Gibson Girl

The Gibson Girl: How she changed the American Image

     Charles Dana Gibson started out just a cartoon artist who drew a picture of a beautiful woman. Well little did Gibson know that this young woman inspired by Evelyn Nesbit would become the famous "Gibson Girl". The images of this so called Gibson Girl were published in Life, Collier's, Harper's weekly, and Scribner's. After all the publicity of these images, Gibson Girl became the woman that all American women aspired to be. An article in the New York Times called her the "dream of american femininity". She was tall, stylish, well-educated, artistic, and  athletic, she was Everything that women aspired to be, and she was the dream girl to every man.  

     Charles Gibson took his inspiration from, as I stated earlier, Evelyn Nesbit. She was discovered at the age of 16 and became the Gibson Girl. Some people believe that Gibson Girl was Gibson's wife or even his sister, but I believe that I was truthfully Evelyn to inspire the creation of the Gibson Girl.I believe so because when comparing an image of the Gibson Girl to Evelyn's features, they align almost perfectly. Evelyn became famous for her likeness to the Gibson Girl, making her as stated by an article on evelynnesbit.com,  "America's first bona-fide sex godess". She was the Marilyn Monroe of her time. 

      Gibson Girl wasn't entirely perfect though, she, like any other human being had problems. This is what made her realistic, she experienced love and loss, This is illustrated in Gibson's comic,"The Widow and her Friends"

Obviously based upon the drawing's title, She has lost her husband. She has fallen into depression. 

These men look at her as in she is a prize to be won, rather than a woman with a broken heart and great sadness.

Note that in image 2 she is "exercising" in a graveyard, perhaps after all she has been through she is visiting her husband.

6) You can see the unhappiness in her face as she is hated by other women
7) Gibson Girl was always shown as a well educated woman. 

After much distress and heartbreak, she finds where she is happy in spite of the troubles she has faced.

     As it can clearly be seen, Gibson Girl wasn't perfect, but every woman in the USA wanted to be just like her. They aspired to be the woman who every man wanted to have. The Gibson Girl was originally a "marketing tool", a way to get women to shop, she was a way to update women on the latest fashions and trends of the time. She then went from said marketing tool to an inspiration for women all over the country.

     

Sources:

PBS on Evelyn Nesbit
I used this source to find out more about Evelyn Nesbit

New York Times article on Gibson girl 

I used this source to read more about how the Gibson Girl was perceived in her own time

scalar,usc.edu on the Gibson Girl 

This was the source that sparked my interest in Evelyn Nesbit. After seeing this source, I began to do further research on Evelyn Nesbit.

Library of Congress 
This website helped me to find the different themes and characteristics of the Gibson Girl

Wikipedia on the Gibson Girl

I used this source to get initial and general information

Korn, Jerry, ed. "The Gibson Girl." This Fabulous Century 1900-1910. N.p.: Time, 1969. 183-91. Print. This Fabulous Century.

This was the source I used for my pictures

Research on Human Migration Patterns

     During class today, I did research on how people move around the world. Some of what I found was actually very surprising. For instance, based upon data from just 2 years ago, the United States has one of the smallest populations of refugees. This really surprised me because of all of the wars going on in the world, I had always thought that people would at first flee to a neighboring country to escape but then make an attempt to get to the US. I can see now that this was a naive assumption, because not everyone can afford to come to the US, and not everyone wants to run that risk.
     I also took a little quiz on "Human Sorting" which again surprised me, but also in a way was not surprising. Now I know I just completely contradicted myself, but allow me to explain. This quiz asks you to classify people based solely on their looks, and to guess their ethnic background. I got mostly incorrect answers which initially I was shocked to see that answers which I thought through carefully were incorrect. But at the same time I wasn't very shocked to know that I was wrong. I'm sure that my answers were very common misconceptions, which goes to show that we can't judge a book by its cover. behind every person's face and skin color is a whole family history.

Philanthropy Research Summary

     Today we discussed what philanthropy is and how different it is from charity. I heard Alexa say something that really made the difference clear to me. She said something along the lines that charity is to fix a problem in the moment, and philanthropy more about the future and how to make it better. If I had the money, I would be a huge benefactor to trying to help people, not just in the US but around the would, to get a safe and affordable home and to help them put food on the table. I believe that there are too many people in the world who can't afford basic human necessities. What ever I could do to help to fix that would be one of the most amazing feelings in the world to me. I strongly identify with why Carnegie wanted to "benefit all mankind"

Thinking About Success

     When given these four words: luck,opportunity,skill and hard work, it isn't hard to discover how I would rank them. I would rank them the following way: luck, opportunity, hard work, and skill.
The reason that I rank them this way is because I can apply this ranking to every aspect of my life. For example, I have a job as a hostess and curbside server at a restaurant. The way I got to success in my job was first by being lucky enough to have known someone who was leaving their job at the restaurant, and to have them put in a good work with my application. By being given the opportunity to have the job, with hard work I developed a skill and become good at what I do around the restaurant. I believe in working for what you have. This same order can be applied to my school work.I was lucky enough for my family to have moved to Huntsville in 2009. From that luck,  I was given an opportunity to go to Randolph, and after lots of hard work I have developed certain skills or aptitudes for certain subjects. At other subjects I have to double the amount of work I apply.
The process for analyzing the success and happiness in my life is really owed to these 4 simple words and the concepts behind them. I can apply this to my friendships, to sports and even to my life at home.

This is a picture of what I find to be the symbols of my hard work that ultimately yield success

Industry and Innovation

     I spent this class period reading a few articles about how the fashion industry, specifically Zara and H&M, have done so well in such a competitive retail market. They accomplish this by having strong company to lay the foundation that gets their product our into the world. while have a solid brand is very important, it is also key to have a company full of people that can get the job done and work cooperatively as a network. 
     As explained by a Forbes article I read about H&M, "An all-important shared pursuit of the three companies is a deep understanding of their customers’ wants and needs. All three have built systems for identifying consumer preferences." The pieces are designed and reviewed over and over again until they are deemed high enough quality to be hung on racks for consumers to buy. The lower prices in combination with their quality of clothing is what makes them such a success. 
     Zara has a similar network to that of H&M, but they do have one more advantage, a technological advantage. Zara has technology that allows them to produce new items at an extremely fast rate. With constantly changing collections, they have the edge of bringing in consumers more frequently to 

19th Century Textbook

https://archive.org/stream/conciseschoolhis02camp#page/n21/mode/2up 

For this activity I am using a 19th century textbook (link above) to discover how kids during that time learned about colonists first interactions with Indians. They were seen as "savages" and this was a term used mostly when the book wanted to discuss Indians in a negative light.

If I were a student being taught material from this textbook, I wouldn't have a very positive view on Indians, nor would I appreciate their way of life. The observations written in the book seem to have a skewed point of view, as though written from the point of view of a white individual or group of white individuals who wish to teach kids in this time to be frightened of  or even hostile toward Indians. I believe that of this way of writing could be due to what was going on in the 19th century in the west with Indians.

Diary from February 22,1872

I read this absolutely tragic article in the paper today. It was about some Indians attacking this small little neighborhood during the French war. They stole the supplies from the settlers all up and down the colonies, then these savages had the nerve to turn the colonies weapons onto the places from which they stole them!

Killburn was the name of one of the first settlers of the area, and the hero of this thrilling story. As these savages crept up to killburn's house, he got the first shot. And with much help from a Colonel Bellows and his men, the savages were taken down. Killburn suffered a bullet to the hip and died from a lack of proper medical aid. 

It is the stories such as these that make us remember how lucky we are and how we are progressively ridding ourselves of the "Indian problem".