Análisis de ratios

In her work Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women’s Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America, Carol Mattingly describes how suffragettes of the time understood this complex relationship between fashion and women’s roles and used the system to their advantage. She looks at how fashion was used as a tool in navigating certain social and political situations, both by those in favor of women’s departure from traditional gender

175 Erika Thiel, Geschichte des Kostüms, Die europäische Mode von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1980), 335.

176Although the corset is generally understood as a marker of feminine beauty, especially when paired with the crinoline to create that unmistakably nineteenth-century ‘wasp-waist’ silhouette, it was also worn by men in certain cases. Interestingly, it was military men and dandies who were most likely to be found corseting. But even with these examples of men opting for the corset to create a certain silhouette, the object remains nonetheless most closely linked to ideas of idealized and overly emphasized notions of femininity and female beauty. Due to the constraints of addressing such a manifold subject, I will be limiting my analysis to corseting as it relates to women and femininity.

112 roles and those in opposition. Regardless of which side was speaking, women’s outward appearance and the clothes on their bodies figured prominently in discussions of politics and propriety.

When women appeared in public to speak, their garments fell under as much scrutiny as their words. As a result, mainstream magazines and newspapers reported on the event with mention of what the speaker was wearing rather what she had argued.

Headlines in American publications often read: “Petticoats and Pantaloons,” “A Female in Breeches,” “A Female in Pantaloons,” “Corset-Strings and Suffrage,” “The Corseted Crusade,” “Politicians in Petticoats,” “A Bustline Army of Crusaders,” and “Petticoats at the Bar.”¹⁷⁷ Corsets and crinolines became synonymous with proper femininity, and by extension, with woman’s enforced identity as a beautiful object rather than a subject.

As demonstrated in chapter one, fashion operated on an international level and gender and class structures functioned beyond national lines. The close link between femininity, women’s social roles, and clothing was equally discernable in the German Der Bazar, as I will demonstrate in subsequent sections of this chapter. Although Mattingly makes the following statement in regard to the American examples of her study, I argue that the same claims can be made about the status of women’s role in Europe at the time: “because nineteenth-century women were so fully defined according to gender, and because, gender was based largely upon dress and appearance, women understood the importance of clothing in negotiating the rigid power structure that permitted them little access to public attention.”¹⁷⁸ In other words, women learned to

177 Carol Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women’s Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 14-15.

178 Ibid., 5.

113 appreciate the role attributed to clothing and to find ways in which to use fashion and clothing to their advantage. Otto, Mayreder, and Ebner-Eschenbach demonstrate how German and Austrian women understood the importance of clothing just as well as their American sisters¹⁷⁹ and used fashion as a way to communicate information about the class and social status of the fictional characters in their works, as well as to make statements about their personal involvement in the women’s movement and the often parallel clothing reform movement.

Throughout Europe and North America, groups of women were banding together to implement and promote the move away from long skirts and tight corsets as the only viable options for their sex. In Austria, Rosa Mayreder was a supporter of the dress reform movement, abandoning the corset at age nineteen and opting for loose, flowing robes thereafter.¹⁸⁰ Many of the images of this writer available to us today depict her in long, comfortably cut garments that suggest the absence of a corset or a crinoline. Those

179 Ibid., 5. For North American women, that sometimes meant eschewing the more radical styles of reform dress in order to appease their audience and to win favor with their readers or listeners. Mattingly explains how “the most impressive women rhetors effected a ‘womanly’ stance to disarm critics who accused them of being ‘unsexed’ and to assuage a public that feared a danger to family and society.” Examples of this can be found in the number of women who adopted Quaker dress as part of their public speaking uniform, calling upon associations with religiosity and morality in order to mollify a potentially hostile audience.

Women’s rights activists presenting themselves in Quaker attire claimed to be doing ‘God’s work,’

invoking religious rhetoric in both text and textile. In contrast, women such as Rosa Mayreder in Austria and Francis Wright in North America, who adopted the reform dress as a symbol of non-compliance, were often met with suspicion and disapproval.

180 See Hilde Schmölzer, Rosa Mayreder.Ein Leben Zwischen Wirklichkeit Und Utopie (Vienna: Promedia, 2002).

114 taking a more radical departure from traditional garments forwent long skirts altogether and opted for loose cut trousers, in English colloquially dubbed “bloomers.”¹⁸¹

Another example of non-traditional dress was the “New Harmony Dress” as introduced by Francis Wright. Wright, a Scottish-born nineteenth-century writer and abolitionist, relocated to North America and founded the Nashoba Commune, fighting for women’s rights and social reform. The New Harmony Dress popular among commune members consisted of Turkish “harem” pants and a long straight knee-length tunic that was cinched at the waist.¹⁸² Although this style of dress was designed for comfort and modesty, it quickly became synonymous with rebellion and “indelicacy.”¹⁸³ The main problem with the New Harmony Dress (and with reform dress in general) was that it revealed the existence of a woman’s legs, no longer hiding them under the sizable construction of the crinoline or layered petticoats. Nineteenth-century middle and upper-class women were not supposed to be seen walking, they were expected to “glide” or

“sweep” across the floor, an illusion no longer sustained by the reform dress worn by followers of Wright.¹⁸⁴ The fashion worn by Wright not only demonstrated that women had legs but also made visible the mobility of women, something that was often

symbolically erased.

Perrot, writing of European fashion and customs, points to a similar public unease with women’s visible mobility. Perrot writes,

181‘Bloomers’ were loose pants that came together at the ankle, usually worn with a long tunic that revealed the lower half of the leg. They came to be known colloquially as bloomers after Amelia Bloomer, women’s rights activist and avid supporter of the dress reform movement.

182 Mattingly, 19.

183 Ibid., 18.

184 Ibid.

115 Society women hardly ever walked. Walking was made perilous by the fullness of their dress, a highly symbolic physical hindrance. As a corollary, the drama of a tear or a spot was understood as more than an involuntary offense against the aesthetic order: it was shameful evidence of ‘excessive’ movement.¹⁸⁵ In other words, fashion was a way to keep in check the excessive and inappropriate movement of the nineteenth-century middle and upper class woman. As the writings of Otto, Mayreder, and Ebner-Eschenbach, as well as the texts within Der Bazar will demonstrate below, the physically mobile woman was a problematic figure in German and Austrian literature. The following section will first explore the relationship between fashion, femininity, and mobility, before turning to the literary examples found in the fashion magazines and the texts by the women writers of the time.