Femininity (11 page)

Few women are reluctant to wear pants because they don’t believe they have the right
to wear a fly front. Some think they’re too tall and might be mistaken for a man from
the rear, and some think they’re too broad in the beam for a pair of pants to do justice
to their figure. There’s no doubt that since most of the rear ends we’re accustomed
to viewing in pants belong to men (and most of these are covered by boxy jackets),
a woman with broad, full hips will think she looks better—even gracefully voluptuous
in the nice, old-fashioned sense—when she puts on a skirt. To the modern mentality,
grace in pants does seem to require a slender rear end.

A skirt, any skirt, has a feminizing mission that goes beyond the drawing of a polite,
yet teasing, shade over the female crotch and its functions, and of flattering or
draping the rear end and stomach with graceful folds. Expansive, casual body gestures
are characterized as immodest and unfeminine when practiced by women, and skirts restrict
those large, free movements. One does not stride. One is perpetually reminded to be
circumspect when sitting or bending down. Whatever its length, and however wide, the
open-endedness of a skirt cannot help but guide the body into a set of conservative
poses and smaller gestures, and the traditional feminine accessories that went with
a skirt in an earlier era (corset, fan, muff, parasol and shawl) and the shoes and
pocket-books of today have always reinforced those restrictions. But of
course. Feminine clothing has never been designed to be functional, for that would
be a contradiction in terms. Functional clothing is a masculine privilege and practicality
is a masculine virtue. To be truly feminine is to accept the handicap of restraint
and restriction, and to come to adore it.

Magnificent garments in the late Middle Ages were intentionally designed to immobilize
the royal personage who wore them as much as to impress the lower orders with their
visual drama, for elaborate, hampering clothes were proof that royal desires were
served by the labor of others. A billowing sleeve, an immense white ruff, and luxurious
layers of fur and embroidered, jewel-encrusted fabric were status symbols for kings
and their courtiers even more than for queens and their ladies. A nobleman’s cloak
was often more splendid than his wife’s. Male plumage became such a giddily competitive
venture that in order to preserve the boundaries of class, sumptuary laws were enacted
periodically throughout Western Europe to allocate the wearing of silk, sable, velvet
and threads of gold and silver by rank and station—so many robes for a baron, so many
yards for a knight, etcetera. Allotments for wives and daughters were added to the
later codes as something of an afterthought.

Under the energizing momentum of political revolution, industrial progress and a burgeoning
middle class, a change in attitude toward clothing began to take place in the late
eighteenth century. Immobilizing garments and uncomfortable accessories were out of
step with the fast-moving times. Elegant men’s wear began its steady advance toward
functional utility and even adapted some practical ideas from the workingman’s wardrobe.
Gentlemen began to wear clothes that reflected the new masculine values of dynamic
action combined with serious responsibility, expressed through expert tailoring and
practical, dark colors. Class distinctions were maintained not by frilly impediments
and ostentatious display but by a new, subtle standard of good cloth and good fit.

No such fundamental change, however, took place for women. While the design of men’s
clothes was streamlined and democratized to reflect the vigorous efficiency of the
soot-filled age of industrialization, the design of women’s clothes did not
move forward at all. Although the industrial revolution employed the labor of working-class
women in factories and mills, it also produced the middle-class lady of leisure with
her staff of household servants and her strictly defined feminine sphere, a sphere
whose parameters were motherhood, social and moral refinement, and gracious adornment
of her husband’s life and home. Throughout the nineteenth century, hoops, crinolines,
bustles and trains might come and go, taste in color might veer and shift, the width
of the skirt, the swell of the sleeve, the location of the waist and the shape of
the bust might vary with considerable imagination from season to season, but the woman
of fashion remained a perishable confection, a wedding-cake vision of conspicuous
consumption whose impractical clothes reflected the aristocratic values of centuries
past. And she had no followers more attentive or more eager to become the Perfect
Lady than the idle wives and daughters of the newly moneyed bourgeoisie with their
newly acquired aspirations and pretensions, and their newly acquired laundresses and
lady’s maids.

