Charles Dana Gibson and the Gibson Girl
Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944) was an important illustrator in the Golden Age of American illustration. He sold his first illustration in 1886 to Life magazine,* where his works appeared every week for thirty years. Soon his drawings appeared in every major American magazine, including Harpers’ Weekly, Scribners and Colliers. He illustrated books, including American editions of Charles Dickens’ novels, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Gallegher and Other Stories by swashbuckling journalists and adventurer Richard Harding Davis.** in 1918, he became first editor and then majority owner of Life.
But his most important impact on American culture was the “Gibson Girl,” whose distinctive silhouette and pompadour hairdo became the ideal for American beauty from the 1890s into the 20th century. (I was amused to see that his Princess Flavia, in The Prisoner of Zenda, had an air of the Gibson Girl about her. Evidently the ideal reigned in Ruritania as well as the United States.)
The Gibson Girl was tall, aloof, stylish, and above all, modern. She was equally at home at balls, on bicycles, and at the beach.*** There is often a satirical, feminist element to the images, most notably the drawing titled “The weaker sex” in which Gibson Girls examine a tiny male figure with a magnifying glass, one of them preparing to poke him with a hat pin as if he were an entomological specimen for collection.
(The feminist element can possibly be attributed to the fact that his wife, Irene Langhorne Gibson, who was one of his models and believed to be the original model for the Gibson Girl, was an active suffragist and progressive activist.)
The Gibson Girl was edged off the page as a beauty icon during World War I, when women’s roles, and fashions, began to change in fundamental ways.
*Founded in 1883, Life was originally a general interest and humor magazine, which featured illustrations from many prominent artists of the time. In 1936, magazine mogul Henry Luce purchased the magazine and took advantage of new printing technology to relaunch it as the iconic photographic news magazine, giving Life a new life as it were. (Sorry. Sometimes I can’t help myself.)
**Who deserves to be the subject of a blog post in his own right, now that I think about it.
*** Her image also appeared on a variety of merchandise, including dishes, pillows, wallpaper, and even shirtwaists. (The idea of wearing a shirtwaist with a picture of a shirtwaist wearing Gibson Girl has a meta quality that amuses me,)
From the Archives: Florence Nightingale Does the Math
Florence Nightingale is best known for her heroic efforts in the Crimean War(1), where she threw open windows, scrubbed filthy floors and equally filthy men(2), bullied doctors and officers on the spot, fought with the British Army’s military director, and saved lives.
She returned home a heroine. Victorian Britain loved to celebrate a celebrity. Nightingale was the recipient of hundreds of poems extolling the Lady with a Lamp. Opportunists printed her picture on souvenirs of every kind: including pottery figurines, lace mats, prints, and paper bags. If Bobblehead dolls had existed at the time, she’d have been Bobbled for sure.
At first Nightingale tried to keep a low-profile. She even traveled home under the unimaginative pseudonym of Miss Smith. She soon came to realize that she could use her celebrity to effect change. With the help of Queen Victoria, who was one of her biggest fans, she convinced the government to set up a Royal Commission to study the health of the army.
One of the lesser known facts about Nightingale is that she was a STEM girl. As a child she loved organizing data. She catalogued her shell collection with precisely drawn tables and lists. When her parents took her and her sisters on a tour of Europe, she collected population statistics . Later she studied mathematics with a personal tutor–not a normal choice for a young woman at the time. She once claimed that she found the sight of a long column of numbers “perfectly reviving.”
Rather than leaving the question of the army’s health to the Royal Commission, Nightingale analyzed the army data herself, working with leading statistician William Farr and sanitation expert John Sutherland of the Sanitary Commission. She reached the conclusion that 16,000 of the 18,000 deaths in the Crimean War were the result of preventable diseases.
Nightingale knew that her love for the clarity of numerical tables is not shared by all. She decided to present her data in a revolutionary way: statistical graphics. (3) Her “rose diagram”, a variation on the modern pie chart, presented her figures in a dramatic and easily understood form.
She went on to spearhead other reform campaigns, using a combination of statistical analysis and expert advice. She prepared by reading the best information available, collecting her own information if good studies didn’t exist, interviewing experts, and testing her recommended changes before releasing her results. The “Lady with the Lamp” gained a new nickname, “the passionate statistician”.
Florence Nightingale: founder of modern nursing, social reformer, grandmother of the info-graphic.
(1) Publicized by the indefatigable William Howard Russell as part of his outraged news reports on the condition under which British soldiers fought and died in that war.
(2) Or more accurately, caused others to scrub.
(3) Farr thought it was a bad idea: “You complain that your report would be dry. The dryer the better. Statistics should be the dryest of all reading.”
Barbie and Ruth
Back in March, Stacy Cordery made a comment that stuck with me:
“As a classroom professor and a woman’s biographer, it had been clear to me for years that female entrepreneurs are largely missing from history. Most of us can name at least a handful of Gilded Age or Progressive Era captains of industry (or robber barons; take your pick). But few of us teach our students about women of vision and grit who overcame the odds in the overwhelmingly masculine world of business.”
I’ve been thinking about women entrepreneurs and how their stories are told ever since.
I decided to start with Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her by Robin Gerber, which at 250 pages was a little less daunting than Cordery’s own biography of Elizabeth Arden.*
Barbie and Ruth is definitely the story of a woman who was a successful entrepreneur, but the title is too small for its subject. Ruth Handler (1916-2002) didn’t just create Barbie, she created Mattel, which became the largest toy company in the world under her leadership. She introduced revolutionary changes in how toys (and ultimately other consumer goods) are sold. (She was also indicted by a federal grand jury, along with several other Mattel executives , on charges of conspiracy, mail fraud, and giving the Securities and Exchange commission false financial statements. She pleaded no contest. And left the company. )Several years after leaving Mattel, inspired by her experience of breast cancer, Handler founded a second successful company that created lifelike protheses for breast cancer survivors marketed as Nearly Me. She was fond of saying “I’ve lived my life from breast to breast.”
I have mixed feelings about both the book and Handler. In Gerber’s hands, Handler is a charming steamroller—which I suspect is an accurate depiction. I was bothered by the time Gerber spent on Handler’s failings as a mother—which I have no doubt is accurate. But I wonder whether a biographer of say, Walt Disney (1916-1966), would spend the same amount of time assessing Disney’s success or failure as a parent.**
At some level, the book felt more like a leadership case study than a biography. Perhaps it’s time for someone to write a Big Fat Biography of Ruth Handler. (Not me, though.)
*Normally I wouldn’t hesitate to dive into a Big Fat Biography on an interesting subject, but my reading commitments have gotten a little overwhelming in recent months. I did it to myself by taking on the challenge of reading my way through the various history and heritage months on top of reading wildly and widely in pursuit of my possible book topics. I have no regrets, but occasionally I have to acknowledge limitations of time and energy. (Some of you who know me in real life are gasping to hear me admit this.)
**It would be easy enough to answer the question. But I’m not prepared to drop everything and read a biography of Disney—the best of which qualify as Big Fat Biographies. At least not right now.