The Modern Girl

Nicholas, Jane

doi:10.3138/9781442616523

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…19 Bondil's statement is consistent with the interpretation of Modern Girls as autonomous historical actors who challenged public/private divides and exercised new modes of agency available for women in the interwar period. 20 Ten women -Nora Collyer (1898-1979), Emily Coonan (1885-1971), Prudence Heward (1896-1947), Mabel Lockerby (1882-1976), Henrietta Mabel May (1877-1971), Kathleen Morris (1893-1986), Lilias Torrance Newton (1896-1980), Sarah Robertson (1891-1948), Anne Savage (1896-1971), and Ethel Seath (1879-1963) -were associated either formally or informally with the Beaver Hall Group, and in recent years, they have received attention from feminist art historians. There were likely other women with connections to the group, either through personal relationships, art school classes, or shared studio space, or who exhibited alongside those who formally belonged to the group.…”

Section: Bringing the Beaver Hall Group And The Modern Girl Into The History And Historiography Of Canadian Modern Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Nicholas points out, one of the striking features of the Canadian Modern Girl was her "whiteness," and Heward's immigrant women and May's Indigenous woman are coded with some of these characteristics. 34 Even in the rural landscapes, artists of both sexes represented women as modern women characterized by their direct gaze, fashionable clothes with attention to modern fabrics, modern hairstyles, and use of makeup. 35 Prudence Heward has been praised by feminist art historians for her depictions of "striking individuality that is underscored by the imposing scale of their bodies and the often muted but contrasting tone of their skin."…”

Section: Bringing the Beaver Hall Group And The Modern Girl Into The History And Historiography Of Canadian Modern Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…6 The dearth of Canadian writing on the Modern Girl has since been remedied with the publication of the edited collection of essays by Cheryl Karsnick Warsh and Dan Malleck, Tamara Myers' research on how the Quebec justice system curbed modern attitudes among adolescent girls between 1869 and 1945, and Jane Nicholas's major study of the Modern Girl, which picks up many of the threads of analysis of the Modern Girl Around the World Research Group. 7 These works have been used in the course recently. Students have been eager to engage with visual images and have consistently made comparisons between the use of makeup by the Modern Girl to create the flapper look alongside the consumption of cosmetics by women in the present and their creation of the feminine self.…”

Section: Introducing the Modern Girl To University Studentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why the Flapper Still Matters: Feminist Pedagogy, the Modern Girl, and the Women Artists of the Beaver Hall Group

Burr

2017

HSE/RHE

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The flapper of the 1920s, with her bobbed hair, use of makeup, flashy dress, independent, flamboyant behaviour and eroticism, and love of dancing and jazz music, signified a new form of femininity, one where women were simultaneously modern objects and subjects. This article examines the flapper as a historical, historiographical, and pedagogical problem and addresses the question of why the flapper matters historically and why she should continue to matter to university teachers and researchers. The article dissects the learning experiences of a group of students who toured the 2016 exhibition of the modern art of Montreal’s Beaver Hall Group in conjunction with a fourth-year seminar on the Modern Girl. Students explored a new and diverse visual economy based on a strong, independent, and assertive Canadian feminine modernity, and discovered that images of women could be empowering. I argue that the flapper challenges masculine traditions by encouraging historians to consider changeable feminine bodies and identities, thus breaking down longstanding binaries in Canadian history and historical writing. The flapper points to the use of the historical material in the everyday world. This confluence of women’s history and visual culture suggests why the flapper still matters today.RésuméLa garçonne des années 1920, avec ses cheveux coupés au carré, son maquillage, ses robes clinquantes, son comportement indépendant et flamboyant, son érotisme, de même que son amour pour la danse et la musique jazz, a introduit une nouvelle forme de féminité où les femmes étaient à la fois des objets et des sujets modernes. Cet article examine la garçonne comme un phénomène historique, historiographique et pédagogique. Il s’interroge sur la signification historique de la garçonne et les raisons pour lesquelles elle devrait continuer d’intéresser les professeurs et les chercheurs universitaires. L’article décortique les expériences d’apprentissage d’un groupe d’étudiants qui ont visité l’exposition d’art moderne du Beaver Hall Group de Montréal en 2016, dans le cadre d’un séminaire de quatrième année sur la Fille Moderne. Les étudiants ont exploré une économie visuelle nouvelle et diversifiée basée sur une modernité féminine canadienne forte, indépendante et affirmée, et ont découvert que des images de femmes peuvent être empowering. Je soutiens que la garçonne défie les traditions masculines en encourageant les historiens à considérer des corps et des identités féminines variables, rompant ainsi des binarités établies de longue date dans l’histoire canadienne et l’écriture historique. La garçonne met en valeur l’utilisation de matériel historique dans le quotidien. Cette convergence entre l’histoire des femmes et la culture visuelle indique pourquoi la garçonne demeure pertinente aujourd’hui.

