The Edwardian era appeared rife with social movements, but none caused as much furor as the “New Woman.” From Paris to London to New York to San Francisco, this phenomenon resulted in bitter denunciations, criticism and recriminations which thundered from pulpits to the Houses of Parliament.

The New Woman was a reaction against the long-held notions of femininity and the proper social sphere for women. This reaction was born, ironically, from the very reforms which were to enfranchise men. With schooling compulsory in the 1870s and 1880s, both boys and girls were given at least a basic education, which enabled them to find employment beyond the expectations of their parents’ generation. As a result of the agricultural depression of the 1880s, young men and women, raised on tenant farms, or whose parents were employed by factories, found life insecure and uninspiring. Raised on the abundance of newspapers, periodicals and journals that proliferated in the late Victorian era, the lure of city life was difficult to resist. And so, for the first time, young women left their home for work, not in the traditional pursuit of domestic service, but as a professional.

New technologies spread rapidly across the globe in the second half of the 19th century: the telephone, the telegraph, the elevator, the typewriter, the sewing machine, the cash register, etcetera. With these new technologies came jobs, and these jobs needed bodies to man them. Obviously, men were hired over women, but gradually, women began to make significant inroads in professional employment. From the working girl of the period–perhaps a saleswoman, a secretary, telephone exchange operator–came the New Woman (or Gibson Girl, as she was characterized in the United States) who was personified by the shirtwaist, tall stiff collar, necktie, and heavy serge skirts she adopted as uniform. Perhaps she would ride her bicycle, which would require the scandalous bloomers!

These “New Women” were not content with their existence as “superfluous” women that characterized the mainstream press’s “woman problem”–that is, what to do with the increasing number of women who would never marry? This caused confusion over the gender role of women and led to a “tremendous debate over whether woman’s natural role was simply to procreate, or whether women should exercise the same range of choices men had.” These questions and contradictions found a place in the fiction of the period, which was quickly called “New Woman literature.” Playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Wing Pinero wrote popular plays that put modern topics such as venereal disease, prostitution, and the role of marriage in the public eye, while authors like Annie Sophie Cory (Victoria Cross), Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, George Egerton, Ella D’Arcy and Ella Hepworth Dixon put a voice to the trials and tribulations of the New Woman.

Another segment of the New Woman was the “Bachelor Girl.” An advice book published during the era characterized the girl-bachelor as a “comfortable creature” and a “clever nest-builder.” More prevalent in American than Europe due to the vaster opportunities for women, the girl-bachelor was most often found in large American cities, sharing a flat or living in a boarding house with other working girls, and working in department stories, millinery shops, couturiers, as a secretary, a clerk,  telephone exchange operator, waitress, hat-check girl, and a host of other supporting positions. Far from being old maids, the bachelor girl broke with traditional intersex relations, her financial and social independence putting her outside of the sphere of hearth and home.

Ultimately, the New Woman, the girl-bachelor, challenged and threatened, in the end shattering notions of proper gender roles for women. In reaction to this threat, there poured upon the heads of these women numerous satires in fiction, plays, cartoons and newspaper editorials of the “emancipated woman.” These scornful pieces of media claimed the New Woman had “unsexed” herself and lost the respect of men. They asked in response to “what does she want” with “what does she not want?” She, according to an editorial in the New York Times, “dresses like a man, as far as possible, thereby making herself hideous…the next step will be to wear her hair short and adopt a mustache.” She also wants, “to work by man’s side and on his level and still be treated with the chivalry due her in her own kingdom–home and society–and any abatement of this treatment produces a storm of indignation and wrath quite beyond the sex she is endeavoring to emulate.” And that’s not the worst of the opinions. The retaliation against the New Woman spilled onto the suffrage debate, creating more problems within the movement as not only man pit himself against woman, but woman versus woman as well. Despite this conflict, the New Woman was here to stay, and paved the road for the women of the post-war society.

Further Reading:
The New Woman
Henrik Ibsen and the New Woman
New woman novelists
Home Life in America by Katherine Graves Busbey
A word to women by Charlotte Eliza Humphry
The new girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880-1915 by Sally Mitchell
A new woman reader by Carolyn Christensen Nelson

No one in this era made any bones about the fact that marriage was a woman’s sole career, and that she owed it to herself and to the family that had so far supported her, to get on with it. Where a girl was concerned, it was the duty of everyone–her mother, her mother’s friends, her chaperone and her bill-settling father–to help her achieve this ambition.