In material terms—ill-paid laborers in the mills, including children, worked day and
night to spin out the yardage; sewing machines were introduced to automate the stitching—this
meant the piling on of ruffles, ribbons, flounces, piping, fringes, tassels, lace,
beads and bows, and numerous starched petticoats to bedeck and adorn a sedate and
artificially molded figure. Perhaps one season a crinoline cage might replace the
petticoats, or perhaps a hobble skirt might replace the hoop, to be replaced in turn
by a bustle or train. Whatever the innovation, the latest feminine mode was usually
expressed through the fashion language of a period revival.

A pattern of looking backward continues to shape the design and marketing of women’s
clothes in the twentieth century. New styles regularly owe their inspiration to historic
costumes and the “bringing back” is happily acknowledged—be it Dior’s New Look of
1947, which brought back long skirts, crinolines and the waist-cincher, the Imperial
Russian peasant look of Saint Laurent in 1976, which brought back frogging, piping
and high boots, the frankly named 1940s “retro” look a year or so later which brought
back slit skirts, shoulder pads and bright-red
lipstick, or Ralph Lauren’s Victorian look of 1980. Except for the geometric space-age
designs of Courrèges and Mary Quant in the turbulent mid-Sixties (white vinyl boots
and miniskirts), new clothes and shoes for women are trumpeted each season as yet
another “return to femininity.” By contrast, fashions for men change very little from
year to year and they never look back, either for inspiration or as a selling technique.
A “return to masculinity” is an unthinkable concept, for masculine is defined by the
present tense. But in clothes, in attitude and in everything else, to be safely feminine—to
“retain” her femininity—a woman must look to the distant past.

Given this striking divergence in purpose between men’s and women’s fashions, it is
no wonder that the creative design centers took root and flourished in different places.
Men looked toward London, the somber city of banking and mercantile commerce with
its cautious, responsible tailors of Savile Row. Women cast their covetous eyes toward
Paris, the thrillingly wicked citadel of romance and art, with its exotic perfumes,
its fanciful dressmakers and ingenious corsetieres.

Although there was more than a symbolic connection between the suffocating confinements
of women’s long skirts and the suffocating restrictions that defined women’s roles,
the dress-reform movement of the 1850s became an excruciating personal torment and
a political mortification to the American heroines of women’s rights. All told, not
more than one hundred suffragists dared to appear in public wearing “the rational
dress,” as it came to be known in health and hygiene circles. Among the pioneers were
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, the Grimke sisters and the self-effacing Quaker
organizer Susan B. Anthony, who later recalled this time in her life as “a mental
crucifixion.”

It was popularly named the “Bloomer” costume because Amelia Bloomer, a Seneca Falls
neighbor of Mrs. Stanton, took up the cause in the pages of her reformist newspaper,
The Lily,
and because “Bloomer” sounded so ridiculous and funny. But the suffragists simply
called it “the short dress” and they were punctilious about giving credit where credit
was due—to Mrs. Stanton’s cousin Elizabeth Smith Miller, the daughter of abolitionist
Gerrit Smith.

Mrs. Miller’s creation, which she had originally stitched up for working in the garden,
had a somewhat Turkish look. The lower part consisted of a pair of ankle-length pantaloons
with an overskirt that came to the knees. To the knees! No trailing skirts to get
caught underfoot, stepped on, ripped or soiled. No undulating petticoats to gather
up and hold with dainty grace while turning a corner or sitting down, in order to
avoid a mishap. On a visit to Seneca Falls, Lizzie Miller gave Lizzie Stanton a practical
demonstration. She showed her cousin how confidently she could walk up a flight of
stairs with a baby in her arm and an oil lamp balanced in her other hand, without
fear of tripping. Mrs. Stanton, who already had four of her seven children, was instantly
converted. With the bounding enthusiasm for which she was famous, she applied the
scissors and needle to her own long skirts and began to evangelize among her many
friends in suffrage and abolition, offering to make a present of the short dress to
Susan Anthony, a promising new ally from the temperance movement. Miss Anthony replied
that she would never put it on.

“We are like the poor fox in the fable, having cut off his tail,” Mrs. Stanton wrote
to her cousin. “We can have no peace in travelling unless we cut off the great national
petticoat … Stand firm.”

