Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine
Ashgate, 2011
Hardcover, 194 pages, $104.95

Interweaving nuanced discussions of politics, visuality, and gender, Director of Humanities and Sciences Rachel Schreiber uncovers the complex ways that gender figures into the graphic satire created by artists for the New York-based socialist journal, the Masses. This exceptional magazine was published between 1911 and 1917, during an unusually radical decade in American history and featured cartoons drawn by artists of the Ashcan School and others, addressing questions of politics, gender, labor, and class. Rather than viewing art from the Masses primarily in terms of its critical social stances or aesthetic choices, however, this study uses these images to open up new ways of understanding the complexity of early-20th-century viewpoints.