| This dissertation argues that women's formal visual education had a marked effect on consumer taste--and ultimately on the appearance of industrially designed goods--in the United States of the 1930s. Informed by the works of Michael Baxandall and Michel Foucault, this study both defines a period "cognitive style" and posits women's vocational education of the 1920s and 1930s as an instrument of social efficiency that operated by fostering a particular way of seeing and thinking about the appearance of objects and persons. The study proposes a model for understanding style, the assessment of aesthetic value, and the social causes and implications of both. It contributes to the scholarship on consumption and industrial design as well as to the histories of gender, education, science, and popular visual culture.; Chapter one introduces the so-called rise in "style consciousness" that occurred in the U.S. in the late 1920s, and discusses previous scholars' approaches to understanding it. Chapter two addresses "related art" education, an offshoot of home economics that taught young women "good taste" in the selection and arrangement of the decorative arts through the use of "objective," "scientific" principles and methods. Chapter three discusses "body mechanics" or posture instruction, which required young women to assess the appearance of their own and others' bodies in the same ways in which they were asked to judge the design quality of furniture, costume, and tableware in related art courses. Chapter four deals with American industrial design of the 1930s, and proposes that "streamlining" was less accurately a design mode derived from aerodynamics than it was a response to female consumers' formally acquired skills in making aesthetic judgments. Chapter five, the conclusion, proposes that the ways of seeing and thinking that were promoted in "vocational" related art and body mechanics courses not only had an impact on the style of mass-produced goods, but also served to make women docile, efficient members of society. |
