A lively look at the ways in which American women in the 1920s transformed their lives through performance and fashion. New definitions of American femininity were formed in the pivotal 1920s, an era that vastly expanded the "market" for sexually explicit displays by women. Angela J. Latham shows how quarrels over and censorship of women's performance — particularly in the arenas of fashion and theater — uniquely reveal the cultural idiosyncracies of the period and provide valuable clues to the developing iconicity of the female body in its more recent historical phases. Through disguise, display, or judicious appropriation of both, performance became a crucial means by which women contested, affirmed, mitigated, and revolutionized norms of female self-presentation and self-stylization. Fashion was a hotly contested arena of bodily display. Latham surveys 1920s fashion trends and explores popular fashion rhetoric. Resistance to social mandates regarding women's fashion was nowhere more pronounced than in the matter of "bathing costumes." Latham critiques locally situated contests over swimwear, including those surrounding the first Miss America Pageant, and suggests how such performances sanctioned otherwise unacceptable self-presentations by women. Looking at American theater, Latham summarizes major arguments about censorship and the ideological assumptions embedded within them. Although sexually provocative displays by women were often the focus of censorship efforts, "leg shows," including revues like the Zeigfeld Follies, were in their heyday. Latham situates the popularity of such performances that featured women's bodies within the larger context of censorship in the American theater at this time.

Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Verena Laschinger and Sirpa Salenius, is a collection of essays that offer a fresh perspective and original analyses of texts by American women writers of the long nineteenth century. The essays, which are written both by European and American scholars, discuss fiction by marginalized authors including Yolanda DuBois (African American fairy tales), Laura E. Richards (children’s literature), Metta Fuller Victor (dime novels/ detective fiction), and other pioneering writers of science fiction, gothic tales, and life narratives. The works covered by this collection represent the rough and ragged realities that women and girls in the nineteenth century experienced; the writings focus on their education, family life, on girls as victims of class prejudice as well as sexual and racial violence, but they also portray girls and women as empowering agents, survivors, and leaders. They do so with a high-voltage creative charge. As progressive pioneers, who forayed into unknown literary terrain and experimented with a variety of genres, the neglected American women writers introduced in this collection themselves emerge as role models whose innovative contribution to nineteenth-century literature the essays celebrate.