VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

In this paper, I will discuss the material culture of elite white women in the urban South, with particular attention to fashionable dress. The time frame will cover 1820 to 1860, and it will concern such cities as Lexington, Louisville, and Cincinnati. The paper will be based on research in manuscript collections, newspapers, and museum holdings. I will argue that these women saw fashion as a means of demonstrating their social status, yes, but also as a way to express the self in a society that did not give women many creative outlets, and as an expression of a distinct female subculture. They were eager for information about fashionable attire, and they were well-informed about changes in fashion in European cities and the East Coast of the United States. This information traveled quickly via merchants and print media, and these women shared that information with their female relatives and close friends. They discussed new styles, new fabrics, and new colors in detail in communications with each other. They were avid consumers, full-fledged participants in the consumer culture of their era, but they were not blind consumers, for they sometimes rejected innovations they found garish or uncomfortable to wear. This paper will draw upon the rich scholarship on women’s history and the history of fashion by such authors as Anne Hollander, Alison Lurie, James Laver, Diane Crane, Valerie Cumming, and Elizabeth Wilson; historians of American women such as Kate Haulman, Anya Jabour, Laura Edwards, Lois Banner, Marli Weiner, Stephanie Camp, and Cynthia Kennedy; and cultural historians such as Constance Classen, Bruno Latour, Ruth Rubinstein, and Richard Bushman. This paper will provide fresh perspectives on women’s lives in the city in nineteenth-century America.