Cover Girls 3

Contents

Editor’s Letter |page 2
The Advent of Women as Book Cover Designers |page 3
Being a Woman Book Cover Designer in the 21st Century

|page 6
A bigger discussion: Gendered Books and Sexism in Publish-

ing | page 6
From Words to Facts: The Abolition of “Man” and “Woman” |page

9
Coverflip: A Challenge Against Gendered Book Covers |page

10
Misled by a Cover |page 12
The Guerrilla Girls’ facts about gender disparity in the

arts |page 14
Editorial Team |page 17

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Cover Girls|Editor’s Letter

Editor’s Letter

Cover Girls is a new idea of magazine. But there is an even more deep contrast
On March 3rd 2017, the American In- between the name of the magazine and
stitute of Graphic Arts of Philadelphia its cover. Manet’s Olympia with a gorilla
hosted a special exhibition baptized Cov- mask.
er Girls: An Exhibition of Women Book Manet’s Olympia is deemed to be the
Cover Designers, celebrating the work first modern painting in art history. By
of six inspiring artists. That exhibition portraying a real woman instead of a
wouldn’t have been necessary if women feminine ideal, the French artist has
hadn’t been so marginalized in art histo- challenged the accepted function of art.
ry. Through that magazine we intend to Olympia is not a picture of a prostitute.
retrace the disturbingly recent history of She is the picture of emancipation. Art’s
women in art, highlighting particularly emancipation but first of all women’s
their official entrée into the book design emancipation.
profession. The gorilla mask is a quite explicit ref-
Explore the past to understand the erence to the Guerrilla Girls, the anon-
ymous group of radical feminist and fe-
present! male artists devoted to fight sexism and
What it means to be a woman book de- racism within the art world. While they
signer in the 21st century? To answer wear gorilla masks to protect their iden-
that question, we will need to engage tity and keep the focus on the issues, we
in a bigger discussion about gendered decided to put a gorilla mask on Olym-
books and sexism in publishing. pia’s face as an emblem of equality. Men,
The AIGA exhibition is not the only rea- women, we all evolved from apes. And if
son we chose the name “Cover Girls” for you are not a science believer, just take
our magazine. Women are on the cover this: men, women, gorillas, we are all an-
of most general-interest magazines for imals!
both men and women. Idealised, objec- Cover Girls it’s not feminist, it’s human-
tified and sexualised, a cover girl must ist. It wants to celebrate human talent
be pretty, attractive, famous, and most and greatness, regardless of sex and
of the time half or completely naked. We ethnic background. Art has no gender,
want to fight that stereotype by using it. artists do. They are all human. They are
There is a deep contrast between the all animals.
name of the magazine and what it
evokes, and the content of the articles.

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Cover Girls|History Class

The Advent of

Women as Book

Cover Designers
Women had had access to the book
design profession quite recently. The sudden willingness to hire women
Before the late 19th century, women’s as book designers was justified by their
contribution to the process of books’ innate sense of beauty but it was also a
making was confined to manufacturing necessary consequence of the American
tasks such as dye-making, engraving and Civil War. The bloodiest war in US histo-
sewing. At that time, the middle class be- ry left families headed by widowed and
gan to read en masse and ask for more impoverished women who needed to be
beautifully crafted books. People started offered new educational and profession-
look at books as emblems of cultivation al opportunity.
and reasonably accessible art objects. Despite the great number of female arti-
sans from that era, their work remained
The Arts and Crafts massively under-recognized.
Movement (1880- Sarah Wyman Whitman, Margaret Neil-
1910), originated son Armstrong and Alice Cordelia Morse
in Great Britain are the most notable among the first
and spread across generation of female book cover design-
Europe and North ers. Although their identities remained
America, gave rise a mystery for the readers, with their art-
to a massive com- works they surely left their mark in book
mercialization design history.
and vulgarization
of craftsmanship
and design, en-
couraged by the rediscovery of human-
istic values of pre-industrial times. The
main idea was that art and design should
be made “by the people and for the peo-
ple”. Among those people, among those
art practitioners, were many women.

