AMERICA 1900-1910 -- 'THE LADIES' (Part 1)

SEIFERT

Posted By: David (email)
Date: 3/7/2004 at 21:08:23

'AMERICA 1900-1910'

~~The Ladies~~

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'A WOMAN'S PLACE'

In other countries you may be gently urged for an appreciation of the architecture of galleries; but the American man will, in nine cases out of ten, make his first question of the visiting foreigner -- "Well, what do you think of our women?"

-- Katherine G. Busbey, 1910

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When George Bernard Shaw was asked his opinion of American women in l907, he answered: "Every American woman explains that she is an absolute exception and is not like any other American woman. But they are all exactly the same. The only thing to be said for them is they are usually very well dressed and extraordinarily good looking." That was exactly the way American men wanted their women: beautiful, but not so bright and sassy that they wandered from their place in the home.

The emancipation of women from male domination -- as well as from fanciful costumes requiring steel-reinforced corsets and a life close to the hearth -- was barely beginning as the century dawned. Fully one quarter of the states then in the Union denied a wife the right to own property; one third of them allowed her no claim on her own earnings -- even if she worked to support a shiftless husband. And 36 of them, or four fifths, denied her an equal share in the guardianship of her children.

Peons the women may have seemed, but powerless they were not. Despite their lack of legal rights, they had many a compensation. "They haven't th' right to vote," conceded Mr. Dooley, the fictitious philosopher created by humorist Finley Peter Dunne, "but they have th' priv'lege iv controllin' th' man ye ilicit. They haven't th' right to make laws, but they have th' priv'lege iv breakin' thim, which is betther. They haven't the right iv a fair thrile be a jury iv their peers; but they have th' priv'lege iv an unfair thrile be a jury iv their admirin' infeeryors. If I cud fly d'ye think I'd want to walk?"

Most women, as Mr. Dooley suggested, chose to "fly."
They got their way exactly as they were expected to, by dazzling their menfolk with feminine wiles. In this course they were abetted by a flood of "women's literature" -- romantic fiction that created an ideal of the softly genteel but indomitable female, and magazines that gave them practical how-to instructions for achieving the ideal. Articles preached decorum and cautioned against dangerous new ideas. Vogue warned in 1900, "All decent people are agreed that the emancipated novelists are not fit reading," and listed as taboo the "cancerous literature" of Ibsen, Zola and Shaw among others. Along with such admonitions went a steady stream of advice on beauty and fashion, which, as the acid Shaw noted, was American woman's most obvious asset.

The ladies adorned themselves with clothes of great variety and elegance, and they spent an unparalleled amount of money doing it: over a billion dollars a year, $14 million of it on corsets alone. The crowning glory of every lady's get-up was her hat, and nary a woman set foot outdoors without one. It was always liberally garnished with poufs of lace, yards of ribbon, bouquets of flowers, bunches of fruit - and besides any or all of these, it frequently carried a nest of birds.

So prodigal was the slaughter of birds to appease the gods of women's fashion that at a single monthly auction in London in 1900 the plumage of more than 24,000 egrets was up for sale - a fact that the Audubon Society protested in vain. In 1905 the Sears, Roebuck catalogue devoted most of a page to some 75 versions of ostrich feathers for women's headgear; and if ostriches were not to the lady's taste, she could adorn her hats instead with clusters of purple grackles or red-winged blackbirds, orioles or skylarks, pigeons or doves, thrushes or wrens - in short, with almost anything that once had chirped.

Below her fancy bonnets the lady wore equally elaborate dresses like those that were illustrated in 1906 in a magazine with the classy Frenchified title of L'Art de la Mode and le Charme United. Generally she made them herself - or had a dressmaker fashion them for her - from McCall or Butterick patterns; but mass-manufactured clothes were coming on the market as immigrant Jewish tailors poured in from pogrom-ridden Poland and Russia. "There is no place in the world where such dainty machine-made garments of all sorts can be found as in American department stores," said Katherine G. Busbey, the lady quoted earlier. The American innovation of well-made ready-to-wear clothes was accompanied by a notable native contribution to fashion: the shirtwaist, a blouse meant to be worn with a skirt. Paris couture looked down its nose on this aberration, but American
women paid no heed. They took to the shirtwaist first in the 1890s. By 1905 the Sears, Roebuck catalogue was offering 150 different versions of it, from a plain one in lawn at 39 cents to a grand concoction in taffeta at $6.95. In 1907 came the peek-a-boo shirtwaist, a daring creation of eyelet embroidery that allowed the flesh of a lady's arms to show. By 1910 the national production of shirtwaists was big business; New York alone turned out 60 million dollars' worth.

The skirts with which the ladies wore their waists were generally long, but once in a while they rakishly bared an ankle. In 1905 Sears, Roebuck, never a firm to be in the vanguard, offered "Ladies' Walking Skirts" -- garments that "are made expressly for convenience and are also known as the Health Skirt."

Shirtwaists and shorter skirts were more than fashion whims. Simpler clothing, easier to wear and more suitable to an active life, was demanded by the new and freer role that women had begun to seek. In increasing numbers they were going out into the world, taking jobs in offices, shops and factories. The feminist movement, agitating vigorously for legal rights, swept many women into political activity. But public life and outside work were adventures for only a daring minority. The average woman concerned herself with a traditional role - obliging her husband, rearing her children, making her nest a cozy place, easing her cares with light reading. The woman's place was still in the home.

To Be Continued . . . "The Rosy World of Romance"

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Copied by Nancee(McMurtrey)Seifert
March 1, 2004