They focused on certain categories-including weddings, mothers, servants, literary life, love-and bypassed others such as politics, hunting, sports, or technology, which historically depicted few, if any, women.Īmong several images dating back to World War II, Mouly showed a 1941 illustration by artist William Cotton, in which a group of young women escorted by a chaperone, their eyes wide with fright, encounter a group of ogling sailors. To find images of women, Mouly and Spiegelman sifted through the New Yorker’s archives-which span more than 6,000 covers, each labeled by category. From a World War II drawing of women socializing in a factory to the nearly published image of Hillary Clinton as the would-be first female president of the United States, the roughly 50 covers they presented reflect the magazine’s ability to mirror cultural change, challenge convention, and normalize new ideas. Mouly noted that the original submission had shown a man waiting for the subway, but she thought, why can’t this be a woman? Women wait for the subway, too.Īgainst a backdrop of near-daily sexual harassment revelations and a broader reckoning with questions of gender, power, and the media, the pair discussed the evolution of women on New Yorker covers throughout the magazine’s 92-year history. “We had gotten to the point where you can make it a woman and it’s not about the fact that she’s a woman,” said New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly in a recent conversation with her daughter, writer Nadja Spiegelman, at the SoHo boutique of designer Rachel Comey in New York. But in April 1998, when the cover of the New Yorker magazine depicted a woman on the platform, holding both a Chanel bag and a briefcase on her way to work, it was a quietly revolutionary moment for women. Take a snapshot of the average crowd waiting on a New York City subway platform and chances are it will be roughly split between women and men.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |