Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
University of Illinois Press (2021), Edition: First, 268 pages
Description
"Often condemned as a form of oppression, fashion could and did allow women to express modern gender identities and promote feminist ideas. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox examines how clothes empowered women, and particularly women barred from positions of influence due to race or class. Moving from 1890s shirtwaists through the miniskirts and unisex styles of the 1970s, Rabinovitch-Fox shows how the rise of mass media culture made fashion a vehicle for women to assert claims over their bodies, femininity, and social roles. She also highlights how trends in women's sartorial practices expressed ideas of independence and equality. As women employed new clothing styles, they expanded feminist activism beyond formal organizations and movements and reclaimed fashion as a realm of pleasure, power, and feminist consciousness. A fascinating account of clothing as an everyday feminist practice, Dressed for Freedom brings fashion into discussions of American feminism during the long twentieth century"--… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member nancyadair
When I was a child growing up, I wore a dress with white gloves and a hat to wear to church.
In junior high, girls were made to kneel and if their skirts didn’t touch the ground they were sent home to change their clothes. Twiggy and Mod style and Sassoon hair cuts were big when I was a freshman
At college, girls wore jeans and long hair parted in the middle. My first full-time job women wore micro-mini skirts. At my tenth class reunion, several of us sported frizzy perms, a kind of Afro for white women. Dress for Success came along and for my first job in sales, I wore a Brooks Brothers navy suit with an oxford cloth button down shirt and ribbon tie, and high heels, and I carried a leather brief case but no purse.
I remember midi skirts, and maxi skirts, platform shoes and cowboy boots and transparent shirts and designer clothes and track suits–and now it seems everyone wears hoodies and sweat pants and expensive running shoes.
Whew. I have seen a lot of changes. Then, I think of my grandmother who was born in 1916 and the changes she saw in her lifetime.
I had not considered the relationship between fashion and feminism. Weren’t Flappers just party girls? The Gibson Girl a mere fashion icon? I knew that Bloomers, the ugly harem pants under short skirts, were designed to allow women mobility. I remember Burn the Bra feminists. But fashion has a closer relationship to feminism than I had considered.
Dressed for Freedom debunks the myth that women’s freedom and fashion were incompatible, showing how icons from the Gibson Girl to Hollywood stars were intertwined with feminism. Considering class and race, working women in the city and activists who appeared on magazine covers, the author traces the transformation of fashion between 1890 and 1980.
Although only 272 pages, there is a lot of information packed into these chapters.
Beginning with the Gibson Girl, the white, middle class, active woman who wore shirtwaists and bicycle skirts, the author shows how dress reflected a ‘new woman’ who was active and attractive. The look was copied by woman of all classes, races, and adopted by suffragists. This correlation of fashions allowing women more freedom and the look being adopted by feminists, the author shows, continued. Feminists endeavored to counter accusations of being masculine by adopting feminine styles. Suffragettes adopted tailored suits with plenty of useful pockets. The more radical women took up Oriental-inspired loose, flowing dresses.
The 1920s saw society women and working women adopt the dropped waist, short skirts, and bobbed hair of the Flapper era. The thin fabrics, short skirt and open sleeves and neckline allowed freedom of movement. The boyish silhouette, focusing on legs instead of the bust, was the beginning of worshipping the youth culture. The simple construction boosted the home sewing pattern industry. And, no restricting corsets were needed.
Hurrah for shorter skirts–they give more freedom of movement–Hurrah for less clothes–they give more health. You don’t find many twentieth century girls fading away or swooning as it seemed the style to do in the 1880’s and 90’s. Now, they play golf, tennis, basketball, they go out for track teams, swimming and numerous other beneficial exercises that have improved the health of the female sex.
Dorothy Ilone Embry, Harlem Sub-Debs Association, 1927 as quoted in Dressed for Freedom
The look also impacted in negative ways, the look requiring dieting, chest binding, and frequent trips to the hair salon.
Many saw the Flapper style as reflecting a loosening of morality, while others recognized its connection to the growing freedom allowed women. I know my paternal grandmother worked in a factory in the 1920s and she is photographed in the simple dresses of this era. Whereas my maternal great-grandmother also worked in a factory while wearing long skirts, long sleeves, and the restrictive undergarments of 1900.
About the time I was born, the New Look returned to fashions that were beautiful but more cumbersome. Tight waists, full skirts ballooned with multiple petticoats, the torpedo bra, fancy hats and gloves. Sportswear then dominated. Shirtwaists, American designers, clothes for the working woman, Hollywood stars wearing pants, boxy coats with pockets. These were the fashions I dressed my Barbie doll in and that my mom wore when I was a girl and that I thought I would be wearing when I grew up.
Instead, as a teenager in the 1960s women’s lib and hippie fashion and short skirts and blue jeans and t-shirts took over. Fashion was all about looking like young teenagers again. I was weird to see my grandmother in a skirt above her knees at my wedding. Fashion followed the more radical element in society, evolving into Unisex and older people complaining they couldn’t tell the boys from the girls anymore. Makeup and hair was more natural. Mom had tortured me with perms as a child, but now I could wear long, straight hair.
In the early 70s, I was sporting an ERA pinback button at the same time female coworkers in the office wore micro-miniskirts that showed all when they bent over and men wore long hair and bell bottoms. The overt feminism of the time combined the struggle for economic equality and equality in the work place with women embracing their sexuality.
