Flora and Mae 1908 ish
A while back, I found a picture posted on Flickr of a classroom in my high school in 1966, the year before I got there.
I downloaded it and put it on the desktop – because the girl in the picture, leaning over to pick up a neat stack of books from her desk, was wearing the same white cotton blouse and grey flannel skirt and green school sweater with yellow stripes I would wear the next year.
And she had short brown hair and was thin and undeveloped, so she could have been me, but a bit shorter, maybe.
It was traumatic, that first year at high school. I went from a city elementary school to that high school (with those testosterone-loaded 16 year old ‘men’ roaming the same halls) after the year had started. In November. Knowing no one.
But this is about the outfit. If it were gym day, that white cotton blouse the girl in the picture is wearing is likely a teddy blouse, that buttoned down between the legs. And the girl may have been wearing her bloomers under the flannel skirt. (The shirt was pretty short; it was 1966 after all.)
I just saw, in my new book, Women in History, that the bloomer was named after the woman who invented them: Amelia Bloomer, who is described in the book as a ‘feminist activist.’
She invented the style to liberate women from heavy-duty, confining, underwear. She was inspired by Turkish pantaloons. A short skirt was worn over the bloomer.
How odd. What was invented to liberate women, made me, in 1967, feel hideous in front of the boys, who took gym separately from the girls and who wore regular t-shirts and gym shorts.
And I recall those teddy blouses pinched between the legs and I didn’t have an especially long body, only long legs.
A few blogs ago, I wrote about the comely young woman in 1910, who donned a “harem skirt’ and went for a stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge and stopped traffic.
She was really wearing ‘harem pants’ but as pants were illegal, they called the garment a skirt.
Today, nothing stops traffic and anything goes in the way of women’s outdoor apparel, as long as the woman is young and pretty and she covers her nipples and pubic area.
Actually, I find the young women’s styles appealing, the layered look, with the comfy leggings and silky Regency-style tops in carnival colours that hide the fact that everyone, young and old, is gaining too much weight. How wonderful! Women are not forced to lumber around in metaphorical chastity belts anymore.
A few decades too late for me to wear, out in public, anyway.
In Flo in the City, I have Marion sew Flora bloomers for her swimsuit to wear at Boston. She styles it after a tennis outfit. This is in 1908. Even that style of swimsuit was considered daring. Many female beach-goers stayed in their corsets and dresses and walked in their shoes and stockings down to the water on walkways made of planks of wood.
Some women went 180 degrees in the other direction:
In 1912, according to my Women in History book, 57 female athletes out of 2,406, competed at the Olympics in Stockholm. (London, held the Olympics in 1908.) There’s a picture of two Australian swimmers, Sarah “Fanny” Durack and Mina Wylie. Sarah is a ‘big girl’ but Mina has an hourglass-shaped full-figure and she is posing in a skin tight body suit that stops above the knees. Talk about no secrets. You can find many pics of her online on Australian websites, but not the racy one in the book.
I wonder how I can sneak that into Flo in the City. I have blogged about how strenuous exercise was considered by many people in the era to be detrimental to women’s health. I’ve even posted a few paragraphs, one from an editorial in the Ladies’ Home Journal.
The Nicholsons clipped out many news items about women of achievement, inventors, aeroplane pilots, etc.
None of the Nicholsons appeared to be particularly athletic, although they loved to skate (for the rink was where they met boys) and they played tennis, too. And, of course, they attended dances. In my story, I make Mae Watters athletic and graceful.
