Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton's New York

Displaying Women explores the role of women in the representation of leisure in turn-of-the-century New York. To see and be seen--on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, in Central Park, and in the fashionable uptown hotels and restaurants--was one of the fundamental principles in the display aesthetic of New York's fashionable society.

Maureen E. Montgomery argues for a reconsideration of the role of women in the bourgeois elite in turn-of-the-century America. By contrasting multiple images of women...