The book’s illustrations bring the descriptions to life. They show how suffragettes and feminists embraced style and beauty to prove that women can be equal and not ‘mannish.’
The book is enjoyable as well as informative. It was also an interesting way to consider fashion over my own lifetime as reflective of women’s gains in independence, equality, and power.
I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
In junior high, girls were made to kneel and if their skirts didn’t touch the ground they were sent home to change their clothes. Twiggy and Mod style and Sassoon hair cuts were big when I was a freshman
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in high school. Spring semester of my senior year of high school, we could wear pants—not jeans–on Fridays.At college, girls wore jeans and long hair parted in the middle. My first full-time job women wore micro-mini skirts. At my tenth class reunion, several of us sported frizzy perms, a kind of Afro for white women. Dress for Success came along and for my first job in sales, I wore a Brooks Brothers navy suit with an oxford cloth button down shirt and ribbon tie, and high heels, and I carried a leather brief case but no purse.
I remember midi skirts, and maxi skirts, platform shoes and cowboy boots and transparent shirts and designer clothes and track suits–and now it seems everyone wears hoodies and sweat pants and expensive running shoes.
Whew. I have seen a lot of changes. Then, I think of my grandmother who was born in 1916 and the changes she saw in her lifetime.
I had not considered the relationship between fashion and feminism. Weren’t Flappers just party girls? The Gibson Girl a mere fashion icon? I knew that Bloomers, the ugly harem pants under short skirts, were designed to allow women mobility. I remember Burn the Bra feminists. But fashion has a closer relationship to feminism than I had considered.
Dressed for Freedom debunks the myth that women’s freedom and fashion were incompatible, showing how icons from the Gibson Girl to Hollywood stars were intertwined with feminism. Considering class and race, working women in the city and activists who appeared on magazine covers, the author traces the transformation of fashion between 1890 and 1980.
Although only 272 pages, there is a lot of information packed into these chapters.
Beginning with the Gibson Girl, the white, middle class, active woman who wore shirtwaists and bicycle skirts, the author shows how dress reflected a ‘new woman’ who was active and attractive. The look was copied by woman of all classes, races, and adopted by suffragists. This correlation of fashions allowing women more freedom and the look being adopted by feminists, the author shows, continued. Feminists endeavored to counter accusations of being masculine by adopting feminine styles. Suffragettes adopted tailored suits with plenty of useful pockets. The more radical women took up Oriental-inspired loose, flowing dresses.
The 1920s saw society women and working women adopt the dropped waist, short skirts, and bobbed hair of the Flapper era. The thin fabrics, short skirt and open sleeves and neckline allowed freedom of movement. The boyish silhouette, focusing on legs instead of the bust, was the beginning of worshipping the youth culture. The simple construction boosted the home sewing pattern industry. And, no restricting corsets were needed.
Hurrah for shorter skirts–they give more freedom of movement–Hurrah for less clothes–they give more health. You don’t find many twentieth century girls fading away or swooning as it seemed the style to do in the 1880’s and 90’s. Now, they play golf, tennis, basketball, they go out for track teams, swimming and numerous other beneficial exercises that have improved the health of the female sex.
Dorothy Ilone Embry, Harlem Sub-Debs Association, 1927 as quoted in Dressed for Freedom
The look also impacted in negative ways, the look requiring dieting, chest binding, and frequent trips to the hair salon.
Many saw the Flapper style as reflecting a loosening of morality, while others recognized its connection to the growing freedom allowed women. I know my paternal grandmother worked in a factory in the 1920s and she is photographed in the simple dresses of this era. Whereas my maternal great-grandmother also worked in a factory while wearing long skirts, long sleeves, and the restrictive undergarments of 1900.
About the time I was born, the New Look returned to fashions that were beautiful but more cumbersome. Tight waists, full skirts ballooned with multiple petticoats, the torpedo bra, fancy hats and gloves. Sportswear then dominated. Shirtwaists, American designers, clothes for the working woman, Hollywood stars wearing pants, boxy coats with pockets. These were the fashions I dressed my Barbie doll in and that my mom wore when I was a girl and that I thought I would be wearing when I grew up.
Instead, as a teenager in the 1960s women’s lib and hippie fashion and short skirts and blue jeans and t-shirts took over. Fashion was all about looking like young teenagers again. I was weird to see my grandmother in a skirt above her knees at my wedding. Fashion followed the more radical element in society, evolving into Unisex and older people complaining they couldn’t tell the boys from the girls anymore. Makeup and hair was more natural. Mom had tortured me with perms as a child, but now I could wear long, straight hair.
In the early 70s, I was sporting an ERA pinback button at the same time female coworkers in the office wore micro-miniskirts that showed all when they bent over and men wore long hair and bell bottoms. The overt feminism of the time combined the struggle for economic equality and equality in the work place with women embracing their sexuality.
The book’s illustrations bring the descriptions to life. They show how suffragettes and feminists embraced style and beauty to prove that women can be equal and not ‘mannish.’
The book is enjoyable as well as informative. It was also an interesting way to consider fashion over my own lifetime as reflective of women’s gains in independence, equality, and power.
I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
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Language
Original language
English
Physical description
268 p.; 9 inches
ISBN
0252086066 / 9780252086069