College Girls

This is the cover illustration for Abbe Carter Goodloe's College Girls, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, and illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson—the artist who defined the 'Gibson Girl' ideal for a generation of American readers. A fashionably dressed young woman in a full white dress, puffed sleeves, and a small cap walks beside a top-hatted young man in a striped frock coat who carries a cane. The pairing is composed in pen-and-ink against a green wash ground, framed by bold yellow. The image positions the college woman as socially poised and romantically eligible—progressive enough to attend university, reassuringly conventional in her femininity—reflecting the anxious negotiation in 1890s culture over women's expanding education and public presence.