Beauty and Business

Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America

Philip Scranton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415926676
• eBook ISBN: 9781136692642
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Leading historians explore how our ideas of what is attractive are influenced by a broad range of social and economic factors. They force us to reckon with the ways that beauty has been made, bought and sold in modern America.

Part 1

IMAGES AND REFORMS

“Any Desired Length”

NEGOTIATING GENDER THROUGH SPORTS CLOTHING, 1870–1925

SARAH A. GORDON

At the age of 53, Frances Willard, leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, learned to ride a bicycle. When she rode her two-wheeler—which she named Gladys—she wore a tweed suit with the skirt three inches from the ground, and walking shoes. In her book, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, published in 1895, Willard critiqued women who claimed their conventional dress was comfortable, and wrote that: “reason will gain upon precedent, and ere long the comfortable, sensible, and artistic wardrobe of the rider will make the conventional style of woman’s dress absurd to the eye and unendurable to the understanding.”¹

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, at a time when definitions of femininity were being challenged from many different directions, women, together with an emerging industry, invented, debated, criticized, and celebrated an entirely new category of women’s clothing. The physicality of newly popular sports demanded a genre of costume that would challenge prevailing ideas of decorum and women’s fragility. Through the process of inventing and adapting clothing to suit new activities, both women and the fashion industry helped to produce a new conception of what it meant to be feminine.

This essay will explore the role of invention and negotiation in the development of a new category of clothing. It argues that the novelty and marginality of clothing for sports provided a space in which women contested notions of “feminine” and “appropriate” bodies, behavior, and appearances. Using sources such as sewing patterns, surviving garments, magazine articles, and advertisements, I will suggest that an interactive relationship between producers and consumers emerged in which the choices women made helped reinvent turn-of-the-century femininity.

The cultural climate of the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries heightened awareness of changing gender ideals. One aspect of this climate was a growing acceptance of women’s participation in athletics and physical culture and a gradual rethinking of the meanings attached to the female body and womanhood. A new understanding of health and leisure, while tempered with caution, informed ideas of proper female behavior. Middle-class observers—the cultural rule-makers—now accepted women at beaches, in single-sex gymnasiums, on the recently invented bicycle, playing tennis, golf, fencing, and walking in the woods. Though once discouraged, girls now were encouraged to be “athletic” and seized opportunities to play and exercise at schools, playgrounds, and settlement houses. This new physical culture infused and informed the emerging concept of the “New Woman.”²

Athletics and leisure challenged ideas of gentility and female delicacy as they offered new arenas for women to find personal satisfaction. Moreover, while affluent and middle-class women had the most time for sports, this athleticism was accessible to working-class women as well. As these new activities redefined notions of propriety, some of the distinctions between white, middle-class women and the working women against whom they had defined their respectability were challenged.

Many women found that their clothing did not accommodate these new activities, and so embraced a series of innovations that defined a new form of clothing that was appropriate yet practical.³ Unlike the dress reform movement, marginalized since its beginnings in the 1840s and 1850s, clothing for sports engaged a wide variety of women in a discussion about their relationship with their garments. At a time when mainstream women rarely challenged fashion’s dictates, the novelty of sports offered an opportunity to rethink women’s clothing. Meanwhile, the idea that the clothes were only for play made them less of a threat to anyone who perceived them as challenging traditional women’s styles. Embodied in the new activities and the clothing worn for them was a new but problematic concept of femininity, one that did not hide but instead celebrated women’s bodies and opened new arenas for women’s participation in public life. As women considered what they thought was appropriate, useful, and comfortable, as they read magazines describing the clothing, as they chose patterns and sewed garments, and as they wore the garments to participate in new leisure activities, they both questioned and embraced inherited ideas of what it meant to be female.

A variety of businesses engaged in this debate. Magazine articles asked what made a good sports outfit, offered a variety of options, and acknowledged the sometimes conflicting issues of comfort, aesthetics, and modesty. Ready-to-wear catalogs insisted their bathing suits wouldn’t dare cling. Advertisers played with language and imagery that associated their clothing with women’s liberation. Meanwhile, pattern makers sold patterns designed to be interpreted in different ways, allowing readers to create their own definitions of what was appropriate and feminine.

All forms of women’s clothing reflected cultural shifts and tensions as middle-class women moved from domestic to more public roles. Yet sports clothing is especially interesting because of its close relationship with changing ideas of the female body as well as with women’s participation in leisure activity that undercut prevailing domestic norms. Clothing for sports functioned as a middle ground between the “New Woman,” who was economically independent, physically active, and sexually autonomous, and older ideals of femininity.

The rules for “acceptable” clothing for sports changed over time, until a relatively uniform idea of sports clothing emerged in the 1920s. With this near-consensus came both the most revealing sports and mainstream clothing ever worn in America—along with a very different concept of femininity. The ideological shift from “Victorian” to “modern” cultural values included a rethinking of the outward manifestations of gender. Perhaps sports clothing actually caused this larger change, as some historians have proposed, but I do not seek to establish causality.⁴ What I will argue is that clothing for sports offers a unique way to understand this cultural transformation. Clothing for bicycling, swimming, walking, and gymnastics provided a space where women actively contested and rethought femininity.

Because I am interested largely in the process of fashioning this new way of thinking, the actual design, feel, and construction of garments are as important to the story as are the magazines that discussed and promoted them. Moreover, the means by which women interpreted styles can be understood as participation in this renegotiation of gender. Did women sew or purchase the items they read about? Did they make modifications? How did the construction and material of the garments affect how they were received? In time, how did the move to ready-made garments change this process?

