This book profiles a woman who helped to create the New Woman -- Gordon Conway. Raye Virginia Allen follows the whole course of Conway's life (1894-1956) from her Dallas upbringing in a wealthy society family through her working years in New York, London, and Paris to her premature retirement and early death at the family estate in Virginia.

Gordon Conway became an illustrator for Vanity Fair at the age of twenty and an accomplished fashion artist. She went on to an illustrious career in design that encompassed publicity campaigns for Broadway musicals, costume and set designs for cabaret in Paris, and the management of the first autonomous costume department at a major British film studio. This record of her career, drawn from extensive archival materials never before published, underscores the role that women played in creating the image of the flapper or New Woman of the 1920s, as well as the limits of their influence.