Reproducing Gender in Nineteenth-century Illustrations

Authors

  • Barbara Balliet Rutgers University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14713/jrul.v60i1.7

Abstract

In American metropolitan centers from the mid-nineteenth-century onward, inescapable images--in the home, in books, magazines, as daguerreotypes, carte de visits, album cards, prints, and chromos, or on the streets in posters and advertisements--coincided with rising middle-class anxiety about what appearances actually revealed. Was that well-dressed visitor in your parlor the gentleman he claimed to be, or a con man? Was the lady a tramp? How did these proliferating images operate and provide knowledge about the changing city, newly settled regions, and their inhabitants or enable viewers to locate themselves in an unfamiliar landscape?

Author Biography

Barbara Balliet, Rutgers University

Barbara Balliet is the Associate Director of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University ­— New Brunswick.

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Published

2005-04-28

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Section

Articles