Pantaloons and Power

A Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States

Gayle V. Fischer

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781612772660
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

By the early nineteenth century clear definitions had developed regarding how American women and men were supposed to appear in public and how they were meant to lead their lives. As men's style of dress moved from the ornate to the moderate, women's fashions continued to be decorative and physically restrictive.

In Pantaloons and Power, Gayle V. Fischer depicts how the reformers' denouncement of conventional dress highlighted the role of clothing in the struggle of power relations between the sexes. Wearing pantaloons was considered a subversive act and was often met with social ostracism.

This carefully researched interdisciplinary study successfully combines the fields of costume history, women's history, material culture, and social history to tell the story of one highly charged dress reform and its resonance in nineteenth-century society.

1

Perfecting America

Antebellum Reform,
Fashion, and Antifashion

Antebellum Reform

The widespread interest in reform that characterized much of the first half of the nineteenth century may have begun with Presbyterian minister Charles Grandison Finney and the religious revivals that proliferated across the United States in these years. Finney preached individual salvation at a number of revivals, replacing the concept of original sin with the idea of individual selfishness as the source of sin. According to Finney, sin could be rooted out of society. Members of the middle class found this message attractive, in part, because it seemed to reinforce their sense of themselves as earnest, pious, and respectable. Finney’s words fell on particularly fertile soil in upstate New York, where “Perfectionism” also garnered a large following.

An 1830s evangelical movement that became particularly popular with New Englanders, Perfectionism taught that the Second Coming of Christ had already occurred and people could aspire to perfection in their earthly lives. Perfectionism—the ability of the individual to conquer sin and avoid temptation—cut across religious and secular beliefs, and the reform impulse arose in part out of the secular interpretation of Perfectionism: ideas for the improvement of American society. Reformers believed that, through education and models of good behavior, America could become a perfect society. The country suffered from numerous social evils that needed to be eradicated—dueling, crime and its punishment, the hours and conditions of work, poverty, and vice. Reformers rallied around various causes and social concerns—observances of the Sabbath, pacifism, temperance, woman’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. Using their position as the guardians of morality and virtue in American society, women justified their entrance into reform movements. Via their belief in Perfectionism, middle-class women began to feel a sense of mission and to believe that they should work in society to pursue goals.¹

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the disappointment with America’s failure to live up to the expectations promised by the Revolution and republicanism prompted the establishment of approximately one hundred utopian communities devoted to political, class, gender, and religious concerns. The variety of alternative lifestyles chosen by communitarians suggested that any reform could and should be possible—including a change in dress. Many utopianists wanted to provide an example to mainstream society of a better way of life, in anticipation that the country would learn from them and change accordingly.

The thousands who flocked to utopian communities were inspired by a belief that all social evils and the weaknesses of human nature could be eliminated. The communities varied widely. Some were rooted in a religious faith that Christ’s return was imminent and that the righteous should prepare for God’s reign by living in accordance with biblical principles. Others were the product of an Enlightenment faith in the shaping influence of environment. Most emphasized economic cooperation; many engaged in radical experiments with diet, clothing, and family and sexual arrangements. Many communities tried to emancipate women from traditional household and child-rearing responsibilities and to elevate them to positions of equality with men.²

The same spirit and enthusiasm that encouraged the founding of alternative religions influenced the leaders of health reform and alternative medical practices. The health reform movement represented an effort to bridge the gap between health as a religious concern and the drift toward secular science. Health reform emphasized the individual’s relationship to the natural laws established by God.³ Reformers theorized that if women and men could be taught to live in accordance with the laws of God or nature, they could prevent disease. Dr. Mary Gove Nichols stressed the importance of God in the work of health reform—“the first duty we owe to God, to ourselves, our children, and the world, is to have Health.” Some dress reformers saw themselves as missionaries seeking “opportunities to do good,” while others severed their attachment to established religions and studied nature’s laws as the basis for future societal perfection.⁴ Historian Catherine Albanese has identified an ambiguous “nature religion,” a system of thought that influenced the secular and the religious. Believers in nature religion questioned whether God “was the author of Disease.” Their theory posited that God and nature “were congruent principles, mutual and intertwined in the living of life because they were very close to being identical.” By living in harmony with nature, men and women could live the lives God wanted for them.⁵

The notion that God created the human form in his divine image led some health and dress reformers to argue that the body must be clothed in such a manner as to keep it in its “natural” state.⁶ One dress reformer, inspired by a revelation, recognized that “the day has dawned, when many are seeing that the laws of Health come from God; the laws of Fashion from Paris milliners.”⁷ While they sought the body God wanted them to have, many health and religious reformers also drew on literature that blamed the Fall on Eve (woman) and linked sin, body, woman, and clothing. Both dress reformers and antifashionists would use this logic in their campaigns to change female dress.