This era’s mainstream fashionable clothing provides the context for understanding the turn-of-the-century discussion over clothing for sports. Women’s clothing in the late nineteenth century was hardly conducive to even the gentlest of physical activity. The popular silhouette of the 1870s and 1880s included floor-length skirts worn over petticoats or hoops, often drawn tightly across the front and gathered in the back in a bustle that emphasized a woman’s curves. Collars were high and sleeves were long and tight. Women wore boned corsets that emphasized their breasts and hips. By the 1890s, shoulders swelled with the giant poufs of “leg-of-mutton” sleeves, and while skirts lost bustles they remained long. Depending on their occupation, working women were less likely to wear tight corsets or heels when on the job, but as historians Kathy Peiss, Elizabeth Ewen, and Nan Enstad have suggested, many went to great effort and expense to buy or sew fashionable styles.⁵

Clothes were the insignia of women’s respectability. Women were supposed to be delicate, curvy, and soft—and hidden by yards of fabric. One reason middle-class observers often portrayed poorer women, both white and African-American, as morally slack was because their finances did not allow for suitable clothing.⁶ Moreover, physical labor did not always allow women to wear corsets, which to some implied a certain laxness or even easier sexual access.⁷ For those who could afford more than a few outfits, complex rules governed what was to be worn when and where. Modesty was paramount. Most middle-class women would rarely expose even their arms, at least during the daytime, and it was considered rather shocking to show an ankle. Pants were associated with dress reformers, children, laborers, and even prostitutes.

Women rarely questioned these designs and expectations. Those who did were often dress reformers or proponents of “rational” dress, whom mainstream writers considered marginal, even radical. Reformers criticized tight corsets and long skirts, which they saw as restrictive, dangerous, and unsanitary, citing examples of women tripping over skirts, going up in flames, and sweeping street debris into their homes. The dress reform movement, spearheaded by Amelia Bloomer in the mid-nineteenth century, was associated with the Women’s Rights movement; early feminists sometimes wore the “Bloomer costume” of long, full pants and a knee- or calf-length skirt. Often ridiculed, reform clothing represented a threat to gender distinctions held by both men and women.⁸ Cartoons lampooned “Bloomer girls,” showing a woman in bloomers involved in masculine work, while her husband, emasculated, wore a dress and cared for children or cooked. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a dress reformer and novelist in the 1870s, acknowledged how women felt threatened by suggestions for change, seeing in reform dress an erosion of respectability and gender distinction. She wrote that: “[t]hrough your vaguest suggestion as to the healthful-ness of shoulder-straps, she sees herself walking up the aisle at church in the scantest of bloomers, and a stovepipe hat.”⁹ With notions of gender so deeply embedded in clothing, changes in styles portended changes in the social structure.

The emerging interest in physical culture proved a serious threat to a fragile gender structure, not only because of the physicality and mobility of new sports but also due to the form of new clothing styles. The popularity of sports in the late ninteenth century grew from a long history. Trips to the seaside and hot springs, footraces, and riding and walking for pleasure had been popular among colonists (and then Americans) since the eighteenth century, as they were in England and Europe. More organized and “scientific” activity arrived, in the form of games with strict rules or timed races, with the Industrial Revolution and urbanization. German and Swedish immigrants brought with them gymnastics methods and established men’s exercise clubs. “Mixed” or coed bathing became acceptable in the 1840s and 1850s, as resort areas such as Cape May and Newport became vacation destinations; and bathing was, as one historian describes, “transformed from a medicinal treatment to a pleasurable pursuit.”¹⁰

However, as sports became increasingly accepted, women were often excluded due to “separate sphere” gender ideals. Whereas middle-class masculinity was predicated largely on being socially dominant and competitive, middle-class femininity became defined by domesticity.¹¹ These social ideals informed physical ones; what Lois Banner calls the “Steel Engraving Lady” ideal—with her “delicate constitution,” pale skin, birdlike bones, sloping shoulders, and narrow waist—embodied Victorian femininity.¹² Some also thought sports threatened (middle-class) women’s reproductive functions. Doctors warned of collapsed uteri or other “female complaints,” advising that too much activity, physical or mental, would sap women of their limited supply of vitality.¹³ Moreover, propriety demanded that women not expose their bodies, even their ankles. Thus up to the 1860s or so, women’s “respectable” sports and exercise could find an outlet only in croquet, archery, or calisthenics. Even seaside bathing, rarely strenuous in the first place, required elaborate “bathing machines” in which elite women would change clothing and be transported to the water.

Even as sports and “physical culture” for women became increasingly accepted, they remained problematic. Although some experts encouraged women to exercise, others warned of its dangers. Well into the twentieth century, magazine articles that praised healthy “modern girls” would in the same breath ask “Are athletics a menace to motherhood?” Too much exercise, especially unsupervised, could threaten a girl’s future health and fertility; the “free out-of-door life, so priceless when properly conducted, may prove to be the path to pain and weakness, if not to permanent invalidism.”¹⁴

At the very least, writers argued, too much sports could leave women with masculinized bodies. Contemporary fiction and magazine articles indicated a fear that sports would masculinize women, either in specific physical ways or by means of subtle behavioral changes. In Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, set in the 1870s, a society matron complains that a younger woman’s hand is large (and by implication, masculine) due to “these modern sports that spread the joints.”¹⁵ Either in self-defense or because they had invested in the sam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• On Beauty … and the History of Business
• Part 1 IMAGES AND REFORMS
• Part 2 BUSINESS AND WORK
• Part 3 CONSTRUCTING COMMODITIES
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index