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Section: Bringing the Beaver Hall Group And The Modern Girl Into The History And Historiography Of Canadian Modern Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Bringing the Beaver Hall Group And The Modern Girl Into The History And Historiography Of Canadian Modern Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introducing the Modern Girl To University Studentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why the Flapper Still Matters: Feminist Pedagogy, the Modern Girl, and the Women Artists of the Beaver Hall Group

Burr

2017

HSE/RHE

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North America from North of the 49th Parallel

Kealey¹

2020

A Companion to Global Gender History

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Alternative Imaginaries of the Modern Girl: A Comparative Examination of Canadian and Australian Magazines

Kuttainen

Lippmann

2020

Comparative Print Culture

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How would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking male experience as paradigmatic, we were to look instead at texts written primarily by or about women? And what if feminine phenomena, often seen as having a secondary of marginal status, were given central importance in the analysis of the culture of modernity? (Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 1995, 10) Longstanding meta-narratives about modernity and modernism have not only neglected gender, as the epigram above from Rita Felski suggests, but also overlooked whole nations, including Canada and Australia. Standard accounts of their literature tend to focus on narratives of either the pioneering and settlement phases of the colonial era or the development of their self-consciously national literatures in the aftermath of the Second World War. In fact, the shared origins of these settler dominions, as well as their "struggle to legitimate the national literature" and overcome "the colonial mentality" which continued well into the post-war years to "disparage... the local product" (McDougall and Whitlock 1987, 7) stimulated the first of many comparative approaches to their literatures. It is consequently unsurprising that settler colonial cultures and their literatures are often either perceived as never modern or born modern, as David Carter has observed of the Australian scene (2013, viii-ix). This misconception tends to contribute to and become reciprocally reinforced by a relative lack of critical attention to the crucial modernising years in Canadian and Australian literary histories.In addition to this chronological miscoding, both Canada and Australia are also typically and falsely coded as masculine societies. "It virtually goes without saying," Kay Schaffer observed, "that national identity and the Australian character are masculine constructions" (1988, 4). Carole Gerson observed much the same of Canada, noting the "dominant view that the great Canadian narrative concerned man's contest with nature" (2015, 345). As a self-described "feminist literary archaeologist" (Gerson 1991, 46), Gerson has challenged this view of Canadian literature as one largely constructed by influential male nationalist critics. Since the 1980s, Drusilla Modjeska (1981) and Carole Ferrier (1985) have also reinstated the place of a number of significant interwar female writers that had been previously overlooked in Australian literature. But, in Australia, Modjeska focused largely on writers of social realist novels and Ferrier emphasised women's political writing.Correspondingly, in Canada, Gerson's significant revisionist literary historical scholarship has tended to focus on women's poetry (1991) or on women's issues in social realist novels (in Sugars 2015).These studies may have restored some aspects of women's literary and cultural history at the cost of overlooking others.One figure missing from these accounts of Canadian and Australian literatures is the Modern Girl. These studies seem to have emphasised versions of the New Woman instead. This e...

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The Modern Girl

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Why the Flapper Still Matters: Feminist Pedagogy, the Modern Girl, and the Women Artists of the Beaver Hall Group

Why the Flapper Still Matters: Feminist Pedagogy, the Modern Girl, and the Women Artists of the Beaver Hall Group

North America from North of the 49th Parallel

Alternative Imaginaries of the Modern Girl: A Comparative Examination of Canadian and Australian Magazines

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