Common Threads: America’s First “It Girl”

Every period has its “It Girl” — an influencer who embodies the looks and beauty of her time. From rich debutantes to movie stars and models, each “girl” captures not only the fashions of the day, but also the values and norms of the period.

The term “It Girl” is often associated with Clara Bow — a Hollywood star from the 1920s who became associated with the image of the flapper — likely due to her starring in the movie It. However, it was the print media at the turn of the 20^th century, not the silver screen, that first crowned “It Girls” for the public.

The rise of consumer culture at the end of the 19th century, together with technological developments in printing and publishing, turned magazines into an influential vehicle for engaging with ideas and products. Magazines provided readers with a way to make sense of their changing world as they prepared to move into the 20^th century.

During this era of rapid change, a new image of feminine beauty emerged from the pages of popular magazines. The image emphasized youth, modernity, and mobility, and corresponded with white middle-class women’s growing presence in the public sphere. This type of “New Woman,” as early feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman called her, represented “a noble type.” According to Gilman, “women are growing honester, braver, stronger, more healthful and skilful [sic] and able and free, more human in all ways.”

Yet, as Gilman was quick to observe, this new woman did not just behave differently from previous generations. She also looked different. She was taller, more athletic, and was often dressed in the modern ensemble of a shirtwaist and skirt, which facilitated her outdoor leisure activities.

On the pages of magazines, illustrators such as Charles Dana Gibson and Harrison Fisher made Gilman’s descriptions concrete. They created their own versions of the ideal “American Girl,” providing the public with the visual vocabulary to understand this new womanhood. Their “girls” embodied women’s new reality of work, athletics, and education, while at the same time maintaining more traditional ideas regarding beauty and appearance.

The Gibson Girl in particular became one of the most circulated images in this period, appearing in advertising and on myriad consumer products, including fashion, wallpaper, silverware, and furniture. Her fashions, and the activities they enabled, turned the Gibson Girl into a modern icon of femininity.

Part of the Gibson Girl’s success was due to Gibson’s ability to portray her as a modern woman, but not too radical. Although she was often depicted as a single confident girl and in fairly equal relationships with men, she was also portrayed as an object of men’s desire, whose main objective was to settle down and get married. She was flirtatious, thus alluding to the liberating possibilities that New Womanhood entailed. Yet, her playful romanticism in relationships with men was portrayed as superficial, not as a demand for political rights.

The Gibson Girl’s fashions also pointed to her modern, non-radical nature. Although her signature outfit of a shirtwaist and separate skirt was more athletic in look and offered a new degree of comfort and mobility, it remained within the boundaries of acceptable feminine appearance. Even when performing sports activities such as tennis and cycling, she always appeared corseted and never in bloomers or more radical items of fashion that challenged the mainstream.

The Fisher Girl, while not as popular as the Gibson Girl, also presented the transitional status of women in the early 20th century. But if the Gibson Girl was romantic and aloof, the Fisher Girl embodied a more wholesome image of the modern woman. She also had her upswept hairdo and a heart-shaped face, but her features were softer than the Gibson Girl. The Fisher Girl embodied youth and freedom more than sexual seductiveness and as such she better captured the new spirit of athleticism that the New Woman represented.

Unlike the Gibson Girl whose illustrations were often accompanied with a caption, the Fisher Girl usually appeared on the cover, thus giving viewers more power to interpret the image. Fisher depicted her engaging in the popular sports, often with an accessory, like a tennis racket and riding crop. By normalizing these outdoor activities, Fisher showed that young girls were not just objects of beauty to be looked at, but independent women.

While the Fisher Girl certainly belonged to the middle class, he was not shy about depicting her explicitly as a college student. Although only about 3 percent of women were enrolled in colleges and universities in the early 1900s, by amplifying her image Fisher made college education a mainstream aspiration for young girls. Moreover, in a time when higher education for women was still considered a radical idea, Fisher’s portrayal of his girl as a beautiful woman contributed to appeasing critiques regarding the “threats” of educated women, who comprised the bulk of women’s reformers and suffragists at the time. As Dorothy Dix claimed in an article in Good Housekeeping: “The modern girl is a suffragist by instinct.”

The nature of magazines and the political realities of segregation and Jim Crow caused the ideal “American Girl,” as she was depicted by Gibson and Fisher, to be limited to only white girls. However, the popularity of their fashions and their ability to cross racial and class boundaries offered a way for Black American women to also reclaim the image of modern femininity. Although the Black illustrator John Henry Adams was not associated with a specific “girl type,” his depictions of fashionable Black women provided a visual testament to Black beauty in support of racial equality.

These images of young women on the pages of popular magazines not only made them a model to emulate but also offered women a tangible way to reimagine themselves as modern and to challenge Victorian notions of femininity. Although neither the Gibson Girl nor the Fisher Girl were “real women,” they offered a visual manifestation of the “It Girl” of the period.

Whether it was the Gibson Girl and her shirtwaists, the Fisher Girl with her elaborate hats, or Adams’s portrayal of Black respectability, the “It Girls” of the turn of the twentieth century came to define that moment: These were women who were beginning to do away with the conventions of their gender, asserting their independence, and modernizing feminine beauty.

And like many “It Girls” who would come after them, it was their style, fashion, and attitudes that helped not only define the period, but also the women who lived in it.