"Where's my piano girl?!"

I'm sitting in the airport, waiting my first flight leading to Canada, where I will present on The Etude, Piano Girls, and New Women.  Life is good.  There's no real time for me to give my abbreviated history of the complicated archetype/stereotype of the Piano Girl.  But there is a bit of time for the New Woman, as embodied in Charles Dana Gibson's illustrations.

The Gibson Girl was created to depict the growing population of women who got out into the public sphere at a time when it was still the proper Victorian thing to stay at home.   These women were known as "New Women" in print; today many of us know them better for Gibson's illustrations.  Gibson portrays these women as the most beautiful creatures in the world.  And most people know his images as being those gorgeous Victorian ladies in tight corsets, hair pinned up, and giving sultry looks.  But in his more comical illustrations, Gibson draws these women more dangerously- almost forebodingly. Drawings depicted the power these women had over men.  One image is of a woman batting around her suitors.  In my presentation, I show the popular images of these women out in public: bathing, playing golf, riding bicycles.  But then I show this image:

Now, I don't have the exact provenance for this.**  It comes from Dover Clip Art, but I just love the idea of it.  The man looks greatly perturbed, as if to say the title of this post-- where's my piano girl?  She used to sit around all day and entertain me.  Why isn't she doing that now?  My argument is that for men in the 1890s and 1900s, it wasn't about what women were gaining necessarily, but more so what they were abandoning. The status quo of old was being forgotten. The stability of the home was in jeopardy.  Hence why magazines like The Etude essentially begged its women to STAY HOME!  RAISE CHILDREN!  They wanted to keep things the way they had always been.  And by 1900, the Piano Girl image was so comforting, it was quite alarming if lost completely.  I think this is one of Gibson's more comical illustrations of the problem with these New Women.

Will be boarding soon- have to stop this for now.

**If anyone knows of the book/magazine this came out of, I would be eternally grateful for the citation.  I'd love to see the original context for this- especially if it was from a book.  Dover has taken many of these Gibson images in the public domain and cropped out the background, and I'm wondering if that's what they did here.