Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [649]
Shopgirls, milliners, and dressmakers’ assistants—professionally well versed in prevailing styles—mischievously parodied elite fashions. They adopted startling color combinations, ornate hats, and elaborate decorations even gaudier than those favored by the wealthy. By recycling fashions of the 1820s, they essayed a retro look. G’hals, like ladies, promenaded in public space, sashaying along the Bowery after working hours with girlfriends or young men, indulging the pleasures of city life, reveling in new freedom from customary constraints.
Yet fashion could restrain women as well as liberate them, and a largely female band of feminists, writers, editors, reformers, and advice givers pointed to its more problematic aspects. They found prevailing styles cumbersome and imprisoning. Layers of petticoats weighed down the wearer, long skirts dragged through the mud, and corsets were positively hazardous to health. Emily Thornwell, in her Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility in Manners, Dress and Conversation (1856), was one of many who deplored tight lacing as causing coughing, consumption, headaches, heart palpitation, deformed ribs, uterine and spinal disorders, and “an extreme heaving of the bosom, resembling the panting of a dying bird.”
Fashion was unrepublican, the handmaiden of aristocratic luxury and self-indulgence. It valued consumption over production, appearance above character, idleness over industry. “Do we not see females in every fashionable circle,” queried Mrs. A. J. Graves in her Woman in America (1843), “who fill no loftier station in social life, and who live as idly and as uselessly as the gorgeously attired inmates of the harem?”
Fashion was expensive. It undid hardworking husbands. Magazine writers often depicted bankrupt businessmen as victims of their wives’ pursuit of lavish wardrobes. The pursuit itself opened women to ridicule. Anna Cora Mowatt’s popular play Fashion (1845) presented a parvenu Mrs. Tiffany who, in her attempts to become a woman of fashion, made a complete fool of herself until set straight by Adam Trueman, her virtuous friend from the country.
Stylish women, finally, were slaves to fashion, which is why feminist reformers attuned to the politics of dress declared that “our sex should rise above subserviency to fashion’s despotic rule.” Determined to take grass-roots control of the mode, the women boldly proposed an alternative costume. Picking up on a gymnastic uniform promoted by the New York City Water-Cure Journal during the 1840s, two upstate women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer (editor of the Lily, a temperance paper) began to wear and publicize a seemlier version in 1851. It consisted of a simple woolen dress, shortened to midcalf or knee, worn over billowing Oriental pantaloons—a blend of Turkish and Quaker. Soon many feminists were wearing the reform attire, which journalists promptly labeled “bloomers.”
The initiative came under instant and ferocious attack. Men were outraged to see women wearing trousers, a patent transgression of gender boundaries. Little boys wore dresses until five years of age, when they ritually signaled their departure from the female community by donning trousers. Strong women who disagreed with their husbands had long been accused of trying to “wear the breeches.” Men jeered at bloomer wearers in the street. Boys pelted them with snowballs in winter, apple cores in summer. They were the butt of vicious caricatures and sexist jokes.
Women didn’t much care for the new style either. Conservative women saw it as a threat to their sphere. Fashionable ladies sniffed