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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

13. Scott, "Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference"; all quotations from p. 35.

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

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).

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."

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

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.

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.

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).

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

22. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism .

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.

1. See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Bourgeois Discourse and the Progressive Era," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 176-178.

2. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), chapter 8; and Smith-Rosenberg, "Bourgeois Discourse and the Progressive Era," pp. 176-178.

3. Both D'Emilio and Freedman, pp. 194-196; and Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), have shaped this chapter's discussion of working-class women, leisure, and sexuality. For other, more general, discussions, see Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985); and John Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).

4. Kathy Peiss, in Cheap Amusements , pp. 174-178, points out the existence of competing cultural styles and values among working-class women. In contrast to their pleasure-seeking sisters, many immigrant women pursued a middle-class ideal of respectability and found the elevating forms of leisure in neighborhood clubs fully satisfying. Still others organized themselves around the ideals of labor and helped to improve their own working conditions.

5. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 3-10, 33-38. Among the most active feminists were the lawyer and cultural radical Crystal Eastman; the industrial investigator Frances Perkins, who became well known as Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor; the anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons; the writers Rhetta Childe Dorr and Inez Haynes Gillmore; and the socialist trade unionist Rose Pastor Stokes. They were joined by other women journalists and educators and by sympathetic men

like The Masses editors Floyd Dell and Max Eastman (brother of Crystal and husband of Ida Rauh) and the columnist Will Irwin.

6. Katherine S. Anthony, Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia (New York: Henry Holt, 1915), p. 6, as quoted in Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism , p. 49.

7. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism , p. 39.

8. This paragraph summarizes Cott's analysis, pp. 41-47. For a discussion of the birth-control movement in the context of feminism in the teens, see Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1977; reprint 1986), pp. 186-245. For a more detailed discussion of feminism in Greenwich Village, see Ellen Kay Trimberger, "Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900-1925," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality , ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stan-sell, and Sharon Tompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 131-152.

9. Cott, in chapter 1 of The Grounding of Modern Feminism , makes this brief coherence a major accomplishment of feminism in the teens.

10. Homer Fort is quoted in Fairfax Downey, Portrait of an Era As Drawn by C. D. Gibson (New York: Scribner, 1936), p. 196. Other information on Gibson and the Gibson girl can be found in Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 154-174; Robert Koch, "Gibson Girl Revisited," Art in America 1 (1965), pp. 70-73; Henry C. Pitz, "Charles Dana Gibson: Creator of a Mode," American Artist 20 (December 1956), pp. 50-55.

11. In Imaging American Women: Ideas and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), Martha Banta considers the effect of types on both daily conduct (the tendency of the Gibson girl to condition fashion and behavior among women) and larger cultural ideals—like a sense of nationhood. For Banta, Gibson was the most effective turn-of-the-century illustrator at imaging a wide range of cultural desires (pp. 15, 211-218).

12. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics , as quoted in Banner, American Beauty , p. 156.

13. Caroline Ticknor, "The Steel-Engraving Lady and the Gibson Girl," Atlantic Monthly 88 (July 1901), p. 106.

14. Ticknor, p. 107.

15. Ticknor, pp. 107-108.

16. Banner, American Beauty , p. 156.

17. Banner, American Beauty , pp. 156-157; Downey, Portrait of an Era , pp. 264-265; and Pamela Neal Warford, "The Social Origins of Female Iconography: Selected Images of Women in American Popular Culture, 1890-1945," Ph.D. diss., Washington University, St. Louis, 1979.

18. Koch, "Gibson Girl Revisited," pp. 71-72.

19. Downey, Portrait of an Era , p. 186.

20. This account of the portrait's origin, from L N. Phelps Stokes, Random Recollections of a Happy Life (New York: 1932), pp. 115-118, is recounted in Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), p. 206.

21. Carter Ratcliff, John Singer Sargent (New York: Abbeville Press, 1982), p. 168.

22. Ratcliff, p. 167.

23. Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait , p. 206.

24. See Trevor J. Fairbrother, The Bostonians: Painters of an Elegant Age, 1870-1930 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1986), pp. 40-92.

25. Bernice Kramer Leader, "Antifeminism in the Paintings of the Boston School," Arts

Magazine 56 (January 1982), 112-119; see also Leader's dissertation, "The Boston Lady as a Work of Art: Paintings by the Boston School at the Turn of the Century," Columbia University, 1980.

26. Leader, "Antifeminism," pp. 117-118. Leader cites Philip Hale's portrayals of his artist wife, Lilian Westcott Hale, who achieved greater financial and professional success as an artist than her husband. Though Philip encouraged her professional life, he was active in the anti-suffrage campaign. When she served as his model, she was "romantically beautiful, face relaxed and dreaming," never painting at her easel.

27. Quotation from the Philadelphia Times coverage of a symposium of prominent women's anti-suffrage views, as quoted in Leader, "Antifeminism," p. 116.

28. The inaugural exhibition American Women Artists, 1830 to 1930, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts provided an occasion for seeing both self-portraits and portraits of women artists by their peers. Information on the artists comes from the catalog, Eleanor Tufts, American Women Artists, 1830-1930 (Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1987).

29. American Women Artists, 1830-1930 , cat. no. 19; Fairbrother, The Bostonians , p. 220; and Martha J. Hoppin, Marie Danforth Page: Back Bay Portraitist (Springfield, Mass.: George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, 1979). Danforth began her studies at age seventeen with Helen Knowlton (who collaborated with William Morris Hunt) and then moved to the Museum of Fine Arts School, where, thanks to the sponsorship of Edward Everett Hale, she studied with Benson and Tarbell between 1890 and 1895. Because she needed to care for her ailing mother, she had to refuse the school's travel prize awarded to her in 1894. Following her marriage to Page in 1896, she received her first commissions for copies of famous portraits and worked as an illustrator and a poster artist. By 1902 she had held her first one-woman exhibition of fifteen portraits at Walter Kimbell and Company. The following year she finally took her European tour and spent a portion of the time in Spain copying works by Velázquez. In the teens and twenties, she received prizes at national and international exhibitions, earned substantial fees as a portraitist (her paintings of children were especially popular), and was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1927.

30. See Fairbrother, The Bostonians , p. 67. The Pages had no children until Marie adopted two young girls in 1919, when she was fifty. Hoppin, Marie Danforth Page , p. 11.

31. Fairbrother, The Bostonians , p. 67.

32. Little is known about Margaret Foster Richardson. She came to Boston for art training from Winnetka, Illinois, studying first at the Normal Art School in Boston and then with Tarbell. Primarily a portraitist, she received the Harris Bronze Medal at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1911 and the Maynard Portrait Prize in 1913 at the National Academy of Design. Tufts, American Women Artists, 1830-1930 , cat. no. 16.

33. William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (1891; reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), p. 128. The discussion of Howells, Caffin, and Santayana and the genteel tradition is indebted to Patricia Hills's discussion in "John Sloan's Images of Working-Class Women: A Case Study of the Roles and Interrelationships of Politics, Personality, and Patrons in the Development of Sloan's Art, 1905-1916," Prospects 5 (1980), pp. 172-174.

34. Charles Caffin, The Story of American Painting (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1907), pp.340-344. For a discussion of late nineteenth-century notions of the decorative in relation to images of women and prevailing notions of femininity, see Bailey Van Hook, "Decorative Images of American Women: The Aristocratic Aesthetic of the Late Nineteenth Century," Smithsonian Studies in American Art 4 (Winter 1990), pp. 45-70.

35. George Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," in Winds of

Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (New York: Scribner, 1926), p. 188. Presented as an address in 1911; published in 1913.

36. Kenneth Russell Chamberlain, interviewed by Richard A. Fitzgerald (unpublished transcript in the library of the University of California, Riverside), p. 28, as quoted in Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 140.

37. Leslie Fishbein, introduction to Art for the Masses , pp. 14-15; and Suzanne L. Kinser, "Prostitutes in the Art of John Sloan," Prospects 9 (1984), p. 234.

38. Bennard B. Perlman, The Immortal Eight: American Painting from Eakins to the Armory Show, 1870-1913 (Cincinnati, Ohio: North Light, 1979), p. 89.

39. Milton W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955; reprint, 1972), pp. 9-17. See also Robert Hay-wood, "George Bellows's Stag at Sharkey's : Boxing, Violence, and Male Identity," Smith-sonian Studies in American Art 2 (Spring 1988), pp. 3-15; and Rebecca Zurier, "Real Men, Real Life, Real Art: Gendering Realism at the Turn of the Century," paper delivered at the American Studies Association annual meeting, Baltimore, Md., November 1, 1991.

40. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), pp. 107-108.

41. Helen Farr Sloan notes, as quoted in Zurier, Art for the Masses , p. 56.

42. Only five of Sloan's paintings from his early period show women working. In four women are cleaning, and in a fifth they are planting. In these works, women's work is "necessary ritual cleansing and renewal, with purification and regeneration the essential content." Hills, "John Sloan's Images," p. 175.

43. D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters , pp. 200-201. In summarizing the shifting foundations of turn-of-the-century sexual norms, the authors cite both commercialized leisure and the existence of lifelong intimate relationships among college-educated new women.

44. At the time he executed this work, Sloan was changing his previously somber palette to the higher-key tonalities of the Maratta color system. His declaration that "lavender light was on my mind" refers to the dominant tones of the painting and reflects his formal preoccupation. David W. Scott and Edgar John Bullard, III, John Sloan, 1871-1951 , exhibition catalog (Washington, D.C: National Gallery of Art, 1971), p. 124.

45. Kinser, "Prostitutes in the Art of John Sloan," p. 238.

46. Though Kinser does not discuss this painting, my analysis of it as a possible narrative of prostitution is based on her discussion of The Haymarket (1907), Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street (1907), Chinese Restaurant (1909), and 3 A.M . (1909).

47. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie: An Authoritative Text, Background and Sources, Criticism , ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 1. Kinser points out this connection between Sloan and Dreiser.

48. Peiss, Cheap Amusements , pp. 62-67.

49. Peiss, pp. 108-113.

50. I want to re-emphasize here Peiss's claim (see n. 3) that not all working-class women sought the same forms of leisure. Many continued to follow parental desires for traditional patterns of courtship. Others went to women's clubs managed by middle-class reformers that offered more intellectual opportunities. Many of these women felt a need to understand American social habits as a means to assimilation and class mobility.

51. Although there is no specific evidence of a response by female working-class viewers of Sloan's work, I am drawing on the evidence of their responses to various institutions of

commercialized pleasure. In proposing a different viewer and in suggesting that the painting's narrative strategies made possible a variety of subject positions, I draw on Laura Mulvey's and Rosemary Betterton's theoretical work on female spectatorship along with the notion expressed by Stanley Fish that we read a text within a specific "interpretive community." Here the theoretical female spectator is positioned within a community of working women. Rosemary Betterton, "How Do Women Look? The Female Nude in the Work of Suzanne Valadon," in Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media , ed. Rosemary Betterton (London and New York: Pandora Press, 1987), p. 218; Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation , ed. Brian Wallis (New York and Boston: New Museum of Contemporary Art in association with Godine, 1984), pp. 361-373.

52. Peiss, Cheap Amusements , pp. 185-188. This double edge is a central theme in Peiss's argument.

53. For a summary of the way that early moviemakers both used and undermined the ideals of new womanhood, see Peiss, pp. 153-158.

54. Leila J. Rupp, "Feminism and the Sexual Revolution in the Early Twentieth Century: The Case of Doris Stevens," Feminist Studies 15 (1989), pp. 289-309, points out this variety within the new woman typology. For a discussion of the early emergence of the flapper, see James R. McGovern, "The American Woman's Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals," Journal of American History 55 (September 1968), pp. 315-333.

55. Susanne Wilcox, "The Unrest of Modern Woman," Independent 67 (July 8, 1909), pp. 62-63.

56. Louise Connoly, "The New Woman," Harper's Weekly 57 (June 7, 1913), p. 6.

57. Norman Hapgood, "What Women Are After," Harper's Weekly 58 (August 16, 1913), p. 29.

58. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. vi. See also Alessandra Comini, "Posters from the War against Women," review of Dijkstra in the New York Times Book Review , February 1, 1987, pp. 13-14.

59. Sloan's images were untitled in the Collier's article "Women March," by Mary Alden Hopkins (May 18, 1912), pp. 13 and 31. See Rowland Elzea and Elizabeth Hawkes, John Sloan, Spectator of Life (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1988), pp. 101-102.

60. Carrie Chapman Catt, "Why Women Want to Vote," The Woman's Journal (January 9, 1915), p. 11, as quoted in Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism , p. 30.

61. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism , p. 30.

62. Estelle B. Freedman, "The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s," Journal of American History 61 (September 1974), p. 387. Freedman notes, for example, that male historians writing in the early 1930s, like Preston William Slosson and Frederick Lewis Allen, claimed that women were liberated but based their assessments on women's roles in the family, the home, and the fashion and entertainment industries. See Preston William Slosson, The Great Crusade and After: 1914-1928 (New York, 1930), pp. 130-161; and Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties , First Perennial Library edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1931; reprint, 1964). By contrast, Inez Haynes Irwin focused on organized women's activities and their political life in Angels and Amazons: A Hundred Years of American Women (Garden City, N.Y., 1933); see also Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, Women in the Twentieth Century: A Study of the Political, Social, and Economic Activities (New York, 1933).

63. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism , pp. 9-10, 20.

64. Editor's statement, "The New Woman," Current History 27 (October 1927), p. 1.

65. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism , p. 272.

66. Harriet Abbott, "What the Newest New Woman Is," Ladies Home Journal , August 1920, p. 154.

67. Freedman in "The New Woman," p. 374, points out that between 1927 and 1933 there was a sudden proliferation of literature on the new woman, unequaled until the historical reassessment that began in the early 1960s. For an evaluation of these two stances toward feminism, see Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism , p. 271.

68. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, "Feminist—New Style," Harper's Monthly Magazine 155 (October 1927), p. 554.

69. Bromley, p. 557.

70. Lillian Symes, "Still a Man's Game: Reflections of a Slightly Tired Feminist," Harper's Monthly Magazine 158 (May 1929), p. 678.

71. Symes, pp. 678-679.

72. Lillian Symes, "The New Masculinism," Harper's Monthly Magazine 161 (June 1930), pp. 98-107.

73. Symes, "Still a Man's Game," p. 678.

74. Henry R. Carey, "This Two-Headed Monster—the Family," Harper's Monthly Magazine 156 (January 1928), p. 171; Symes, "The New Masculinism," pp. 98-107. Carey's piece was also a direct refutation of what he perceived as the rampant selfishness of the economically independent woman in Bromley's "Feminist—New Style." His "Virist—New Style'' also claimed independence from his job so he could become women's equal in "the art of recreation."

75. Symes, "The New Masculinism," pp. 105-107.

76. Lois Banner, Women in Modern America: A Brief History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 142. 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. 102-103.

77. Elizabeth Onativia, "Give Us Our Privileges," Scribner's 87 (June 1930), p. 597.

78. Banner, Women in Modern America , p. 142.

79. Benjamin R. Andrews, "The Home Woman as Buyer and Controller of Consumption," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 163 (May 1929), p. 41.

80. 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, 1983), pp. 5-12.

81. Before the franchise, the largest women's reform groups saw labor legislation as a device to win over women to the suffrage movement. Among groups supporting legislation were the Women's Trade Union League, the League of Women Voters, and the Women's Bureau. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 205-210.

82. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism , pp. 120-129; Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), xiii.

83. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work , p. 206.

84. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism , pp. 73-74, 124-129; Rapp and Ross, "The Twenties' Backlash," p. 93.

1. Alison Lurie, The Truth about Lorin Jones (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), p. 320.

2. Lurie, The Truth about Lorin Jones , pp. 326-327.

3. John I. H. Baur, Revolution and Tradition in Modern American Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. viii, 87-90, 8.

4. Milton W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955; reprint, 1972), pp. 182-186.

5. There has been disagreement about the notion of a school since the early 1950s. On the occasion of the Art Students League retrospective for Miller just after his death (September 23-October 11, 1953), Stuart Klonis, director of the league, claimed Miller was "the only teacher working in America who, in the tradition of the Renaissance, produced a school of painters." This assertion was quickly refuted by the critic Margaret Breuning, who argued that there was no "common tradition of technical expression" among painters like Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Niles Spencer, or William Palmer—and many others who had been Miller's pupils. Kenneth Hayes Miller: A Memorial Exhibition (New York: Art Students League, 1953), no pagination; and Margaret Breuning, ''Little Touched by a Changing World," review of the 1953 memorial exhibition for Kenneth Hayes Miller at the National Academy, Art Digest 28 (October 1, 1953), pp. 19, 31.

6. I compare Soyer's account of the 1930s from his Self-Revealment: A Memoir (New York: Maecenas Press, Random House, 1969), pp. 70-79, and his essay "An Artist's Experiences in the 1930s," in Patricia Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930 s (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1983), pp. 27-30. Soyer also wrote Diary of an Artist (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1977), Homage to Thomas Eakins , ed. Rebecca L. Soyer (South Brunswick, N.J.: T. Yoseloff, 1966), and A Painter's Pilgrimage (New York: Crown, 1962).

7. Interview with Lloyd Goodrich, December 30, 1982. Though he knew Soyer less well than the other artists, Goodrich felt that he shared with them a conviction that the human figure should be used as a design element—something that abstract art lacked. See also Lloyd Goodrich, Kenneth Hayes Miller (New York: Arts Publishing Corporation, 1930), Raphael Soyer (New York: Abrams, 1972), and Reginald Marsh (New York: Abrams, 1972).

8. Griselda Pollock, "Van Gogh and the Poor Slaves: Images of Rural Labour as Modern Art," Art History 11 (September 1988), p. 409.

9. Noyes's sister married John Miller, Kenneth's grandfather. Noyes's mother, Polly Hayes (Miller's middle name), was President Rutherford Hayes's aunt. Lincoln Rothschild, To Keep Art Alive: The Effort of Kenneth Hayes Miller, American Painter (1876-1952 ) (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1974), p. 19.

10. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 112.

11. Louis J. Kern, An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias — the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 224-225. D'Emilio and Freedman, on p. 113, define the Oneidan conception of free love. The system of coitus reservatus is to be distinguished from the other traditional method of birth control, coitus interruptus , in which the male ejaculates outside the female to prevent conception; to the Oneidans this method would have meant loss of both semen and self-control.

12. These ideas are summarized in D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters , p. 120; Kern, An Ordered Love , p. 247; and Rothschild, To Keep Art Alive , pp. 19-21.

13. D'Emilio and Freedman, p. 120; Kern, p. 247; and Rothschild, pp. 19-21.

14. Rothschild, pp. 24-25. Miller's letters indicate some work done for the Century and for McClure's . Initially he taught a course on illustration at the Chase school. Rothschild argues that these early experiences gave Miller his lifelong interest in "the linear technique of etching."

15. Rothschild, To Keep Art Alive , pp. 25-26.

16. Kern, An Ordered Love , pp. 230, 259-260.

17. Kern, p. 270.

18. Ellen Kay Trimberger, "Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900-1925," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality , ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Start-sell, and Sharon Tompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), p. 133.

19. Trimberger, p. 134.

20. Trimberger, pp. 134, 149.

21. Specific information on Miller's activities comes from Rothschild, To Keep Art Alive , pp. 35-36. In a letter to his cousin Rhoda Dunn, dated September 8, 1918, Miller professed admiration for Max Eastman's "American Ideals in Poetry," an essay in "the current issue of The New Republic, " Kenneth Hayes Miller Papers, Roll 583, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York: Essays on Fourteen American Moderns (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), pp. 135-144; for general discussions of the Greenwich Village milieu that help to place Miller's activities and attitudes see also Trimberger, "Feminism, Men, and Modern Love," p. 135; and Arthur Frank Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture, 1908-1917 (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 172-173.

22. Letter from Miller to Rhoda Dunn, dated October 19, 1915. In a letter to her dated September 8, 1918, Miller relates that Dr. Frink has had remarkable success with Helen in psychoanalysis: "Besides the benefit to her personality ... she has gained ability and insight for the psychoanalytic technique which with practice she might use to practical—perhaps even professional purpose." Roll 583, Archives of American Art.

23. The artist Minna Citron, a former student of Miller's and a close friend of the artist's daughter, Louise, provided the information on marital dynamics in an interview, December 22, 1982. Evidently Helen's friends encouraged her to take a lover as well.

