In the late nineteenth century, American women stepped boldly beyond the threshold of domesticity and into the increasingly mediated and visual realm of the public sphere. Noting the coincidence of this “frenzy of the visible” (1) with the movement of women out of the home, Seeing the American Woman attends to the gendered dimensions of visual culture during the forty years that span the turn of the twentieth century through an examination of images of American women in vaudeville, film, newspapers, periodicals, musicals, pageants and travelling circuses.

The central premise that structures the argument is rather neat, if ultimately somewhat reductive. Images of American women in this era can be classified according to a typology of “six powerful icons, visual symbols that attracted and held the American gaze” (3). There is the Woman-as-Child/Child-as-Woman, who played on the porous and contested boundaries between childhood (innocence) and adulthood (knowledge, often sexual) – in the theatre and early cinema, girls as young as eight played grown women with lovers and sometimes children, while women in their twenties dressed up as girls, performing alongside actual (male) children in iconic roles such as Peter Pan. The Gibson Girl derived from fashion plates was beautiful but deindividuated, a reproducible and interchangeable blank; while her zany sister, the Stunt Girl, encroached on male territories in pursuit of distinctly unfeminine adventures involving cars, planes, and guns. The (Comedic) Victim of Violence category comprised not only fictional women in peril, tied to railroads or held up by robbers in silent movies, but also real victims of violence, such as the 142 women who perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911, a catastrophe apparently related with some drollery in the New York papers. A more exotic and transgressive figure appeared in the form of the Evil Lone Dancer of the burlesque show, a dark and dangerous counterpart to the more socially acceptable Gibson Girl. The Woman on Scientific Display included circus “freaks,” dark-skinned foreign women, and even women accused of murder, whose subversive allure appealed to a diverse spectrum of spectators, from the educated readership of National Geographic to young thrill-seekers at the travelling fairs. Finally, out of this six, a seventh, composite type emerged, a so-called “Modern Amalgam.” The Political Woman, according to the authors, incorporated elements of all of the aforementioned stock types, sometimes strategically, sometimes unwittingly.

Conspicuously, the “types” of American woman identified by the authors are overwhelmingly white. The book gestures tantalizingly towards the racialized dynamics of female visual representation in several places – in the discussion of the “dark, exotic” Salome figure, and in the brief but rather trenchant section on National Geographic's exposure of the dark, bare-breasted African female body in the cause of scientific discovery in the early 1900s – but for the most part the whiteness of female iconography in the US in this period is taken as a given. Furthermore, the black and brown bodies that do get a mention belong to foreigners – thus the American woman of colour is almost completely absent from the study. This is surprising for several reasons: the period with which the book is concerned is one of increased movement not only into the US but also within it, most prominently via the Great Migration of African Americans from South to North. A context was thus established for the increased visibility of women of color, not only to the white majority but also to one another, through forms of representation and performance such as black vaudeville. An analysis of their representation in the period's visual culture would have augmented this study in important ways; as it stands, the conclusion that one draws is that the American Woman mentioned in the title is white. Only foreign women, the Arabian Salomes and aboriginal curiosities pictured on cartes de visite, have dark skins.

The fact that the whiteness of the American woman (at least in her public guise) passes without remark is symptomatic of a larger weakness in the analysis, which is a failure either to interrogate its objects of study or to scrutinize its own methods and conclusions. The prose often lacks precision: evocative but vague adjectives such as “riveting,” “fascinating” and “exciting” are frequently deployed to describe the female icons that circulated among American audiences during this period, but exactly how, and in what ways, these images riveted, fascinated and excited is left largely for the reader to conjecture. The first chapter, on the Woman-as-Child/Child-as-Woman, falls prey to this tendency most conspicuously. That such images were both risqué and captivating is not, in itself, revealing – precisely why they captured the public imagination, at this particular moment in history, is the more interesting question that is insinuated but not investigated. Ultimately, the analysis retreats into tautology: images of women as children and children as women fascinated audiences because they were fascinating. This problem recurs, albeit to different degrees, throughout the book: potentially generative debates are evoked but then abandoned; the reader's interest is piqued but ultimately remains unsatisfied.

This is a shame because the material with which this book engages is frequently compelling. Seeing the American Woman is a book that promises much, and despite its faults is not wholly without merit. Its attention to the interplay of word and image within a gendered economy of signification will likely prove valuable to scholars working in visual studies, media studies, gender studies and literary studies, though I suspect many readers will ultimately find its analysis wanting. The topic invites a deeper, more complex reading of the trends this book quite perceptively identifies, and its value may finally lie in its capacity to incite further, more penetrating, debates.