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Cover Girls|History Class

Sarah Wyman Whitman

Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842-1904), born in Massachusetts, originally
worked as a stained-glass artist. She began to design illustrations and
covers for books in 1884, soon becoming one of the America’s most im-
portant women designers. Whitman has been extremely prolific, design-
ing around 200 book covers. Her work has been consistently influenced
by the Arts and Crafts design aesthetic and philosophy. She strongly
believed that the middle class should have access to good design. Whit-
man’s style was based primarily on Art Nouveau, yet showing a more
radical minimalism with emphasised negative spaces. She is known to
be one of the first to develop a design around the cover, from the front
to the back and through the spine (see The Marble Faun by Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Houghton Mifflin, 1899). After a whole life fighting against
gender and racial inequalities and encouraging women artists to gain
professional status, Sarah Whitman died in 1904 from heart disease.

Margaret Neilson Armstrong

Margaret Neilson Armstrong (1867-1944), born in New York, began de-
signing holiday cards and then moved to book cover design in the 1880s.
Hired initially by A.C. McClurg, she also worked with Harper Brothers
and Scribner’s Sons, producing more than 250 book covers. While Whit-
man preferred gold stamping, Armstrong favoured multi-coloured inks
and plant-related motifs, completely embracing the Art Nouveau style.
She designed covers for writers the likes of Charles Dickens and Robert
Louis Stevenson. Around 1913, when dust jackets began to be popular,
Armstrong gave up on book cover design and turned to writing her own
books. She died in New York in 1944 and her work is now preserved in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Alice Cordelia Morse

Alice Cordelia Morse (1863-1961), born in Ohio, studied art and design,
specialising in drawing, at one of the few art schools open to wom-
en, the Woman’s Art School of the Cooper Union, in Manhattan. Like
Whitman before, she began her career as a stained-glass artist and
started designing book covers in the 1890s. In 1893, Morse chaired the
Sub-Committee on Book-Covers, Wood Engraving, and Illustration of
the Board of Women Managers for the Woman’s Building at the World’s
Columbian Exposition, bringing women artists to the public eye and in-
creasing their success. Beside her independent career as a book cover
designer, Morse contributed to the New York Society of Decorative Art,
an organization dedicated to helping American women artists and arti-
sans obtain training and employment. Her technique was influenced by
a variety of design styles from Roman and Renaissance styles, to Celtic,
Arabic, Gothic, Rococo, Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau and pictorial styles.
Alice Morse died in 1961 in New York, donating 58 of her book covers to
the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Cover Girls|History Class
The career of those three women is an example of the progress that women were making into
the commercial art world. With their talent and activism, they made a significant contribution to

change the role of women in culture and art.

5

5

Cover Girls|Opinion

Being a Woman Book
Cover Designer in

the 21st Century

We have come a long way from the and thus in design. That is because
Arts and Crafts movement and the our culture has built functioning gen-
first entrée into the design profession. der-based roles.
If you walk into any design classroom in We believe that arts and design can and
America, you’ll see a wonderful balance should bring the two genders together to
between male and female students. create unity and powerful collaboration.
However, the design professional field The book design field, as part of the
doesn’t reflect the same proportion. overall graphic design industry, reflect
Certainly, we made great progress from the same gender disparity. And to make
single-gender schools such as the late matters worse, most of women book
Philadelphia Design School for Women, cover designers, when there are some,
founded in 1850 by Sarah Worthington are victims of sexist practices and gender
King Peter, but how to explain the ine- stereotypes.
quality?

The numbers in the UK are even more A Bigger Discussion: Gendered
alarming. 70% of graphic design stu- Books and Sexism in Publishing
dents at London’s internationally dis-
tinguished arts university, Central Saint Jennifer Heuer is a
Martins, are women, compared with 50% talented graphic de-
in the late 1990s, but the number of fe- signer and illustrator
male graphic designers that actually ap- who has been work-
ply for a job is only 30%. ing as a freelancer for
According to recent researches published six years. On July 25th,
in Graphic Designers Surveyed, the dis- 2016, she wrote a piece
crepancy can be justified by the impres- on LitHub’s blog titled “On Gendered
sive gender pay gap in the industry. Book Covers and Being a Woman De-
More generally, that trend is led by the signer” where she says that, based on
historical misconception that men are her experience, most women designers
better than women in art professions are assigned to projects aimed directly
at women readers and that just because

