Displaying Women explores the role of women in the representation of leisure in turn-of-the-century New York. To see and be seen--on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, in Central Park, and in the fashionable uptown hotels and restaurants--was one of the fundamental principles in the display aesthetic of New York's fashionable society.
Maureen E. Montgomery argues for a reconsideration of the role of women in the bourgeois elite in turn-of-the-century America. By contrasting multiple images of women drawn from newspapers, magazines, private correspondence, etiquette manuals and the New York fiction of Edith Wharton, Henry James and others, she offers a convincing antidote to the long-standing tendency in women's history to overlook women whose class affiliations have put them in a position of power.
Introduction; Chapter 1 The Social Calendar; Chapter 2 The Female World of Ritual and Etiquette; Chapter 3 Interiors and Façades; Chapter 4 Women Abroad; Chapter 5 "Optical Excursions"; Chapter 6 Women in the Public Eye; conclusion Spectacle and Surveillance;