Modern Womanhood: Unusual Sites of Twentieth-Century Women’s Empowerment in Europe and the United States

Notions of modern womanhood conjure, for some, visions of long-gowned suffragists carrying banners along a parade route. Still others might picture a leggy flapper with bobbed hair, short dress, and bare arms. Others might envision a crisply-attired Michelle Obama doing a “healthy dance” with school children. Invariably, modern womanhood invokes thoughts of emancipation, feminism, and women’s rights even as it invites images of women that emphasize fashion and sexuality. This issue presents articles that investigate many ways that women in the twentieth century have found empowerment through fashion, sport, work, reading, nursing, and giving birth in four western countries: Sweden, Germany, Spain, and the United States. Sometimes they have done so by borrowing ideas and styles from abroad. Sometimes, they have retooled homegrown traditions and ideologies. Sometimes, they have resisted or co-opted the authority of science. Women have found empowerment in unlikely places.

Our first article, Einav Rabinovitch-Fox’s “[Re]fashioning the New Woman: Women’s Dress, the Oriental Style, and the Construction of American Feminist Imagery in the 1910s,” argues that women in the United States “did not see fashion as opposing feminist ideas, but as a useful way to achieve them.” As early as the 1850s, such well known feminists as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony donned “Turkish trousers”—more popularly known as the “Bloomer costume”—in an effort to advance women’s health, freedom, and political equality. But the style failed to take hold, largely, Rabinovitch-Fox maintains, because women promoted it as utilitarian not fashionable. A later generation of “New Women and feminists” borrowed fashions not from the Middle East but from Japan. Flowing kimonos, the Obi girdle, and “kimono-style” dresses did not simply free women from tight corsets and heavy Victorian gowns; they also resembled haute-couture fashions popularized at the time by Paris designer Paul Poiret. American feminist Nina Wilcox Putnam, for example, adopted the kimono style for its fashion and beauty—not just function—and recommended that women empower themselves further by designing and sewing their own clothes. Doing so would allow women to control their own appearance, free from commercial influence, and render them producers and not just consumers of fashion. By forging “a positive link between mainstream fashion and feminism,” Putnam and other prominent feminists—including Mabel Dodge and Crystal Eastman—succeeded where earlier dress reformers had not.

By contrast, Helena Tolvhed’s “A Sound Citizen in a Sound Body: Sport and the Issue of Women’s Emancipation in 1920s Sweden,” examines why a feminist sport federation failed. The Swedish Federation for Physical Culture (SKCFK) was founded in 1924 by women who saw sport as a means of achieving equality, “a logical next phase after women won the vote and employment rights in the early 1920s.” They joined an international movement—led by the Federation Sportive Feminine Internationale (FSFI)—that resisted women’s exclusion from the Olympic games by holding four Women’s World Games between 1922 and 1934. Some historians have treated women’s sport—much as they have women’s fashion—as if it were necessarily an anti-feminist tool for enhancing women’s “beauty and heterosexual attractiveness.” On the contrary, Tolvhed reveals the SKCFK’s ties to women’s rights. The organization was led by former suffragists who aimed to improve “women’s physical and spiritual health” as well as their “social capability,” not only by encouraging their athletics but also by urging women to dress in ways that would allow them freer movement. Its agenda relied on two main arguments. First, modern societies needed the labor of strong women. Second, as citizens, women had the same rights as men to participate in sport. The SKCFK’s demise began in the late 1920s after it accepted a subordinate membership status in the male-dominated Swedish Sport Movement. In addition, the overall decline in women’s rights activism, onset of the economic depression, and looming threat of war accompanied a shift away from the athletic female ideal that was fashionable in the 1920s. Under these...