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A seasoned adventurer around the globe, Jane Dolinger stood for the freedom to live boldly against convention. But Jane also stood for another kind of freedom that was years ahead of its time. In the conservative atmosphere of the 1950s, she embraced her sexuality without shame and supplemented her writing career with figure modeling. She regularly posed for photographs used in men’s magazines in conjunction with her articles about exotic parts of the world. She was often marketed to her reading public as a traveling glamour girl—which may have shortchanged her real worth as a writer but brought her a great deal of notoriety and a large readership.
She was introduced to modeling in the context of serious art when she agreed to pose for Ecuador’s great national artist, Oswaldo Guayasamin. He was enamored of her and considered her his favorite model. In the bedroom of his home in Quito, now a national museum dedicated to his work, hangs a nude portrait of Jane Dolinger.
Having shed her clothes for art, it soon became easy for her to pose in dishabille, or even seminude, for the photo illustrations to her magazine articles. A woman of great beauty, she was instantly popular for doing so. Her husband took all of the photos and encouraged her in promoting herself as a glamour girl adventurer. At the height of her popularity in the early-to-mid 1960s, she appeared almost every month as a writer/model in one magazine or another.
Most interest in Jane today focuses on her modeling work in men’s magazines, with her books and articles regarded as a curious sideline, an unusual addition that made her stand out a little from the other figure models of her time.
This website is built on an entirely different view: that Jane was, above all, a travel and adventure writer worthy of serious consideration, whose work makes a significant contribution to modern literature. Part of that contribution involves the way in which Jane combined adventurous living, professional writing, and creative self-promotion into an empowering career at a time when that lifestyle was largely closed to women.
We applaud Jane for her modeling work of the 1950s and 1960s, recognizing in it a bold proto-feminism that complemented her accomplishments in writing. | 
