The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, the Body and Commodities in the 1920s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE MODERN GIRL: FEMININE MODERNITIES, THE BODY, AND COMMODITIES IN THE 1920s Jane Nicholas Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, The Body, and Commodities in the 1920s, Jane Nicholas examines the centrality of the Modern Girl in 1920s Canada. Nicholas argues that the proliferation of the Modern Girl and the emphasis on her physical appearance was inextricably linked to anxieties over shifts in the social, economic, and cultural landscape ofa modern Canada. Nicholas' approach to the topic is multidimensional, employing a range of methodologies from feminist historiography to visual content analysis to explore the complex and fraught place of the Modern Girl in Canada. Nicholas argues that the figure of the Modern Girl was central not only to the construction of gender and femininity in Canada in the 1920s but was integral to nation building and the formation of a Canadian national identity. The Modern Girl'vs informed by and firmly situated within literature on the body, feminist theory, and art history. Nicholas frames her discussion of the Modern Girl within modernity, urbanization, the commodification of women's bodies, racialization, and class stratification. Her theoretical framework is built over the first three chapters; the remaining three chapters explore specific facets of 1920s culture: beauty pageants, modern art and the female nude, and automobiles and film projectors. Nicholas's content analysis of advertisements, magazine articles, and newspaper media is enriched by earlier discussions of theory, is very engaging, and provides a balance to the more theoretical chapters. The Modern Girl is an important contribution to feminist history and historiography. Nicholas firmly positions her book within a wider project of feminist theory that seeks to uncover and re-write the ways in which history has been naturalized as masculine. Nicholas argues that feminine modernities were a noteworthy facet of English-Canadian narratives of modernity, highlighting the centrality of notions of race and racial purity in the perpetuation of the Modern Girl as an ideal of feminine beauty. Nicholas' engagement with the personal politics of the Modern Girl strengthens her argument as she demonstrates how women themselves would have experienced modernity. Women, Nicholas argues, were not simply victims of consumer culture but were active in its construction and perpetuation. While Nicholas aptly demonstrates the roles race, racialization, and Orientalism played in the construction of the Modern Girl and in Canadian national identity, the ways in which women of colour, immigrant, and indigenous women experienced or engaged with the Modern Girl is missing from the narrative. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".