Women of the 1900s

Women and Society

One of the ideals of feminine beauty from the 1890s through the early 1900s was the Gibson Girl. The illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, whose work appeared in Life magazine, drew beautiful women with exaggerated curves and tiny waists with heads of voluminous, typically upswept, hair. The image of the Gibson Girl was based on many different models, and many women tried to immitate the styles of the illustrations (Charles Dana Gibson Finds the Perfect Woman). The following videos explain how to duplicate a classic Gibson Girl hair style: Part 1 and Part 2. Part 1 focuses more on makeup, and Part 2 focuses more on hair, but the hair styling starts in Part 1, and you really have to see the whole thing to understand it. The Gibson Girl styles faded around the beginning of World War I in the following decade because women wanted and needed more practical styles of hair and clothing.

Another image of women at the time, which also began in the late 19th century and was actually compatible with the Gibson Girl, was that of the New Woman. "New Women" wanted to change society and the role of women in it. The Suffragettes (also called Suffragists, depending on location and the types of tactics they used - in Britain "suffragettes" were more militant) were considered New Women. (Note: In some parts of the western United States, women already at the right to vote at this point in history, but the ability for women to vote would not become national in the United States until 1920.) The increasing urbanization of society provided women with new opportunities for education and employment. Mainly, women with careers focused on the fields that were traditionally considered women's work, such as teaching and nursing. Women also participated in the arts, literature, and theater, which were fields that depended on individual skills and endevours. Gradually, beginning in the 19th century, more women began seeking higher education so they could join more prestigious professions, becoming doctors, lawyers, journalists, and professors. By the early 1900s, they had made considerable progress. Among the women who were making names and careers for themselves were:

• Margaret Abbott - A golfer who became the first American woman to win first place in an Olympic event in 1900.
• Florence Bascom - In 1893, she became one of the first women in the United States to earn a Ph.D in geology, and she was one the first woman to participate in the United States Geological Survey. In 1901, she presented a paper to the Geological Survey of Washington, the first woman to do so. She also established the geology department at Bryn Mawr.
• Mary Roberts Rinehart - Writer, mystery novelist.

Not everyone approved of the "New Woman" image or took them seriously. The picture below was meant to poke fun at New Women for acting like men. The woman in the picture is wearing men's clothing and smoking, while the man (presumably her husband) wears women's clothing and does the laundry.

However, not everyone viewed women who were active in society as unfeminine. In face, in Charles Dana Gibson's view, the ideal woman was intelligent, independent-minded, and active (Charles Dana Gibson Finds the Perfect Woman). Like other New Women, Gibson Girls were well-educated and had poise and confidence, taking an active part in public life. They had skills and hobbies, such as art and music, and were unafraid to show them in public. Gibson Girls were also frequently athletic and were shown taking part in a variety of sports, such as swimming, golf, tennis, and bicycling (The Gibson Girl as the “New Woman”). In short, Gibson Girls weren't just pretty faces; they had minds and personalities and were doers in life.

In the picture below, Charles Dana Gibson shows twelve American women of different ages, backgrounds, and levels of society as they might appear sitting on a jury together in 1902. In reality, women weren't very common on juries in the early 1900s. Typically, women were used as jurors in cases that had women as defendents. However, it's an interesting study in the types of women found in early 1900s society as well as their differing facial expressions and reactions to the case being presented (The Gibson Girl as the “New Woman”). We are not told what the case is supposed to be, but the different backgrounds of these women cause them to view the matter differently. Again, the women have different personalities and independent thoughts.

Over the following decades, as women increasingly struggled to gain the right to vote, have a voice in society, and establish careers of their own, they would also struggle with society's conception of them and even how they viewed themselves. The questions of what made a woman feminine and whether she could remain feminine even while engaging in activities that had been previously considered for men only would continue for decades to come.

In the United States, the first Mother's Day was celebrated in 1908.

Women's Clothing

This video shows a woman dressing in an outfit like those that women would have worn in 1903. This video explains lingerie dresses, which were light, white cotton dresses worn in the summer that were particularly popular in the United States. They were popular because they were easy to wear, easy to clean, and were affordable across different social classes. This type of dress was available as ready-to-wear clothing. Ready-to-wear clothing existed during the 19th century and become more popular throughout the 20th century. Ready-to-wear clothing made the latest fashions more affordable to people in lower classes of society, but it also relied on cheap labor. Marketing used by the clothing industry and department stores urged people to buy new fashions seasonally. Before industrialization, fashion styles would last for years, like the garments themselves (Ready-to-Wear: A Short History of the Garment Industry).

Although the ideal figure for women's fashions for the 1900s was an hourglass figure, emphasized by the use of a corset, real life women's bodies came in as many different shapes as they ever did. Human forms do not change with the fashion of the decade, and women of the 1900s grappled with the same problem that women of other decades also pondered: how to dress more or less in fashion when the fashions of the day were not created with their body types in mind. It was a problem for pregnant women as well as those who were overweight. Lane Byrant opened in 1904 as a small clothing shop in New York City, and one of its earliest requests was a maternity dress that could be worn fashionably in public. It became the first form of commercially-made maternity wear, and Lane Bryant began selling specially-made maternity wear and plus-sized women's fashions. Early in the company's history, Lena Bryant (her name was misspelled when she started her business) had trouble marketing her maternity wear because pregancy was a taboo subject in print. Her husband, who helped to run the business, finally convinced the New York Herald to run one of their advertisements in 1911, and their store's stock sold out completely the very next day. There had been a demand that had gone unfilled because of social taboos regarding pregnancy and the needs of pregnant women. During the 1910s, Bryant also realized that no major clothing manufacturers catered to plus-sized women. After studying the figures of her current customers and gathering data about other women, Bryant developed three different styles of plus-sized clothing (called "stout" at the time). The popularity of the plus-sized clothing quickly exceeded the popularity of the maternity clothing, and by the 1920s, the company was earning millions of dollars. Lane Bryant still exists today and still sells plus-sized clothing.

There are two questions that people often ask about historical women's clothing: how did they go to the bathroom with those extra layers of clothing, and what did they do about their periods? "Combinations" undergarments used since the 1800s. They were called "combinations" because they were one-piece undergarments that combined two earlier undergarments, the chemise and drawers. They had split legs with an opening in the middle so the women would not have had to actually remove or pull down their underwear to use the toilet. These one-piece undergarments had the advantage of being less bulky than previous undergarments. However, some women were still wearing separate drawers and chemises, as the video demonstrating an outfit from 1903 shows. As for periods, women didn't have disposable supplies in the early 1900s (although there had been earlier experiments with disposable products that hadn't caught on), but a form of disposable period supplies was later inspired by types of disposable bandaging that nurses used on injured soldiers during World War I. However, these would not be available commercially until the following decade (this article and the video cited in the article explain more). When the Kotex disposable pads made of cellulose were first marketed during the early 1920s, advertisements mentioned that WWI nurses in France had used it for their periods (Take a Bizarre Look Back at Period Products Used Throughout History). Part of the reason why earlier attempts at marketing disposable products had failed was that periods were a taboo subject in conversation and products associated with them were not something that could easily be advertised. Perhaps the more clinical and patriotic associations with war nurses helped to make the advertising of new disposable products more acceptable during the early 1920s. However, before these disposable products were available and popularized, women had to rely on techniques that they had used in previous decades. During the early 1900s, women would use cloth pads that could be fastened to a belt with buttons or ties or padding that was similar to a folded cloth diaper. These cloth pads or padding would be soaked, washed, and reused after being worn. They were frequently uncomfortable and inconvenient to wear (That Time of the Month in Victorian America).