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by Margot Mifflin Juno

Winston Churchill's mother, Jennie Jerome, had one. So does punk rocker Chrissie Hynde. Despite widespread perception that tattoos are subversive and a symptom of the imminent demise of Western civilization, a recent book shows that during the late-19th century upper-class women and even European royalty were getting them. In Bodies of Subversion, Margot Mifflin, a journalist and assistant professor of English at Lehman College, writes that "positioned against the shifting social backdrop of Western culture in the last century, tattoos serve as touchstones for women's changing roles and evolving concerns during the most progressive era in women's history, and as visual passkeys to the psyches of women who are rewriting accepted notions of feminine beauty and self-expression." Mifflin takes the reader on a remarkable journey through the 20th century, with the tattooed signs on women's skin charting the way. The journey begins with 22-year-old Nora Hildebrandt, the first tattooed female circus attraction, who began displaying her 365 designs in 1882. Hildebrandt had been tattooed by her father in his New York City street shop, but in the tradition of sideshow hyperbole, she claimed that Chief Sitting Bull had taken them captive and forced her father to tattoo her head to toe. Early tattooed circus women like Hildebrandt were titillating anomalies in the strait-laced Victorian era when bare female skin was taboo. Their tattooed successors joined the early-20th-century women's vanguard in rejecting the Victorian archetype of the repressed and demure woman. "Tattooing," writes Mifflin, "was a bold intrusion into the masculine realm." Soon after tattooing left the confines of the circus, it was taken up by women from across the social spectrum. During the twenties and thirties, upper-crust English women sported dainty tattoos, inspired in part by the 1923 discovery of a tattooed Egyptian priestess dating from around 2000 B.C. Bodies of Subversion begins by charting the growth and decline of women's tattoos during the first half of the century with the remarkable stories of unusual women and the cultural changes that influenced them. Subsequent chapters on "The 70s Revival," "Totem and Tattoo," "The Chick Spot," and "Resistance Through Style" bring the reader up to date through the seventies' countercultural resurrection of women's tattoos, the late seventies' and eighties' aggressively redesigned bodies of punk rebels, and the nineties' Yuppie and New Age body adornments that have brought a small measure of respectability to tattooed women. It is only in relation to shifting cultural currents that the history of women's tattoos can be understood. Mifflin weaves individual women's stories into broad cultural history, avoiding the generalizations that so often erase historical complexity in surveys of this kind. No dry historical tome, Bodies of Subversion is a book with substance and style that is hard to put down. It is appropriate for art history and women's studies classes and will appeal as well to the tattoo enthusiast. Readers will also be drawn to the many photos of tattooed women, including some never-before-seen ones dating back to the 19th century...

Courtesy of WOMAN'S ART JOURNAL
Reviewed by Claudia Springer, Professor of English and Film Studies at Rhode Island College, is the author of Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (1996).