In The Spectacular Modern Woman, Liz Conor illustrates how technologicaladvances in image reproduction transformed Western industrial societies into visualor "ocularcentric" cultures with significant and complex consequences forwomen's lives. With the rise of mass media, photography, and movies, a woman'svisibility became a mark of her modernity, and the result was at once liberating andconfining, given the many narrow conceptions of what it meant to be a modern woman.Focusing on the city girl in the metropolitan scene, the "Screen StruckGirl" in the cinematic scene, the mannequin in the commodity scene, the beautycontestant in the photographic scene, the "primitive" woman in the latecolonial scene, and the flapper in the heterosexual leisure scene, Conor shows howwomen's roles were intimately tied to the visual culture of the day.