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Cover Girls|Opinion

they are women. According to her, the main problem is
Over the years, she had the chance to that the distinction between chick lit
talk to a lot of women in the industry and as a sub-genre of women’s fiction and
they all seem to have experienced that women’s fiction itself has blurred, allow-
same pattern, which implies two big ste- ing publishers to label works of fiction
reotypes. First that those projects aimed in pink and frilly covers, assuming again
directly at women readers are basically that this is what women want.
women’s fiction and, as a result, the as- Although usually associated with terms
sumption that women are automatically such as “light”, “beach read”, “brainless”
interested in female topics. But the real or even “trashy”, chick lit is absolutely a
problem concerns the genre itself. worthy sub-genre that deserves a place
A book written by a woman is system- on the shelves, specifies the writer, but it
atically considered women’s fiction doesn’t have to be confused with wom-
and thus aimed at a female audience. en’s fiction.
“Whether high or lowbrow, the mar- Reading that article made me wonder
keting of many female authors ends up why a male version of chick lit doesn’t
with commercial, chick-lit style covers”, exist. Could be a macho lit? The truth is
says Jennifer Heuer. Assuming that this that there shouldn’t be a chick or a ma-
is what women want and would buy is a cho literature, just literature.
symptom of a form of sexism in publish-
ing.

“I think if we mixed things up a little more—hired women to design sports
books and hired men to design cookbooks—we’d get some fresh and unex-
pected designs. And that would benefit all of us in the industry.”

Catherine Casalino, Art Director and Cover Designer

Polly Courtney is a
British writer of nov-
els and screenplays
particularly interested
in social issues such as
sexism in the book in-
dustry. Few years ago,
she wrote an article on
The Guardian titled “No frills please:
don’t chick-lit my books just because I’m
a woman” where she dissects all the ste-
reotypes associated with women’s fic-
tion.

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Cover Girls|Opinion

From Words to Facts:
The Abolition of
“Man” and “Woman”

Exactly how we stopped having sin- “[…] more women read books than
gle-gender schools, we should stop men, more women write books
distinguishing what is thought to be for
men from what it is for women. than men, but only a small fraction
Equality should be realized through the of books that win literary awards
facts as well as through the words. That
is why we shouldn’t talk about chick lit, are written by women.”
exactly how we shouldn’t have a sepa-
rate literary prize for women. Amanda Hocking, million-selling
The Britain’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, self-published novelist
formerly known as the Orange Prize, was
founded in response to the 1991 Book- Many women see the Women’s Prize for
er Prize, whose nominees were all men, Fiction as a remedy for centuries of liter-
again due to the double gender stereo- ary sexism, cultural bias and invisibility,
type that a book written by a women is and to some extent it certainly fostered
automatically chick lit and thus less val- the acknowledgement of female authors
uable. among the literary community, but it
Creating an independent prize for wom- didn’t rebalance the gender inequities.
en didn’t solve the current and undeni- If you create something exclusively for
able inequity between genders. On the women, be it a literary genre or a prize,
contrary, it emphasised it. you inevitably acknowledge the gender
The 2012 VIDA – Women in Literary Arts difference, which is real.
statistics showed consistent gender im- Men and women are different, but when
balances within the literary prizes world. it comes to art, to literature, they should
The number of reviews of books by men all be treated equally as human being.
was greater than the number of reviews
of books by women; the number of male
reviewers was greater than the number
of female reviewers.
In other words, men were still the cultur-
al arbiters and gatekeepers.

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Cover Girls|Experience

Coverflip:

A Challenge Against
Gendered Book Covers

Publisher’s sexist attitudes to women’s mance novels aren’t for smart people.
fiction are a fact. They are soft and silly, and men don’t
Female authors are usually considered want to look soft.
romantic writers and given pink and
“girly” covers, despite the content of “I do wish I had a dime for every
their books. That again proves how ab- email I get that says: ‘Please put a
surd gender marketing works. non-girly cover on your book so I can
Young adult novelist Maureen Johnson
hasn’t just criticised publishers for such read it – signed, A Guy.’”
practices. She has proposed an exper-
iment aimed at subverting the gender Maureen Johnson
paradigms in publishing.
No matter how much you pretend it’s not Starting from her own books as an ex-
true, we do judge a book from its cover. ample of gendered covers, Maureen
The cover is, among other things, the Johnson decided to fight sexism in the
strongest book’s quality indicator. publishing business using it to her ad-
Now, if you are a female writer and you vantage.
get a “girly” package, your book will On May 6th 2013 she launched a chal-
be most certainly perceived as a lower lenge on twitter called “Coverflip” ask-
quality book. That is because “girly” has ing her 77,000 followers to take a well-
somehow become a synonym for light, known book, switch the author’s gender
easy, frivolous and worthless, exactly and then imagine what that cover might
how “chick lit” has become a disparaging look like.
label for commercial female-authored “Girl book”, “boy book”, she used those
fiction. categorisations because they exist, as
Moreover, people assume that “girly” the experiment showed, not because she
books are romance novels and that ro- believed they are right.
The result of the contest speaks for itself.