There were many exhortations from one feminist to another in the years 1851 and 1852
to stand firm. Wrote Ida Husted Harper, “… the press howled in derision, the pulpit
hurled its anathemas and the rabble took up the refrain. On the streets of the larger
cities the women were followed by mobs of men and boys, who jeered and yelled and
did not hesitate to express their disapproval by throwing sticks and stones.” Many
a votes-for-women rally turned into a circus when an unruly mob invaded the hall to
gawk at the Bloomers. What began as a personal convenience had turned into a painful
political principle, the right of a woman to wear comfortable clothes. In December
1852 while visiting with Mrs. Stanton, Susan B. took the plunge, shortening her skirts
and cutting her hair to make a total statement. “Well, at last I am in short skirt
and trousers!” she anxiously wrote to Lucy Stone. She was the last of the great
suffragists to adopt the style. Within one year, she would be among the last to still
wear it.

Despite the support of her husband and father, who believed that dress reform was
the key to women’s emancipation, Elizabeth Smith Miller lowered her skirts with each
passing season. She wore some variation of her Turkish costume for seven years, as
did Amelia Bloomer. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s bloomers became an unpleasant issue in
her husband’s campaign for the state senate, inspiring a bit of verse from the opposition:
“Twenty tailors take the stitches, Mrs. Stanton wears the breeches.” Her son Neil
wrote from school begging his mother not to wear the short dress when she came to
visit. In less than two years Mrs. Stanton capitulated. She let down her hems and
urged her movement friends to full retreat, writing to Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone,
“I know what you must suffer in consenting to bow again to the tyranny of fashion,
but I also know what you suffer among fashionable people in wearing the short dress;
and so, not for the sake of the cause, nor for any sake but your own, take it off!”

Anthony and Stone conferred quickly by letter. From Stone: “I have bought a nice new
dress, which I have had a month, and it is not made because I can’t decide whether
to make it long or short. Not that I think any cause will suffer, but simply to save
myself a great deal of annoyance and not feel when I am a guest in a family that they
are mortified if other persons happen to come in. I was at Lucretia Mott’s a few weeks
ago, and her daughters took up a regular labor with me to make me abandon the dress.
They said they would not go in the street with me …”

Susan B. replied in agitation, “If Lucy Stone, with all her powers of eloquence, her
loveliness of character, who wins all that hear the sound of her voice, can not bear
the martyrdom of the dress, who can? Mrs. Stanton’s parting words were, ‘Let the hem
out of your dress today, before tomorrow’s meeting.’ I have not obeyed her but have
been in the streets and printing offices all day long and have had rude, vulgar men
stare me out of countenance and heard them say as I opened the door, ‘There comes
my Bloomer.’ O, hated name! I am known only as one of
the women who ape men—coarse, brutal men! Oh, I can not, can not bear it any longer.”

The failure of the Bloomer movement can be laid at many doors. Mrs. Stanton conceded
years later that pantaloons under a knee-length skirt were “not artistic,” and Mrs.
Bloomer ruefully acknowledged that new ideas in women’s fashion did not arise from
reformist journals but from the romantic fantasies draped and sewn for the Emperor’s
ladies in France. Among the denizens of the water-cure resorts and the partisans of
the “improved” spelling, the rational dress had its devoted champions—they tried to
rename it the “American costume”—but these women were on the fringe, determinedly
unfashionable, and the suffragists needed to win the hearts and minds of the nation.
Where the suffragists saw a short skirt and a modest leg covering that allowed them
to move with an ease and freedom they had never known, others saw only a pair of obtrusive
pants that confirmed their worst fears—that suffragists were women who really wanted
to be men.

In Victorian England, where femininity was enshrined in ribbons and bonnets and Alençon
lace, reform-minded women also formed a Rational Dress Society to press for the divided
skirt. But the real drama lay with a group of working-class heroines who fought desperately
from 1850 to 1877 to remain in trousers, for their livelihood depended on rugged clothes.
These were the colliery workers of Lancashire, Wigan, Birmingham and South Wales,
the hardy pit-brow lasses and mine-tip girls who sifted and loaded the coal after
men brought it up to the surface. (The women had already been banned from working
the mine shafts and tunnels.) Dressed in trousers, clogs and sacking aprons, the coal
haulers labored in twelve-hour shifts, and by all accounts they were fiercely proud
of their grimy independence. Newspaper exposes and government subcommissions periodically
deplored the colliery women in their “disgusting habiliments,” and repeated efforts
were made to oust them from the mines on the pious ground that their work clothes
rendered them “unsexed” and degraded.