Beauty
Young, Art. “Beauty.” The Masses (Vol. 5, No. 1): 4. New York: The Masses Publishing Co., 1913.
In the midst of the many masculine print images of American women, especially in the form of activist figures or suffragettes, Art Young’s 1913 cartoon invites consideration of traditional feminine beauty. Young’s fruitful career with The Masses began in 1910. Originally from the Midwest, Young (1866-1943) moved to New York as a professional cartoonist and became increasingly interested in socialist ideals (Fitzgerald 49). He found freedom to explore polarizing political issues on the pages of The Masses and generally investigated labor and class issues in his art (Schreiber 68). He especially pursued topics related to workers’ rights and the negative impact of capitalism on the working class. While Young’s cartoons about gender therefore typically highlight the plight of the working-class mother figure, in his humorous October 1913 cartoon, the scene is entirely bourgeois. The image depicts the interior of a parlor or library. Artwork hangs in the background. Elegant furniture and décor adorn the room, contributing to the cartoon’s conventional domesticity.
In the scene, two women are conversing, and Young portrays the pair as figures of contrast. The woman standing on the left exudes a disapproving, matronly air. Her garments offer markers of labor. An apron, ankle-length gown, utilitarian house slippers, and rolled-up sleeves suggest that she is employed as a domestic worker or housemaid. In contrast to her working-class counterpart, the lithe figure seated at the writing desk on the right side of the image evinces youthful disinterest. Her garments suggest signs of luxury. The svelte sheath dress, dainty shoes, and jewelry hint at her stylized refinement. She grips a pen in one hand and a piece of crumpled paper in the other. An untidy pile of discarded papers gathers at her feet. Clearly, the young woman has been working on some kind of composition. The cartoon’s humor emerges in how these women, inhabiting different social and economic classes, relate to one another.
Like in Stuart Davis’s cover illustration, the caption of Young’s cartoon contributes essential information to the artist’s message and the humor embedded in this message. The young woman, we find out, is named Kate, and the older woman is asking her a question. “Kate,” the worker inquires, “if a woman more intelligent and better looking than you, should attract your husband away, what would you do?” In this question, the worker describes characteristics commonly associated with the New Woman and crystallizes her suspicion of these progressive figures. The cartoon suggests that the New Woman, as a figure both educated and beautiful, represents a threat to the domestic sphere and places other women’s marriages at hazard. Unless Kate can remain lovelier and cleverer, the New Woman may “attract” her husband away and thus destabilize Kate’s position in this bourgeois class.
The young woman’s response to the worker’s hypothetical question is both playful and surprising. While she admits that another woman “might be more intelligent,” beauty, she assures the worker, will not be an issue. “She wouldn’t be better lookin’,” Kate quips, “after I got through with her.” Such a response suggests that a sinister aggression lurks beneath the young woman’s physical loveliness. The humor of this scenario calls attention to the disconnect between Kate’s feminine appearance and her willingness to resort to masculine violence. Young sets traditional womanhood in tension with the enterprising femininity associated with the New Woman and uses this tension to poke fun of the domestic anxiety it provokes within both the bourgeois and working classes.
Source
Fitzgerald, Richard. Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973. Print.
Schreiber, Rachel. Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine: The Modern Figures of The Masses. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. Print.