Defining Waistlines and Defining a Nation : American Women's Fashion from 1760-1850
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Authors
Grau, Madalyn J.
Issue Date
2016
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
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Abstract
The clothes we wear are a public declaration of who we are and what we value. Society has regularly constructed fashion as a feminine concern, and women have been held highly accountable for the clothing that they wear and what their clothing expresses to the public. Fashion throughout the early years of America's nationhood spoke volumes about how Americans saw themselves in a rapidly changing period. Between the American Revolution and the middle of the nineteenth century, women's fashions changed in very dramatic ways. Due to the formalization of political spaces, the division of work and home through the Industrial Revolution, and the privatization of the female body throughout the early republic and antebellum periods, women lost the political ground upon which they stood during the American Revolution. As a result, what they wore throughout these periods became depoliticized as women played increasingly depoliticized roles in the developing nation. American women's relationship between modesty and fashion took evolving roles. American women's modesty in consumption was always closely tied to their dress, because their dress was the omnipresent reminder of their ability to control their consumption of fashionable luxuries, a decadence that many Americans believed was tied to their insatiable lust. Throughout these different periods, Americans constantly tied women's clothing to their modesty and sexual morality. American women's fashion developed as their political roles changed through three separate, succeeding eras. The author discusses three historic periods: the twenty year period of the American Revolution, from the early 1760s to 1780s; the early republic, which for the sake of this study, is from the end of the American Revolution in the mid-1780s to the War of 1812; and the Antebellum period, which for the purposes of this paper, consists of the time after the War of 1812 through the 1850s. The author also discusses the relationship between the woman’s rights activists of 1840s and the introduction of the “bloomer.”
Description
ii, 80 p.
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License
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