The art/fashion of Yinka Shonibare, who melds 18th and 19th British aesthetics with “African” prints (his work is incredibly ironic and subversive; just looking at it makes me think) brought to mind the prints of Japanese women wearing Western fashions, yet made from Japanese textiles that I found online a few months ago. They were [...]
On paper it looked incongruous: how did a divorced Southern aristocrat charm not only English society but enough rural constituents to make history as the first woman to sit in Parliament? Born into the Langhorne family of Virginia, Nancy was one of the three beautiful Langhorne sisters, but did not want to be known strictly [...]
The militant suffrage movement in Great Britain began as a Pankhurst family enterprise that, from 1903 to 1905 remained focused around Manchester, until the general election of 1905 brought matters to a head. Prior to the Pankhursts, the fight for women’s suffrage in Britain was a relatively tame one. In the mid 1860s, a group [...]
Ladies began to carve out a separate, independent life of their own by the late 1890s, and there came to London a proliferation of clubs catering specifically to gentlewomen of rank and means. Inside, the clubs mirrored that of their more famous counterparts like White’s or the Marlborough Club, as centers of leisure and relaxation, [...]
It took a lot of gumption and even more courage for women of the Victorian and Edwardian eras to pack their trunks and set off for parts unknown. Despite the sharp edge of colonialism’s knife for the oppressed, the movement of European and American powers into Asia, Africa, South America, and the islands dotting the [...]
Opera singers were the world’s first pop stars, and the nineteenth century saw the apex of diva and divo worship, with hundreds of thousands left spellbound by the heavenly voices of Jenny Lind, Nelli Melba, Enrico Caruso, and Jean de Rezke, to name a few stars. Since this was before radio, and definitely before television [...]