24. Interview with Minna Citron, December 22, 1982.

25. Raphael Soyer, "The Lesson: The Academy, the League, the Classroom," Arts Magazine 42. (September 1967), p. 35.

26. For a selection of some of these characterizations, see artists' remarks in Kenneth Hayes Miller, A Memorial Exhibition ; Alan Burroughs, "Kenneth Hayes Miller," The Arts 14 (December 1928), pp. 301-306; and Harry Salpeter, "Kenneth Hayes Miller, Intellectual," Esquire , October 1937, pp. 89, 197-203.

27. Notes from Miller to Helen, dated July 28, 1921, and June 26 and October 8, 1923. Letters to Helen Pendleton Miller, Kenneth Hayes Miller Papers, Roll 583, Archives of American Art.

28. Letters from Miller to his mother, dated February 4, 1911; March 1, 1912; and December 20, 1915. Roll 583, Archives of American Art.

29. Letter from Miller to his cousin Rhoda Dunn, October 16, 1917.

30. Letters from Miller to Helen, dated December 31, 1912; July 7, 1925; July 13, 1925; and May 27, 1926; and letters from Miller to his cousin Rhoda Dunn, dated September 21, 1909; February 13, 1915; and September 8, 1918. Kenneth Hayes Miller Papers, Roll 583, Archives of American Art.

31. Harry Salpeter, "Kenneth Hayes Miller: Intellectual," p. 197.

32. For the most comprehensive biographical summary see Marilyn Cohen, "Reginald Marsh: An Interpretation of His Art," Ph.D. diss., New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, 1986; early information on Marsh's grandfather and father also appears in Frederick A. Blossom, "Reginald Marsh as a Painter," Creative Art 12 (April 1933), p. 257.

33. Interview with Lloyd Goodrich, December 3o, 1982. Goodrich claimed that Fred Marsh designed and built three family homes as well as motor cars and miniature theaters and made a technologically advanced phonograph recording in 1910.

34. Lloyd Goodrich, Reginald Marsh (New York: Abrams, 1972), p. 295. Unless otherwise noted, Marsh's biography is based on Goodrich.

35. Goodrich, Reginald Marsh , p. 20. According to Goodrich, Marsh once reported that he had barely passed the art courses, instructed by "pedants" who "taught drawing from the antique and painting in still life ... in a way that would make their 'old master' heroes turn in their graves."

36. Trimberger, "Feminism, Men, and Modern Love," pp. 146-147; Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance , pp. 230-231.

37. Malcolm Cowley, as quoted in Wertheim, p. 230.

38. Enrollment Cards, the Art Students League of New York. Marsh enrolled in John Sloan's painting class from October 1921 through February 1922 and in his illustration class for the month of May 1922. That same year he signed up for Miller's "studio" in March. He spent four months of the 1922 season in Miller's life drawing and painting classes, and the following November in a painting course with George Luks. He concluded his formal studies with Miller in the 1927-28 season when he spent five more months in life drawing and painting, with an additional month of study in January 1929. At the league, students signed up on a month-by-month basis, following an academic (September to May) calendar with individual teachers. Miller's classes in the early 1920s were designated either life drawing and painting or studio. The latter designation may have referred to Miller's Wednesday afternoon teas at his studio on Fourteenth Street.

39. For a discussion of Burroughs's career, see Gwendolyn Owens, "Pioneers in American Museums: Bryson Burroughs," Museum News 57 (May 1979), pp. 46-53, 84.

40. Betty Burroughs, in an interview with Marilyn Cohen, characterized the Marsh family as nouveau riche (with enough wealth to be upper middle-class) and their life as bohemian. See Cohen, "Reginald Marsh: An Interpretation," p. 21.

41. Cohen, "Reginald Marsh: An Interpretation," pp. 19-20.

42. Interview with Lloyd Goodrich, December 30, 1982.

43. Reginald Marsh Papers, Roll D-308, frames 1-172, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

44. Reginald Marsh Papers, Roll D-308, frames 1-172, Archives of American Art.

45. One can follow the events leading to the divorce in Marsh's diaries. He first saw a lawyer on October 5, 1932. During November and December, he paid bi- and triweekly visits to a Dr. Spaulding (a psychiatrist?). On December 21 Marsh left for Reno, Nevada.

Caleb Marsh, whose birth is recorded in Marsh's diary, is never mentioned by Marsh biographers. According to Raphael Soyer, to whom Marsh told the story, Marsh had been thrilled with the birth of Caleb, believing that the child was his. When Betty subsequently informed him that he was not the father, he was devastated (interview with Soyer, March 13, 1987). Edward Laning (interviewed by Marilyn Cohen, October 10, 1979) believed that Marsh might have been sterile as a result of a childhood illness and thus anxious about his masculinity. Cohen, "Reginald Marsh: An Interpretation," p. 220 n. 55.

46. Desk diary entries dated May 24, 1933, and June 30, 1933, Reginald Marsh Papers, Roll NRM-2, Archives of American Art.

47. Marilyn Cohen, Reginald Marsh's New York: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, and Photographs (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Dover, 1983), p. 34.

48. By February 1937, after occupying four different Fourteenth Street studios, Marsh moved into his two-story studio at 1 Union Square West, in the Lincoln Arcade Building, which he would occupy until his death. Marsh records these moves in his desk diaries—from 21 East Fourteenth Street, his first studio; to 9 West Fourteenth Street on June 1, 1932; to 5 East Fourteenth Street on January 19, 1934; back to 9 West Fourteenth Street on March 2, 1935; to 7 West Fourteenth Street on September 14, 1935; and finally to 1 Union Square West on February 2, 1937. Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art; see Map 1.

49. On one occasion he wrote: "I've hardly talked with or seen a soul since my last letter [this is confirmed in Marsh's August 1934 diary entries], working, planning, rambling and staring, meditating; I think this is the way a painter should live." Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art, letter dated September 9, 1934.

50. Cohen, "Reginald Marsh: An Interpretation," p. 170.

51. Though never a natural athlete (perhaps because his childhood illnesses forced long periods of inactivity), Marsh was constantly testing himself, always recording his scores in golf, swimming, and tennis in comparison with those of others. Marsh's diary for April 12, 1912, Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.

52. Lloyd Goodrich, Reginald Marsh , p. 18.

53. Edward Laning, East Side, West Side, All Around the Town (Tucson: University of Arizona Museum of Art, 1969), p. 95.

54. Interview with Lloyd Goodrich, December 30, 1982; Interview with Raphael Soyer, December 27, 1982; and Raphael Soyer, "Reginald Marsh," Reality: A Journal of Artists' Opinions 3 (Summer 1955), pp. 5-6.

55. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men. American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1984), pp. 68-84.

56. Laning, East Side, West Side , p. 95.

57. Interview with Raphael Soyer, March 13, 1987. Even before he entered psychoanalysis, Marsh would have become aware of its processes as a student of Kenneth Hayes Miller's in the 1920s. Several appointments with a Dr. Spaulding are recorded in Marsh's 1932 desk diary prior to his departure for Reno, Nevada, to obtain a divorce. Although the consecutive appointments in a stressful time suggest that Dr. Spaulding may have been a psychiatrist, I have not determined that this is the case. Marsh's calendars of the mid-1930s indicate regular appointments with a psychiatrist, Dr. Belcher; he saw Dr. Brodman, a psychiatrist interested in the psychology of artists, late in the 1930s and into the 1940s. Since Soyer and Marsh had adjoining studios in the Lincoln Arcade Building, at 1 Union Square West, beginning in 1937, Soyer's recollections undoubtedly date from sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s, long after Marsh's mother's death in 1927. Dr. Brodman's wife kindly sent me photocopies of three letters, one undated and two dated 1945 and 1946, in which Marsh thanks Dr. Brodman for treatment and discusses paintings he is sending to the doctor. See also Cohen, "Reginald Marsh: An Interpretation," p. 211 n. 11.

58. Laning, East Side, West Side , pp. 89-91, and Edward Laning, The Sketchbooks of Reginald Marsh (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), p. 25.

59. Bishop could trace her lineage to both English and Dutch settlers in the eighteenth century. Her mother, Anna Bartram Newbold, was a descendant of the famous eighteenth-century botanist John Bartram. Her father was a member of a New Brunswick, New Jersey, family for whom Bishop House, the offices of the history department at Rutgers University, was named. John Bishop, one of the largest landowners in that area's early town-

ship, subsequently became a member of the governor's council. The family also rose to prominence in the shipping business in the early 1800s, when New Brunswick became New Jersey's first port. James Bishop was a New Jersey Whig representative to the Thirty-fourth Congress of the United States in 1855-57 and a principal founder of St. James Methodist Church of New Brunswick. "Isabel Bishop," Current Biography Yearbook (New York: Wilson, 1977), p. 63; and Sunday Home News (n.p.), June 21, 1970, clipping fragment, Isabel Bishop Papers, Archives of American Art.

60. Cindy Nemser, "A Conversation with Isabel Bishop," Feminist Art Journal 5 (Spring 1976), pp. 15-16. Helen Yglesias, Isabel Bishop (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), p. 10. Yglesias's book provides much new information about Bishop's childhood and her relationships with her parents. Yglesias mentions that one of Bishop's sisters, a gifted artist, was older by fifteen years. Thus the first set of twins would have been born in about 1887, the second in 1889.

61. Yglesias, Isabel Bishop , p. 10. This discussion of her childhood occurred sometime in the 1980s.

62. Yglesias, Isabel Bishop , p. 10. Bishop's parents were especially divided over religion: her father worshiped regularly at the Episcopal church; her mother dismissed Christianity as a "minor sect." The most scandalous display of her mother's nonbelief occurred when Bishop was eight or ten. Her mother, who had to appear in court, refused to swear on the Bible, claiming, "I don't believe in God." Bishop condemned her mother's actions—violations of convention that deeply humiliated her father. "I felt so sorry for my father. I thought it was terrible of her." Over the years, her own semiregular church attendance paid homage to her father's beliefs.

63. Yglesias, Isabel Bishop , p. 11. Information on Bishop's early class is found on the enrollment cards, Art Students League of New York.

64. Enrollment cards, Art Students League of New York. Bishop's observations on Weber and Henri were made during my interview with her, December 16, 1982.

65. Bishop, as quoted in Yglesias, Isabel Bishop , p. 12.

66. Nemser, "A Conversation with Isabel Bishop," pp. 16-17.

67. Sally Moore, "Isabel Bishop: Half a Century of Painting the Flotsam of Union Square," People , May 26, 1975.

68. Edward Laning, "The New Deal Mural Projects," in Francis V. O'Connor, The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), p. 80; Howard E. Wooden, Edward Laning, American Realist, 1906-1981: A Retrospective Exhibition (Wichita, Kans.: Wichita Art Museum, 1982), pp. 6, 19; Yglesias, Isabel Bishop , p. 15; Reginald Marsh, desk diaries, 1931-34, Roll NRM-2, Archives of American Art. A comparison of these sources may correct the confusion about who participated in the 1931 and 1933 European trips. Marsh's desk calendars for the late spring and summer of 1931 show that he never left New York. An entry for May 30, 1931, states, "Miller sails, Brooks sail" (the plural may indicate Alexander Brook and his wife, Peggy Bacon). An entry for July 7, 1931, reads, "Majestic arrives bearing Ken, Isobel" (Marsh often misspelled Bishop's first name).

69. Interview with Isabel Bishop, December 16, 1982; Yglesias, Isabel Bishop , p. 14. Listings of the works exhibited at Midtown Galleries are in the Isabel Bishop Papers, Archives of American Art.

70. Yglesias, Isabel Bishop , pp. 16-17.

71. From the available literature, it is not clear when and how the stipend ended. According to a 1941 article, Bishop admitted "that if it were not for a small sum of money left her in a will and the income of her husband, Dr. Harold G. Wolff ... she would have real trouble following her art career." Donna Ford, "Other Women's Lives," Worcester

Telegram , May 20, 1941, no pagination. The source of this small inheritance is unknown.

72. In a taped interview with me (December 18, 1982) and in interviews with Nemser ("A Conversation with Isabel Bishop," p. 17) and with Yglesias ( Isabel Bishop , p. 12.) Bishop credits the painter Guy Pène du Bois with helping her realize how much she was influenced by Miller, to her detriment. In the early 1930s, du Bois, who had been her teacher one summer, arrived at her studio for one of his irregular visits, looked at her work, and asked, "What are you doing?" As Bishop told me, "Well, I was doing from morning until night and trying hard and struggling with it, but he felt there was nothing in it." Bishop also recalled that critics were quite "hard" on her about Miller's "influence.'' Although some of that criticism was apt, its persistence long after Bishop established her own manner of working suggests a bias in the criticism itself: women are always subject to authority, always "influenced."

73. Yglesias, Isabel Bishop , p. 16.

74. Yglesias, p. 16.

75. Yglesias, p. 17.

76. Yglesias, p. 19. The artist Jack Levine described her as a pluralist who always led from a position of neutrality.

77. Yglesias, Isabel Bishop , p. 17.

78. Reginald Marsh Papers, Roll NRM-3, Archives of American Art. The last sentence in this part of the letter reads, "So—no wonder Miller's been padding his nest." This enigmatic statement places me in the center of "Polly's dilemma." Do I interpret this as evidence of a more intimate relationship between Bishop and Miller, now coming to an end? We have evidence of Miller's reputation for becoming involved with a succession of female art students. Bishop (in her interview with me) said that she was very close to Miller's entire family. In 1928 Miller wrote to his mother: "Louise [his daughter] will have a really brilliant Christmas as Isabel Bishop is giving her a fur coat: she is rather stunned by such good fortune which seemed to have dropped from the skies." Bishop also subsidized a major study on Miller by Lloyd Goodrich, published in 1930. They may have traveled alone together in Europe; as I indicated in n. 68 above, Marsh's diaries for 1931 show that he did not accompany them in their travels that year as Bishop has claimed, though her memory could simply have elided separate events fifty years after the fact. In 1933, when they traveled to Europe together, Marsh left Bishop and Miller after ten days. (They all arrived in Berlin on July 10 and traveled to Munich on July 13; on July 19 Marsh took the train alone from Munich back to Berlin, where he caught a plane for Moscow.) There is not enough evidence to argue with any certainty for a more intimate bond; if there were one, it would have intensified the inequality of power in a relationship from which Bishop felt obliged to extricate herself. At the same time, if there were even an "assumed" perception of involvement on the part of members of Miller's and Bishop's social circle, it may have removed or postponed for Bishop the possibility of too early a marriage, which she also feared.

79. Margaret Breuning, review from the New York Evening Post , quoted in "Women Art Critics Attack Organization of Modernist Women," Art Digest 3 (March 1, 1929), p. 9. She claimed that the older National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors was formed at a time (initially in 1889 as the Woman's Art Club of New York, in 1912 as an association) when a separate exhibition structure was necessary. For an overview of several early women's organizations, see Julie Graham, "American Women Artists' Groups: 1867-1930," Woman's Art Journal 1 (Spring-Summer 1980), pp. 7-12.

80. Helen Appleton Read, as quoted in "Women Art Critics," p. 9.

81. 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. 100-101.

82. It is difficult to say how conscious Bishop's choices were; her 1980s insights are those of someone with historical distance and an awareness of feminist issues. One has a sense that she was making careful choices but that she did not deliberately manipulate circumstances she fully understood.

83. Raphael Soyer, Diary of an Artist , p. 181. Parts of Soyer's narrative of his childhood, his education, his early career, and his experiences in the 1930s appear in his earlier books, A Painter's Pilgrimage, Homage to Thomas Eakins , and Self-Revealment: A Memoir .

84. Interview with the artist, March 13, 1987. Soyer learned Hebrew along with Russian because his father took the twins to these private tutorials. In gratitude for their lessons, several of the students also taught the twins some French and German. Borisoglebsk is in the province of Tambov approximately 325 miles southeast of Moscow.

85. For the structure of Eastern European communities and the place of the scholar see Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985), pp. 38-39.

86. Moses Soyer, "Three Brothers," Magazine of Art 32 (April 1939), p. 201; and Raphael Soyer, Diary of an Artist , p. 207. The twins would copy their father's drawings of cossacks; he would correct these and hang the best pictures on the walls as both encouragement and praise. He also made intricate designs for table linens for their mother, who would select the color schemes and execute the embroidery.

87. Ewen, Immigrant Women , p. 52; Cynthia Jaffee McCabe and Daniel J. Boorstin, The Golden Door: Artist Immigrants of America, 1876-1976 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1976), p. 158. In his interview with me on March 13, 1987, Soyer characterized his father as a "social democrat," rather than a radical or a Communist, and an ardent Zionist (who longed for a Jewish state).

88. Raphael Soyer, Diary of an Artist , pp. 206-207. In "Three Brothers," p. 201, Moses described his father as a remarkable man who had toiled hard all his life without deviating from his youthful ideals—he was "self-taught and self-made in the real American sense of the phrase" and adored by contemporaries and colleagues as a brilliant teacher and scholar. In my interview with Raphael on April 26, 1984, he suggested that the picture Moses painted of their early days in New York was too "rosy." Life was particularly difficult for their mother. She had wanted to study and to learn English, but a lack of money and time made these pursuits increasingly difficult. Her recognition of lost possibilities in the New World, with its opportunities and its less repressive ideology of male and female roles, may well have contributed to the debilitating depression that eventually necessitated her institutionalization.

89. For a discussion of Old World and immigrant notions of childhood and adolescence, see Ewen, Immigrant Women , pp. 98-100; Soyer quotation from Diary of an Artist , p. 202.

90. Frank Gettings, Raphael Soyer: Sixty-five Years of Printmaking (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1982), pp. 8-9. Harry Salpeter, "Raphael Soyer: East Side Degas," Esquire , May 1933, p. 156. As early as 1917, the Soyers also discovered printmaking. Their mother gave them twenty-five dollars to buy an etching press, which they set up in the back room. At the academy, Raphael attended Joseph Pennell's lectures on etching, which emphasized the work of Rembrandt and Whistler. Several years later, he found his first "patron," the printer Jacob Friedland, who "seemed to be a prosperous man." In exchange for studio space, models, and lithographic stones, Raphael gave Friedland a painting per month.

91. Soyer, Diary of an Artist , p. 211.

92. Moses Soyer, "Three Brothers," p. 204.

93. Raphael Soyer, Diary of an Artist , p. 212. Soyer is specific about the three-month stipend from his uncle. The Art Students League enrollment cards, however, show that he spent five months with du Bois at two different periods; two months of classes are recorded for December 1920 - January 1921, three for January-March 1923. Perhaps Soyer wanted to return to du Bois after spending a year back at the National Academy (or at least the spring of 1922), and his uncle made the next three months possible.

94. Raphael Soyer, Diary of an Artist , p. 213, compares Luks and Miller. It is difficult to know if Soyer shied away from Miller because he feared Miller's "influence"; critics discussed it in the early thirties, and students may have talked among themselves at the league. Soyer told me (December 27, 1982) he disliked Miller's work. He met Miller only once, when they served on a jury together—where Miller was, as Soyer put it, "very loyal to his students." At the time, Soyer may have felt that Miller and his students, and the weekly teas, were a closed circle he could never enter. And he still needed part-time work. He tutored students in Hebrew and found seasonal work in embroidery shops, activities he alternated with painting.

95. Soyer, Self-Revealment , p. 58. Soyer also discussed his early behavior with me (December 27, 1982). His shyness prevented him from meeting several of the artists he admired in the late twenties. He particularly regretted avoiding the artist Jules Pascin, who had influenced him (as had Louis Bouché, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Alexander Brook, and Peggy Bacon); under Pascin's influence Soyer hired his first nude model. Evidently Pascin made a great effort to know American artists. When he saw Soyer's first one-man show at the Daniel Gallery and expressed a desire to meet him, Soyer failed to make the appointment. Within the year, in 1930, Pascin had taken his own life.

96. Soyer, Diary of an Artist , p. 218. Although Soyer doesn't recall meeting Kuniyoshi, Salpeter ("Raphael Soyer," p. 157) reports that he attended these sketch classes.

97. Elizabeth McCausland, "The Daniel Gallery and Modern American Art," Magazine of Art 44 (November 1951), pp. 280-285. In the early 1920s Charles Daniel showed watercolors by John Marin and Charles Demuth; oils by Niles Spencer, Preston Dickinson, and Charles Sheeler; and works by the artists who most influenced Soyer, among them Jules Pascin, Louis Bouché, Alexander Brook, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.

98. Interview with the artist, December 27, 1982. A lack of records, beyond the New York telephone directory, makes Soyer's movements hard to trace in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Soyers lived at 203 and 240 West Fourteenth Street as well as at 229 West Fourth and 96 Charles Street. Soyer had a studio at 3 West Fourteenth Street, perhaps for several years. See Map 1.

99. Lloyd Goodrich, Raphael Soyer , p. 336. For a discussion of teachers in the Depression, see 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), pp. 75-77.