A wide assortment of Americans took up the call and exhorted their fellow citizens along the path of health. “Nutritional moralist” Sylvester Graham traveled the country, speaking out against red meat, fats, salt, sweets, and white bread. He claimed these “sinful” substances caused sexual excess, disease, and insanity. Instead, he encouraged tooth brushing, frequent baths, looser clothing, and a vegetarian diet.⁸ Health reformers insisted that individual women and men had to be held accountable and responsible for their own health. The general public did not sanction most of the more extreme ideas, but often incorporated the more moderate suggestions into their daily routines. Reformers also culled the most appealing approaches from the many health theories in vogue. Susan B. Anthony, for example, ate a simple diet, believed in breathing plenty of fresh air—always sleeping with a wide-open window—and used fresh water freely, starting each morning with a cold sponge bath.⁹ The Strangite Mormons practiced their own variation on health reform, which prohibited alcohol, narcotics, too-small shoes, tight boots, and cinched waists.¹⁰ Oneida Perfectionists boasted about the healthy lives they lived, but credited the community’s relative freedom from disease to their spirituality rather than their healthful lifestyle, which included a balanced diet, exercise, and hygiene.¹¹

Thomsonianism, Eclecticism, homeopathy, hydropathy, and phrenology could be counted among the most popular of the various medical alternatives introduced. The sects could be distinguished from one another by their therapeutics, degrees of professional education, methods of recruiting patients, relative appeal in rural or urban areas, and the class of their supporters. Yet their medical or health philosophies contained common elements even if their individual therapeutic practices differed. Most rejected “regular” medical practices and stressed hygienic principles. Many agreed on nature’s ability to aid in the curing of disease, criticized the kinds and amounts of drugs used by regular doctors, stressed healthful living as a prerequisite for a strong physical constitution, and, in some instances, offered women a role as practitioners.¹²

The perception that many nineteenth-century women suffered from ill health reflects the important position women held in the health reform movement as objects of concern. Historians have grappled with the question of whether or not women were as sick as the numerous writings of health reformers, doctors, and others indicated.¹³ It has been suggested that the assumption that women were unhealthy may have been self-perpetuating. Regardless of the extent of women’s illnesses, health reform’s stress on the individual’s ability to prevent disease provided women with some measure of autonomy and control over their bodies. Health reform could be liberating for women, but it also made good health a measure of women’s “respectability and self-worth.”¹⁴ As caregivers and maintainers of health, women became responsible for not only their own physical well-being, but that of their families and, indirectly, for society’s well-being. The domestic sphere rose in importance as reformers attempted to standardize the household arts. At the same time, this focus on the home as the center for good health reinforced ideas about women and their place in society. This ambiguity is apparent in several places: health reform stressed self-control as the key to good health, yet made women monitor the health of others; it reinforced the emerging code of “true womanhood” as well as proposing alternatives to it; finally, health reformers attempted to guide women on the way to good health, but blamed them if they fell ill. Reformers held women accountable for many of their ailments, charging that women did not get enough exercise, ate the wrong foods, wore inappropriate clothing, and loved fashion too much. Conflicting notions about women and their role were not unique to health reform, however.

As an element in the design for better living, dress reform became an important part of many health reformers’ agendas. Hydropathic thought replicated the larger health reform movement’s message, and the message of many religions, with its emphasis on self-denial and self-control. The medical practice of hydropathy or water cure (an “irregular” sect) heralded the beneficent effects of pure water.¹⁵ The hydropathic therapeutic system applied cold water (in the form of showers, baths, and compresses) to different parts of the body. Through personal examples of “right living,” hydropathists expected to contribute to the common good. Dress reform fit into the ideology of water cure, and the isolated nature of hydropathic spas made them perfect environments in which to nurture “private” dress reform. Hydropathists encouraged women to restructure their place in society, and saw dress reform as a basis for arguing for new freedoms for women. Like many other antebellum reformers, hydropathists shared a belief that greater societal reformation would come through personal change.

Dress reform and an expanded role for women, closely resembling a domestic feminism, were carried into the public arena, although not necessarily into the formal male political sphere. The most important way the hydropathists aided dress reform was in their key role in the formation and continuation of one of the few formal dress reform organizations in the mid-nineteenth-century United States—the National Dress Reform Association.

