Overview
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 drawn from newspapers, magazines, private correspondence, etiquette manuals and the New York fiction of Edith Wharton, Henry James and others, she offers a convincing antidote to the long-standing tendency in women's history to overlook women whose class affiliations have put them in a position of power.