Displaying Women

by Maureen E. Montgomery

Displaying Women explores the role of women in the representation of leisure in turn-of-the-century New York. To see and be seen--on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, in Central Park, and in the fashionable uptown hotels and restaurants--was one of the fundamental principles in the display aesthetic of New York's fashionable society.

Maureen E. Montgomery argues for a reconsideration of the role of women in the bourgeois elite in turn-of-the-century America. By contrasting multiple images of women drawn from newspapers, magazines, private correspondence, etiquette manuals and the New York fiction of Edith Wharton, Henry James and others, she offers a convincing antidote to the long-standing tendency in women's history to overlook women whose class affiliations have put them in a position of power.

Genres: Nonfiction

226 pages, Paperback

First published April 6, 1998

Reviews

[Jaclyn]

This book is very interesting. It reminds me of some of today's television shows - the ones that glorify rich and famous women. I highly recommend reading it. It provides an insight of wealthy women of the early 20th century and the rules they are subjected to live by.

[Hope Tarr]

Engaging social history of the role of women in NYC society from the turn of the century through the 1920s. Challenges the established assumption of a "separation of spheres" between the sexes.