In eighteenth-century America, fashion served as a site of contests over various forms of gendered power. Here, Kate Haulman explores how and why fashion--both as a concept and as the changing style ...of personal adornment--linked gender relations, social order, commerce, and political authority during a time when traditional hierarchies were in flux.In the see-and-be-seen port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, fashion, a form of power and distinction, was conceptually feminized yet pursued by both men and women across class ranks. Haulman shows that elite men and women in these cities relied on fashion to present their status but also attempted to undercut its ability to do so for others. Disdain for others' fashionability was a means of safeguarding social position in cities where the modes of dress were particularly fluid and a way to maintain gender hierarchy in a world in which women's power as consumers was expanding. Concerns over gendered power expressed through fashion in dress, Haulman reveals, shaped the revolutionary-era struggles of the 1760s and 1770s, influenced national political debates, and helped to secure the exclusions of the new political order.
Making Women's Histories showcases the transformations that the intellectual and political production of women's history has engendered across time and space. It considers the difference women's and ...gender history has made to and within national fields of study, and to what extent the wider historiography has integrated this new knowledge. What are the accomplishments of women's and gender history? What are its shortcomings? What is its future?The contributors discuss their discovery of women's histories,the multiple turns the field has taken, and how place affected the course of this scholarship. Noted scholars of women's and gender history, they stand atop such historiographically-defined vantage points as Tsarist Russia, the British Empire in Egypt and India, Qing-dynasty China, and the U.S. roiling through the 1960s. From these and other peaks they gaze out at the world around them, surveying trajectories in the creation of women's histories in recent and distant pasts and envisioning their futures.
Through the story of Philadelphia's dancing and fishing clubs, this article explores the intersection of elite Anglo-American social institutions, gender relations, and political culture in the late ...colonial and early national periods. These exclusive, invitation-only organizations provide a case study and window onto the shifting relationship between elite sociability and politics across the period. From the clubs' origins in the 1730s and 1740s through their function on the eve of the Seven Years' War to their careers in the early republic, their position and composition suggest that they evolved from integral components of colonial political culture to something more insularly social—from the auxiliaries of governance and diplomacy to their counterpoint. This trajectory shows that one way in which local men of wealth and lineage may have adapted to the gendered, ethnic, and political challenges fired in the forge of imperial crisis, revolution, nation making, and democratization was by closing their social ranks.
By the late eighteenth century, the originally Quaker town of Philadelphia had gained the reputation of the most fashionable and refined city in the American colonies. The elaborate hairstyles of men ...and women of that era are described, along with the intricately detailed clothing of that period.
Examines how women's histories are explored and explained around the world Making Women's Histories showcases the transformations that the intellectual and political production of women’s history has ...engendered across time and space. It considers the difference women’s and gender history has made to and within national fields of study, and to what extent the wider historiography has integrated this new knowledge. What are the accomplishments of women’s and gender history? What are its shortcomings? What is its future? The contributors discuss their discovery of women’s histories, the multiple turns the field has taken, and how place affected the course of this scholarship. Noted scholars of women’s and gender history, they stand atop such historiographically-defined vantage points as Tsarist Russia, the British Empire in Egypt and India, Qing-dynasty China, and the U.S. roiling through the 1960s. From these and other peaks they gaze out at the world around them, surveying trajectories in the creation of women’s histories in recent and distant pasts and envisioning their futures.
When Mary Alexander, a merchant who operated a business with her husband, James, in New York, placed a large order for fabric with her English suppliers in 1726, she included three pages of samples: ...a sheet filled with ribbon pieces, another displaying fifty - eight mixed fabric swatches, and a third containing thirty strips of calico and chintz. The sheets and their contents remain preserved as beautiful artifacts, bright and textured collages in which the materials have retained their brilliance after nearly three hundred years. A viewer is struck not only by the quantity of fabric Alexander ordered but the
EPILOGUE Haulman, Kate
The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America,
08/2011
Book Chapter
In the 1790s, the corset reentered the world of fashion. This is not to say that the midsections of women’s bodies had gone unsupported in the decades, even centuries, before. Stays, or “jumps,” and ...stomachers stiff ened by whalebone shaped the forms of many women in the early modern period. But the word “corset,” from the Latin for “body” and dating to the late medieval period in reference to an outer garment, one also worn by men, had been out of use for some time. It reappeared in common usage in 1795 as a “closely fitting inner bodice . .
From the hoop controversies of the early eighteenth century and the sumptuary restrictions of South Carolina’s 1740 slave code to the homespun campaigns and backlash of the 1760s and early 1770s, the ...port cities of British North America saw continual contests over fashion in dress. Fueled by a variety of sartorial styles and attempts to define their meanings, these confl icts often concerned the ways in which social order intersected with gendered power in a robust consumer culture. In the midst of a period in whichla modeitself was beginning to change, becoming more country (however refined) and less
Fashion and Nation Haulman, Kate
The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America,
08/2011
Book Chapter
In the 1780s, Americans faced dilemmas both sartorial and political. Having won independence from Great Britain in a contest that not only pitted an imperial power against a nascent republic but also ...set ways of signifying power, legitimacy, and authority against one another, inhabitants of the United States faced the vexing question of how the new nation would appear in the eyes of the world and to itself. Fashion in dress focused the tension of being freed from political dependence on Britain while still economically tethered through commerce, exposing the de facto colonial position of the republican polity.¹ Observing that
Fops and Coquettes Haulman, Kate
The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America,
08/2011
Book Chapter
Stopping in Staten Island along his journey from Maryland to Boston in 1744, Dr. Alexander Hamilton observed, almost without irony, that the gray moss that hung heavily from the trees might “if ...handsomely oild and powdered and tyed behind with a bag or ribbon . . . make a tollerable beau -periwig.” Ever casting a keen eye toward things genteel (or just as often ungenteel), Hamilton knew a thing or two about the styling of wigs, preeminent markers of status and masculine identity for men in eighteenth - century British America. Yet he did not limit his observations to the
