“Fluffy Ruffles”: The Spectacular Comic Icon of Working Woman's Activity

The comic strip “Fluffy Ruffles” is little known today, but in 1907 it generated a national and transatlantic icon of the working New Woman in America. The hybrid narrative follows the protagonist's search for employment, which always concludes in failure due to the attention she receives from men in the vicinity. This paper asks how the comic situated motion, both in activity and restriction, as fundamental to female embodiment and spectacular subjectivity in the urban environment. The influence of “Fluffy Ruffles” is examined in the emulation and resistance it produced from the female reading community of The New York Herald.