'God-gifted girls': Women illustrators, gender, class, and commerce in American visual culture, 1885--1925

This dissertation examines the careers and cultural significance of Philadelphia women illustrators between 1885--1925, including Bertha Corson Day, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Charlotte Harding, Violet Oakley, Jessie Willcox Smith, Alice Barber Stephens, and others. "God-gifted girls," a moniker coined by writer William Dean Howells, hints at their unusual status in the highly competitive and contested art world of that time. I analyze the artists' work and professional practices within the complex matrix of mass-market magazines, visual culture, class, and consumerism, and probe the gendered implications of their identities as "women illustrators." Despite achieving professional recognition and national fame, the artists have been written largely out of American art history due to the "feminine" and popular nature of their production. My study aims to rectify this omission in order to illuminate the pivotal roles of women illustrators in the realms of fine and commercial art alike.;In chapter 1, I attend to the particular circumstances in Philadelphia that fostered the emergence of women illustrators: the growing demand for magazine illustration, the increased availability of art education, and training in illustration with Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute. I map out the ways in which the women established themselves as serious artists through their home and studio environments, and professional associations such as the Plastic Club. In chapters 2 and 3, I examine the women's careers as commercial and fine artists, their challenges in straddling these two increasingly divergent realms of art, and the gendered reception of the illustrators and their work. In the final two chapters, I scrutinize their scenes of childhood and new womanhood, respectively, to understand the images' roles in constructions of gender, race, and class. Although dismissed as sentimental kitsch, the artists' pictures of childhood played an important role in the shaping of middle-class taste and consumerism. Further, their incarnations of the New Woman present a more complex, compelling, and composite portrait of this phenomenon than the binary of the American girl and the mannish woman. This study of popular, "female art" broadens and sharpens our understanding of the cultural landscape in the early twentieth-century United States.