The 19th Century
In American Beauty, author Lois Banner characterizes the 19th century as the feminists vs. the fashionables. Feminists in later 19th century America worked hard to promote the idea that any woman could be beautiful (probably with some obvious elitist, racist, and nativist complications, mind you). This was in opposition to the idea that only a few chosen women were graced with beauty and that the arena of appearance was competitive. Furthermore the idea was that the natural woman was better; beauty in fact, followed virtue, so that a woman who was virtuous, thought at the time to be the specific domain and talent of the woman (please see the Women’s Christian Temperance movement and the Cult of True Womanhood), was likely to exude beauty. To feminists not only was fashion and the pursuit of beauty often dangerous, as in the well-documented ill health effects of wearing a corset or the willingness of women to apply skin lighteners containing lead, but the often consuming focus on beauty and fashion was also a distraction from the pursuit of women’s rights and an impediment to a woman’s ability to elevate herself through education. Dress reformer Celia Burleigh wrote, “Dress has become primary, woman secondary. Other dress reformers, who included Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone Blackwell, manifested this feeling and a concern for the physical restrictions of women’s fashions in their alternative manners of dress such as shorter dresses and bloomers. Many wearers of the reform dress back off after public criticism eclipsed their other important concerns (like voting), but of course, we know that eventually women’s dress does become less restrictive (at least literally) though it isn’t exactly the triumph over fashion that might have been imagined. Nonetheless, the point remains that dress was not only an area that needed change but also was, though not smoothly, a part of the pathway to change. I flippantly quip to my students that you couldn’t drive a car to go vote in a corset…but it’s not untrue.
 |
| Corsets were so crazy that you needed assistance. As a bleeding heart liberal, I feel for this poor maid. As a woman who has struggled with a snap crotch "miraclesuit"...no comment. |
 |
| Oh shit. Amelia Bloomer is why we call bloomers bloomers. |
Nonetheless, despite the obvious dangers of certain practices, the protests of advocates for women, and the prohibition against obvious cosmetic enhancement that ebbed and flowed throughout the 19th century, many women still engaged in beautification practices. The reality of this time is as Charlotte Perkins Gilman put it in her 1898 Women and Economics, “that the economic status of women generally is dependent on men generally.” She further says that “her living, all that she gets,--food, clothing, ornaments, amusements, luxuries…these things bear relation only to the man she marries, the man she depends on,-- to how much he has and how much he is willing to give her.” Women’s primary form of agency (if you want to call it that) for attaining greater wealth was through marriage. And the more distinct her sex, which I take to mean the more pronounced her femininity, the more optimal she appears to the masculine gaze of this era. Thus, feminine beauty, whether a reflection of nature, virtue, or enhancement, was ostensibly (then as now) a way to secure a better marriage and thus position in life. The 24 karat question here seems to be...how much different is this now? It's an actual question, not just a rhetorical one. Someone answer it.
As is common when discussing the struggle for women’s rights in the 19th century, which often emanated from white women of some means, the above analysis is truer for white upper and middle income ladyhood than anything else. I can and will address beauty culture for African- American women in the late 19th and early 20th century directly in a later, more specific entry.
No comments:
Post a Comment