THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF WOMEN’S ACCESSORIES: MIDDLE-CLASS PERFORMANCE, RACE FORMATION AND FEMININE DISPLAY, 1830-1920 by Ariel Beaujot A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. Graduate Department of History University of Toronto © Copyright by Ariel Beaujot 2008 The Material Culture of Women’s Accessories: Middle-Class Performance, Race Formation, and Feminine Display 1830-1920 PhD, 2008 Ariel Beaujot Department of History University of Toronto This dissertation investigates the cultural meaning ascribed to feminine fashionable objects such as gloves, fans, parasols and vanity sets. I pay particular attention to issues of middle-class formation, the performance of gender, and the materiality of race, empire and colonialism. While these issues lie at the heart of British historiography, this project is written from a unique perspective which privileges cultural artifacts through material culture analysis. While the emergence of the middle class is typically studied as a masculine/public phenomenon, this project corrects the overemphasis on male activity by showing that middle-class women created a distinctive ‘look’ for their class via the consumption of specific goods and through participation in daily beauty rituals. Adding to these ideas, I argue that Victorian women performed a distinct type of femininity represented as passivity, asexuality, innocence, and leisure. By studying the repetitive gestures, poses and consumption practices of middle-class women, I show that certain corporeal acts helped to create Victorian femininity. This work also suggests that women participated in the British colonial project by consuming objects that were represented in the Victorian imagination as imperial spoils. As such, I argue that imperialism penetrated the everyday lives of Britons through several everyday objects. Empire building also created anxieties surrounding questions of race. Women’s accessories, such as gloves and parasols, helped British women to maintain their whiteness, an important way of distinguishing the ‘civilized’ Britons from the ‘uncivilized’ tanned colonial peoples. ii Overall this project showed that within the everyday objects consumed by women we can identify the anxieties, hopes and dreams of Victorians. iii Acknowledgments I would first like to thank the many archivists and currators who helped me navagate the collections that have allowed me to do this study: Julie Anne Lambert from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at Oxford, Oriole Cullen at the Museum of London, Valerie Reilly at Paisley Museum, Emma Luker Assistant Curator of the Furniture, Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Rosemary Crill of the Indian Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Eleanor Summers at the Museum of Costume at Bath, Sheila Hughes at Axminster Museum, Mrs. Alexandre at the Fan Museum, Allison Pollard at the Science Museum Library, and Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Roger Horwitz, Linda Gross, Marge McNinch, and Debra Hughes from Hagley Museum and Library. I have been fortunate to have a committee that was both enthusiastic about my project and thoughtful in their suggestions. I am particularly grateful to my supervisor, Lori Loeb, who offered encouragement, advice, and support at every stage of the writing process. Committee members Sidney Aster, Adrienne Hood and Carol Chin all enriched my work with their helpful comments. And my external examiner, Erika Rappaport, offered many fascinating lines of inquiry. At the University of Toronto I have been fortunate to belong to a wonderful academic community full of imagination. In particular I received invaluable advice from the Women/Gender/Sexuality Working Group. I am also indebted to the support of the “Footnotes” reading group and in particular I thank Amy Milne-Smith, Sarah Amato and Nathan Smith for reading and commenting on sections of the dissertation. Support from outside the University of Toronto has also been very important throughout the thesis writing process. Here I would like to thank Tim Blackmore and Pat Skidmore for their thoughtful mentorship, Amanda Irvine for her careful editing, Rod Beaujot, Liz Beaujot and Matthew Hodkinson for their moral and financial support, Alison Innes and Hilary Innes for providing essential distractions, and Cheryl Richardson for providing much needed physio treatment. I received financial support from an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, a grant-in-aid from Hagley Museum and Library, and travel grants from the History Department and the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. I am also indebted to Annette Gunn and Andrew Gunn who allowed me to stay with them in England and made feel at home. iv Table of Contents Introduction …………………………………………………………………………...1-41 Chapter One ‘The Beauty of Her Hands’: The Glove and the Making of Middle-Class Womanhood …………………………..42-80 Chapter Two ‘The Language of the Fan’: Pushing the Boundaries of Middle-Class Womanhood……………………………. 81-122 Chapter Three Umbrellas and Parasols: Symbols of Imperialism, Race, Youth and Flirtation…………………………….. 