100. Soyer, "An Artist's Experiences," pp. 27-29.

101. Soyer, Self-Revealment , p. 16; interview with the artist, March 13, 1987. Fannie was the first of the children to die, in 1963. According to Soyer, she was "steadfast, responsible, dedicated," and she loved school. In dedicating Self-Revealment to her in 1967, Soyer made his "secret and intimate appraisal of her," placing her "on a plane with a Marie Curie or a Käthe Kollwitz."

102. Ewen, Immigrant Women , pp. 193-196.

103. Gettings, Raphael Soyer . Throughout this catalog Soyer discusses his models; he

expanded on this subject in our interview of March 13, 1987, from which the characterizations of his models are quoted.

104. It is unclear from Soyer's account of the event whether the presence of the model with the artist and the model's recognition that "she was not expected" carried sexual innuendos. Soyer sketched the men present at the meeting: Nicolai Cikovsky, William Gropper, Adolph Wolf, Walter Quirt, and Nemo Piccoli. After Soyer became a teacher at the club, it exhibited the work of one of his students, Ruth Gikow, who went on to become a painter; Soyer wrote the catalog introduction for the show. Women, if Soyer's sketches give any indication, were more of a presence at Artist's Union meetings. Soyer, Diary of an Artist , p. 222, and Soyer, "An Artist's Experiences," pp. 28-29. See Soyer's John Reed Club Meeting (Fig. 3.32).

105. In her publication Women and the American Left: A Guide to Sources (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), p. 169, Mari Jo Buhle notes a "precipitous decline" in the radical feminist press during this period. The Communist party had little use for feminist journalism except for tactical purposes. Many radical women journalists turned to more middle-of-the-road literary publications, principally the New Masses. Working Woman maintained an ultra-left position, predicting incipient class warfare. In March 1933 the publication adopted a magazine format; in November 1934 Gwen Bard began to write and illustrate the "Fashion Letter." Apart from her work and occasional drawings by Mary Morrow, the magazine's principal, almost monthly, illustrator was William Gropper, with occasional submissions by Ben Shahn, Dan Rico, and John Arrow. For a general discussion of John Reed Club activities, see Helen A. Harrison, "John Reed Club Artists and the New Deal: Radical Responses to Roosevelt's 'Peaceful Revolution,' " Prospects 5 (1980), pp. 241-268.

106. Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).

107. Interview with the artist, December 27, 1982. Soyer claimed that when his friends brought him to the John Reed Club, he himself had no idea that he was already well known.

108. "New Instructors at the Art Students League," Art Digest 8 (October 1, 1933), p. 25. Interview with the artist, March 13, 1987.

109. Richard Beers, "As They Are at Thirty-four," Art News 32 (January 13, 1934), p. 13; and "Brook and Soyer Enter the Metropolitan," Art Digest 7 (September 1, 1933), p. 7.

110. Soyer, Diary of an Artist , p. 218. Soyer told me (December 27, 1982) that he also took his work to the Downtown Gallery but that Edith Halpert wanted him to leave the paintings. He was reluctant to do so and went on to the Valentine Gallery, which at the time showed work by Picasso, Soutine, Modigliani, and some of the Impressionists along with a few Americans: Louis Eilshemius, Milton Avery, and John Kane.

111. Interview with the artist, December 27, 1982; and Soyer, Diary of an Artist , pp. 218-219.

112. Carl Zigrosser, The Artist in America: Twenty-four Close-ups of Contemporary Printmakers (New York: Knopf, 1942), pp. 60-61.

113. The discussion of a mainstream here and in the following paragraph comes from Randy Rosen and Catherine C. Brawer, Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970-1985 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), pp. 7-9.

114. 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. 71-76.

115. Hills and Tarbell, The Figurative Tradition , p. 7.

116. The Art Students League yearly catalogs give a complete roster of league instructors. See Hills and Tarbell, The Figurative Tradition , p. 70.

117. See Hills and Tarbell, The Figurative Tradition , p. 14.

118. Forbes Watson, "Opening Studio," The Arts 10 (October 1927), p. 220; for a discussion of Watson's criticism see Peninah R. Y. Petruck, American Art Criticism, 1910-1939 (New York: Garland, 1981), pp. 134-176.

119. Raphael Soyer, Self-Revealment , p. 68.

120. See Hills and Tarbell, The Figurative Tradition , p. 15.

121. When I interviewed them, both Raphael Soyer and Isabel Bishop spoke highly of the magazine. It satisfied their needs, and both claimed to be faithful readers.

122. Hills and Tarbell, The Figurative Tradition , p. 13.

123. Statement of purpose in the Forbes Watson Papers, Roll D-48, Archives of American Art, as quoted in Petruck, American Art Criticism , p. 37.

124. Forbes Watson, editorial, The Arts 3 (January 1923), p. 1.

125. Alan Burroughs, "Young America—Reginald Marsh," The Arts 3 (February 1923), p. 138.

126. Lloyd Goodrich, " The Arts Magazine: 1920-1931," American Art Journal 5 (May 1973), p. 84.

127. Goodrich told me about the circumstances of the publication of his book on Miller in an interview, December 30, 1982. See Goodrich, Kenneth Hayes Miller ; and Alan Burroughs, Kenneth Hayes Miller , American Artists Series (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1931).

128. See in particular Marsh's desk diaries for 1931-32 for references to bowling and for entries about his almost daily social activities with Laning, Bishop, and Miller. Reginald Marsh Papers, Roll NRM-2, Frames 145-395, Archives of American Art.

129. Cohen, Reginald Marsh's New York , p. 3; Laning, "The New Deal Mural Projects," p. 80; Nemser, "A Conversation with Isabel Bishop," p. 16.

130. Cohen, "Reginald Marsh: An Interpretation," p. 14.

131. Interview with the artist, April 26, 1984.

132. Interview with the artist, December 27, 1982. Soyer in 1937 had a studio with Marsh in the Lincoln Arcade Building at 1 Union Square West, and occasionally they shared models. The two artists probably knew each other fairly well by the early 1940s, for Marsh confided some intimate details of his life to Soyer and Soyer included Marsh's portrait in his group portrait of 1966, Homage to Thomas Eakins .

133. Though Isabel Bishop did not know Soyer until the early 1950s, she became familiar with his work through the Whitney shows. She claimed that she had thought of Soyer as a disciple of both Brook and Kuniyoshi, whose work she defined as the "accepted" style of American art in the 1920s. She called it the Woodstock style, which she described as "the National Academy of Design touched by Cézanne," referring to the American painters' tendency to work from models posed in the studio and to treat their canvases with Cézanne's facture and manipulations of pictorial space.

134. Undated anonymous review for a traveling show featuring works by Miller, Marsh, Soyer, Kuniyoshi, Sloan, Sheeler, du Bois, and Dickinson, from the Minneapolis Daily Star Review . Whitney Museum Papers, Roll N-591, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

135. Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930 s (New York: Praeger, 1974), p. 23.

136. Reginald Marsh, "What I See in Laning's Art," Creative Art 12 (March 1933), p. 187.

137. Miller's ideas were most clearly expressed in a lecture entitled "The Third Dimension in Painting," which he delivered at the league in the early 1920s. His students, moreover, recorded his ideas, which also survive in accounts of the critiques he gave at the league. Finally, in the 1920s and early 1930s perceptive responses to his work were published, focusing on his essentially formalist intentions. Rothschild, To Keep Art Alive , chapters 5 and 6; Goodrich, Kenneth Hayes Miller ; and Burroughs, Kenneth Hayes Miller .

138. Rothschild, To Keep Art Alive , pp. 70-75.

139. Fry introduced the doctrine of significant form in his 1909 piece "An Essay in Aesthetics," published in the New Quarterly and republished in Fry's book of essays Vision and Design (1920). It was after this time that Miller codified his own views. See Sandra S. Phillips, "The Art Criticism of Walter Pach," Art Bulletin 65 (March 1983), p. 109 n. 22. Clive Bell also promulgated the idea of significant form in his 1913 book Art , implying, according to W. Eugene Kleinbauer, Modern Perspectives in Western Art History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 7, that forms, lines, and colors are significant in themselves.

140. Rothschild, To Keep Art Alive , p. 74.

141. In November 1982 I interviewed Jack Henderson, N.A., one of Laning's oldest friends and colleagues. He said that Laning had often expressed a desire to be reincarnated as a fifteenth-century Sienese painter.

142. Petruck, American Art Criticism , pp. 35-37; and Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), pp. 151-154.

143. Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans , exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1930). The artists in the show (December 13, 1929-January 13, 1930) were chosen by ballot.

144. Petruck, American Art Criticism , pp. 68-85.

145. Baur, Revolution and Tradition , p. 89. Baur observed that Soyer's attention to closely knit design prevented his sympathetic paintings from becoming sentimental.

146. Bennard B. Perlman, The Immortal Eight: American Painting from Eakins to the Armory Show, 1870-1913 (Cincinnati, Ohio: North Light, 1979), p. 46.

147. In his autobiography It's Me O Lord (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955), Rockwell Kent, a onetime student of Miller's, distinguished among three of the major art teachers, Chase, Miller, and Henri:

As Chase had taught us just to use our eyes, and Henri to enlist our hearts, now Miller called on us to use our heads. Utterly disregardful of the emotional values which Henri was so insistent upon, and contemptuous of both the surface realism and virtuosity of Chase, Miller ... exacted a recognition of the tactile qualities of paint and of the elements of composition—line and mass—not as a means toward the re-creation of life, but as the fulfillment of an end, aesthetic pleasure.... Yet the importance of style as intrinsic to the expression of thought is undeniable; and Miller's emphasis upon some of its elements was of value to me if for no reason but as a corrective of Henri's disregard of it. (p. 83)

148. Petruck, American Art Criticism , pp. 139-143.

149. Marsh claimed that these old masters allowed him to see the energy in groups of moving figures. In 1944 he wrote that he loved going to the beach at Coney Island—another crowded New York scene: "I like to go there because of the sea, the open air and the crowds—crowds of people in all directions, in all positions, without clothing, moving—like

the compositions of Michelangelo and Rubens." Reginald Marsh, "Let's Get Back to Painting," Magazine of Art 37 (December 1944), p. 296.

150. Interview with the artist, December 27, 1982.

1. Albert Halper, "Behind the Scenes of Union Square," Wings 7 (March 1933), p. 5.

2. John Hart, Albert Halper (Boston: Twayne, 1980), pp. 45, 50.

3. The WPA Guide to New York City: The Federal Writers' Project Guide to 1930s New York , originally published as New York City Guide (New York: Random House, 1939; reprint, New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), pp. 200-201, 322.

4. Gerald R. Wolfe, New York: A Guide to the Metropolis (New York: New York University Press, 1975), pp. 170-173.

5. Frank Beckman, "I Remember When ... "New Yorker News , Spring 1964, p. 24.

6. The WPA Guide to New York City , p. 201.

7. "The Rebuilding of Fourteenth Street," New York Times , August 29, 1926, sec. 10, p. 2.

8. "The Rebuilding of Fourteenth Street." Mitchell's Fourteenth Street Central Mercantile Bank had increased its capital by $27 million in three years.

9. Reginald Marsh made one of these new buildings his New York home following his 1933 divorce. "Many Advantages in Midtown Area," New York Times , September 6, 1925, sec. 10, p. 1.

10. In her catalog, Reginald Marsh's New York: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, and Photographs (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Dover, 1983), p. 24, Marilyn Cohen clarifies this meaning, but her statement that " Dead Man's Curve does not refer to the shape of a road" fails to recognize Marsh's pun on an actual Union Square location.

11. "The Rebuilding of Fourteenth Street"; "Favor Union Square for Bus Terminal," New York Times , December 3, 1926, p. 10; "Times Square Terminal for Buses Planned," New York Times , December 31, 1926, p. 2. In the article dated December 13, Nathan Ohrbach, president of the large Union Square store, said that the need for a central city terminal transcended local concerns and would be an advantage for suburban and city passengers, allowing buses to come down both East and West sides and cross to a terminal in Union Square, below the major congestion. "Extension Asked of Fourteenth Street Subway,'' New York Times , May 10, 1926, p. 39.

12. "Explains Progress in Midtown Zone," New York Times , September 23, 1928, sec. 12, p. 24.

13. "Many Advantages in Midtown Area."

14. "The Rebuilding of Fourteenth Street." Mr. Adams, the advocate of Americanization, was president of Styles and Cash, 135 West Fourteenth Street.

15. Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem is a particularly appropriate iconographic source for Henry Kirke Brown's equestrian statue of George Washington. The monument, dedicated July 4, 1856, commemorates Washington's triumphal arrival in New York in 1783 after he had driven the British out of the city. Joseph Lederer, All Around the Town (New York: Scribner, 1975), p. 53.

16. Although Bishop's inclusion of Dante and Virgil may seem to imply that modern urban life is hell, the artist had in mind a very different idea, based on a vernacular translation of Dante's Inferno :

When I was working on this picture I was preoccupied with two things—one, trying to formulate visually my feeling about Union Square and, at the same time, immersing myself in a literal translation of Dante. Dante's Inferno in this down-to-earth "unpoetical" translation has to me a marvelous homely quality, almost a "genre" feeling in its reference to the definite, particular and concrete features of objects. They are thus given an every-day character even in the midst of the fantastic underworld! This "genre" aspect connected in my mind with my feeling for Union Square, which I felt to be ''homely," ugly, and in that quality, lovable (instead of fearful) as the setting for hordes of human beings. At a point in the Inferno , Dante and Virgil find themselves confronted by a multitude of souls. This was my picture.

Bishop made the picture for her father; it was to hang in her parents' new home in White Plains after he retired. Given her mother's work on a translation of Dante throughout Bishop's childhood, the work had personal meaning for the family. Elizabeth H. Hawkes, American Painting and Sculpture (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1975), p. 122; and Helen Yglesias, Isabel Bishop (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), pp. 15-16.

17. Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original (New York: Knopf, 1989), pp. 156-160; Marsh and Laning both spent time with Benton as he produced the New School murals—Benton, in fact, helped Marsh perfect his tempera technique. For a discussion of the environmentalist theories that fueled both the American Scene movement and the mural movement see Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930 s (New York: Praeger, 1974), pp. 41ff. and Forbes Watson, "A Perspective on American Murals," in Art in Federal Buildings I: Mural Designs 1934-1936, ed. Edward Bruce and Forbes Watson (Washington, D.C.: Art in Federal Buildings, Inc., 1936), pp. 3-5.

18. "Critics Unanimously Condemn Modern Museum's Mural Show," Art Digest 6 (May 15, 1932), p. 7.

19. A. Millier, "Murals and Men," Art Digest 9 (September 1, 1935), p. 6.

20. Of the three Union Square works Bishop exhibited in her first one-woman show at Midtown Galleries, one was in a private collection; Laning's Fourteenth Street (one of approximately six neighborhood scenes) was purchased by the Whitney Museum in 1933, and Bishop acquired Unlawful Assembly from Laning for her private collection. The other two works went into private collections much later. These were early works, some of them explorations for subsequent projects, that the artists kept in their possession or, in Bishop's cases, destroyed much later.

21. "Building Activity in Union Square," New York Times , July 15, 1928, sec. 11, p. 1.

22. "Union Square Attracts Banking Locations," New York Times , September 29, 1929, sec. 12, p. 2.

23. "The Rebuilding of Fourteenth Street."

24. "The Rebuilding of Fourteenth Street." See also the caption information for photograph 1002-C7/C8, dated 1930, "Photographic Views of New York," Microfiche Collection, New York Public Library.

25. The WPA Guide to New York City , p. 203.

26. Albert Halper, Union Square (New York: Viking Press, 1933), p. 378. In addition to banks and insurance and utility companies, developers planned a number of office buildings for the district. In 1928 Consolidated Edison bought the old Tammany Hall building for an addition ("Wigwam Sold Again at $100,000 Profit," New York Times , January 2, 1928, p. 2; and "Plan Eighteen-Story Building for Tammany Hall Site," New York Times , September 8, 1928, p. 29). Shortly afterward, the 1871 iron-front Domestic Building was

sold to the Broadway and Fourteenth Street Development Corporation, which planned to construct a twenty-one story building ("Office Building to Replace Union Square Landmark," New York Times , January 8, 1928, sec. 12, p. 2). In April 1928 Henry Mandel Associates, Inc., leased the property at 21-23 Union Square West to add to their existing property on the corner of Sixteenth Street and Union Square West. By June construction plans for a forty-three-story office building were in the works ("Mandel Adds Leasehold to Site on Union Square," New York Times , April 28, 1928, p. 32; "Work Started on Forty-three Story Structure by Henry Mandel,'' New York Times , June 17, 1928, sec. 11, p. 2; and "Building Activity in Union Square").

27. "The Rebuilding of Fourteenth Street."

28. "How Hearn Store Took Present Site," New York Times , August 9, 1925, sec. 10, p. 2.

29. "How Hearn Store Took Present Site."

30. "Hearn Will Have Fifth Avenue Entrance," New York Times , February 13, 1926, p. 16.

31. Gretta Palmer, A Shopping Guide to New York (New York: McBride, 1930), p. 170.

32. Until 1931 or 1932 Bishop was tied closely to Miller's influence (see Chapter 2, n. 72). Guy Pène du Bois visited her studio and questioned her about her early works. Some of them she destroyed prior to her 1975 retrospective exhibition because in her view they were "all wrong." Interview with the artist, December 16, 1982.

33. Interview with Isabel Bishop, December 16, 1982.

34. "The Rebuilding of Fourteenth Street."

35. Caption information from photographs 1002-F1, dated January 29, 1928, and 1002-F2, dated February 24, 1933, "Photographic Views of New York," Microfiche Collection, New York Public Library.

36. Palmer, A Shopping Guide to New York , pp. 45-46.

37. "Woman's Scream Stampedes Four Thousand Shoppers," New York Times , March 30, 1930, p. 6.

38. Palmer, A Shopping Guide to New York , p. 46.

39. "Growing Activity in Fourteenth Street Section," New York Times , January 11, 1930.

40. "Park Change Plans Approved by Board," New York Times , February 17, 1927, p. 12.

41. "To Shift Statues to Aid Straphanger," New York Times , April 22, 1928, p. 1.

42. "Lafayette Statue Moved," New York Times , August 7, 1929, p. 18.

43. "Cheering News for Union Square," New York Times , August 25, 1931, p. 20.

44. "Thousands View Flag Day Parade," New York Times , June 15, 1932, p. 3; "Celebrate Garden in Union Square," New York Times , June 16, 1932, p. 23; and The WPA Guide to New York City , p. 202.

45. The photograph (Fig. 3.16) by Marsh was probably taken in the late 1930s or early 1940s.

46. Harry Salpeter, "Kenneth Hayes Miller, Intellectual," Esquire , October 1937, p. 198. Salpeter described Miller's analysis of the painting, which reveals the studied classicism of his design:

Miller showed how deliberately designed and classically derived was every square inch of his In 14th Street [ Sidewalk Merchant ]. He showed, for example, how the arc of the store front, between the flanking show cases, stemmed from paintings by Watteau and Rubens which had been similarly designed, except, of course, in antique architectural

settings. He showed how the leash of the Pekinese tied him into the body of the painting and how the creases in the women's dresses were plotted in order to lead the eye from and to the center, and how the dominant note was struck by the arc of the store front and the suggestion of depth beyond. Even the form of the electric light bulbs and the women's sleeves—which one might suppose to be incidental details—Miller proved to be subordinate to the main design and contributing to the impression the painter sought to convey.

This description refers to the original design for In Fourteenth Street of 1932; it was repainted c. 1940 and titled Sidewalk Merchant . A photograph of the 1932 work (in which the leash is visible) can be found in Milton W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955; reprint, 1972), p. 182.

47. Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last One Hundred Years (New York: Random House, 1951), pp. 339-345.

48. Sloan, as quoted in David W. Scott and Edgar John Bullard, III, John Sloan, 1871-1951 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1971), p. 179.

49. The painting was one of two works Sloan executed for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), one of the first relief projects sponsored by the federal government.

50. It has been a commonplace (at least since the eighteenth century) that many artist-illustrators—working in graphic media as well as in painting—are more openly honest and descriptive about political and sexual matters in their graphic works than in their paintings. This is particularly true for Sloan and Marsh. It is not my intent, however, to explore the important relationship between Marsh's painting and his graphic oeuvre.

51. Helen Farr Sloan, ed., John Sloan: New York Etchings (1905-1949 ) (New York: Dover, 1978), no. 57.

52. Jean McPherson Kitchen, "Surging Fourteenth Street," New York Times , June 9, 1929, sec. 5, p. 23.

53. According to New York Panorama , American Guide Series (New York: Random House, the Guilds' Committee for Federal Writers' Publications, 1938), pp. 90-130, the Lower East Side was made up of dozens of ethnic groups, with people of Eastern European, Mediterranean, and Jewish heritage predominant.

