American Ideal

By Katie Roiphe, in Financial Times

For a long time people have been trying to define the American woman, mostly for the purpose of mocking, dismissing or putting her in her place.

“There is no such thing as ‘the fast girl’ in America,” says one of Henry James’s Englishmen, meaning, of course, that all American girls are fast – and this is more or less the view of an ambitious new Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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