Once a young girl turned eighteen, her childhood was essentially over. The moment she put up her hair and lengthened her skirts, she was a woman. A coddled, protected woman, but a woman nonetheless. The putting up of the hair was the most important aspect of signifying one’s status as a jeune fille à marier, or a young woman ready for marriage: no man bothered to address himself with other than the merest passing courtesy to a girl whose hair hung down her back. As soon as her hair was pinned up, everything changed, and for the remainder of the young lady’s life, only inside her bedroom or during a fancy dress ball would her hair hang down over her shoulders.

The young lady of America’s entrance into society was marked by the order of dresses from Paris, a ball at Delmonico’s or at home, and the most extensive leaving of cards on all desirable acquaintances. In introducing a daughter, parents seldom or never put her name on the card, merely sending invitations written thus:

Mrs. Walsingham
at home,
Thursday evening, February 9th,
at ten o’clock

At her first ball, the young lady stood beside her mother, was presented, or launched, and took her place in society with the way clear before her. The young lady was then introduced to and danced the German with the gentleman to whom her mother had selected to lead the dance–and that was it. In the 1890s, the Four Hundred incorporated the chaperone from Europe. This adoption, however, invoked controversy. America at the time prided itself upon the ability of a woman to move about unmolested. The presence of a chaperone was a smack in the face to the American gentleman: were they not be trusted? An etiquette book of the period stated it bluntly: “if men did not drink, there would be less need for chaperones.” But the fierce independence of  Americans won out in the end, and the chaperone died a quick, painless death by the turn of the century.

For the young English girl, their entrance into society was marked by a few ways: the court presentation, a supper party, or a country ball. In some unorthodox families, such as the Tennants, young ladies could have taken part in social events as young as 15 or 16. The young men whom they might meet were always carefully inspected and discussed beforehand by their mothers, aunts, grandmothers and indeed the whole circle of older ladies. Meetings were seldom, if ever, mere chance: daughters who might be expected to become a good political hostess due to their father’s status were deliberately placed in the way of eligible political bachelors; young daughters of great landed estates who would expect to live in the country were steered towards gentlemen with great landed estates. The acceptable choice was limited, but quite clear.

Gentlemen were placed into types: if the young lady met a “detrimental,” or extremely ineligible man, her female relations would gently remind her of her duty. There was less to fear from the “indefatigable,” a young man just come out or an old beau who danced indiscriminately with any and all women, and the “indispensable,” the anxious fetcher and carrier of wraps, gloves, lemonade, fans and ices, but a young lady was introduced to as many approved and eligible men as quickly as possible.

The French, however, were a bit more cerebral when it came to the debutante. To be considered an eligible young woman, one must have a dot, or dowry. Those who were not to be provided for were doomed to be spinsters or poor relations, and as a result, most convents were packed not with devout novitiates, but poor young women. Not to say there were no “love matches” amongst the French, but rarely amongst the nobility, for whom marriage was too serious a matter to be dominated by romantic notions. After emerging from a convent school, the young French lady was introduced at a bal blanc, at which all ladies were gowned in pure white and only maidens and bachelors were expected to be present. There, the gentlemen were permitted to request to dance with a lady without having been first introduced to her, and it was considered very bad form for a young woman and young man to “sit out” a dance together or to retire to the veranda or lawn.

Prior to this ball, the young lady was invited nowhere and met no gentleman, as amusements and flirtations were the sole province of a married woman. Young men were hampered by this restriction as well, for they were honor-bound never to court a girl without having previously asked her parents’ permission. As the slightest attention to a girl assumed immediately a serious character, the young man must either ask this permission before knowing his bride or risk being shot down by her brother should he afterward decline marrying within a few weeks’ notice.

Even stricter were the lives of debutantes in Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary. The daughters of Russia’s nobility were entered into one the of the numerous educational establishments founded for the their training as early as age three, and there they remained until seventeen. At The Catherine Institution, one of the principal rules was that from the time a pupil entered until her sortie, she would not quit the bounds of the establishment on any plea whatsoever, ill-health alone excepted.

Relatives were permitted to visit the girls whenever they chose, and on Sundays, the pupils received any lady of their acquaintance and male relations to whom the law prohibited them from marrying–this latter rule was constantly evaded however, with many dashing suitors proclaiming themselves to be “first cousin” to a pupil and gaining admittance to visit with them. Easter was the season for the sortie of finished pupils, and previous to the reception of a debutante at the home of her parents and friends, an apartment was prepared for her within the institute to be filled with elegant furnishings and lavish gifts from friends and, if from a distinguished family, the Russian royals.

Austro-German court circles were tightly regulated, and none but the highest nobility could make headway (with the exception of wealthy Americans introduced by their ambassadors, and aristocrats of other nations). The imperial German court was usually held in either Berlin or in Potsdam where the imperial family resided during its regular stay in town, which typically lasted from shortly after New Year’s until the middle of April or May. During these months the large court festivities took place of about ten large and many smaller fetes, consisting of several big court balls, at which attendance reached two to three thousand. They all open with the first “Defilir Cour,” or ceremonious reception, at which all persons entitled to presentation at court made their first obeisance to majesty.