54. "Fourteenth Street Salesmen Are Bold and High-Powered," New York Times , July 18, 1926, sec. 7, p. 14.

55. Nils Hogner and Guy Scott, Cartoon Guide of New York City (New York: Augustin, 1938), p. 55.

56. Halper, Union Square , p. 50.

57. The WPA Guide to New York City , p. 198.

58. "Fourteenth Street Salesmen."

59. The WPA Guide to New York City , p. 198.

60. Halper, Union Square , p. 48.

61. Halper, Union Square , pp. 47-48.

62. Halper, Union Square , pp. 47-48; and The WPA Guide to New York City , p. 198.

63. Kitchen, "Surging Fourteenth Street."

64. Edward Laning, "Reginald Marsh," Demcourier 13 (June 1943), p. 4.

65. Warren I. Susman, "The Culture of the Thirties," in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 156-157, distinguishes between civilization and culture, which is concerned with the quality of living an American life. Culture, according to Susman, became the central preoccupation of the 1930s.

66. John Kwiat, "John Reed Club Art Exhibition," New Masses 8 (February 1933), p. 23; Reginald Marsh Papers, Roll NRM-2, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

67. "Congress Seceders," Art Digest 14 (June 1, 1940), p. 18; for a full account of events leading up to the split, see Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams, introduction to Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists' Congress (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), pp. 3-44. Baigell and Williams point out that Soyer remained with the congress through 1941, by which time it had ceased to play a major role, concentrating on the fascist threat in America rather than abroad, and on the economic crisis for artists. Helen Yglesias notes that Bishop wanted to maintain a position as politically neutral as possible during these years and was angered at Stuart Davis's pressuring her to "sign something or join some protest to do with the Artists' Union." Unable to remember the details, Bishop may well have been referring to requests by Davis and other organizers to sign the first "call." Yglesias, Isabel Bishop , p. 18.

68. To locate the various radical organizations in Union Square throughout the Depression, refer to Map 2 and the following sources: caption information for photograph 1003-A4, August 30, 1930, "Photographic Views of New York," Microfiche Collection, New York Public Library; "Communists Move Headquarters Here," New York Times , September 25, 1930, p. 29; Helen A. Harrison, "John Reed Club Artists and the New Deal: Radical Responses to Roosevelt's 'Peaceful Revolution,'" Prospects 5 (1980), pp. 241-243, 249-250; "Patriotic Parade Marks May Day," New York Times , May 2, 1938, p. 3; and The WPA Guide to New York City , p. 200. From 1928 to 1930, the block of buildings at 24-30 Union Square East housed the offices of the Communist party; the Daily Worker ; the Polish, Jewish, and Hungarian dailies; the Workers' Bookstore and School; the Young Communist League of America; and the Cooperative Cafeteria, where Communist organizers gathered. The New Masses was located across the square at 39 Union Square West; the John Reed Club made frequent moves throughout the decade: from 65 West Fifteenth Street in the early 1930s to 131 West Fourteenth Street by the mid-1930s. The Debs Auditorium, site of frequent Socialist party meetings, lay just off the square at 5 East Fourteenth Street.

69. "May Day Rallies Pass Quietly Here" and "May Day Finds Labor Well Off in America," New York Times , May 2, 1926, p. 3; "May Day Passes Peacefully Here—Police Have Listless Time," New York Times , May 2, 1927, p. 3.

70. The WPA Guide to New York City , p. 199; and "City Crowds Silent on News of Death," New York Times , August 23, 1927, p. 1.

71. Daily Worker , May 2, 1929; and "Eight Slain, Seventy-three Wounded as Five Hundred Police Fight Reds in Berlin Riots," New York Times , May 2, 1929, p. 2.

72. "Tammany Police Paraders Tear Down Sign on Workers' Center. Children Assaulted," Daily Worker , May 20, 1929; The WPA Guide to New York City , p. 199; and New York Times , May 29, 1929, sec. 1, pp. 1-2.

73. For accounts of the largest and most disruptive demonstrations against unemployment, staged on March 6, 1930, see my discussion in the text and refer to the Daily Worker , March 3, 1930, p. 1; March 6, 1930; and March 7, 1930. See also, "All Police on Duty to Avert Violence at Red Rally Today," New York Times , March 6, 1930, pp. 1, 10; "Reds Battle Police in Union Square," New York Times , March 7, 1930, pp. 6-8; and "Veterans to Hold Union Square Parade," New York Times , March 8, 1930, p. 2.

74. "May Day Peaceful Here As Thousands March in a Gay Mood," New York Times , May 2, 1935, p. 1; "Forty Thousand March Here in May Day Parade—Quietest in Years," New York Times , May 2, 1936, p. 1; "Seventy Thousand Mark Orderly May Day," New York Times , May 2, 1937, p. 1.

75. "Veterans Rally in Union Square," New York Times , May 1, 1931, p. 23.

76. New York Times , January 21, 1932, p. 5. The Washington's birthday celebration never occurred, in part because the square was not physically ready for such an event.

77. "Mayor Walker Proclaims Union Square Fete," New York Times , April 4, 1932, p. 19; "Hoover Aids Union Square Fete," New York Times , April 21, 1932, p. 17. President Hoover pleased local business leaders with his official letter on the fete, which he said was of particular interest to him

because of my firm belief in the value of preserving historical traditions as a stimulus to local pride in community progress. The historical interest of the park ... and its evolution through residential and retail business to its present importance as a centre of industry, finance and commerce, give it a distinctive quality deserving commemoration. I congratulate your committee and the business interests which it represents, upon this successful celebration of a significant occasion.

78. New York Times , April 17, 1932, sec. 2, p. 1; and "Union Square Marks Its Centenary Gaily," New York Times , April 24, 1932, p. 17.

79. In addition to these works, Laning exhibited two others in John Reed Club exhibitions in 1933 and 1934. In The World Crisis Expressed in Art show beginning in December 1933, Laning exhibited Relief ; in the Revolutionary Front show beginning in November 1934 he exhibited Riders . Both works are now lost.

80. In May-June 1931 Marsh attended weekly meetings, which he recorded in his diaries with entries like "workers communism class," "workers school," and "red class." Reginald Marsh Papers, Roll NRM-2, Archives of American Art.

81. Lloyd Goodrich, Raphael Soyer (New York: Abrams, 1972), p. 84.

82. See Raphael Soyer, "An Artist's Experiences in the 1930s," in Patricia Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930 s (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1983), pp. 27-31.

83. Kantor's Union Square was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art's May 1932 exhibition; see the catalog Murals by American Painters and Photographers (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932), p. 5. For the show, the museum asked each artist to make a three-part horizontal composition measuring 21 by 48 inches and to enlarge one panel to measure 7 by 4 feet. Kantor's work was the large panel.

Kantor was a Russian-born painter and lithographer who had a Fourteenth Street studio until about 1931. At that time he painted his lyrical Farewell to Union Square to commemorate his stay and his nostalgia at leaving. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression , p. 186.

84. Permits were required for any demonstrations or speeches in Union Square. For major gatherings like the annual May Day rallies, bandstands with microphones were erected. "All Police on Duty," pp. 1, 10.

85. At the 1931 May Day rally, veterans, Socialists, and Communists all carried American flags at the head of their processions. "Violence Avoided on May Day Here," New York Times , May 2., 1931, p. 4.

86. Interview with Raphael Soyer, December 28, 1982. The other painting was Workers Armed (Fig. 6.25).

87. For a discussion of the social meaning of the crayon style see Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 129-132.

88. For a discussion of these doctrines, promulgated by the American Communist party early in the 1930s, see the chapter "Propaganda in Print," in Céile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 8-33.

89. Richard N. Masteller, " We, the People?" Satiric Prints of the 1930s , (Walla Walla, Wash.: Donald H. Sheehan Gallery, Whitman College, 1989), pp. 7, 49.

90. Fourth Avenue, the extension of Union Square East, was on a direct line with the Bowery, whose missions and flophouses had always provided food, clothing, and shelter for the destitute. When the number of these poor increased dramatically with the massive unemployment of the 1930s, their plight became more visible.

91. Joseph Lederer, All Around the Town (New York: Scribner, 1975). The most prominent of these monuments, in the park and subsequently in all the works of art, was the large equestrian monument of George Washington. Its pendant was a bronze statue of Lincoln, also by Brown. There was also a bronze statue of Lafayette, by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, given by the French to New Yorkers in 1876 to commemorate their support of France during the Franco-Prussian War. A bronze fountain sculpture of a woman and child by the German artist Adolf yon Donndorf was located at the west side of the park. Finally, an 80-foot flagpole resting on a drum at the center of the square was a memorial to the Tammany Hall leader Charles Francis Murphy, who had died in 1924.

92. Goodrich, Raphael Soyer , p. 84.

93. Philip Evergood, "There Is a Difference in Bums," unpublished draft of an undated essay, American Contemporary Artists Gallery Paper, Roll D-304, frame 315, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., as cited in Kendall Taylor, Philip Evergood: Selections from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978), n. 17. For a fuller discussion of Bishop's attitude toward these men, see Chapter 5.

94. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 194-196.

1. Miller's preference for Titianesque prototypes was well known and can also be studied in relation to the nudes he continued to paint throughout his career. This particular Titian image was illustrated in Oskar Fischel, Tizian, des Meisters Gemälde , 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1924 [?]), p. 77.

2. Betsy Fahlman, Guy Pène du Bois, Artist about Town (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1980). Du Bois (1884-1958) was a student of Miller's only briefly, when Miller taught at William Merritt Chase's New York School for Art during the first decade of the century. Ultimately du Bois was more of a realist. His work and artistic philosophy emerged from his studies with Robert Henri and Henri's art-for-life's-sake philosophy rather than from his brief encounter with Miller's Renaissance prototypes and formalist aesthetic concerns. Isabel Bishop reported to me (interview, December 16, 1982) that Miller had little use for du Bois.

3. Du Bois was cosmopolitan in his outlook, in part from the years he spent living outside Paris (1924-30). His paintings of glamorous well-to-do figures like those in Americans in Paris were typical. He also took the mannequin-like flapper as his subject, portraying her as an aspiring sophisticate.

4. Held, along with his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, did much to create the popular flapper image. Jack Shuttleworth, "John Held, Jr., and His World," American Heritage: The Twenties , special issue 16 (August 1965), pp. 29-32.

5. Ladies Home Journal , October 22, 1921, as quoted in Lois Banner, Women in Modern America: A Brief History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 129.

6. William E. Leuchtenberg, The Perils of Prosperity , 1914-1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 172; and Alice Almond Shrock, "Feminists, Flappers, and the

Maternal Mystique: Changing Conceptions of Women and Their Roles in the 1920s," Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1974, P. 123.

7. Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return (New York: Viking Press, 1951), p. 64. My characterization of the flapper is derived from Shrock, "Feminists, Flappers, and the Maternal Mystique," pp. 130-133; and Pamela Neal Warford, "The Social Origins of Female Iconography: Selected Images of Women in American Popular Culture, 1890-1945," Ph.D. diss., Washington University, St. Louis, 1979, P. 43.

8. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties , First Perennial Library edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1931; reprint, 1964), pp. 79-81.

9. Miller grew up in and retained close ties with the Oneida community, where the silver was made; in several letters to his mother he mentions shares of Oneida stock. Because images are so closely related, it is tempting to think he might have seen this advertisement.

10. In May 1929, after Miller's show at the Rehn Gallery, Marsh bought Party Dress for his own collection; according to Miller's letter to his mother, May 2, 1929, he paid full price. This Miller work is the closest in iconography to Marsh's paintings of women at leisure. Kenneth Hayes Miller correspondence, Roll N-583, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

11. Shrock, "Feminists, Flappers, and the Maternal Mystique," pp. 150-170; for specific examples, p. 158.

12. Allen, Only Yesterday , pp. 73-85. Allen attributed the revolution largely to the disillusionment of the postwar era, to woman's liberation, prohibition, the automobile, sex, magazines, and the movies. More recently, James R. McGovern has demonstrated that the revolution was under way well before the war, in part because of urbanization and industrialization. "The American Woman's Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals," Journal of American History 55 (September 1968), pp. 315-333.

13. Allen, Only Yesterday , pp. 74-76. In Current History's symposium on the New Woman, the Catholic rector Hugh L. McMenamin wrote: "We may call [the flapper's] boldness greater self-reliance, brazenness greater self-assertion, license greater freedom and try to pardon immodesty in dress by calling it style and fashion, but the fact remains that deep down in our hearts we feel a sense of shame and pity." "Evils of the Woman's Revolt against the Old Standards," Current History 27 (October 1927), p. 31. Among those also dismayed by flapper behavior were older feminists whose sobriety and hard work for social causes were scorned by younger women. See Lillian Symes, "Still a Man's Game: Reflections of a Slightly Tired Feminist," Harper's Monthly Magazine 158 (May 1929), pp. 678-686.

14. Warford, "The Social Origins of Female Iconography," p. 50, suggests that some saw the flapper's realism and lack of repression as antidotes to Wilsonian idealism.

15. Banner, Women in Modern America , pp. 150-151, argues that the real extent of the sexual revolution of the 1920s is debatable. Surveys from the period, like Katherine P. Davis's sample of two thousand middle-class women, showed that only 7 percent of those who were married and 14 percent of those who were single had engaged in premarital sex. Among the unmarried women, 80 percent said they found little justification for engaging in sex. Birth control was difficult to obtain and remained illegal in all states. Although the number of divorces rose in the 1920s, the number of marriages remained high. In Middletown (Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929], pp. 114-117), more people were marrying by the end of the decade.

16. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown , p. 144.

17. Allen, Only Yesterday , p. 79.

18. William L. O'Neill, "The End of Feminism," in Twentieths Century America: Recent Interpretations , ed. Barton J. Bernstein and Allen J. Matusow, 2d edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 191.

19. J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), introduction.

20. Shrock, "Feminists, Flappers, and the Maternal Mystique," pp. 147-148.

21. In the introduction to her dissertation on three images of womanhood in the 1920s, Alice Shrock argues that the maternal mystique was a "resolution of a brief fling at Flapperdom" and that it represented a "strong, ever-present set of attitudes rooted in the [nineteenth-century] cult of true womanhood, reaffirming woman's traditional role in nurturing, conserving and protecting the home, husband and offspring." Lois Banner ( Women in Modern America , p. 153) argues that little had been done to change sex-role conditioning in the 1920s and that once freedom had played itself out, women returned to culturally expected roles. She quoted the well-known psychologist Floyd Allport, who wrote in 1929 that a woman "not through nature but by early training . . . becomes a reflection of a feminine image which men carry around in their heads."

22. A number of recent historians have discussed the back-to-the-home movement: Banner, Women in Modern America ; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: One Hundred Fifty Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1978); and Gaye Tuchman, Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Particularly useful is Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), chapter 6, "Consumption and the Ideal of the New Woman."

23. William F. Ogburn, "The Family and Its Functions," in Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934), p. 661. Ogburn observed that such changes, continuous for one hundred years, had had a singular impact in the postwar decades.

24. The electric washing machine, invented in 1905, and the mechanical refrigerator, invented in 1917, were but two of numerous aids to household work. William F. Ogburn, "The Influence of Invention and Discovery," in Recent Social Trends , p. 148.

25. Lawrence K. Frank, "Social Change and the Family," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 160 (March 1932), p. 98. For statistics on the decrease in the number of children, see Frank, "Childhood and Youth," Recent Social Trends , pp. 754-755.

26. Frank, "Social Change and the Family," pp. 96-97.

27. Shrock, "Feminists, Flappers, and the Maternal Mystique," pp. 194-195. In 1922 the Better Homes Movement was inaugurated, with Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge as its officers. Efforts focused on home building and furnishing, for the home environment was equated with a strong family. The back-to-the-home movement was also proclaimed in women's magazines. In "Nineteen-Twenty: An Editorial" in the Ladies Home Journal , January 1, 1920, p. 3, published on the heels of the franchise, M. D. Davis wrote:

Since the beginning of time the housekeeper's job has been looked down upon; she has been considered a drudge; even the Federal census calls her a woman of "no occupation." Let us elevate the homemaker's task to the dignity of a profession. For her job is as important as that of her husband, whatever he may do. . .. she is the most important woman in the world.

28. Shrock, in "Feminists, Flappers, and the Maternal Mystique," p. 196, uses the term hearthbound to describe the woman desired by those who covertly reprogrammed the move-

ment, making consumption a major occupation.

29. Shrock, p. 196.

30. Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good , pp. 131, 135. A number of home economics institutions flourished in the 1920s to encourage women to acquire home management skills, among them the Pratt Institute in New York and the Garland and Fanny Farmer schools in Boston. General Electric in 1932 and Westinghouse in 1934 opened cooking institutes for women. See also Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness , p. 172; and Glenna Matthews, " Just a Housewife": The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 145-171.

31. Amey E. Watson, "The Reorganization of Household Work," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 160 (March 1932), p. 168.

32. Allen, Only Yesterday , pp. 79-80; and Lillian G. Germ, "The Bachelor Girl: Is She a Menace?" Independent Woman 7 (December 1928), p. 538.

33. Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good , pp. 145-148, have demonstrated that all the new inventions made more work since women had to clean more frequently.

34. On the heterosexual revolution and feminism, see 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. 100-101. Clifford Kirkpatrick, a sociology professor, defined the pros and cons of three marital roles in "Techniques of Marital Adjustment," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 160 (March 1932), pp. 178-183. As a "wife-mother," the woman assumed domestic and child-rearing responsibilities, subordinating herself economically to her husband in exchange for the "security, respect, domestic authority, economic support and loyalty of her husband." In the role of ''companion," she shared pleasures, enjoyed "a more ardent emotional response" as an "object" of admiration, and received funds for dress and recreation but had to preserve her beauty to maintain her marital security, provide her husband with "ego satisfaction," cultivate advantageous social contacts, and be responsible for alleviating her husband's domestic responsibility. In the role of "partner," created by the new "cultural situation," the woman would accept certain obligations—to contribute economically to the household, to undertake equal responsibility for child support, "to dispense with any appeal to chivalry," to bear an equal responsibility for the family status through her own career success, and to renounce alimony (except for dependent children)—in exchange for certain privileges: economic independence, equal authority in family finances, and acceptance as an equal. Kirkpatrick advocated a balance of privileges and obligations to achieve domestic accord. The spokespersons for the professionalized homemaker found ways to make her wife-mother role seem more economically and socially advantageous, equal in privilege rather than overbalanced toward obligation.

35. Amey Watson, "The Reorganization of Household Work."

36. Watson, all quotations p. 171.

37. Watson, p. 172.

38. Watson, p. 171.

39. Since the complex issues of child rearing in the 1920s apply indirectly to a discussion of the matronly shopper as consumer, I will only mention them. Like "professionalized" homemaking, child rearing became both important and difficult. In his influential book The Psychological Care of Infant and Child , published in 1928, the behavioral psychologist John B. Watson argued that environment and psychological nurturing were as important as physiological care. Watson also worked for advertisers, and many 1920s advertisements played on women's escalating guilt about being unable to devote all the necessary care to child

rearing. Food products would mold children into particular kinds of adults, and women needed to educate children in correct consumption habits to ensure them a healthy, happy adulthood. Psychologists and advertisers created tension between a "continued ideal of motherhood and the inadequacies of that role" by unifying the tasks of motherhood and consumption. Shrock, "Feminists, Flappers, and the Maternal Mystique," pp. 203-204; and Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness , pp. 173-175.

40. Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 , Women in the Political Economy Series (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

41. For full statistics on the time devoted to rural and urban household work, see Ogburn, "The Family and Its Functions," pp. 669-672.

42. Abraham Myerson, The Nervous Housewife (Boston: Little, Brown, 1920), p. 77, as quoted in Matthews, " Just a Housewife": The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America , p. 194.

43. Shrock, "Feminists, Flappers, and the Maternal Mystique," p. 201; Amey Watson, "The Reorganization of Household Work," pp. 170-171. Together, wife and husband would form family policy on income, standard of living, choice of home, planning of budget, division of responsibility, number and spacing of children, vacation planning, etc.

44. Benjamin R. Andrews, Economics of the Household, Its Administration and Finance (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 3, as cited in Watson, "The Reorganization of Household Work," p. 170.

45. Andrews as quoted in Watson, p. 169.

46. William Baldwin, The Shopping Book (New York: Macmillan, 1929), pp. 1-2. As Stuart Ewen suggests, women's "power" was actually "circumscribed ... by the ideology of the consumer market"—the real repository of power—and the industrial culture necessarily required a separation of the world of women (consumption) from that of men (production). Captains of Consciousness , pp. 169-173.

