The society of women
This month, I’m continuing with the theme of women in 1860 (or thereabouts), and their relationship with each other. It’s a not-so-subtle, and not at all minor, sub-theme in What Empty Things Are These.
I have a view that while you can certainly view Western culture as overarching in Western society, within that culture are others – there is a male (masculine) and a female (feminine) culture which exist within the whole, for example. The more complex the society, of course, the more I am sure we could spend many happy hours identifying all sorts of sub-cultures. There’s class, of course and obviously. And the male and female cultures, logically, also include and are influenced by class. Picture if you will those Venn diagrams from high school, and imagine a number of overlappings. You will need a couple of hours, paper and coloured pencils.
And those at the top of the class (the high school class, here) will of course be perfectly aware that notions such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are imposed cultural things and do not relate closely if at all to scientific and psychological definitions of male and female. I just thought I’d get that one out of the way. Everybody passed that one with flying colours, of course.
And so we come back to Adelaide and Sobriety, speaking of women and class. They are of course, separated by their relative status. Yet they share a close proximity, and an intimacy -when you come to think of it – over and beyond that of most women. There’s a companionship implied in being a lady’s maid; not that every woman, maid or mistress, would necessarily have enjoyed the fulness of that role. Still.
Still, and despite the startling arrogance of a trend amongst the ladies-of-the-house to simply refer to their lady’s maid as ‘Mary’ (Adelaide’s sister-in-law, Mrs Courtney, does that, you will recall) this didn’t hold for all. And even where it did (and I suppose we must accept that many bougeoises of the 19th century were a bit obtuse about respect as we would see it now), still it is true that maid and mistress were thrown together and frequently developed a very close relationship. Sometimes, indeed, the relationship was so close that maid and mistress could each come to refer to the other by her first name. This in a society where formality was such that ladies of decades’ acquaintance would refer to each other as ‘Mrs Whatever’.
It’s this and other elements in her life that prompts Adelaide to begin her written musings on the relationship of women to each other and across class. Add to this, of course, that literacy had spread across a much-expanded middle class and been taken to a working class whose one day off a week had been commandeered by charitable groups to ensure they could read the bible… and you have the ability for people from different classes to share information and the events of the world and dispute each other’s point of view.
Women, in this literate world, had a range of journals open to them, including journals featuring fashion. Ah, fashion! I wrote an awfully long appendix about fashion and fashion plates in 1860 for my thesis. There’s a lot to be deduced from fashion and the way it’s represented. I won’t go into all of that here, and those who are still standing can always have a look at the thesis itself.
Anyway. Fashion plates had properly come into their own by 1860, tinted in lovely colours and everything. You can deduce a few things from this – that fashions themselves would, since you couldn’t just keep presenting the same frock pattern ad infinitum week after week, begin to change more rapidly; that women across classes would begin to be influenced by the same fashions; that, more subtly, women would become more conscious of themselves as a group.
Fashion plates of the time presented women, each wearing a variation of the fashion being promoted, in pairs or in groups. Not, it must be said, depicted as guffawing at a private joke or diving into champagne – rather, they were always rather cool and aloof with each other. After all, docility was required of ladies. Still, there they were, in their pairs and groups, clearly sharing a social occasion of some sort.
I find this interesting on a number of levels. That, firstly, it was an expression of women as a group interested in the interests of the group and in each other. Secondly, I can’t help but remember all those times over the many decades since then when it was stated that women just don’t like each other and are just so deeply nasty, hen, all the while, it’s men who continue to use various forms of psychological attack to drive women from employment in various sectors from journalism to scientific research. Just saying.
But I digress.
The notion of fashion in 1860 (and any era since) ties in with sexuality and sensuality too, of course. After all, fashion advertises the female shape-du-jour, which implies sexuality while, conversely, putting real sexuality at a distance because it’s been dressed up and turned into stereotype. Or caricature, if you think of the hourglass shape. Then there is sensuality implied by the materials themselves, how they would look and how they would feel (Sobriety, it amused me to write, reflected the dour Methodist sub-section of her class by doggedly removing every flounce from the dresses that Adelaide would hand on to her).
Thus, it’s very arguable that then, and now, a certain level of the homoerotic is discernible in the presented in fashion, especially implied in the groupings in plates of the time. Yet, yet, yet. While this is true, and very true that the plates were a conversation being had between women, I do think it must never be forgotten that the implication was that the presentation itself, after all, was about men. Women were enacting a role which was required of them; and clothes were an expression of what the men could afford to wrap their women in. Ruskin, after all, ranted on about extravagant dress because it was, at its extreme, about the parading of wealth. Men’s wealth, of course.
Nonetheless, the notion of women as a culture of their own within the broader culture is something, I think, we could begin to examine. While those guys were indeed always lurking in the background, women related to each other in distinct ways that were, in the end, fundamental to society while at the same time ignored for their importance.