Those entitled to admittance included those who by reason of birth or official station, were members of the royal family, members of all other German dynasties present in Berlin, members of the aristocracy, all officers of the army and navy, all members of the Prussian and imperial cabinets, all persons who have been decorated, court and higher government officials, members of the Prussian Diet, of the Bundesrath and the Reichstag. All considered eligible were called “courfahig.” The debutantes of the season were presented at the initial receptions by their mothers in gowns with deep decolletage and train of a certain length according to their rank.

In Vienna, the “Frauenheim,” which was given at the Sofiensaale, was the ball at which young girls made their debut, dressed entirely in white similar to a bal blanc in France. It was usually patronized by an Archduke or Archduchess. However, these unmarried princesses, countesses, duchesses and archduchesses had a special place in society. At every ball there was a room set aside for them called the “Comtessin Zimmer,” into which no married woman was allowed to penetrate. There the girls “gossiped with their partners between the dances, keeping a jealous and watchful eye on any erring sister who ventured to overstep the bounds of the most innocent flirtation.”

A young woman’s entrance into society marked a time of transition. There was no concept of “adolescence” at the time: a female was either a child or a woman, and her treatment and behavior was precisely dictated and delineated for the sole purpose of creating a perfect “wife.” This was a time where perhaps they were to meet gentlemen on equal footing for the first time, and indeed, a few girls–the aforementioned Tennant family, of whom Margot was the ultimate exception–thrived within this mold, and others languished. But it was an interesting time for these young women: once they put up their hair, they were expected to be “adults” and were immediately accorded the respect of an adult despite possibly having been horsing around in the nursery with younger siblings just the week before her debut!

Further Reading:

1900s Lady by Kate Caffrey
Princess Daisy of Pless by Herself by Princess Daisy of Pless
Etiquette of American Society by Mrs. M.E.W. Sherwood
France of To-day by Matilda Betham-Edwards
Russia of Yesterday and Tomorrow by Baroness Souiny
1913: A Beginning and an End by Virginia Cowles

Of all the fads in fashion of the Edwardian era, none was so provocative–or dangerous–as the hobble skirt. French couturier Paul Poiret claimed to have created the hobble skirt, but the narrow, nearly skin-tight skirt had its roots in the early 1880s, when fashion placed emphasis on the posterior hidden beneath a neat, erotic bustle. However, it wasn’t until skirts began to narrow once more circa 1908/09 when the true “hobble skirt” made its appearance.

Between 1910 and 1913, the hobble skirt reigned supreme in fashion, obtaining popularity from the Oriental- and Directoire-inspired crazes. These skirts were extremely slim to the point of forcing women who wore them to take tiny, mincing “geisha-like” steps, and nearly barring them from independent movement (it is rather curious that as the suffrage movement moved to militancy, fashions for women became restricting). Though the hobble skirt was denounced as unsafe, and some employers even barred their female workers from wearing them, a few factions approved of the trend: “Grandmothers think that the means justify the end, and that the hobble skirt will bring back to women the old grace. They will be compelled to shorten their strides, learn to place their feet in a straight line, and not throw them in or out in the slovenly modern way, and that the entire appearance of women will be thus benefited.”

By 1912, the hobble skirt had become a tad more practical, with many concealing slits, hidden pleats, draping, and sometimes even Turkish trousers, beneath the narrow outer-skirt, which allowed greater movement than the hobbled walk initially characterizing the fad. Thank goodness, for the newspapers of the day reported countless accidents involving hobble skirts, with many women tripping, falling, and even breaking their legs while maneuvering in the skirt. To save face against the backlash, many Parisian couturiers began to characterize the trend as “American”!

To the rescue did come an American firm who, with great ingenuity, designed “Hobble Skirt” cars for city tramways. The correct name for these trams was Low Level Center Entrance cars or Hedley-Doyle cars after their designers, Frank Hedley, who was Vice-President and General Manager of the New York Railways Company, and James S. Doyle, Superintendent of Car Equipment. In 1912 they produced three prototype cars for the company–the sills of the doors were only about 8 inches from street level and once inside the floor sloped up into each saloon to give space under the floor for the bogies–and by 1914, tramlines throughout the world were equipped with “Hobble Skirt” cars.

As with all fads, the hobble skirt passed from fad to fashion history by 1915. The odd thing is, with the fabric shortages of WWI, it should have remained in style rather than the fabric-hoarding “war crinoline” trend (left), but who can tell what drives fashion?

Further Reading: