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By Root 7913 0

themselves particularly chaste and pure and rejected sex apart from procreation. Respectable sorts assumed the opposite and denounced them as sexual libertines. When Andrews and Fourierist Albert Brisbane founded the New York Free Love League in 1853, Henry Raymond’s New York Times accused its five to six hundred members of holding regular “orgies” at its 555 Broadway clubhouse, though his own news columns admitted that, whatever their theories, their social events were refined gatherings, little different from “an ordinary family party.” But it was precisely the theory that alarmed Raymond, who saw in it an assault on the family; he kept up his sensational coverage and prodded police into raiding the club and arresting some members. The cases were thrown out of court, and the circle continued in existence, but from then on, respectable and conventional feminists would find themselves charged with being Free Lovers, stifling further discussion.

New York women thus faced substantial obstacles when they tried to loosen some of the constraints that bound them. They were barred from most professions, banned from labor unions, balked in their efforts to limit prostitution, excluded from many public activities and spaces. City life did afford women new avenues of expression, however, wherever an expansion of female possibilities suited the needs of the marketplace.

“FASHION’S DESPOTIC RULE”

As rapidly as republican simplicity was scrapped in urban architecture, it waned even faster in the field of feminine attire. Nowhere was this more striking than in New York City, capital of America’s clothing industry and portal for la mode parisienne. Fashion was the affluent woman’s metier, a way to display her expertise (as well as her husband’s wealth). Devotees of fashion redeployed old words to describe new looks: “elegant” gained currency from 1845, “stunning” from 1849, and “chic” from 1856.

The pursuit of fashion also validated expanded female claims on city space. Shopping was irreproachably legitimate, and respectable women could wander the Broadway commercial district without reproach in search of commodities. This “midtown” terrain, easily accessible from uptown’s female zone yet satisfactorily distant from downtown’s all-male turf, emerged as an acceptable heterosexual domain (as would Central Park).

Fashion provided women farther down the social scale with expanded employment opportunities. Quite apart from the thousands employed in the garment industry itself, milliners and dressmakers blossomed, most of whom affected fancy French names, though most were Irish working class. They subscribed to French fashion magazines, kept up with current French designers, and maintained correspondents in Paris who dispatched dress dolls in the latest styles. Cosmeticians did a thriving trade too, now that New York women had abandoned the old republican association of painted faces with aristocrats or whores. Some professional hairdressers in the 1850s opened their own shops, and others were attached to hotels for out-of-towners, but most still attended wealthy patrons in their homes. On New Year’s Eve hairdressers went from house to house, crimping with heating irons, working through the night until noon next day when visiting began; those clients done early might sit up all night so as not to spoil their hairdos.

Working women were consumers too. Immigrants might arrive at Castle Garden in traditional costume, but those who could afford it shed such garb with great alacrity and slipped into something fashionable. Stylish dress could signal one’s aspirations, attract an upward-striving husband, and erase (or at least smudge) sartorial discrepancies of class. When Irish maids donned hoopskirts and flowered bonnets, one observer noted, they were “scarcely to be distinguished from their employers.” Irritated mistresses agreed, and some insisted their employees wear costumes adapted to their station in life.

Democratization of fashion led to contestation as well as imitation. The bourgeois model of beauty favored a pale-complexioned, heart-shaped