Hobble Skirts and the New Knickers

I've been looking into 1910s fashion - I want to know what I would have been wearing a hundred years ago. Actually, I thought I knew: long, modest skirts, tight corsets and dark colours. But it seemed worth checking.

Mostly, I was wrong. Point one - just because the photographs are black and white does not mean the clothes were. In fact, according to fashion-era.com, things were pretty colourful in the first half of the decade.  Think ostrich plumes and orientalist styles - at least if you were better off. In 1908, something radical had happened - the waistline had got higher, sitting right below the bust, and your feet could peep out of the bottom of your skirt.

And that skirt, for those in high fashion, was a whole new shape. Hobble skirts had come in, which effectively tied your ankles together. Morticia Addams is probably the most memorable wearer of a hobble skirt - they may not have been quite as tight in the 1910s but the need to walk in tiny footsteps was entertainingly commented on.

In high society, women were changing for every occasion, five or six outfits a day. (Do they now? I suspect so.)  Jayne Shrimpton's article is pretty clear that more active women (i.e. those who actually had to walk around) adapted the hobble skirt design, adding pleats so they could take a full stride. A whole extra area of expression was the blouse, from frilled to 'masculine' with a tie. On your feet were neat boots with one-inch heels. On your head, a flowery and beribboned hat. (I take great joy in the word beribonned.)

And underclothes? I was half-right about corsets: they were worn but a less restrictive version than a decade previously, starting below the bust and spreading over the hips. Hobbled we may have been, but we could breathe. Only one petticoat, rather than layers and layers of lace. Bras were invented but not generally worn - though BBs, or bust bodices, were. And knickers - here I quote Jayne Shrimpton - 'Knee-length knickers were made increasingly with a closed crotch, preferable for wear with knickerbockers and divided skirts.'

Which poses questions about what underwear was like before.

March of the Women

A hundred years ago this year was the first performance of March of the Women, in Pall Mall. The work of two suffrage campaigners, Ethyl Smyth (composer) and Cicely Hamilton (writer) it became an anthem for the women's suffrage movement. Here it is revived by a US choir in 2009:

March of the Women

The last verse is best, I think - you wouldn't write it the same way now, but the meaning stands. Faith and daring - laugh a defiance - friend to friend.

Life, strife -- those two are one,

Naught can ye win but by faith and daring.

On, on -- that ye have done

But for the work of today preparing.

Firm in reliance, laugh a defiance,

(Laugh in hope, for sure is the end)

March, march -- many as one,

Shoulder to shoulder and friend to friend.

There is a great story about suffragettes in Holloway Prison in 1912, marching in the courtyard and singing it while being conducted by Ethyl Smyth herself with a toothbrush.

Slang of the 1910s

Just spent an enjoyable if frustrating morning trying to discover the slang of the 1910s. It seems to be a non-subject online. (I thought everything was out there if you looked for it, but the vocab of middle-class young ladies in the 1910s is remarkably absent.)

On the other hand, there's some great 1811 slang in Francis Grose's dictionary of the vulgar tongue. Some of it's still with us: "Leaky. Apt to blab; one who cannot keep a secret is said to be leaky." Some of it has shifted its meaning: " Frosty face. One pitted with the small pox." Some of it's gone: "Clack. A tongue, chiefly applied to women; a simile drawn from the clack of a water-mill." In Sinks of London laid open by an unknown author of the 1800s there's "Black beetles: the lower order of people." and "Box of ivory: the teeth."

There's a whole pot more stuff on slang at the BBC's h2g2. I didn't know there was a gay undercover language in the '50s and '60s that contributed masses to my everyday vocab. And knowing the origins of swearing must be useful too. (Berk is ruder than you think.)

I gave up on the internet and tried fiction. Dorothy Sayers; P.G. Wodehouse; both a bit late really, and Wodehouse, rumour has it, made up a lot of his slang. But immediately something is clear - not only do class and region define your language, but women use a slightly different vocabulary from men.

I have one genuine source of 1910s ladies' middle(ish) class slang: my collection of letters from the First World War. It's not a big collection or a representative sample. It's letters home though, not as informal as speech but closer than published prose. So it's a start. Here are some phrases I don't use much that seem to prevail: beastly cold, tremendous, a budget of letters, the stove is a perfect brute, dreadfully, she's very jolly, she's a lazy hound, topping, we are all very cheery, awfully well, feeling rotten, frightfully excited, rather a character, she's an old tadpole.

I'm going to keep on looking. And I'm going to look at my own language to see if I speak differently from men. 

New Year 1911

New Year's Day: time to review the year that's passed. But why stick to this century? I wondered what kind of a year British feminists had had in 1910.

One with its ups and downs, it turns out. In July a bill that proposed giving the vote to large numbers of women was debated at length in Parliament. The report in Hansard (July 12 1910) makes strange reading: men debating whether women need or deserve a vote, whether their lives would be changed, whether the world would change -

"I cannot help thinking that there is some instability in our political system at present. I am quite certain that from time to time there are gusts of passion which sweep over the democracy, and I ask the House whether it would be wise to add to those a new and dangerous force of incalculable moment—I mean the collective emotion of women." (Mr. S. Butcher)

"I am asking for woman suffrage as a man, from a man's point of view, because I think it will be the best and the greatest reform we have ever had. I am asking for it for the sake of the country, for the sake of the men, as well as for the sake of the women." (Mr. Walter M'Laren)

"I do not want to roam into the abstract question of the relations between the sexes, their relative capacities and capabilities. I shall not go into that further than to say that I believe that there is a proportion of women capable of exercising the Parliamentary franchise, not merely for their own satisfaction, but to the public advantage, and I believe that that proportion of women is found in every class throughout the community. I believe the State would be the gainer if they had the vote, and if, in consequence of the vote, they had what I think myself follows from that—access in the fullest sense to all positions in our public life. I feel that the line of sex disqualification is not in accordance with obvious facts. I do not think it is necessary for the security of society. On the other hand, I think the grievance is greatly exaggerated. I think the great mass of women are not in any sensible degree losers by the disability under which they lie. It cannot be proved that they suffer any disadvantage in legislation." (Mr. Churchill)

"A slur of inferiority has been cast upon members of the other sex by hon. Gentlemen who have opposed this Bill. I think there is no inferiority whatever. One cannot but realise that members of the other sex have the gentler qualities much more marked; they transcend men in those qualities. They have also various qualities which fit them for assisting in local government matters. They have qualities which are virtuous in them, but which, in the male sex, would probably not be virtuous at all." (Mr. J.M.H. Kirkwood)

"The experience of Parliament has shown that these changes and reforms which [Stuart Mill] believed could not be accomplished without woman suffrage have, almost all of them, been carried." (Mr. S.H. Butcher)

The Bill was granted a second reading, but then dropped in the run-up to elections, on 18th November. Riots ensued, that day and later, as the Suffragette groups who had held off protests while the Bill was in Parliament resumed their activity and clashed with police. There were over a hundred arrests, and one protester later died of her injuries.

Other movements in feminism had seen continuation of gradual progress: it was the voting question that had been uppermost in the media in 1910.  What would 1911 hold?


(Thanks to the Women's Hour website for its handy timeline)