47. Kenneth Hayes Miller to Rhoda Dunn, January 19, 1920; July 20, 1920; and November 16, 1920. Kenneth Hayes Miller Papers, Roll 583, Archives of American Art.

48. "Of all the great streets in the world, there is none which possesses such splendid variety of interest, none that so consistently proclaims throughout its whole length the joys of material life in their most alluring forms, as Fifth Avenue." International Commercial Service, "Fifth Avenue: The World's Golden Highway of Wealth, Fashion, and Beauty," Gazette des Dames , Album of Fashion with Shopping Guide (London and New York, 1921).

49. For a good general overview of artists' activities and themes, see Patricia Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930s (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1983). See also Chapter 3.

50. Jean McPherson Kitchen, "Surging Fourteenth Street," New York Times , June 9, 1929, sec. 5, p. 23. Though the description does not correspond to one specific Miller image, it captures the general qualities of several Fourteenth Street works. "Middle-aged women of the district may be seen shopping, garbed for the street in knitted caps of gray hues, pulled well down over the ears, and with tweed topcoats of somewhat masculine design that suggest wear by husband or son. A frequent accessory is a bulging brown paper shopping bag."

51. Like Fitting Room , which conflates practices from bargain and finer department stores, other works of the early 1930s still resemble images of the early 1920s. In Woman with an Umbrella (Fig. 4.8) and The Little Coat and Fur Shop (Fig. 4.33) the women are both more attractive physically and more fashionably dressed than those of Afternoon on the Avenue and The Bargain Counter (Figs. 3.10 and 3.13).

52. This is a major theme of the essay by T. J. Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-

Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1920," in The Culture of Consumption , ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), pp. 3-38.

53. My interpretation of Laning's and Bishop's mural-like paintings of the early 1930s here and in Chapter x is supported by Karal Ann Marling, "A Note on New Deal Iconography: Futurology and the Historical Myth," Prospects 4 (1979), pp. 421-440.

54. The policeman's relaxed posture in this image was not that typical of the works of artists engaged in social protest. Social realists regularly saw the police as brutal perpetrators of an unfair system of justice, as cartoons and drawings in the New Masses demonstrate (see, for example, William Gropper's "Free Speech" [Fig. 3.38]).

55. See Matthews, "Just a Housewife," p. 19 3 . Matthews argues that the devaluation of domesticity by the 1920s—thanks to mass-produced consumer goods—meant that women could no longer use "women's sphere" as a rationale for political activism.

56. Thorstein Veblen, as quoted in John Wilmerding, Linda Ayres, and Earl A. Powell, An American Perspective: Nineteenth-Century Art from the Collection of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr . (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1981), p. 70 n. 82.

57. I am grateful to Kathy Peiss for suggesting this reading of "middle-classness" in relation to Miller's shoppers.

58. John Kwiat, "John Reed Club Art Exhibition," New Masses 8 (February 1933), p. 2.3.

59. This painting was one of several New York City images Orozco did for a show at the Art Students League and the Downtown Gallery in 1929.

60. Lloyd Goodrich, "Exhibitions in New York," The Arts 15 (May 1929), pp. 328-329.

61. Hearn's also contributed to the Fireman's Honor Emergency Fund and the Police Relief Fund, and to unemployed actors through Stage Relief Day. New York Times , August 6, 1932, p. 23; January 8, 1933, p. 31; January 11, 1933, p. 6; February 2, 1933, p. 6; March 1, 1933, p. 14; and March 21, 1933, p.15.

62. New York Times , January 22, 1933, sec. 2, p. 1.

63. New York Times , January 22, 1933, sec. 2, p. 1. Klein made his appeal to the professionalized homemaker through Mrs. Grace Morrison Poole, president of a middle-class women's organization, the General Federation of Women's Clubs.

64. Kitchen, "Surging Fourteenth Street," p. 23.

65. "Kenneth Hayes Miller," Art News 30 (November 28, 1931), p. 10.

66. Photographers like Dorothea Lange in her pictures of migrant farm workers, painters working on mural commissions for the government, and novelists like John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath took this theme as their project.

67. Lloyd Goodrich, Kenneth Hayes Miller (New York: Arts Publishing Corporation, 1930), pp. 1-2, 12.

68. Walter K. Gutman, "Kenneth Hayes Miller," Art in America 18 (February 1930), p. 92.

69. Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York: Essays on Fourteen American Moderns (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), p. 143.

70. Art News 28 (December 27, 1929), p. 13.

71. Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 27 5 -276. Barbara Melosh, in Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater , discusses local criticism of monumental female figures in Section murals as part of the response to the new cult of slimness (Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 211.

72. Quoted in Harry Salpeter, "Kenneth Hayes Miller, Intellectual," Esquire , October 1937, p. 197.

73. Undated correspondence between Louis Lozowick and Kenneth Hayes Miller (I assign it a date of 1932 because that was the year intellectuals endorsed the presidential candidate William Foster). Kenneth Hayes Miller Papers, Roll 583, Archives of American Art.

74. In a letter to his mother dated March 1, 1912, Miller reported that he and Nell (his wife Helen) were reading Key. Kenneth Hayes Miller Papers, Roll 583.

75. Key wrote in Love and Ethics (New York: Hubbsch, 1911), p. 69: "Either we believe that the sensual instincts are pitfalls and obstacles or we regard them as guides in the upward movement of life on a par with reason and conscience." Ellen Key, Love and Marriage , trans. Arthur G. Chater (New York: Putnam, 1911).

76. Key was not alone in her arguments. In his 1915 book The Marriage Revolt William Carsons reprinted an earlier New York Times article by the psychologist Carl Jung, who stated that Americans were more "tragic" and "neurotic" than any of the world's peoples, largely from trying to control themselves too rigidly; if American prudery were eliminated, America would become "the greatest country the world had ever known.'' Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Freud and the Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 268-269.

77. "Ellen Key's Startling Views on Love and Marriage," Current Literature 50 (April 1911), pp. 403-405; and "Ellen Key's Revaluation of Woman's Chastity," Current Literature 52 (February 1912), pp. 200-201.

78. "The New Erotic Ethics," The Nation 94 (March 14, 1912), p. 261.

79. "The New Erotic Ethics." Sigmund Freud, in works like Totem and Taboo (translated and published in the United States in 1918) similarly argued that "repression should exist for social rather than individual goals." Hale, Freud and the Americans , p. 347.

80. Ellen Key, "Motherliness," Atlantic 110 (October 1912), pp. 562-570.

81. Key, Love and Marriage , p. 175.

82. Key, "Motherliness," pp. 567-568.

83. Key, "Motherliness," p. 566.

84. "Ellen Key's Startling Views on Love and Marriage," p. 405.

85. Lincoln Rothschild, To Keep Art Alive: The Effort of Kenneth Hayes Miller, American Painter (1876-1952 ) (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1974), p. 32.

86. The major debate occurred in Current Opinion : "Ellen Key's Attack on 'Amaternal' Feminism," 54 (February 1913), pp. 138-139; "Charlotte Gilman's Reply to Ellen Key," 54 (March 1913), pp. 220-221; and "The Conflict between 'Human' and 'Female' Feminism," 56 (April 1914), pp. 291-292.

87. "The Conflict between 'Human' and 'Female' Feminism," p. 291.

88. Key, "Motherliness," p. 566.

89. William H. Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-2970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 12-14.

90. Gilman, as quoted in Warford, "The Social Origins of Female Iconography," p. 41. In its focus, if not its substance, Gilman's statement represents a change from her Progressive Era vision as outlined in her arguments with Ellen Key.

91. Letter from Miller to Rhoda Dunn, dated September 21, 1909. Kenneth Hayes Miller Papers, Roll 583, Archives of American Art. In this letter Miller alluded both to his feelings for Helen and to opening a discussion with Irma about separation. He concluded by asking Rhoda to destroy the letter.

92. Miller's fascination with Freud can be traced in his letters to Rhoda, beginning in about 1915. In the teens, Miller met frequently with psychiatrists, trying to discover ties

between Freud's theories of the unconscious and the creative process. He was also interested, at a somewhat irksome level if his onetime student Rockwell Kent is to be believed, in trying to "ferret out what he alleged to be erotic symbolism in the work of the greater masters of the past," symbolism to which he attached great significance.

93. Letter from Edward Laning to Isabel Bishop, dated August 9, 1974. Edward Laning Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

94. Miller was reading Twilight of the Gods in October 1915 and expressed "fascination" with Nietzsche's ideas in letters to Rhoda Dunn, dated October 19 and December 13, 1915. Kenneth Hayes Miller Papers, Roll 583, Archives of American Art.

95. For a fuller discussion of sexuality and sex roles in the Oneida Community, see Chapter z and John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 72-120; and Louis J. Kern, An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias — the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 207-257.

96. In a 1976 letter to Isabel Bishop (Isabel Bishop papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.), Edward Laning described Miller's philosophy as a "primitive 19th-century form of Darwinism, the Doctrine of the 'survival of the fittest.'" Laning said that Miller and the writer Theodore Dreiser, Miller's close friend, shared this "naive" view as it applied to human behavior.

97. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Scribner, 1916; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970), p. 263.

98. Henry Fairfield Osborn, preface to The Passing of the Great Race , p. ix.

99. Leuchtenberg, The Perils of Prosperity , pp. 204-205. From June 1920 to June 1921 more than 800,000 people entered the country. In February, Congress passed the Emergency Immigration Act. By 1924, the National Origins Act had been passed.

100. Leuchtenberg, The Perils of Prosperity , pp. 66-83 . See also Cynthia Jaffee McCabe and Daniel J. Boorstin, The Golden Door: Artist Immigrants of America, 1876-1976 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1976), pp. 17-19.

101. In a letter to his cousin Rhoda, dated October 15, 1919, Miller speculated about the effects of various national traits on his close literary friends: "Paul Rosenfeld is a Jew— not Dreiser. That degree of creative force would be extraordinary in a Jew. And when they have intellect it is so subtle, consciously subtle. Dreiser of course is not subtle." Kenneth Hayes Miller Papers, Roll 583, Archives of American Art.

102. Alice Shrock ("Feminists, Flappers, and the Maternal Mystique," p. 171) has observed that the stories celebrating the values of American motherhood appeared in a range of mainstream magazines: Ladies Home Journal, Harper's, Smart Set, Cosmopolitan, Woman's Home Companion , and The Saturday Evening Post .

103. There are a few exceptions to Miller's general exclusion of other racial types. In Women in the Store (1937), for example, Miller depicts a black woman shopper. Besides the obvious precedent for fair women—in paintings by Titian and Rubens, Miller's favorite prototypes—there was that of Renoir's late nudes, who were often red haired. Furthermore, there was in the immediate pre- and postwar period in America a vogue for red hair. Mary Pickford was fair, and Held's flappers were usually redheads or blonds. Clearly Miller's choice of a type was governed by a variety of cultural and art-historical prototypes. Lois Banner, American Beauty , p. 176.

104. Interview with Lloyd Goodrich, December 30, 1982.

1. Erica L. Doss, "Images of American Women in the 2930s: Reginald Marsh and Paramount Picture," Woman's Art Journal 4 (Fall 1983-Winter 1984), p. 3.

2. Richard N. Masteller, in his recent study of Marsh's graphic work ("We, the People?" Satiric Prints of the 1930s [Walla Walla, Wash.: Donald H. Sheehan Gallery, Whitman College, 1989]), has noted the contradictory critical responses to the artist:

Marsh has been variously seen as an artist given to "lyricism and unabashed romantic abandon," a realist presenting an "accurate picture" and "bold record" of contemporary life, a ''traditional painter" whose knowledge of the Old Masters informs his work, and a satirist whose caricatures "comment on social vulgarities." Lloyd Goodrich has asserted, . . . "he was not primarily or exclusively a satirist" because "fundamentally the affirmative elements in his art outweighed the negative." (pp. 49, 67 n. 53)

3. The "failing grip of categories" is Leo Steinberg's phrase, in "The Polemical Part," Art in America 67 (March/April 1979), p. 119.

4. Edward Laning, The Sketchbooks of Reginald Marsh (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), p. 12; and Marilyn Cohen, "Reginald Marsh: An Interpretation of His Art," Ph.D. diss., New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, pp. 95-96.

5. To follow the controversy, see "Art, U.S. Scene," Time , December 24, 1934, pp. 24-25; Stuart Davis, "The New York American Scene in Art," Art Front 1 (February 1935), p. 6; and Reginald Marsh, "A Short Autobiography," Art and Artists of Today 1 (March 1937), p. 8. Lloyd Goodrich analyzes the interchange and reasserts the apolitical nature of Marsh's paintings in his Reginald Marsh (New York: Abrams, 1972), p. 44.

6. In his interview with me, December 30, 1982, Goodrich claimed that Marsh never believed an artist could make art that was both comprehensible to the working classes and instrumental in the class struggle without sacrificing the demands of art.

7. For the discussion of "cultural satire," see Chapter 3 and Masteller, "We, the People? " pp. 45-65.

8. Cohen, "Reginald Marsh: An Interpretation," p. 170.

9. Cohen, "Reginald Marsh: An Interpretation," pp. 176, 179-193.

10. Rosemary Betterton, "How Do Women Look? The Female Nude in the Work of Suzanne Valadon," in Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media , ed. Rosemary Betterton (London and New York: Pandora Press, 1987), p. 218.

11. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York and Boston: New Museum of Contemporary Art, in association with Godine, 1984), pp. 361-373. Mulvey's work as well as that of Rosalind Coward, Female Desire: Women's Sexuality Today (London: Paladin, 1974), p. 78, is discussed in Betterton, "How Do Women Look?" pp. 219-222.

12. Laura Mulvey, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Inspired by Duel in the Sun " in Feminism and Film Theory , ed. Constance Penley (London and New York: Routledge, 2988), pp. 69-79; Betterton, "How Do Women Look?" p. 222.

13. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2987), pp. 4-5.

14. De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender , p. 2. In this introduction to the book, de Lauretis explores the limits of gender as "sexual difference." For an excellent discussion of why it is important to retain the idea of sexual difference, why gender (a social difference imposed on a sexed body) is a different kind of difference, and what results from the psychic

construction of sexual difference, see Constance Penley, The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. xi-xx.

15. See Chapter 6 for a discussion of the Siren's image in the role of working girl.

16. Edward Laning, East Side, West Side, All Around the Town (Tucson: University of Arizona Museum of Art, 1969), pp. 96-97. Laning believes that Marsh found this woman at the burlesque. Marsh did not create the Siren stereotype (as Charles Dana Gibson created the Gibson girl), but the Marsh girl is a distinctive type, fueled by the contemporaneous Siren stereotype.

17. In January 1931, there were 22,731 motion picture theaters in America, seating an audience of 11 million. The industry developed rapidly following the introduction of sound in 1926. J. F. Steiner, "Recreation and Leisure Time Activities," in Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934), pp. 940-941.

18. Cover page slogans from Modern Screen , all months, 1933.

19. European traits of the Siren are discussed in Mildred Adams, "Now the Siren Eclipses the Flapper," New York Times , July 28, 1929, sec. 5, pp. 4-5, and in Alexander Walker, The Celluloid Sacrifice: Aspects of Sex in the Movies (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966), chapter 5, "The Fugitive Kind: Garbo," pp. 93-112.

20. Forbes Watson, a major critic of the 1930s, felt that Marsh's paintings were like photographically seen bits, pasted together without an overriding compositional order. Forbes Watson, "Innocent Bystander," American Magazine of Art 28 (January 1935), p. 62.

21. Although I have not located either Antoine's at 20 East Fourteenth Street or the Modern Beauty School, at 7 East Fourteenth Street (see Fig. 3.19; Plate 3), it was Marsh's practice to be documentary.

22. Edward Laning, "Reginald Marsh," Demcourier 13 (June 1943), p. 7; and Watson, "Innocent Bystander," p. 62. Marilyn Cohen, Reginald Marsh's New York: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, and Photographs (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Dover, 1983), p. 2; and Thomas H. Garver, Reginald Marsh: A Retrospective Exhibition (Newport Beach, Ca.: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1972), refer to the Marsh girl as a fantasy.

23. Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (New York: Praeger, 1974), p. 146. According to Edward Laning ("Reginald Marsh," p. 7), Kenneth Hayes Miller observed that Marsh's work looked best when viewed as a sequence. Marilyn Cohen, Reginald Marsh's New York , p. 12, has observed that Marsh's working process was cinematic: he liked to paste contacts of photographs into his album in long rows and also worked on several paintings at once.

24. Malcolm M. Willey," 'Identification' and the Inculcation of Social Values," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 160 (March 1932), pp. 103-109.

25. Marsh's 1912 diary, entries dated January 26, October 22, November 19 and 26, and December 25. Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

26. Lloyd Goodrich, Reginald Marsh , p. 295. Between 1926 and 1930 both movie attendance and the rate of capital investment doubled, in part because of the installation of sound equipment in three-fourths of the new theaters. See J. F. Steiner, "Recreation and Leisure Time Activities," in Recent Social Trends , pp. 940-941.

27. Lloyd Goodrich suggested Marsh's fondness for both German films and newsreels in our interview, December 30, 1982. With Felicia, Marsh attended several operas; he also began to record his attendance at symphonies and plays in his diaries. He participated more often in museum and gallery openings and went to more parties. In 1932, Marsh accepted

new institutional responsibilities with the vice-presidency of the Art Students League's Board of Control. By 1935 he was teaching regularly in the summer. With the commencement of the Treasury Section's program for decorating public buildings, Marsh received two commissions for murals. Beginning in May 1935 he spent most of his time preparing his murals for the Post Office Department Building in Washington, D.C., and in 1937 he executed his murals for the Customs House in New York. The summary of movies and events in Marsh's

life is culled from his diaries at the Archives of American Art.

28. Laning, "Reginald Marsh," p. 7.

29. Goodrich, Reginald Marsh , p. 6. Many of the letters from performers and viewers in the burlesque shows that Marsh reviewed can be found in the Marsh papers at the Archives of American Art.

30. Benton initially paid Marsh $100 per month and then increased the payment to $150. Cohen, "Reginald Marsh: An Interpretation," p. 83 n. 6.

31. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), p. 310; and Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970), p. 80.

32. Terkel, Hard Times, p . 81.

33. Kenneth Brooks Haas, Adventures in Buysmanship (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Edwards Brothers, 1937), p.13.

34. Mildred Adams, "Now the Siren Eclipses the Flapper." I do not know whether Marsh read the New York Times or if he would have seen this particular piece, a feature article in the Sunday supplement.

35. All quotations here from Adams, p. 4. Greta Garbo and Theda Bara are two Sirens often cited. For additional discussions of the Siren, see Lois Banner, American Beauty (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 280.

36. Adams, "Now the Siren Eclipses the Flapper," p. 5.

37. Adams, p. 5.

38. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, "Feminist—New Style," Harper's Monthly Magazine 155 (October 1927), pp. 552-560; Lillian Symes, "The New Masculinism," Harper's Monthly Magazine 161 (June 1930), pp. 98-107; and Symes, "Still a Man's Game: Reflections of a Slightly Tired Feminist," Harper's Monthly Magazine 158 (May 1929), pp. 678-686.

39. Cohen, Reginald Marsh's New York , p. 27.

40. Pamela Neal Warford, "The Social Origins of Female Iconography: Selected Images of Women in American Popular Culture, 1890-1945," Ph.D. diss., Washington University, St. Louis, 1979, pp. 78-80.

41. Adams, "Now the Siren Eclipses the Flapper," pp. 4-5.

42. Modern Screen , December 1933, pp. 14-16.

43. Modern Screen , June 1933, p. 52. Following a brief postwar baby boom, the birth rate had been in decline since about 1926, and there was some concern about the ultimate long-range effects of the decline. P. K. Whelpton, "The Population of the Nation," in Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934), p. 39. See also Recent Social Trends for statistics on marriage and childbearing in the Depression. In the early 1980s Time magazine's cover story "The New Baby Bloom" featured "Charlie's Angels" star Jaclyn Smith as its prime example of a successful woman in her thirties turning away from a career to home and motherhood. The cover featured a radiantly pregnant Smith surrounded, like a Madonna,

by a glow of light. The article failed to mention the reality for mothers who continued to work from economic need. Time , February 22, 1982, pp. 52-58.