123-163 Chapter Four ‘The Real Thing’: The Celluloid Vanity Set and the Search for Authenticity……………………….. 164-214 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………215-220 Figures……………………………………………………………………………. 221-233 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………. ...234-253 v List of Figures Figure 1.1: Fashion Plates from The Queen, The London and Paris Ladies’ Magazine, Townsend’s Monthly, The Ladies Cabinet, 1820s-1880s. Figure 1.2: Fashion Plate from The London and Paris Ladies’ Magazine, July 1879. Figure 1.3: Family Photo, 1897. Figure 2.1: Fashion Plates from The Queen, July 2, 1881; July 2, 1895; July 3 1885. Figure 2.2: Fashion Plate from Ladies’ Magazine of Fashion, December 1833. Figure 2.3: Song Sheets “Bell of the Ball,” “The Flirt,” “The Language of the Eye” from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera from the Bodleian Library. Figure 2.4: Song Sheet “The Mikado,” from the John Johnson Collection and two Cartes de Visite from the Fan Museum in Greenwich, London. Figure 3.1: Punch cartoon entitled "Sic Itur Ad Astra; or, How Pelham Jones Gets into "Society" (1880): 203. Figure 4.1: Image from The Barrett book of Beautiful Presents catalogue, May 1937. Figure 4.2: Image from The Barrett book of Beautiful Presents catalogue, May 1937. Figure 4.3: Trade mark image of the British Xylonite Company British Xylonite Co., Catalogue of Articles Manufactured from Xylonite and Other Plastics (Hasell: Watson and Viney Ltd., 1936). Figure 4.4: Punch cartoon entitled “Cause and Effect” March 26, 1864. Figure 4.5: Pyralin advertisement from “Twenty Million" catalogue by E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, 1920 from Hagley Museum and Library. vi 1 Introduction In the Victorian period, a woman’s accessories were much more than the incidental finishing touches to an elaborate dress. Accessories revealed the beliefs, values, attitudes and assumptions of the women who wore them and the Victorian society which created them. The colour and material makeup of a pair of gloves, for example, indicated a woman’s class aspirations. Likewise the design on a fan could indicate a woman’s affinity for the orient. The twirl of a parasol could be used to communicate to a potential lover. Even a woman’s vanity set on her bedroom dresser helped to indicate a woman’s marital status. In these ways accessories reflected ideas of gender, social class and race held by the Victorian populace. This thesis will explore Victorian writings about and the significance of four women’s accessories: the glove, the fan, the parasol or umbrella and the vanity set. I selected these accessories because they all are particularly Victorian, but did not last long thereafter due to changing concepts of leisure, gender and class in the post World War One period.1 While each has been largely overlooked by previous scholars, all of these objects have connections to the hands, face and head—some of the most important sites of class and gender formation and differentiation. 2 Through the accentuation of the skin, 1 Gloves were used into the 1950s but they were no longer worn constantly after 1920. Vanity sets lasted into the inter-war period. For more information on this see: Ariel Beaujot, "Coiffing Vanity: A Study of the Manufacture, Design, and Meaning of the Celluloid Hairbrush in America, 1900-1930," in Producing Fashion, ed. Reggie Balszczyk, Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).pp. 229-254 2 There has been considerable work done on shoes and hats and bags. See for example: Georgine De Courtais, Women's Headdress and Hairstyles: In England from Ad 600 to Present Day (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1973), Vanda Foster, Bags and Purses, ed. Aileen Ribeiro, The Costume Accessories Series 222 the eyes and the hair, these accessories highlight the parts of the body that were all regarded as important markers of middle-class womanhood. A focus of this study will be to highlight the tensions between older eighteenth-century constructs of womanhood— that were dependent on internal character and the beauty of the soul—and newer Victorian models that focused on womanhood as a performance of gender, social class, and race. Throughout the Victorian period many still believed that the moral character of a woman was communicated through her body and therefore could be read by those around her. To change her appearances for the better, according to this model, a woman must go through a moral re-education. The anonymous author of The Ladies’ Hand-Book of the Toilet reassured women that they could improve their external beauty by simply cultivating a good character: From this mode of reasoning, it results that the fair one, who would become really beautiful, must make the cultivation of her mind—of those intellectual and moral powers with which her Creator has endowed her—her first and principal care. Pure affections must be cherished; amiable dispositions encouraged; useful knowledge acquired, and a mild, even, and obliging temper assiduously cultivated; or all her endeavours, to obtain real beauty, will prove nugatory and vain.