AMERICA 1900-1910 -- 'THE LADIES' (Part 4)

SEIFERT

Posted By: David (email)
Date: 3/11/2004 at 11:24:08

'AMERICA 1900-1910'

~~ 'The Ladies' ~~

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THE LADIES LEAVE HOME

Though most women were content to play the traditional role of keeper of the home, a growing band of determined rebels was leading a march away from the pots and pans and into the exiciting, man-filled world beyond. They quickly made themselves indispensable to industry and a force to be reckoned with in public affairs. At first blush the men seemed to think this invasion of male precincts was dreadful. "Men want a girl," huffed Independent magazine in April 1901, "who has not rubbed off the peach blossom of innocence by exposure to a rough world." Whether or not the men professed to like the new role of the ladies, the truth was that the men needed them.

In business offices, the bursting growth of the American economy had created an avalanche of paper work. A wonderful contraption called the typewriter had been invented to speed letter writing. However, male clerks found the machine a bore to operate and refused to have any truck with it. Then women tried the new machine, and from the first it was obvious that women and typewriters had been made for each other. Whereas in l870 there had been but seven women stenographers in all of America, by 1900 there were over 100,000 "lady typewriters."

The attractions of a business job were more than simply money - though that was no small considereation, since in an office a girl could make $10 or more a week, twice what she could earn in a kitchen or an old-fashioned sweatshop. There was another, perhaps more compelling lure for the single girl -- and practically every working woman was single. She found in business a world full of eager men to flirt with, a happy prospect, even if some turned out to be mashers like the plug-uglies portrayed in self-defense manuals.

The working girl was not the only woman who was itching to get out of the house. Her married sister was ready, too. And with no end of handy gadgets from Sears' wish book to speed her kitchen chores, she had more time to get around than her mother had had. The first thing she usually did was join a woman's club, one of those earnest organizations dedicated to helping the poor - or simply to providing for the "self-improvement" of the members themselves.

By the end of the decade, almost a million ladies belonged to such groups. They pressured local governments to create juvenile courts, and they brought about enlightened child-labor laws. What they did most, however, was simply make the ladies feel busy and worthwhile. As the movement continued to grow, its box score of actual achievements sank so low that Edward Bok, the powerful editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, fired off a blast in his January 1910 issue (condensed below):

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Now what has the average woman's club done during the past five years? What has the average woman's club done for clearer understanding of self-sex and life in the mind of the child? Absolutely nothing. What has the average woman's club done to agitate or prevent the needless blindness of 33 per cent of little blind babies? What has been done by the average woman's club toward the curse that is the one direct cause of sending 80 per cent of the women of today to the operating table? What has the average woman's club done toward the abolishment of the public drinking cup? What has the average woman's club done toward the repression in newspapers of indecent advertisements relating to private diseases, nostrums, dangerous "beauty" remedies for the skin and hair?

Until the woman's club shall show a more intelligent conception of its trustee ship, I insist that the woman's club up to date has been "weighed in the balance and found wanting."

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'THE GIBSON GIRL'

From 1890 until the First World War, American women between 15 and 30 yearned to be like the dazzling visions that floated through the ink drawings of Charles Dana Gibson. The Gibson girl -- tall and stately, superbly dressed, artful but never truly wicked -- first appeared in illustrations in the old humor magazine - Life. Overnight she became the idol and the model for a generation.

"Before Gibson synthetized his ideal woman, the American girl was vague, nondescript, inchoate," wrote a reporter in the New York World. "As soon as the world saw Gibson's ideal it bowed down in adoration, saying: 'Lo, at last the typical American girl.' "And a European commentator exclaimed of the Gibson girl: "Parents in the United States are no better than elsewhere but their daughters! Divinely tall, brows like Juno, lovely heads poised on throats aphrodite might envy."

The adulation paid his pen-and-ink ladies astonished Gibson, who regarded himself as a social and political satirist, not as a style-setter for women. "If I hadn't seen it in the papers," he said, "I should never have known that there was such a thing as a Gibson girl."

He was, apparently, the only one in such ignorance. so eagerly did women look to his paragon for arbitrament in fashion that Gibson was charged with competing against the famous Butterick dress patterns, and one contemporary observer wrote: "You can always tell when a girl is taking the Gibson Cure by the way she fixes her hair."

Men were just as smitten with the Gibson girl; imitating the handsome swains who always attended her, they shaved their mustaches and padded the shoulders of their jackets. And more than one gay blade decorated his living quarters with Gibson girl wallpaper, which the manufacturer touted as just the thing for a bachelor apartment.

Gibson amiably granted licenses to put his girls on china plates, silverware, dresser sets, pillows, whiskbroom holders and virtually any other respectable surface that would accommodate them. But when an automobile manufacturer asked him to enter an advertising contest, offering a cash prize if he won but demanding the right to keep the drawing if he lost, he retorted: "I am running a competition for automobiles. Kindly submit one of yours. If acceptable, it wins an award. If rejected, it becomes my property."

Gibson used an abundance of this kind of waspish wit, together with his talent for drawing unsurpassable girls, to poke fun at the foibles of society - in fiction illustrations, in cartoons and in serialized picture stories that the artist captioned himself.

To Be Continued. . .'Sports'

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Copied by Nancee(McMurtrey)Seifert
March 3, 2004