The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them.
In the summer of 1885, Karl Pearson founded The Men and Women’s Club with the aim to discuss “all matters…connected with the mutual position and relation of men and women.” Pearson drew his members from middle-class liberals, socialists, and feminists, and over the lifespan of the club (1885-1889), discussions ranged from sexual relations in Periclean [...]
For the unmarried gentleman of high society, the world was his oyster. At no other time in history was bachelordom such a widespread, and pleasurable, pursuit. As the turn of the century dawned, the “Marriage Question” began to shift from the issue of surplus women, but on why men refused to marry! Certainly England’s system [...]
After reading The New York Magazine’s list of the Top 20 Chef Empires, and perusing a few culinary books I’d borrowed from the library, I was struck, dumbstruck actually, that all save one of those twenty names are those of men. Many would argue that the age of modern cookery was of the turn of [...]
Hairstyles of this period shifted with the shifting silhouette in dress and also reflected, as the era progressed, the growing freedom and emphasis on ease in hairdressing that marked a more mobile society. The agricultural depression of the 1880s which dampened spirits, expressed itself in the somber, less frivolous clothing of the decade. This was [...]
The House of Lords measured 100 feet by 50 feet, and was decorated in solemn hues of gold and crimson, with lofty stained-glass windows depicting the past kings and queens of England. At the end of the Chamber was a canopied throne of gold where the reigning monarch sat when opening Parliament. On the [...]
“Booker T. Washington, the well known negro educator and President of the Tuskegee, Ala. institute , was a guest of President Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt at dinner at the white house tonight.”
It was a day like any other when the White House Social Calendar, a regular column in the newspapers of Washington D.C, inserted a [...]
From the end of Reconstruction until the Great War, Washington was the center of the black aristocracy. Nowhere else in the United States possessed such a concentration of “old families,” not merely from the District and nearby Maryland and Virginia, but from throughout the country, whose emphasis on family background, good breeding, occupation, respectability, and [...]
The new silhouette required a much slimmer parcel of undergarments than before, and it was in this period that underclothing took on the sensual connotations of the word “lingerie“. Ornate, overtly sexual and colorful underclothes began to shift away from the boudoirs of courtesans and into the bedchambers of respectable housewives and independent [...]
