Elizabeth Hawes - Later Life

Later Life

Hawes spent much of 1947 in Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands and then relaunched her fashion house in New York in 1948, early in the McCarthy era, opening a shop on Madison Avenue. She later said that she responded to former clients who needed to replace items they had purchased from her before the war by retrieving the designs from the fashion collection of the Brooklyn Museum and reproducing them. The FBI contacted all her professional connections and informed them of her radical political activities and associations. As a result she was shunned by industry professionals and her business venture failed. The business proved unsuccessful and she ended operations on August 1, 1949. In 1950 she moved to the U.S. Virgin Islands once more to escape the conservative political climate on the mainland United States. Hawes turned to work as a freelance designer and continued writing. Despite her harsh words about the fashion industry, she supported herself by working for Priscilla of Boston, an American bridal wear designer. For the rest of her life, in addition to her freelance work, she continued designing clothing for herself and her friends, specializing in hand-knitted separates.

In 1948 Hawes published Anything But Love: A Complete Digest of the Rules for Feminine Behavior from Birth to Death; Given out in Print, on Film, and Over the Air; Seen, Listened to Monthly by Some 340,000,000 American Women. This book referenced popular women's magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Glamour, and Ladies' Home Journal to compile a manual of tongue-in-cheek advice on how to be a good woman. Hawes aimed to expose the American media's efforts to brainwash the post-war woman back into her traditional pre-war role. She accused the American government of using undemocratic policies to lull the American people into a passive consumerist world based on the false promise of ever-increasing prosperity and conformity.

For a time in the early 1950s, she rented her home on Jane Street in Greenwich Village to J. Robert Oppenheimer.

She tried to relaunch her design work in California in 1954, again without success, though she found there one new designer whose work she enjoyed, Rudi Gernreich. She continued to live there until she relocated to New York a few years before her death.

When she published an update of her critique of the fashion industry in 1954, It's Still Spinach, a New York Times reviewer gently mocked its overdressed homespun advice in a 70-line poem:

She conjures up her fashion news

To teach, convert, and to amuse,

And this she does, with varied cracks,

Employing rapier and axe.

An Oracle, appointed by

Herself, she tells us how and why

We do, our very souls, lay bare

For all to see, by what we wear.

Her time in the Virgin Islands period provided the basis for another book, But Say It Politely, published in 1954, that discussed racial and cultural issues in the islands.

Hawes died on September 6, 1971, of cirrhosis of the liver at her home in the Hotel Chelsea in New York City.