44. Modern Screen , April 1933, p. 4 for all quotations.

45. Occasionally, magazines and stories documented the darker side of Hollywood. One article in Modern Screen (ironically placed near a regular feature entitled "You Can Be Anything You Want"), citing statistics to show the near impossibility of Hollywood hopefuls' finding jobs, urged parents to keep their boys and girls at home. Jack Jamison, "Hollywood's Lost Children," Modern Screen , September 1934, pp. 62 -63 . In The Day of the Locust , published in 1939, Nathanael West painted a grim picture of Hollywood's failures, one of them an aspiring Siren.

46. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975), writes of three movies, all from 1932, in which this type appears — Blonde Venus (Marlene Dietrich), Red Dust (Jean Harlow), and Back Street (Irene Dunn). He observes that although Hollywood used this type to cater to prurient interests, these films also implied "that there was no room in the marketplace for women other than on stage or in bed" (p. 178). See also, Warford, "The Social Origins of Female Iconography," pp. 73-75.

47. Adams, "Now the Siren Eclipses the Flapper," p. 5; and Warford, p. 79.

48. Andrew Bergman, We're in the Money: Depression American and Its Films (New York: New York University Press, 1971), p. 51. See also Warford, p. 24 n. 11.

49. Doss, "Images of American Women in the 1930s," pp. 2-3. Much of Doss's analysis is based on Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1973).

50. Lois W. Banner, American Beauty , pp. 280-282.

51. A 1920s Listerine mouthwash advertisement that pictured a woman looking at a photograph of her husband read,

Why had he changed so in his attentions? The thing was simply beyond her. She couldn't puzzle it out. And every moment it preyed on her mind and was almost breaking her heart.

He had been the most attentive lover and husband imaginable. But of late some strange something seemed to have come between them. Now he was so changed.

Was it some other woman? No, she told herself—it couldn't be! Yet why wasn't he the way he used to be toward her?

The ad then went on to assure the anxious reader that halitosis could indeed be cured with frequent use of Listerine.

52. Modern Screen , September 1933, p. 89.

53. Modern Screen , April 1933, p. 91.

54. My historical analysis is based on Lois Banner's argument in American Beauty , pp. 202-208, 218.

55. In 1920 there were 5,000 beauty parlors in the United States; by 1925 the number had grown to 25,000, and by 1930, to 40,000. In 1930, cosmetic sales reached $180 million, more than was allocated nationally to either education or social services. Banner, American Beauty , pp. 271-272.

56. Banner, American Beauty , p. 208.

57. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream , pp. 52-60.

58. Marchand, p. 62. Much of Marchand's material on advertisers' feelings about audi-

ence is drawn from the discussions in trade publications like Printers' Ink and agencies' inhouse newsletters. Marchand demonstrates how in the 1920s advertising men were brought up short by the popularity of the tabloids and True Story magazine. Although they initially resisted the lower standards of the confessional advertisement, by the end of the decade it had become a popular form, even in magazines targeting a middle- to upper-middle-class audience.

59. Marchand, pp. 66-69.

60. Marchand, pp. 300-301.

61. Advertising Age , March 22, 1937, p. 50, as quoted in Marchand, p. 68.

62. "Cynic's Progress," newspaper clipping of an undated review of Marsh's one-man exhibition at the Rehn Gallery when he was thirty-four; from scrapbook no. 4, frontispiece to Cohen, Reginald Marsh's New York .

63. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream , pp. 48-50, 86-87.

64. Adolph Dehn, "My Friend, Reggie," Demcourier 13 (June 1943), p. 11.

65. Marsh's explanation of why his pictures didn't sell in the 1930s, in William Benton, "Reginald Marsh As I Remember Him," mimeographed essay, quoted in Cohen, "Reginald Marsh: An Interpretation," p. 27.

66. My discussion of the Siren stereotype's function is based on Pamela Warford's analysis in "The Social Origins of Female Iconography." Warford (p. viii) suggests that women have been instructed in numerous roles, often through a stereotypical model of womanhood like the Gibson girl, the flapper, and the Siren. She argues further that people in the media have recognized that a particular image at a given time was "culturally functional or economically advantageous," even if it was disadvantageous to the American woman. She assumes that the media generate and control "needs" in a given era.

67. Sumiko Higashi, "Cinderella vs. Statistics: The Silent Movie Heroine as Jazz-Age Working Girl," in Mary Kelly, ed., Woman's Being, Woman's Place: Female Identity and Vocation in American History (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979).

68. Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982).

69. Laning, East Side, West Side, p . 97.

70. Cohen, Reginald Marsh's New York , p. 21.

71. Haas, Adventures in Buysmanship , pp. 12-13. Haas observed that advertisers used slogans and stereotypes because we symbolize in precisely the same way. For a discussion of the way stereotypes work—and the way they are both simple and complex like ideology— see T. E. Perkins, "Rethinking Stereotypes," in Michele Barrett et al., Ideology and Cultural Production (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), pp. 135-139.

72. T. J. Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930," in The Culture of Consumption , ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), pp. 3-5. Lears argues that advertising became effective as middle-class people became increasingly preoccupied with finding health and well-being (selfhood and autonomy) in secular rather than in religious or moral frameworks. This "modern therapeutic ethos," with its central goal of regenerating selfhood and autonomy, became a central modern preoccupation and fueled advertising strategies throughout the first third of the century. I borrow the terms autonomy and selfhood from Lears's discussions throughout my analysis since they apply to the Siren and the shopping crowd as Marsh depicts them.

73. Edward Laning, The Sketchbooks of Reginald Marsh (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), p. 136.

74. Sklar, Movie-Made America , pp. 173-174, 176. Sklar observes that between 1930

and 1934 Hollywood films were preoccupied with sex, violence, and political melodrama. Although such themes tied into social realism in general, Sklar suggests that subjects were chosen for reasons of "crassest expediency." Producers deliberately sought exaggerated forms of stimulation, appealing to prurient interest to lure audiences and reverse plummeting theater revenues in the early years of the Depression (one-third of the nation's movie theaters had shut down by 1933).

75. Erica Doss identifies this woman as a working women in "Images of American Women in the 1930s," p. 3.

76. I would like to thank Rebecca Zurier for her helpful suggestions on Marsh's "sketchiness" and his use of tempera. In fact, as Lloyd Goodrich has argued, Marsh had problems learning to handle the oil painting medium; tempera came closer to his natural way of working as a draftsman. Goodrich, Reginald Marsh , pp. 162-163.

77. One of the most fruitful of these studies is Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct (New York: Macmillan, 1933), part of a twelve-book series on motion pictures and youth that gives some indication of the concern about film's role in shaping values. Sponsored by the Committee on Educational Research of the Payne Fund as requested by the National Committee for the Study of Social Values in Motion Pictures—by 1933 renamed The Motion Picture Research Council—the series included the following titles: Getting Ideas from the Movies; Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children; The Social Conduct and Attitudes of Movie Fans; Motion Pictures and Standards of Morality; Movies, Delinquency, and Crime ; and Boys, Movies, and City Streets .

78. This is discussed below, and documented in Ewen and Ewen, Channels of Desire , pp. 52-55.

79. Haas, Adventures in Buysmanship . The sociologist David Park at the University of Chicago was one of the major scholars to discuss individual behavior in the crowd during this period.

80. Willey, "'Identification' and the Inculcation of Social Values," p. 108.

81. Willey, p. 109.

82. Willey, pp. 109-110.

83. Blumer, Movies and Conduct , p. 34.

84. Blumer, pp. 41-42. In Advertising the American Dream , p. 96, Marchand illustrates an advertisement featuring a testimonial by Nazimova for Lucky Strike cigarettes. European stars who were undaunted by America's prohibitions against "lady" smokers were frequently employed by the tobacco industry to promote its products.

85. Blumer, Movies and Conduct , p. 48.

86. These other models include Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, and Marian Anderson.

87. Blumer, Movies and Conduct , pp. 194-195.

88. Ewen and Ewen, Channels of Desire ; Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985); Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983, introduction; Joanne Meyerowitz, "Sexual Geography and Gender Economy: The Furnished Room Districts of Chicago, 1890-1930," Gender and History z (Autumn 1990), pp. 274-296; and Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

89. 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), pp. 877-878; Sally Stein, "The Graphic Ordering of Desire: Modernization of a Middle-Class Woman's Magazine," Heresies 5 (1985), pp. 7-16. Lynd observed,

Fifteen years ago a manufacturer was safe in preparing for volume sale models that were fashionable in Fifth Avenue shops the year before. Today it is frequently less than a week after a model has been shown in the window of one of the exclusive couturiers of 57th street or Fifth Avenue that it appears at $6.95 or $3.95 in the 14th-Street serve-yourself stores. (p. 878)

90. Modern Screen , January 1934, pp. 70-71.

91. Willey," 'Identification' and the Inculcation of Social Values," p. 108.

92. Blumer, Movies and Conduct , pp. 197-198.

93. Ewen and Ewen, Channels of Desire . The Ewens write from a Marxist perspective and assume that working-class Americans are exploited and directed by institutions of culture run by the ruling class. Their assumption that "it is the agencies of communication that provide the mechanisms for social order" rests on a belief that the individual has no will or choice. Their analyses of immigrant women's acceptance of movies and advertising as models for a way of life help to interpret Marsh's image of the voluptuous shopper as a consumer automaton on Fourteenth Street. For a more extensive analysis of immigrant women in the New World, see Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars .

94. Louis Palmer, "The World in Motion," Survey 11 (1909), p. 357, as quoted in Ewen and Ewen, Channels of Desire , p. 88.

95. Ewen and Ewen, p. 87.

96. All quotations are from Ewen and Ewen, p. 87.

97. Caroline F. Ware, Greenwich Village, 1920-1930: A Comment on American Civilization in the Post-War Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), pp. 129, 167. Ware detected these patterns among immigrant women in Greenwich Village.

98. The Immigration Act of 1917 included a literacy requirement and excluded peoples from much of Asia and the Pacific Islands. The Quota Act of 1921 (following the height of the Red scare and the Palmer raids of 1920) added numerical limitations to U.S. immigration laws. The Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) reduced the annual quota for each nationality to z percent of the number of persons of the national origin in the United States in 1890. This reduced the number of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. Cynthia Jaffee McCabe and Daniel J. Boorstin, The Golden Door: Artist Immigrants of America, 1876-1976 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1976), pp. 66-72; Ewen and Ewen, Channels of Desire , pp. 43-44; 98-101; and Higashi, "Cinderella vs. Statistics," pp. 112-113.

99. Edgar D. Furniss, Labor Problems (Boston, 1925), p. 176, as quoted in Ewen and Ewen, p. 52.

100. Ewen and Ewen, pp. 53-54.

101. For an excellent discussion of assimilation and new mass-culture amusements, see John Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).

102. Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization," pp. 19-20.

103. Lynd, "The People as Consumers," especially the section on consumer literacy, pp. 881-889.

104. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream , pp. 312-318.

105. Kay Austin, What Do You Want for $1.98? A Guide to Intelligent Shopping (New York: Carrick and Evans, 1938); Ruth Brindze, How to Spend Money: Everybody's Practical Guide to Buying (New York: Vanguard Press, 1935); Jessie Vee Coles, The Consumer-Buyer and the Market (New York: Wiley, 1938); and Haas, Adventures in Buysmanship .

106. Stuart Chase and F. J. Schlink, Your Money's Worth: A Study in the Waste of the

Consumer's Dollar (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 2.

107. Lynd discussed "puffing," the practice of distorting claims about products, in "The People as Consumers," p. 873. See also Peter E. Samson, "The Emergence of a Consumer Interest in America, 1870-1930," Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1980. Haas, Adventures in Buysmanship , pp. 12-21.

108. 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. 123. Fox traces a historical shift from a belief in the individual's power to resist the consumer environment to an acceptance of the consumer's inherent irrationality. He locates this shift in the thinking and underlying value system of the social scientist Robert Lynd.

109. Fox, "Epitaph for Middletown," pp. 125-128. Lynd's early thinking was founded in John Dewey's Progressive Era belief in the common man. Like Dewey, Lynd believed that re-education in the processes of a new culture occurred with the agency of the individual. Community change also originated with the individual. Lynd's thinking in his earlier works represented a conscious challenge to the influential Chicago school of sociologists headed by David Park, who argued that urbanization was an impersonal, natural process with a life of its own, and that individuals played no determining role.

110. Lynd, "The People as Consumers," p. 866. In a roughly contemporary piece, "Family Members as Consumers," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 160 (March 1932), Lynd voiced similar concerns but placed even greater emphasis on tensions in consumer culture and demonstrated his mistrust of big business.

Living as a husband or wife or boy or girl in these 1930s is a nerve-racking affair under the most favorable circumstances. Impelled from within by the need for security in the most emotionally insecure culture in which any recent generation of Americans has lived, beset on every hand by a public philosophy that puts not the quality of family living but the health of business first, untrained in the backward art of spending to live, buttressed by his government only against a few of the grossest abuses of his efforts to buy an effective living, the consumer faces a trying dilemma. (p. 92)

111. Haas, Adventures in Buysmanship , p. 21.

112. Fox, "Epitaph for Middletown," p. 139.

113. See Rockwell Kent's autobiography, It's Me, O Lord (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955), as quoted in Lincoln Rothschild, To Keep Art Alive: The Effort of Kenneth Hayes Miller, American Painter (1876-1952 ) (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1974), p. 34. See Chapter z, n. 57, for a discussion of Marsh's analysis.

114. T. J. Jackson Lears, a historian of consumer culture, has demonstrated that Marsh's anxieties were widely felt among members of the middle to upper-middle class. Lears shows that by the last decades of the nineteenth century middle-class individuals began to lose their sense of autonomy in the face of an economic system based increasingly on consumption rather than individual production. This loss of autonomy resulted in a demand for more vigorous behavior, a new "quest for real life"—the cult of the strenuous life, with its emphasis on athletic achievement, preached throughout Marsh's boyhood by President Theodore Roosevelt. Lears summarizes the causes of the dilemma:

In all, the modern sense of unreality stemmed from extraordinarily various sources and generated complex effects. Technological change isolated the urban bourgeoisie from the hardness of life on the land; an interdependent and increasingly corporate economy

circumscribed autonomous will and choice; a softening Protestant theology undermined commitments and blurred ethical distinctions. Yet a production ethos persisted; self-control became merely a tool for secular achievement; success began to occur in a moral and spiritual void.

In his work on advertising and the therapeutic roots of consumer culture, Lears traces the mutual relationship between what he calls the feeling of unreality, which "helped to generate longings for bodily vigor, emotional intensity and a revitalized sense of selfhood," and advertising strategies that helped satisfy these longings and ultimately advanced the culture of consumption. Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization," pp. 7-10, and Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. 222.

1. 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 University of Delaware Press, 1980), p. 71.

2. Susan Porter Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations: Managing the Work of Department Store Saleswomen, 2900-1940," Business History Review 55 (Spring 2981); Benson, "The Clerking Sisterhood: Rationalization and the Work Culture of Saleswomen in American Department Stores, 1890-2960," Radical America 12 (March-April 1978), pp. 41-55; and Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

3. Benson, Counter Cultures , chapter 6, "'The Clerking Sisterhood': Saleswomen's Work Culture," pp. 227-271.

4. Critics throughout the 1930s placed Soyer squarely within the movement away from landscape toward a "commercial and industrial" subject matter that focused on "human beings affected by social conditions." Soyer's art, often referred to as "social commentary," was also praised for its frank realism and its often penetrating psychological observation. Far from suggesting that Soyer's art might be a propagandistic vehicle for social change, most critics praised the artist's craftsmanship, his subtle palette, and his direct, strong brush-work and marked him as one of the most promising painters of his generation. See, for example, "Social Commentaries Mark the Pennsylvania Academy's Annual," Art Digest 8 (February 15, 1934), quotations pp. 5-7; Lloyd Goodrich, ''In the New York Galleries," The Arts 15 (May 1929), p. 334; "Around the Galleries," Art News 30 (February 27, 1932), p. 10; "Exhibitions in New York," Art News 31 (February 18, 2933), p. 5; and "New Exhibitions of the Week: Human Studies by Raphael Soyer," Art News 37 (April 15, 1939), P. 14.

5. Interview with the artist, March 13, 1987. The relationship of horizontal and vertical hand gestures at the center of Shop Girls is loosely based on that of the gestures of Christ, Peter, and the disciple between them in Masaccio's Tribute Money (Fig. 6.7).

6. James Lane, "The Passing Shows," Art News 40 (April 1-15, 1941), p. 29.

7. Patricia Hills, with an essay by Raphael Soyer, Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930 s (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1983), p. 39. Davis spent most of his life in Arizona. During the 1930s, however, he was a student at the National Academy of Design and exhibited widely on the East Coast. He was also active in the WPA.

8. Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism, p . 91. Born in Vienna, Vavak immigrated

to New York in 1904. He settled in Chicago and studied at the Art Institute. During the 1930s, he was in the WPA and was a member of the Chicago Artists' Union. His goal was to create a contemporary history painting.

9. Margaret Breuning, "Art in New York," Parnassus 10 (March 1938), p. 20 (review of Soyer's 1938 show at the Valentine Gallery); Helen Buchalter, "Carnegie International, 1939," Magazine of Art 32 (November 1939), p. 630; "New Exhibitions of the Week."

10. Soyer told me that Degas was always on his mind when he worked. His early interest in the French painter began when his twin brother, Moses, sent him a large volume of plates of Degas's work from France in 1926. As early as the 1930s, critics began to recognize the affinities between the Soyers and the French painter. Interview with the artist, December 27, 1982; Milton W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955; reprint, 1972), p. 185; and Harry Salpeter, "Raphael Soyer: East Side Degas," Esquire , May 1938.

11. Hills and Tarbell, The Figurative Tradition , p. 71. My discussion of the studio-picture tradition is taken from Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression , pp. 154-155. For the interpretation of Degas's bather images see Eunice Lipton, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 165-186; and (for the monotypes), Hollis Clayson, " Avant-Garde and Pompier Images of the Nineteenth Century French Prostitution: The Matter of Modernism, Modernity, and Social Ideology," in Modernism and Modernity , ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, et al., Vancouver Conference Papers (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), pp. 43-64. For a discussion of the female nude in early twentieth-century modernist painting see Carol Duncan, "Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting," in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany , ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 293-314.

12. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression , p. 154.

13. Interview with Isabel Bishop, December 16, 1982.

14. Frank Gettings, Raphael Soyer: Sixty-five Years of Printmaking (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), p. 11; and interviews with Raphael Soyer, December 27, 1982, and March 13, 1987. Soyer rarely used professional models. In my last interview with him, he said he knew many of his models intimately, and they in turn would know him better than almost anyone else. Many of his last models had worked for him for ten to twenty years; some in their forties he had known since their early twenties. Soyer remarked that their late twentieth-century dilemmas—principally failed relationships with men reluctant to make commitments or to have the children many of the women were desperate for— were markedly different from those of the Depression era. One sensed in Soyer's commentary on his models long-standing relationships of mutual respect. It may have been the care Soyer took in these relationships beginning in the 1930s that prompted the New York Post reviewer Jerome Klein's comment that Soyer "reaches the greatest freedom under the most intimate conditions in the quiet of the studio where the distinction between model and person breaks down." Quoted in "Raphael Soyer, Realist, Captures That 'Haunted Look of the Unemployed,' "Art Digest 12 (March 15, 1938), p. 12.

15. Frances Fisher Dubuc, "Women Wanted by Department Stores," Saturday Evening Post , June 23, 1928, p. 134.

16. New York Times , May 9, 192 6 , sec. 2, p. 17.

17. As I've indicated elsewhere, polls in the 1920s showed that the white middle-class working woman preferred marriage over a career and usually dropped out of the work force with marriage or the birth of a child. Consequently, the proportion of working women

between twenty-five and forty-four years old rose from only 3.3 to 7.3 percent between 1900 and 1920. Furthermore, the occupational distribution of married women showed that of those who worked following marriage the largest group held low-level factory or domestic positions. By 1940 only 15 percent of all married women were employed, and only one-third of these women held professional, mercantile, or clerical positions. 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), pp. 41, 16.

18. Alice Calvin, "The Shop Girl," Outlook 88 (February 15, 1908), pp. 383-384; Mary Rankin Cranston, "The Girl behind the Counter," World Today 10 (March 1906), pp. 270-274; Mary Alden Hopkins, "The Girls behind the Counter," Collier's , March 16, 1912; Mary Maule, "What Is a Shop Girl's Life?" World's Work 14 (September 1907); Anne O'Hagan, "The Shop-Girl and Her Wages,'' Munsey's Magazine 50 (November 1913), pp. 252-259; Mary Van Kleek, "Working Conditions in New York Department Stores," Survey , October 11, 1913, pp. 50-51. Van Kleek was writing as secretary of the Russell Sage Foundation's Committee on Women's Work. In New York and other major cities, there was a phenomenal growth in the number of department stores from the mid-nineteenth century until World War I. Older New York stores, like Arnold Constable, Lord & Taylor, and A. T. Stewart, had moved uptown and were joined by numerous others. Stores were clustered in districts between Sixth Avenue and Broadway and from just below Fourteenth Street to Forty-second Street. Within this small geographical area by 1910 between twenty and thirty thousand "girls and women" were employed in dry goods and department stores, as many as three thousand in some of the largest emporiums. John William Ferry, A History of the Department Store (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 35-39; and Mary Maule, "What Is a Shop Girl's Life?" p. 9311.

