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.
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Approx. second half of 1880s poster showing Annie Oakley wearing short-skirted attire
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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)
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1895 Punch satire on wearing a bicycle suit despite lacking a bicycle
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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:
“The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be “a hand, not a mouth”; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“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)
“Despite compelling evidence that she will be working at 35, by choice or necessity, today’s 21-year-old woman has difficulty looking beyond the ceremonies of her marriage and her babies’ christenings.”
—Marilyn Bender (b. 1925)
“A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)