. She wants to show the importance of deconstruction as a tool within the latter practice for feminists interested in history, race, and class. [BACK]