Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton's New York

By Maur Montgomery, Maureen E. Montgomery, Maureen E Montgomery, et al.

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415905664
• ISBN13: 9780415905664
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Excellent resource

If you've always been curious to know what life was like for the Four Hundred, this is a perfect book. "Displaying Women" is far from a dry, scholarly account of the lives of upper-class New York women of the 19th and early 20th centuries. With painstaking detail Montgomery not only describes the inner and outer lives of American women, but places them in context of greater American society. Imminently readable and well-written, I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in America's upper classes.