Dreamers of a New Day. Sheila Rowbotham
emigrating from Bristol to Boston in 1890, Helena Born explained in her lecture on ‘Whitman and Nature’:
Ordinary clothes are apt to be an impediment to the appreciation of nature. For women the disqualifications of dress have been very serious – happily becoming less so, not so much from a saner view of the dignity of the body as from the demands of locomotive improvement.14
By the turn of the century the arts and crafts movement was inspiring simplified forms of clothing suitable for locomotive, natural women. The Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, founded in 1901, propagated ‘health, comfort, activity’.15 One of its leading members, Janet Ashbee, had settled at Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds when her husband, the designer Charles Ashbee, brought the Guild and School of Handicrafts to the village. Their ‘arts and crafts’ community allowed scope for eccentric innovation. In the early 1900s Janet Ashbee was to be seen in a peasant smock, sun bonnet, fisherman’s jacket and sandals.16 Utopian communities fostered freer clothes along with new lifestyles, which influenced first the bohemian intelligentsia and eventually moved into the mainstream. Nellie Shaw went bare-legged and in sandals at the Cotswolds anarchist colony, Whiteway – though when her mother visited, she sat down on the road just outside Gloucester and donned ‘stockings and shoes to please her’.17
The Healthy and Artistic Dress Union was keen to establish a counter-cultural aesthetic of ‘graceful appearance’, and promoted flowing Grecian clothes for women seeking expressive freedom.18 The style proved popular with the American dancer Isadora Duncan and with the British pioneer of exercise and healthy food, Margaret Morris. The wealthy American lesbian émigrée in Paris, Natalie Barney, created a ‘Temple à l’Amitié’ in her overgrown Parisian garden in the early 1900s, where her women friends danced in scanty Grecian robes evocative of nymphs close to nature.19
Margaret Morris, 1921
But there was more to clothes than met the eye. ‘Cloth is a social tissue; a sort of social skin,’ wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her 1915 The Dress of Women, arguing that the distinct costumes of men and women were meant to ensure that ‘we should never forget sex’.20 In the late nineteenth century the practical shirt-waister and tie subverted these indicators. By desexualizing clothing, women could enter male spaces – the workplace or the café at night – while signalling that they were not sexually available. The new women who went a step further, dressing as men and cropping their hair, found they could walk through cities unmolested. Masculine styles were consequently at once the badge of a geographical mobility and marked the social arrival of the new woman in men’s zones. Nevertheless, to revolt against the conventions of appearance and behaviour meant putting oneself into an unprotected space. Critics sneered at the plain shirtwaisters and ties worn by Russian-Jewish immigrant working-class new women who sat in cafés debating marriage, the family and working conditions. One hostile observer in the 1890s derided the ‘atmosphere of tea-steam and cigarette smoke’, denouncing the ‘pallid, tired, thin-lipped, flat-chested and angular’ women for whom ‘The time of night means nothing until way into the small hours.’21 To dress, act and think differently upset cultural assumptions about gender that were deeply embedded.
Relatively small deviations in conduct could place a woman outside the norms of socially acceptable behaviour and invoke rejection, not only from men, but from other women. Cosmo Gordon Lang (later to become Archbishop of Canterbury) recalled how Beatrice Webb, while researching her book on the co-operative movement, upset the co-operative women of Hebden Bridge in 1889 by asking if she could smoke, then by announcing that she would go for a walk with the men on Haworth Moor.
The ladies were now all the more convinced that they must be at hand to protect their lords. We started, an odd-looking party. But the good women, in their long dresses and elastic-sided boots, wholly unaccustomed to walk further than the distance between their homes and shop or chapel, soon gave up. They intimated to the New Woman that they must return. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said she, with engaging frankness, ‘but I’m going on.’ Then one of the guardians of the proprieties turned to another and said grimly: ‘The impudent hussy.’22
Some women preferred to disregard dress sooner than defy the codes overtly. Neither Sylvia Pankhurst nor Ada Nield Chew were particularly interested in fashion. However, ignoring what you looked like could also make you memorably bizarre. In the 1970s, after the passage of more than half a century, the former trade union leader Maurice Hann remembered Sylvia Pankhurst speaking at a meeting in a blouse that was inside out. ‘A proper scruff,’ he declared to me with the admonition not to quote him.23 Doris Nield Chew recollected how her mother ‘was completely without personal vanity’. Indeed, her hairdresser recalled ruefully how Chew ‘crammed her hat on a head of beautifully waved hair’.24
Ada Nield Chew might go ‘round the world on a sixpenny tin of Pond’s cold cream’, but plenty of middle-class feminists rebelled without loss of style.25 Appropriating conventional forms of femininity offset unconventional political action and confused male opponents. Ironically this resulted in suffrage shoppers being courted by the new large department stores – despite the broken windows. The Women’s Social and Political Union militants, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, were studiously elegant and would have concurred with the Liberal father of the constitutional suffragist, Margery Corbett Ashby, who advised her: ‘if you want to reform anything else, do not reform your clothes’.26
In contrast, for working-class women fashionable clothes could mark a break with deference. In early twentieth-century America the bright, modern young telephone operators who formed an elite among working women brought glamour to the picket line in defiance of scabs. They took a class pride in wearing clothes that signalled their access to the respect and power surrounding rich women. Similarly, when Milka Sablich, the American miner’s daughter who became active in the violent strikes of the Colorado mining industry in the late 1920s, was taunted for wearing a silk dress, red-haired ‘Flaming Milka’ flashed back: ‘Miners’ children like pretty things as well as anyone else!’27 In Britain during World War One, young women in munitions factories earned high wages by working in conditions of considerable danger. They responded by seeking fun and spending their money on clothes, earning disapproving comments in the press. Such criticism provoked a defiant letter to the Daily Express in November 1917 from a ‘Munition Girl’:
Those who point the finger of scorn at me seem to me to be utterly without imagination. Let them put themselves in my place. Let them realise what it means, after a life of soul-suffocation, to find oneself suddenly able to breathe free air, to see the walls of one’s prison house gradually crumbling, to feel the shackles of tyranny loosening from one’s feet, to taste a tiny bit of ambition realised. Ambition is the same power in every walk of life, whether it aims at world domination or the possession of a small article of flesh-coloured crepe de Chine.28
A. Philip Randolph and his Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an organization of black workers on the Pullman trains, encouraged African-American women to stand up for their rights and stay in fashion. The union journal, the Messenger, opined that ‘Bobbed hair is very often attractive and becoming. Bobbed brains however are a serious handicap to anyone.’29 Randolph was encouraged by his wife, the socialist Lucille Randolph, who saw the ‘new negro woman’ as beautiful and brainy. She linked the Brotherhood’s ‘ladies’ auxiliary’, the Women’s Economic Council, to 1920s modernity by holding ‘bobbed hair’ contests.
The semiology of the ‘social tissue’ was various indeed. Well-dressed suffragettes could infiltrate a venue in ladylike mode, only to smash windows and hurl axes at politicians. Workers dressed up to assert class, race and gender pride, while ‘new women’ donned male clothing as a means of holding gender at bay. The shirt and tie were marks of the respect due to women at the cutting edge. When in 1920 members of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy Club made an album for the club’s founder, Marie Jenny Howe, several chose photographs of themselves in white shirts and ties – including Heterodoxy’s only black