“Why is it ‘domestic fiction’ if a woman writes about family/relationships,
but if a man does that, it’s Pulitzer-worthy?”

Jodi Picoult, bestselling novelist

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Original Cover- Original Cover-
flipped flipped

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Cover Girls|Experience

Misled by a

Cover
Readers expect to read what they see. comparisons to “$4 romance book[s]
As the primary marketing tool and found in an American gas station.”
the best way to reach the audience, the The perfect “chick lit” cover formula
cover of a book should reflect its content. seems then to be pastel colours, ocean
In the article titled “The Subtle Genius of horizons and women with their backs
Elena Ferrante’s Bad Book Covers” Amer- turned. Does exist something more ste-
ican writer Emily Harnett proves again reotypical?
that in publishing exists a sexist practice Publishers are imposing that style of
in which any book written by a woman covers on any book written by a woman,
is automatically marketed as women’s regardless of its content, mainly for mar-
fiction. keting purposes.
“With their sandy beaches and wind- Diane Shipley, a freelance writer, in 2008
swept women, the U.S. editions of Ele- interviewed for The Guardian a number
na Ferrante’s novels look familiar even if of female authors on that subject. She
you’ve never seen them. That’s because describes one woman, Sue Hepworth,
they look like virtually every other book as the author of a novel that “poignantly
authored by a woman these days—not to explores the pain of losing a parent” but
mention like bridal magazines, beach-re- whose cover “makes it look like it’s about
sort brochures, and even Viagra ads.” garden parties and designer clothes.”
Emily Harnett took the example of Fer- All this complaining about book covers
rante’s books as one of the most shock- like Ferrante’s seems to be based on the
ing. egalitarian hope that abolishing gen-
Since the release of the first book, My Bril- dered book marketing we will be done
liant Friend (2012), the Neapolitan novels with gendered genres.
have sold over a million copies in the US The way to eliminate institutional gender
and garnered enthusiastic critical praise. bias in the publishing industry is longer
Her covers, by contrast, have earned that what we expect.

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Cover Girls|Facts

The Guerrilla
Girls’ facts about

gender disparity
in the arts

Less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art section of New York’s Metro-
politan Museum of Art are women, but 76% of the nudes are female.
In 1723, Dutch painter Margareta Haverman was expelled from the
Académie Royale when the painting she submitted was judged too good
to have been done by a woman.
Things have not changed much since 12th century England: women who
embroidered earned 83% less per day than their male peers.

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Cover Girls|Facts

The National Museum of Women in the Arts, “the only major museum in the
world solely dedicated to recognizing women’s creative contributions”, published
other disturbing facts.

51% of visual artists today are women; on average, they earn 81¢ for every dol-
lar made by male artists.
Work by women artists makes up only 3–5% of major permanent collections in
the U.S. and Europe, and 34% in Australian state museums.
Of 590 major exhibitions by nearly 70 institutions in the U.S. from 2007–2013,
only 27% were devoted to women artists.
ArtReview’s 2016 Power 100 list of the “most influential people in the contempo-
rary art world” was 32% women, 70% white, and 51% European.
“The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the
best painters.”—Georgia O’Keeffe
From the 16–19th centuries, women were barred from studying the nude model,
which formed the basis for academic training and representation.
“This is so good you wouldn’t know it was done by a woman.”—artist-instructor

Hans Hofmann’s “compliment” to Lee Krasner
The top three museums in the world, the British Museum (est. 1753), the Louvre
(est. 1793), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (est. 1870) have never had fe-
male directors.
Only five women made the list of the top 100 artists by cumulative auction value
between 2011-2016.
In the list of top 100 individual works sold between 2011-2016, only two artists
were women. Of those 100 artworks, 75 of them came from just 5 male artists.
No major international exhibition of contemporary art has achieved gender par-
ity.
The good news is that, while in 2005, women ran 32% of the museums in the
United States, they now run 42.6%—albeit mainly the ones with the smallest
budgets

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Editorial
Team

Editor in Chief |Nicole Pypaert
Art Director |Nicole Pypaert
Designer |Nicole Pypaert
Picture Director |Nicole Pypaert
Copy Editor |Nicole Pypaert
Proof Reader |Nicole Pypaert
Production Manager |Nicole Pypaert


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