19. Cranston, "The Girl behind the Counter," p. 270; Calvin, "The Shop Girl," p. 383; O'Hagan, "The Shop-Girl and Her Wages," pp. 253-254, 256; and Alice Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1981), p. 99. In 1900, less than 10 percent of the female working population held jobs in sales; about 33 percent were domestic servants; 25 percent worked in factories or mills; and about 10 percent worked in agriculture. Most of these jobs paid more than sales work, but sales work had a higher status because the environment was cleaner and, though minimal, opportunities for advancement were comparatively greater (p. 80).

20. Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations," p. 6, and Counter Cultures , p. 132. One indignant writer observed in 1913 that although social workers had estimated nine dollars per week as the lowest reasonable wage on which a working girl could be self-sufficient, ten thousand New York shopgirls received less than eight dollars. Van Kleek, "Working Conditions," p. 50. The belief that the shopgirl was prey to the "social evil" was the primary motive for some of the writers who investigated her job and life. Many feared that a young girl receiving low wages would succumb to advances by unscrupulous male superiors and store patrons who might, with money or goods, make her life easier. Even when a federal report showed that 75 percent of female crimes were committed by women in domestic and personal service and only z percent by saleswomen, the belief that a shopgirl was likely to compromise her virtue persisted. According to one author, both the staff and customers of one of the better New York stores believed "many of its saleswomen were subsidized by private illicit relations." O'Hagan, "The Shop-Girl," p. 256.

21. Helen Stuart Campbell, "Among the Shop-Girls," in Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States , ed. Erna Olaf Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981), p. 374.

22. Helen Stuart Campbell, "Among the Shop-Girls," p. 374.

23. Benson, Counter Cultures , p. 178. "At the suggestion of a minimum wage for women and children, employers variously invoked the Constitution, grieved over the inefficient, whom they would be forced to dismiss to utter poverty in the event of any governmental interference with wages, and recited their ancient creed that woman works for 'pin-money.'" O'Hagan, "The Shop-Girl," p. 252. O'Hagan also observed (p. 253) that employers always tried to hire women who lived at home with male wage earners so as not to threaten their belief that she worked for spending money.

24. Mrs. John Van Vorst, " Grisettes and Midinettes," Lipincott's Magazine 80 (July 1907), quotations from pp. 101, 103.

25. Van Vorst, " Grisettes and Midinettes, " pp. 104, 107.

26. Many of the observations here are based on an extended discussion with Soyer about his relationship to his models, March 13, 1987.

27. Frances Donovan, The Saleslady (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1974). In the introduction, Donovan's fellow sociologist David Park observed, "the little shopgirl whose fortunes have been touchingly described by O'Henry, has been very largely superseded; the saleslady is likely to be a mature woman. Many of them are married or widowed, and in any case they hold their jobs by their competence rather than by their charm" (p. ix).

28. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties , First Perennial Library edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1931; reprint, 1964), p. 80.

29. Changes in labor laws, thanks in part to lobbying efforts by organizations like the Consumers' League of New York, altered some of the worst conditions. In 1913, for example, a law was passed prohibiting women from working more than 54 hours per week, children between fourteen and sixteen from working over 48 hours (previous limits had been 60 and 54 hours). Mary Dewhurst Blankenhorn, "Behind the Counter," Outlook , 144 (December 22, 1926), p. 531. Frances Donovan, The Saleslady , p. 83. Donovan, a sociologist who worked in the dress department of a New York store as a participant-observer, suggested that commissions for a good saleswoman could average ten to fifteen dollars per week. Blankenhorn, "Behind the Counter," p. 532, pointed out that the hiring of a nurse and provision for mutual-aid societies, uncommon in the prewar period, were by the 1920 s established practice. See also Dubuc, "Women Wanted by Department Stores," pp. 130. 134.

30. Donovan was quoting from an article in Woman's Wear , dated August 21, 1926, called "A Shop Girl by Any Other Name." The Saleslady , pp. 160-161.

31. "Where the Schools Fail," Dry Goods Economist 67 (May 10, 1913), p. 27, as quoted in Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations," p. 12. There were also strong prescriptions on race: black women were almost never saleswomen but served as elevator operators or backstage personnel. Benson, Counter Cultures , p. 209.

32. Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations," pp. 13-14, and Counter Cultures , pp. 142-146; Paul Brown, "Shopgirls: 1930 Model," Commonweal 12 (October 8, 1930), p. 577; and Donovan, The Saleslady , p. 83.

33. In The Saleslady , Frances Donovan expressed surprise at the difficulty of her training class. The teacher

scores us, calls our attention to errors, has us make out more checks, tells us in detail how to handle "C.O.D.s," when it is necessary to have the section-manager sign slips, when to send the money to the cashier in a gray carrier, when in a red or a blue one,

which form to put into the carrier, which with the merchandise, which to keep and how. She explains the intricacies . . . detail after detail until we are exhausted and dizzy. (p. 21)

Helen Rich Norton, Department-Store Education: An Account of the Training Methods Developed at the Boston School of Salesmanship, under the Direction of Lucinda Wyman Prince , Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1917, no. 9 (Washington, D.C.), p. 12, as quoted in Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations," p. 15.

34. Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations," p. 9.

35. Donovan, The Saleslady , introduction by David Park, p. ix; and Dubuc, "Women Wanted by Department Stores," p. 130. The manager of the book department in one store said that the store preferred college women, "although we will train high-school graduates if their home background is good" (p. 133).

36. Among these schools were the Prince School of Store Service Education (a graduate school of Simmons College in Boston); the Research Bureau for Retail Training, the University of Pittsburgh; and the School of Retailing at New York University. Helen Law, "A New Job for the College Girl," Review of Reviews 81 (June 1930), pp. 74-75.

37. Benson, Counter Cultures , p. 160.

38. Law, "A New Job," p. 74. Three years earlier, Reyburn, a key figure in training store managers, in a speech before the Store Managers' Division, National Dry Goods Association, spoke about the greater effects the middle- to upper-class store environment would have on the lower-class girl.

Constant contact with the woman who is in charge of her department will have an influence on her. Daily contact with other girls who have been subjected to influences in business will have an influence on her. Daily observations of customers in the building will influence her, and slowly she will change because of these influences. She will lower the tone of her voice, grow quiet in her manner, exhibit better taste in the selection of her clothes, become more considerate of others.

Quoted in Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations," p. 13.

39. Donovan, The Saleslady , p. 9.

40. "We go our separate ways. . .. During the business week we are like a family with the close bond of a common interest. We know each other's outside life only through what we tell each other. We are not interested in the husbands, children, friends, except as they affect the attitudes of the girls in the store. Later I was to learn that there were outside contacts, carefully safeguarded, not at all general." Donovan, The Saleslady , p. 41.

41. "There are two girls who hold themselves aloof. They do not chatter but they take pains to tell us that they belong to the Training Squad, which is composed of college graduates who are given an intensive training in department-store procedure for a period of two years. One of the girls says, 'And when we get through, we are going to be store superintendents.' "Donovan, The Saleslady , p. 20.

42. John Wanamaker, as quoted in Benson, Counter Cultures , p. 155. Donovan recorded a conversation she had with Alice, a store model hired for her looks who was an unsuccessful saleswoman because she had left school early and used poor grammar when she spoke. Alice assured Donovan that she (Donovan) would get ahead because of her education ( The Saleslady , pp. 66-67 ). Helen Law, in "A New Job," p. 74, observed the passage of what she called the chewing-gum era among shopgirls in department stores, and Paul Brown, in "Shopgirls: 1930 Model," p. 576, noted how the O'Henry shopgirl became the

modern salesgirl with the elimination of the" 'dese, dem and dose' school of pronunciation."

43. Dubuc, "Women Wanted for Department Stores," p. 134; and Benson, Counter Cultures , pp. 153-159.

44. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , p. 37.

45. At the turn of the century, saleswomen (shopgirls) were required to wear black so they would not detract from the store displays. Cranston, "The Girl behind the Counter," p. 270. A writer in the 1920s suggested that the practice continued, to avoid the "danger of display of poor taste and lack of background on the part of employees." "Employees' Dress Regulations," Bulletin of the National Retail Dry Goods Association 10 (October 19 28), p. 457, as quoted in Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations,'' p. 20. Donovan suggests that dark dresses remained appropriate and observed that salesladies changed into lighter-colored dresses to go out for lunch or to leave at the end of the day. Donovan, The Saleslady , p. 101. Miller's saleswomen conform to the practice by wearing monochromatic dresses with simple collars.

46. Richard R. Brettell and Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Degas in the Art Institute of Chicago (New York: Art Institute of Chicago and Abrams, 1984), p. 131. For a further discussion of Degas's milliners see Lipton, Looking into Degas , pp. 161-164.

47. Lorine Pruette, ed., Women Workers through the Depression: A Study of White Collar Employment Made by the American Woman's Association (New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 20, 66-74; and Scharf, To Work and to Wed , p. 120.

48. Although the WPA brought some relief, three-fourths of the women on WPA rolls were former factory workers or domestics, who found creative art or sewing projects more easily than sales or clerical workers could have done. This occurred even though the proportion of white-collar women was higher and they were generally out of work longer. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , pp. 121-122; and Meridel Le Sueur, "Women on the Bread-lines," New Masses 7 (January 1932), pp. 5-7.

49. The only image that alludes to women's unemployment is Isabel Bishop's painting Waiting (1935-37). It shows a plainly dressed mother leaning back with her child resting in her lap. Although the Depression era viewer might have interpreted this woman, very different from Bishop's other females, as one waiting for work, Bishop said that she was trying to portray the dependence that exists between mother and child.

50. Grace Hutchins, Women Who Work (New York: International Publishers, 1934), pp. 83-84. Since the turn of the century, stools had been placed behind counters so that women could rest their feet when not waiting on customers. Managers believed, however, that seated workers undermined a store's reputation for prompt and energetic service, and girls caught using the stools received reprimands for laziness. The unwritten rule that stools were never to be used persisted and a shopgirl, particularly in the Depression, would endure aching feet rather than risk losing her job or the chance for a much-needed raise or promotion. O'Hagan, "The Shop-Girl," p. 253.

51. Lauren Gilfillan, "Weary Feet," Forum and Century 90 (October 1933), p. 202.

52. The NRA was established to enforce the wage and hour regulations resulting from the 1933 NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act), designed to pump new life into the economy. The act resulted from long discussions among businessmen, labor leaders, and government officials and also involved a massive public-relations program to stimulate consumer support (and purchasing). Businesses conforming to NRA practices could display the NRA sticker—a blue eagle with the slogan We Do Our Part emblazoned beneath. Klein's annex proudly displays it in a 1936 Berenice Abbott photograph (Fig. 3.5).

53. New York Times , September 5, 1933, p. 5; and "S. Klein: 'On the Square' Store Plays Santa to Its Employees," Newsweek , December 29, 1934, pp. 28-30.

54. "S. Klein Loses Wage Plea," New York Times , November 30, 1933, p. 10; and "S. Klein: 'On the Square,'" p. 29.

55. Stella Ormsby, "The Other Side of the Profile," New Republic 72 (August 17, 1932), p. 21. Although wages had improved by the time Soyer painted Shop Girls in 1936, the piece approximates the working conditions at Klein's.

56. Stella Ormsby, "The Other Side of the Profile," p. 21. Ormsby's letter was submitted to Klein by the New Republic editorial staff, who invited him to reply for simultaneous publication. After waiting three weeks, they published the letter, promising to print his reply. Apparently one was never forthcoming.

57. "NRA Violation Laid to Klein's Store," New York Times , December 18, 1934, p. 14; and New York Times , February 3, 1935, p. 12.

58. On February 10 an audience at the Civic Repertory Theater on Fourteenth Street was left waiting when five actors in the radical play Sailors of Cattero were arrested for picketing Ohrbach's. On February 7 a warrant had been issued for the arrest of the author Nathaneal West, also for picketing. For details on the strike, see New York Times , January 3, 1935, p. 8; January 4, 1935, p. 14; January 6, 1935, p. 28; January 11, 1935, p. 27; February 7, 1935, p. 40; February 10, 1935, p. 17; February 12, 1935, p. 6; February 13, 1935, p. 22; February 17, 1935, p. 17; February 21, 1935, p. 6; February 24, 1935, p. 23; February 27, 1935, p. 10; March 3, 1935, p. 30; March 9, 1935, p. 8.

59. The signs in Marsh's painting read, Locked Out for Joining Union, Don't Buy at Ohrbachs, and Young Men and Young Women Jailed for Picketing, Don't Buy at Ohrbachs.

60. Department stores continued their practice of seeking out mature women and in the 1930s hired and rehired working wives more than any other white-collar employer. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , p. 103. Whether or not Miller intended his matronly saleswomen to represent married women, the paintings corroborate the social fact. Although he believed in women's traditional roles, moreover, Miller was sympathetic to their doing other work as children grew older. Kenneth Hayes Miller Papers, Roll 583, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

61. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , chapter 2, "Marriage and Careers: Feminism in the 1920s," pp. 21-38. Against historians who argue that feminism died in the 1920s (see William H. Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1972], and William L. O'Neill, "The End of Feminism," in Twentieth-Century America: Recent Interpretations , ed. Barton J. Bernstein and Allen J. Matusow, zd edition [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972], pp. 186-196), Scharf exposes this feminist "voice" that advocated the right of married women to work, one which, though never as strong as that advocating suffrage, should nonetheless be considered in evaluating the feminist movement and its relation to working women. The arguments of this small group of feminists, however, never altered the dominant image of the womanly homemaker or the womanly worker.

62. I would like to thank Peter Boswell for his thoughtful contribution to this analysis.

63. New York State Assemblyman Arthur Schwartz, for example, claimed in 1931 that the employment of married women was "reprehensible," and he admonished both federal and local governments to "cooperate and remove these undeserving parasites." George Gallup, after seeing the results of a 1936 poll on whether to permit married women to work, stated that he had never seen respondents "so solidly united in opposition as on any subject imaginable including sin and hay fever." Scharf, To Work and to Wed , pp. 47, 50.

The most telling example of strong public opposition to working wives appeared in the controversy over Section 213 of the 1932 Economy Act, which stated that whenever personnel reductions had to be made in government jobs, married persons (meaning married

women) must be discharged if their spouses were also government employees. Since this discriminatory clause applied only to a narrow group of government employees, President Hoover initially opposed it for the economic hardship it would cause as it made only an inconsequential contribution to economic recovery. With the growing sentiment against working wives, however, the section received widespread public attention and enjoyed strong public support. Women's groups who found the act economically and socially repugnant campaigned for its repeal. Yet Congress, recognizing a "politically advantageous symbol," debated for two years before repealing it, in July 1937. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , pp. 46-47, 50.

Scharf assumes some public familiarity with Section 213, to judge from her citation of newspaper references to it. Artists might have noticed the controversy. The journalist Adela Rogers St. John published case-study articles in the Washington Herald on the hardships of women who lost jobs because of the federal legislation. The novelist Rupert Hughes wrote a six-part serial in the winter of 19 36 for the New York Herald Tribune entitled "Section 213-a Story behind the Headlines." A year before, in the same paper, the humorist Franklin Pierce Adams published the following ditty:

Oh for a play by Bernard Shaw

On the Federal Marital Status Law

Finally, an official history of the civil service, written in the early 1940s, noted that Section 213 was "the best known of the [Economy Act's] provisions." Scharf, To Work and to Wed , p. 51.

64. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , pp. 100-102.

65. For descriptions of the humanity, honesty, and sincerity of Soyer's women see "Around the Galleries," Art News 30 (February 27, 1932), p. 10; Robert Coates, "Latter Day Impressionist," New Yorker (March 13, 1948), pp. 61-62; and Carl Zigrosser, Tbe Artist in America: Twenty-four Close-ups of Contemporary Printmakers (New York: Knopf, 1942), pp. 60-61.

66. The critic Emily Genauer was quoted on Soyer's drab women in the anonymous review "Raphael Soyer Paints Twenty-three Artists and Some Hungering Shop Girls," Art Digest 15 (April 1, 1941), p. 17. A reviewer of Soyer's 1929 show at the Daniel Gallery spoke of the grotesque stupidity of his model Susan in "Raphael Soyer: Daniel Galleries," Art News 27 (April 27, 1929), p. 10. Reviewing the same show, Walter Gutman spoke of Soyer's "unconscious way of deforming which makes his subjects ludicrous" ("Raphael Soyer,'' Creative Art 6 [April 1930], pp. 258-260); "Reviews and Previews," Art News 48 (April 1948), p. 51.

67. For the classic discussion of this phenomenon in the Western European tradition of oil painting, of which Soyer was a part, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 45-64.

68. Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Tbirties (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), as quoted in Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 54.

69. According to Frances Donovan, a store's management typically chose the prettiest saleswomen as models ( The Saleslady , p. 66).

70. "Exhibitions in New York," Art News 31 (February 18, 1933), p. 5.

71. Reviews, in the order quoted, are "Raphael Soyer Paints Twenty-three Artists," p. 17; "New York Criticism," Art Digest 9 (March 1, 1935), p. 18; Soyer quoted from Gettings, Raphael Soyer , p. 30; "Social Commentaries Mark the Pennsylvania Academy's Annual,"

Art Digest 8 (February 15, 1934), pp. 5-7; and Laurie Eglington, "Exhibitions in New York," Art News 33 (February 23, 1935), p. 10.

72. Interview with the artist, December 27, 1982.

73. Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism , p.27.

74. Moses Soyer, "Three Brothers," Magazine of Art 32 (April 1939), p. 207. In Self-Revealment: A Memoir (New York: Maecenas Press, 1969), Raphael Soyer also recalled feeling lonely and disenchanted with France, in part because he knew no French and had few friends there, in part because Parisian museums had not yet been renovated (p. 22). My discussion of Soyer's relation to the aesthetic policies and politics of the Popular Front is indebted here and below to Céile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

75. Soyer, Self-Revealment , p. 23. Soyer saw Grosz's works in Munich at an exhibit called Von neue Sachlichkeit zu kein Sachlichkeit (From new objectivism to non-objectivism).

76. Lloyd Goodrich, Raphael Soyer (New York: Abrams, 1972), p. 66; and statement of purpose from the Artists' Congress, as quoted in Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism , p. 29.

77. Soyer did several paintings of dancers, often at rest in the studio rather than in performance. His brother Moses had married a dancer, and perhaps through him Raphael became interested in the theme. In mid-decade he painted dancers from the studios of Fé Alf and Jane Dudley, relatively unknown figures at that time who were interested in presenting revolutionary themes in dance. The determined pose of Fé Alf in Figure 6.24 suggests this purpose. John Martin, "Fé All Seen Here in Dance Recital," New York Times , February 25, 1935, p. 12; New York Times , April 21, 1935, sec. 9, p. 4; and Harry Salpeter, "Raphael Soyer: East Side Degas," p. 158.

78. Whiting, Antifascism in American Art , pp. 38-39, 165.

79. Pruette, Women Workers through the Depression , p. 155.

80. For a discussion of Art Front , its role in the Artists' Union and its changing editorial policy, see Gerald M. Monroe, "Art Front," Archives of American Art Journal 13 (1973), pp. 13-19.

81. The argument here is based on my understanding of the content of Art Front from Monroe; from selections from articles quoted in Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism , pp. 16 - 17; and from Whiting, Antifascism in American Art , chapters 2, 5.

82. Harold Rosenberg, "The Wit of William Gropper," Art Front z (March 1936), pp. 7-8, as quoted in Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism , p. 17.

83. Louis Lozowick, "Towards a Revolutionary Art," Art Front 2 (July-August 1936), pp. 12-13, as quoted in Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism , p. 17. Lozowick's statement reads:

Nor does partisanship narrow the horizon of revolutionary art. Quite the contrary, the challenge of a new cause leads to the discovery of a new storehouse of experience and the exploration of a new world of actuality. Even a tentative summary will show the vast possibilities, ideologic and plastic; relations between the classes; relations within each class; a clear characterization in historic perspective, of the capitalist as employer, as philanthropist, as statesman, as art patron; the worker as victim, as striker, as hero, as comrade, as fighter for a better world; the unattached liberal, the unctuous priest, the labor racketeer; all the ills capitalist flesh is heir to—persons and events treated not as chance snapshot episodes but correlated among themselves shown in their dramatic antagonisms, made convincing by the living language of fact and made meaningful from the standpoint of a world philosophy. The very newness of the theme will forbid a conformity in technique.

