Women in the 1910s

Women

The women's suffrage movement continued, and although most women were marrying and raising families, some of them were very concerned about career opportunities and economic independence for women.

Among the women forging careers and creating opportunities for other women were:

• Alice Stebbins Wells - In 1910, she joined the police force in Los Angeles as one of the first American female police officers.
• Harriet Quimby - In 1911, she became the first woman in the United States to get a pilot's license, and the following year, she became the first woman to fly across the English Channel. Unfortunately, she died later that year in an airplane accident, the cause of which has never been fully explained.
• Katharine Gibbs - In 1911, she founded a secretarial school to train young women to be executive secretaries, hoping to expand career opportunities for women.
• Irene Castle - Professional ballroom dancer. She had an act with her husband, until he was killed in a plane crash toward the end of WWI. Irene Castle was one of the trendsetters of her day, introducing the short, bobbed hairstyles that would be popular in the 1920s. She later became an animal rights activist.
• Jeannette Rankin - In 1916, she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, making her the first woman to hold a federal office in the United States.

During World War I, many women entered professions which were not normally open to them because many of the men who usually did them were away at war. Most of these jobs were given back to men after the war was over because it seemed only right that the men who had served their country should have their jobs back after their service. However, the women’s suffrage movement continued. It was an international movement, although different countries granted women the right to vote at different times. Women in the United States gained the right to vote at the beginning of the following decade.

Women's clothing evolved during this time to be more practical. At least, for the most part. There were some problematic fashions that restricted women's movement and could even provoke injury, such as the hobble skirt, which made women unable to take more than tiny steps. However, hats were becoming smaller, skirts were becoming shorter, and less women were wearing corsets. Particularly during the war, working women needed to be able to move easily. This video explains more about the evolution of women's clothing during the 1910s and how it related to their vision of the ideal female form. Short hair was not yet fashionable, but women often pulled their hair back and some cut it at the sides to make it look like they had shorter hair when people saw them from the front. Toward the end of the decade, some of the more daring women began wearing their hair short. At first, short hair for women was considered scandalous, but in the following decade, short "bob" hairstyles became much more popular (The History of the Flapper, Part 4: Emboldened by the Bob). This video shows how an average young woman would dress during World War I. Women weren't wearing short skirts (hemlines were still well below the knee), but skirts were becoming shorter than they had been in previous decades, making the women's shoes and stockings more visible. It mentions that shorter skirts and changes in the styles of stockings caused women to begin shaving their legs, something that they would not have done previously. The shorter skirts also inspired new styles of shoes and greater variety in shoe styles. The video also talks about the new popularity in sweaters for women and how popular and practical knitting skills where at the time. The end of the video has an advertisement for a book of knitting patterns based on styles from the 1910s. This video shows a woman dressing in an outfit from 1914 and explains more about women's undergarments and the types of corsets worn in the 1910s. Women in the 1910s were starting to experiment with brassieres, althoug they wouldn't become the type that modern women wear until the 1920s. This video shows an English maid changing from her working clothes to an outfit that she wears to a suffragette meeting. It also talks about her working conditions and what it was like to be a suffragette. This video demonstrates what a WWI VAD nurse in Britain (Voluntary Aid Detachment, affiliated with the British Red Cross) would wear and talks about her duties.

Explanations of women's fashions often focus on the concept of the ideal feminine that was popular in that time period and on clothing for fashionable young women, but real life women's bodies came in as many different shapes in this decade as they ever did. Human forms do not change with the fashion of the decade, and women of the 1910s 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? How they went to the bathroom depended on the type of undergarments the women were wearing, and there were some choices in the 1910s. The videos that explain women's clothing in the 1910s that I mentioned above explain that some women's undergarments of the time had split legs with an opening in the middle, as they did in previous decades, so the women would not have had to actually remove or pull down their underwear to use the toilet. The "combinations" undergarments that they show were used since the 1800s and were called "combinations" because they were one-piece undergarments that combined two earlier undergarments, the chemise and drawers. However, the 1910s versions tended to be shorter and a bit more racy than the 19th century versions. A teddy (sometimes called a camiknicker) is a similar one-piece undergarment that was developed in the 1910s. Teddies continued to be used through the 20th century and are still sometimes used today, in varying styles. These one-piece undergarments had the advantage of being less bulky than previous undergarments. Some women in the 1910s started wearing knickers that didn't have split legs and buttoned at the side, along with a separate undergarment on top, so they would have been more like modern women's underwear (except for the buttons). As for periods, women didn't have disposable supplies in the 1910s (although there had been earlier experiments with disposable products that hadn't caught on), but a form of disposable period supplies was actually inspired by types of disposable bandaging that nurses used on injured soldiers during WWI. 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 1910s, 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).