Girl Athletes and Working Women
In the 19th century, poor women were known to wear corsets "boned" with rope, rather than steel or bone, to facilitate work in the field.
-
Approx. second half of 1880s poster showing Annie Oakley wearing short-skirted attire
-
An 1897 ad, showing a relatively early example of an ordinary non-sea-bathing woman in public view in unskirted garments (to ride a bicycle)
-
1895 Punch satire on wearing a bicycle suit despite lacking a bicycle
-
Wigan "pit brow lasses" scandalized by wearing trousers for dangerous work in coal mines. They wore skirts over their trousers, rolled up to the waist to keep them out of the way.
Read more about this topic: Victorian Dress Reform
Famous quotes containing the words girl, athletes, working and/or women:
“Tallulah [Bankhead] was the foremost naughty girl of her era but, in those days, “naughty” meant piquant, whereas values have so changed that now, in the 1970s, it generally means nauseating.”
—Anita Loos (1888–1981)
“The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth ... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“That myth—that image of the madonna-mother—has disabled us from knowing that, just as men are more than fathers, women are more than mothers. It has kept us from hearing their voices when they try to tell us their aspirations . . . kept us from believing that they share with men the desire for achievement, mastery, competence—the desire to do something for themselves.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)