This book shows 11 different hairstyles you can comb from one basic setting. These styles include several Grecian variations, "Tiara," "The Portrait," "Whistler's Mother--Moderne," several pony tail variations, "Undulation," "Miss Muffin," "Christian Dior Chignon," "Flight," and "Everyman's Dreamgirl."

Expanded and back in print, this popular resource to recreating authentic period hairstyles covers everything from short hairdos popular in the early 1940s to the cut-to-fit look made popular by Christian Dior in the late 1940s. Hundreds of vintage illustrations, photographs, and diagrams accompany detailed instructions and techniques for replicating the styles of the decade. Fun facts and trivia related to the hairstyles of the time are included, as is a look at wartime hair and regulations brought about by the government. Comprehensive lists of the beauty tools needed to create these hairdos, where to purchase the various hard-to-find items discussed, and hairstyles based on hair length and type are all included for those interested in revisiting the period beauty of the 1940s.

In the years between the world wars, Manhattan's Fourteenth Street-Union Square district became a center for commercial, cultural, and political activities, and hence a sensitive barometer of the dramatic social changes of the period. It was here that four urban realist painters--Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, and Isabel Bishop--placed their images of modern "new women." Bargain stores, cheap movie theaters, pinball arcades, and radical political organizations were the backdrop for the women shoppers, office and store workers, and consumers of mass culture portrayed by these artists. Ellen Wiley Todd deftly interprets the painters' complex images as they were refracted through the gender ideology of the period. This is a work of skillful interdisciplinary scholarship, combining recent insights from feminist art history, gender studies, and social and cultural theory. Drawing on a range of visual and verbal representations as well as biographical and critical texts, Todd balances the historical context surrounding the painters with nuanced analyses of how each artist's image of womanhood contributed to the continual redefining of the "new woman's" relationships to men, family, work, feminism, and sexuality.