While the ideal of good health managed to bridge some of the ideological differences among dress reformers, different definitions of what constituted a healthy woman and how a woman was to achieve good health prevented the reformers from joining forces and creating a mass dress reform organization. Social and intellectual historian Martha H. Verbrugge has argued that “definitions of health carried far more than biological information,” and that they, too, were culturally constructed.¹⁶ The diversity of ideas that dress reformers had about health and medical therapeutics reflected the larger discussion of health issues taking place in antebellum society.

The doctrine of good health and antebellum religious fervor came together in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The roots of Seventh-day Adventism cannot be found in health reform, nor did health reform occupy a central place among the Adventists before the 1860s. The Seventh-day Adventists grew out of a faction of the Millerite movement of the early 1840s. When the Second Coming of Christ failed to occur in 1843, many Millerites returned to their former churches. Shortly after the “Great Disappointment,” sickly seventeen-year-old Ellen Gould Harmon reported having ecstatic visions. In 1846 she married James White, a young Adventist preacher, who became her mentor as well as her husband. Ellen Gould White’s visions influenced the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which she and James White organized.¹⁷

By the late 1850s, the institutionalization of the religion distinguished the Adventists as a separate religious community. First, members accepted Ellen Gould White’s prophetic and authoritative role and her position as a leader in the church.¹⁸ Second, Adventists observed the seventh-day (Saturday) Sabbath and distrusted evolutionists, Catholics, labor unionists, and evangelical Christians who observed Sundays. In the early 1860s, the Seventh-day Adventists embraced complementary reforms, as did many of their secular antebellum reform cousins. Ellen Gould White encouraged members to join temperance organizations and experiment with vegetarianism and water cures, and she discouraged the use of tobacco, tea, and coffee. The ideas of health reformers Sylvester Graham, L. B. Coles, and James Caleb Jackson influenced the Church, as did White’s June 1863 vision, which elevated healthful living to a moral obligation. The vision impressed on her the intimate relationship between physical and mental health and the maintenance of one’s body as a sacred duty.¹⁹

The religious experiences of the Second Great Awakening, the concept of the cult of true womanhood (also known as the cult of domesticity), and the desire to create a “Christian nation” motivated some women to enter reform organizations and, later, the woman’s rights movement. This ideology dictated that true women should be the moral guardians of the family, because they were spiritually pure and, therefore, closer to God. Women remained pure and gained their own sphere because they stayed away from the degrading environment of the outside world. Men, who were by necessity exposed to the outside world and wise in its ways, became women’s protectors. Although women’s purity argued for strict seclusion from the corruptive elements of the outside world, that very corruption obligated women to intervene in the male-run world for the good of their men, the community, the nation, and humankind. Thus, the more women accepted the tenets of the cult of true womanhood, the more they were forced to step outside them.²⁰

A public debate over the proper role of women in the antislavery movement, especially their right to lecture to audiences composed of both sexes, led to the first organized movement for woman’s rights. In 1840, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton traveled to England to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention. When they arrived, they learned that women would not be allowed to participate. Both were upset and frustrated. Writing over the next few years, Mott and Stanton recognized that women had to fight for their own rights, and they decided to host a gathering of sympathetic activists to explore the status of women in society and develop the issue of woman’s rights. About three hundred women and forty men attended the first convention at Seneca Falls in 1848. Stanton read a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled after the Declaration of Independence, that began, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”²¹ During the two days of meetings, the convention adopted and passed unanimously twelve resolutions—except the ninth, which demanded for women the right to vote. Many delegates worried that people would think it ridiculous. It is not surprising that the health crusade also converged with woman’s rights, although it never became central to the campaign for rights.²²

The world of antebellum reformers was a small one; the paths of some reformers crossed often. Susan B. Anthony did not follow Sylvester Graham’s ve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Who Wears the Pants?
• 1. Perfecting America: Antebellum Reform, Fashion, and Antifashion
• 2. The First Dress Reformers: New Harmony, Indiana, 1824–1827
• 3. Pantaloons in Private: Health and Religious Dress Reform before Freedom Dresses
• 4. Pantaloons in Public: Woman’s Rights and Freedom Dresses
• 5. Out of the Closet: Health and Religious Dress Reform after Freedom Dresses
• 6. “I’m Coming Out as a Bloomer”: Eccentric and Independent Dress Reformers
• 7. What Happened to Dress Reform?
• Epilogue: Women Wear the Pants
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index