Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [65]
At Collier’s, the girl’s home for many years, the staff practiced editorial taxonomy, organizing and subdividing the character’s various incarnations into seven distinct types of modern goddess: the Boy-Girl, the Flirt, the Beauty, the Sentimental, the Convinced, the Ambitious, the Well-Balanced or Rounded. Regardless of her precise type, the magazine declared, “she is incarnate, a representation of modernity, individuality, and personality.” As a female fan wrote in a letter to the magazine: “We admire most about her the manner in which she keeps her own counsel.” When pictured with one of her inevitable suitors, the Gibson girl rarely looked directly at him; rather, she gazed off into the distance, suggesting that she saw on the horizon possibilities beyond that man, or suggesting perhaps to the man that he would never penetrate to the core of her self-containment.
The girl, whether girl-boy athletic, well-balanced friend, flirt, or beauty, became a young single icon in the same way that white slaving became the iconic crime committed against the single girl: through the burgeoning media. The slave scare came alive on film; the Gibson girl was born in print and took on larger life as she was reproduced in a mass-merchandising campaign historic in its scope.
It’s true that stage stars and characters such as Trilby had appeared before on wallet cards, postcards, and wall-size posters (many saloons were miniature shrines to certain adored actresses). But the Gibson girl appeared everywhere: on china dishes, drinking glasses, furniture (vanities, dressers, hallway chairs and chests), calendars, flasks, cigarette cases, flatware, paper dolls, dress patterns, hair ribbons, ink blotters, and on down a long list that ends in lockets and thimbles. Her image also inspired look-alike pageants and song and essay contests, and of course she had dances and drinks named for her.
It was as a mass commercial entity that the Gibson girl had her greatest impact on single-womanhood. Nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century advertising concentrated on endorsing and explaining a product’s merits, at very great length and often in very tiny print. The emphasis was on solidity and tradition, a confident masculine promise of quality. But as single young women attained some purchasing power, it became clear that the old ways—selling only to wives and mothers—would not hold. Nor would the dull thousand-word odes to the sturdy reliability of a detergent. The Gibson girl provided a form of early branding, a visual shorthand for a product’s values that had previously required great amounts of text to describe.
As early as 1915, the Ivory Soap girl, traditionally a symbol of saint-like purity, had become a rouged and healthy-looking Gibson type. These ads contained less text than had previous ads, and the illustration of the girl was larger. In this way, the Gibson prefigured the eventual death of testimonials and the rise of psychological advertising, that is, the use of images to put forth a dream world, a perfect person—things and qualities you might have, that you might actually be, if you would only buy the product. Just as early silent films propagated cautionary tales for new women, ads began, just a little bit, to peddle images of freedom and beauty.
Ironically, the Gibson girl also seemed to reassure those who believed that “new woman” was an oxymoron, or should be. Generally speaking, these were confused and troubling times—years of violent strikes and demonstrations, of anarchist bombings. Little more than a decade before, the president, William McKinley, had been assassinated, and the First World War was already under way in Europe. In some drawings the Gibson girl seemed soft and ethereal rather than sharp, and brilliantly new. Sometimes she was just a pretty head that floated high above a soothing landscape, making her less a symbol of modernity and change than an angel.
Ultimately Mr. Gibson grew tired of drawing her, just as his public became slightly bored with her limited exploits. And as it happened, another, far jazzier