1. See, for example, "Isabel Bishop Finds Critics Receptive," Art Digest 13 (February 1, 1939), p. 21; "New York Criticism: A Miller Pupil's Shackles Loosen," Art Digest 10 (March 1, 1936), p. 16; and Bernard Myers, ed., " Sleeping Child , by Isabel Bishop,'' Scribner's American Painters Series, no. 9, Scribner's 122 (November 1937), p. 32; and "New Paintings Shown by Isabel Bishop," New York World-Telegram , January 21, 1939, p. 16.

2. One notable exception to this type is the 1937 painting Young Woman (Fig. 7.10), a three-quarter-length portrait of a self-assured, business-like woman standing against a column with a hazy urban backdrop behind her. She assumes a relaxed contrapposto pose, her coat and purse over one arm, her gloves in the other hand.

3. See, for example, Grace L. Coyle, "Women in the Clerical Occupations," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Women in the Modern World 143 (May 1929),p. 184; Orlie Pell, "Two Million in Offices," Woman's Press 33 (June 1939), p. 256; and U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau Bulletin no. 120, The Employment of Women in Offices , by Ethel Erickson, 1934, pp. 3, 7. For important historical overviews see Lorine Pruette, ed., Women Workers through the Depression: A Study of White Collar Employment Made by the American Woman's Association (New York: Macmillan, 1934); Margery Davies, "Woman's Place Is at the Typewriter: The Feminization of the Clerical Labor Force," Radical America 8 (July-August 1974), pp. 1-28, and her Woman's Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers, 1870-1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); and 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).

4. See, for example, Loire Brophy, If Women Must Work (New York: Appleton-Century, 2936); Hazel Rawson Cades, Jobs for Girls (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928); Dorothy Dayton, "Personality Plus—or Minus," Independent Woman 15 (November 1936), pp. 343, 362; Frances Maule, She Strives to Conquer: Business Behavior, Opportunities, and Job Requirements for Women (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1937); Elizabeth Gregg MacGibbon, Manners in Business (New York: Macmillan, 1936); and Ruth Wanger, What Girls Can Do (New York: Henry Holt, 1926).

5. Griselda Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 56.

6. The fifty-story Metropolitan Life Insurance Company at Twenty-third Street also employed seven thousand women in a total staff of nine thousand. New York in Pictures , vol. 2 (New York: Sun Printing and Publishing Association, 1928), p. 7. Information on the tasks for each institution is in U.S. Department of Labor, The Employment of Women in Offices , p. 5.

7. Bishop recalled that many of her models were from the block of buildings, which included the Bank of Manhattan Building, the Decker Building, The Union Building, and the Hartford Building, ranging from 31 to 41 Union Square West, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth streets, just adjacent to Bishop's studio (see Fig. 3.1 and Maps 1, 2). Interview with the artist, December 16, 1982.

8. In the work force in general, between 1890 and 1920 the percentage of native-born white women grew while the proportion of working women who were foreign-born declined. Among clerical workers the percentage remained high—80 percent by 1940. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , pp. 11-12. According to a report on women's occupational progress, for the years 1910 to 1920 the increase among women in the clerical occupations was "seven and a half times as great as the increase among women in manufacturing and mechanical

pursuits, and almost three times as great as that among women in professional service." U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau, The Occupational Progress of Women , p. 17, as quoted in Coyle, "Women in the Clerical Occupations," p. 180.

9. Between 1900 and 1920 the participation in the work force of women aged 16 to 24 increased from 39 to 50 percent while the proportion of working women aged 25 to 44 rose from 3.3 to 7.3 percent. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , pp. 13, 41.

10. Over half of all women surveyed were under twenty-five. For hiring policies, see MacGibbon, Manners in Business , p. 26; U.S. Department of Labor, The Employment of Women in Offices , pp. 14, 27.

11. U.S. Department of Labor, The Employment of Women in Offices , p. 30.

12. Married women made up 35.3 percent of all the women in trade, 35 percent of those in domestic service, and 32.4 percent of those in manufacturing and mechanical industries. In the 1934 New York survey of 24,025 clerical workers, only 10.1 percent reported that they were married. U.S. Department of Labor, The Employment of Women in Offices , pp. 12-13, 29.

13. Coyle, "Women in the Clerical Occupations," p. 183.

14. Coyle, p. 183; and U.S. Department of Labor, The Employment of Women in Offices , p. 13.

15. The Employment of Women in Offices , pp. 5-8; and Wanger, What Girls Can Do , p. 112.

16. U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau, The Employment of Women in Offices , pp. 5-7; and Wanger, What Girls Can Do , p. 113.

17. Unpublished interviews with Isabel Bishop conducted in September 1957 by Louis M. Starr of the Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, New York. Quoted in Helen Yglesias, Isabel Bishop (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), p. 66.

18. See John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1972); and Rosemary Betterton, ed., Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media (London and New York: Pandora Press, 1987), introduction, pp. 10-14.

19. Emily Genauer, "Miss Bishop Rates High as Painter," New York World-Telegram , February 15, 1936, p. 15; Edward Alden Jewell, as quoted in Art Digest 13 (February 1, 1939), p. 21; James W. Lane, "Bishop," Art News 41 (June 1942), p. 42, and Lane, "Canvases by Isabel Bishop, Painter of Subtle Tonalities," Art News 37 (January 21, 1939), p. 12; and Forbes Watson, ''Isabel Bishop," Magazine of Art 32 (January 1939), p. 52.

20. Bishop's technique was complicated, and she took many months to complete a single painting. She worked either in oil or tempera, building up meticulously crafted layers of paint. The pencil strokes, which she added toward the end of the process, often to a surface still wet, suggest where a contour might appear without really defining it. As a result, the pencil strokes seem to hover above the surface, implying motion.

21. In most New York offices women worked a thirty-nine-hour week, seven hours a day with four hours on Saturday mornings, except during the summer. In large offices there were good benefit packages that included two weeks of paid vacation, one week of paid sick leave, some group insurance, and small bonuses, either for Christmas or with continued service. Some offices made provision for additional education, and in banks there were often lunchrooms where employees could have inexpensive midday meals. U.S. Department of Labor, The Employment of Women in Offices , pp. 29-33.

Clerical wages seem to have been considerably better than those of domestic, industrial, and sales workers. In the early 1930s a beginning file clerk in a large institution seems to have made about a dollar a week more (or around $17) than a beginning saleswoman in a major department store, and a secretary two to five dollars a week more than an upper-level

saleswoman (or around $42.50). According to Lorine Pruette, in Women Workers through the Depression (pp. 66-74), saleswomen were always at the low end of the white-collar pay scale. My own estimate is based on an evaluation of several median wage charts in The Employment of Women in Offices (pp. 20-23), modified by reports of somewhat lower salary ranges in "Women in Business II," Fortune 12 (August 1935), p. 85.

22. Wanger, What Girls Can Do , p. 111.

23. Coyle, "Women in the Clerical Occupations," p. 181.

24. U.S. Department of Labor, The Employment of Women in Offices , p. 1.

25. Bishop believed a painter had to maintain an awareness of the painted surface even while creating the illusion of forms existing or moving in space. She argued that representational painters had two basic historical "forms" of painting by which they could simultaneously maintain an awareness of surface and of depth. Renaissance artists like Raphael retained planar integrity by arranging forms parallel to the surface, even though those forms were so solidly demarcated from the surrounding space that they could be removed from it, leaving the setting undisturbed. Other artists, like Rubens, Watteau, and Renoir, destroyed the compositional integrity of the picture plane by animating their figures and by creating diagonal recessions into the picture plane. But they reinforced the plane again by minimizing contour and by creating such a strong painterly continuity between figure and ground that figures could no longer be detached from their settings.

In her own work, Bishop chose the second method. In "Concerning Edges," Magazine of Art 32 (January 1939), pp. 57-58, she explained her theories. She summarized some of the problems she and like-minded representational painters faced:

And if the painter wants to make the thing painted on look different from what it is, he has to keep several balls in the air at once—that is, he has to create several sets of suggestions—one set always keeping you aware of what the thing painted on is like, while other suggestions are persuading you of depth, movement, weight, and what not. Jean Helion has defined painting as ". . . combining opposed purposes so that they develop instead of annihilate each other."

26. Sheldon Reich, Isabel Bishop , introduction by Martin H. Bush (Tucson: University of Arizona Museum of Art, 1974), p. 24.

27. In "Isabel Bishop, the Grand Manner, and the Working Girl," Art in America 63 (September 1975), p. 63, the art critic Lawrence Alloway identified this technique as a metaphor.

28. Reich, IsabelBishop , p. 23.

29. Reich, Isabel Bishop , p. 24.

30. Cindy Nemser, "A Conversation with Isabel Bishop," Feminist Art Journal 5 (Spring 1976), p. 15.

31. "Isabel Bishop," Current Biography Yearbook (New York: Wilson, 1977), p. 63; and Karl Lunde, Isabel Bishop (New York: Abrams, 1975), p. 169.

32. "American Painting Bought by the Metropolitan," New York Herald-Tribune , February 20, 1936, p. 15.

33. Nemser, "A Conversation with Isabel Bishop," p. 15; and interview with the artist, December 16, 1982.

34. William Engle, "Portrait of Two Girls Bought by Metropolitan Reunites Two Ex-Waitresses Who Posed for It," New York World-Telegram , February 27, 1936, p. 3.

35. William Engle, "Portrait of Two Girls."

36. Interview with the artist, December 16, 1982. Quotations from Cindy Nemser, "A Conversation with Isabel Bishop," p. 18; and Reich, Isabel Bishop , pp. 14, 25.

37. Alloway, "Isabel Bishop, the Grand Manner, and the Working Girl," p. 63. Alloway also argued that Bishop's fully articulated theories about mobility were a way for her to assuage her conscience for her remarks about the social limitations of these figures, a judgment that may have been unfair given Bishop's values and her position in particular social and political discourses in the 1930s.

38. Positive attributes of clerical conditions, like the ones I have cited, served as preliminary comments to the studies of the rapid disappearance of occupational advantages once attributed to office work. Economic, technological, and institutional change had made them largely fictional by the 1930s.

39. Grace Hutchins, Women Who Work (New York: International Publishers, 1934), p. 84. Hutchins, a writer with a Marxist perspective, quoted a 1926 National Industrial Conference Board report that showed 39 percent of all clerks received less than twenty dollars per week. Her study is an excellent foil for Lorine Pruette's study of white-collar workers on large salaries. Every woman in Pruette's sample, however, is forty-five or older. That these women earned so little after twenty to twenty-five years of working experience is the astonishing statistic.

40. "Women in Business II," p. 55.

41. In New York, where employers generally paid the highest wages, secretaries, who in 1931 had earned $30-$60 per week, received $25-$35 in 1935; stenographers dropped from $20-$40 per week to $15-$25; typists, who earned $18-$30 in 1935, received $16-$18 after three years' experience. "Women in Business II," p. 55; Grace Hutchins quotes a different, still lower, scale and looks to some of the lower clerical occupations. In 1929, clerks earned $10-$22 per week; in 1931 their wages dropped to $8-$18 per week.

42. Hutchins, Women Who Work , p. 84; "Women in Business II," p. 50; and Elizabeth Gregg MacGibbon, "Exit—the Private Secretary," Occupations 15 (January 1937), p. 300.

43. A bookkeeper might absorb the jobs of a saleswoman, stenographer, and general clerical worker and work six days, eleven to fourteen hours each, for half her former wage. She dared not complain for fear of losing her job. Hutchins, Women Who Work , p. 84. According to a New York Emergency Relief Committee report from 1932, stenographers were hardest hit by unemployment, followed by seamstresses and general clerical workers. Once stenographers had lost their jobs, they were often out of work longer than women in other occupations, and many were forced to move down the occupational scale and take domestic positions. Furthermore, 50 percent of clerical workers, like saleswomen, reported substantially decreased earnings. Pruette, Women Workers through the Depression , pp. 64-74; and Scharf, To Work and to Wed , pp. 160-162.

44. MacGibbon, Manners in Business , p. 165. Eunice Fuller Barnard, in "Girl Graduate, 1936," Independent Woman 15 (July 1936), assessed prospects for graduates:

The main trouble seems to be that even today's college graduate, and more extensively and tragically the high school graduate, has had too little informed guidance as to which occupation offers her a really promising field. She has had access to no accurate charts to show her long-time occupational trends. She has had as a rule no adviser with the requisite combination of patience, insight and scientific data to aid her in discovering her own best capabilities. With all her haunting worry about landing a job, with all the experience of her predecessors as a warning, the girl graduate still too often follows sheeplike, in the crowded paths of certain standardized occupations, such as office work and teaching. (p. 203)

45. Barnard, p. 203.

46. Caroline Ware, "The 1939 Job of the White Collar Girl," Woman's Press 33 (June 1939), pp. 254-255; and Coyle, "Women in the Clerical Occupations," p. 184.

47. MacGibbon, "Exit—the Private Secretary," p. 296, reported that in one enormous New York office, seventy-seven private secretaries, each of whom had served an executive, were replaced by twenty-two workers. One private secretary served the corporation president, while seven stenographers and fourteen voice-machine transcribers turned out the rest of the work. See also, Coyle, "Women in the Clerical Occupations," pp. 185-186; and Ware, ''The 1939 Job," pp. 254-255.

48. The male figure here is Walter Broe, an unemployed man who modeled for all the artists. When I questioned Soyer about the conjunction of male unemployment with female labor, he said that given the opportunity to redo the work, he would eliminate the man, who added too strong a "storytelling" element.

49. For a discussion of how the cartoon or crayon drawing came to be used and understood as a medium of social protest in earlier radical publications see Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). pp. 126-132.

50. Rembrandt was by no means Bishop's only old master model, and she also painted the female nude. As I suggested in looking at her early mural-like paintings, she was inspired by Renaissance art. She also admired Rubens's drawing style and his ability to convey movement in his art. Many of her "favorite" works were also models for Miller and Marsh, but she used her models to different ends.

51. Lawrence Alloway, "Isabel Bishop, the Grand Manner, and the Working Girl," p. 64.

52. In "Danaë: Virtuous, Voluptuous, Venal Woman," Art Bulletin 60 (March 1978), pp. 43-55, Madlyn Millner Kahr described Rembrandt's humanizing depiction of women, particularly nudes, as a new image of woman.

53. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , pp. 100-101.

54. MacGibbon, Manners in Business , pp. 12, 28. Some of these job advice manuals were scientific in their approach, with many categories of investigation; others were impressionistic; and still others took the form of letters between mothers and daughters, providing highly personalized advice. As the number of working women increased, advice literature helped to establish better lines of communication between high school guidance counselors, professional employment counselors, and businesses.

55. Cades, Jobs for Girls , p. 16.

56. MacGibbon, Manners in Business , pp. 16-17. MacGibbon also reported that heads of women's colleges said that those women with the best scholastic averages were usually the last hired for office positions because they spent so much time at their studies that they failed to take care of themselves.

57. In "Women in Business II" it was estimated that more than a fifth of an office girl's salary was spent on clothing. The most expensive items were silk stockings, at the rate of a pair a week (p. 85). See also MacGibbon, Manners in Business , p. 29; and Maule, She Strives to Conquer , p. 125.

58. Interview with the artist, December 16, 1982. "New York Types at the Midtown Galleries, New York," Art Digest 10 (February 15, 1936), p. 19. Another critic identified Head No . 2 as a shopgirl. "Colorado Springs Buys," Art Digest 16 (March 15, 1942), p. 15; and "Museumized: Noon Hour by I. Bishop Bought by Springfield," Art Digest 13 (May 1, 1939), p. 5.

59. Maule, She Strives to Conquer , p. 6; and MacGibbon, Manners in Business , p. vii.

60. Cades, Jobs for Girls , p. 16; Dayton, "Personality Plus—or Minus," p. 343. Dayton

wrote that personality was about 75 percent of getting a job, brains and technical training, less than 25 percent. Her article discusses the increasing reliance on experts to help a girl change her voice and improve her personality, first by testing, then through a series of classes.

61. Brophy, If Women Must Work , pp. 35-41.

62. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , p. 97.

63. Maule, She Strives to Conquer , p. 6; MacGibbon, Manners in Business , pp. 66-72; and "Women in Business II," p. 55.

64. "Women in Business II," p. 55. As the historian Lois Scharf described this new woman, she was "nothing less than the office mate of the harried male executive [who] dutifully fulfilled the emotional and business needs of her boss. In direct imitation of marriage, in which the wife derives her social status from her husband, the private secretary achieved her exalted position through the man to whom her services were indispensable" ( To Work and to Wed , p. 98). See also Eugenia Wallace, ''Office Work and the Ladder of Success," Independent Woman 6 (October 1927), pp. 16-18.

65. "Women in Business II," p. 86.

66. For an extended discussion of this painting, see Ellen Wiley Todd, "Will [S]he Stoop to Conquer? Preliminaries Toward a Reading of Edward Hopper's Office at Night " in Norman Bryson et al., eds., Visual Theory: Method and Interpretation in Art History and the Visual Arts (New York: HarperCollins, 1990); Victor Burgin, Between (Oxford: Basil Blackwell in association with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1986), p. 184; Gail Levin, "Edward Hopper's Office at Night," Arts Magazine (January 1978), pp. 134-137; and Linda Nochlin, "Edward Hopper and the Imagery of Alienation," Art Journal 41 (Summer 1981), pp. 136-141.

67. "Women in Business II," p. 55. The persistent belief that these jobs were temporary was buttressed by the departure of four out of five women who entered clerical occupations when they married.

68. MacGibbon, Manners in Business , pp. 61, 116-127.

69. MacGibbon, Manners in Business , p. 127.

70. Margaret Culkin Banning, Letters to Susan (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), pp. 92, 94. To support her argument, Susan's mother offered the case study of a married woman who owned her own bookstore. Her husband had to go to his club every afternoon to wait for her while she finished her "unimportant" work. They lived in an apartment and ate many of their meals in restaurants so that she did not have to cook, a practice Susan's mother deplored as an avoidance of wifely responsibility. She concluded, "Martha won't give up her bookshop though dozens of girls could step into her place. She should be building him up. And bearing a child would do more for Martha than any number of sales slips." The feminist argument that women continued to work and needed to work after marriage for personal satisfaction was completely at odds with the demands, responsibilities, and obligations of traditional marriage.

71. Banning, Letters to Susan , p. 7.

72. Wanger, What Girls Can Do , p. 4.

73. Unlike her nineteenth-century predecessors Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, who would never have thought of entering the cafes, nightclubs, and brothels that emblematized modern life for their fellow Impressionists, Isabel Bishop accompanied Marsh to the burlesque and to striptease joints on occasion. But as a proper upper-middle-class female viewer and producer of representations of women, she could not "properly" or "publicly" (through paintings) enter those spaces or envision female sexuality in that way for herself or her female viewers.

74. By the 1930s there were a few small local unions that combined bookkeepers, ste-

nographers, accountants, and occasionally saleswomen. In May 1934 the legislative body of the Y.W.C.A., along with representatives of business and professional clubs, adopted resolutions identifying the welfare of office workers with that of other workers and proposing study and educational groups to help office workers prepare for unionization. Neither the movement nor the organization was widespread in the 1930s. Marion H. Barbour, "The Business Girl Looks at Her Job," Woman's Press 30 (January 1936), pp. 18-19; Clyde Beals, Pearl Wiesen, Albion A. Hartwell, and Theresa Wolfson, "Should White Collar Workers Organize?" Independent Woman 15 (November 1936): pp. 340-342; and Ware, "The 1939 Job," p. 255.

75. "Women in Business II," p. 85.

76. Interview with the artist, December 16, 1982.

77. Henry McBride, "Some Others Who Arouse Interest," New York Sun , February 15, 1936, p. 28; Bernard Myers, " Sleeping Child by Isabel Bishop," p. 32.

1. Cecelia F. Klein, Editor's Statement, "Depictions of the Dispossessed," Art Journal 49 (Summer 1990), p. 108.

2. Virgil Barker, "The Search for Americanism," American Magazine of Art 27 (February 1934), p. 52.

3. Editor's Statement, "The New Woman," Current History 27 (October 1927), p. 1.

4. The phrase "regime of representation" is Griselda Pollock's, used to describe "visual codes and their institutionalized circulation," in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 14.

5. The points here about the aesthetic and social agenda in the Popular Front period are discussed in Cécile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).