When Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern Olympics in 1896, it’s hardly surprising that he excluded women from the Games. The problem, in part, was the clothing that women were saddled with in that era.
In the 1800s, women’s clothing was so restrictive that it prohibited simple movement, let alone meaningful physical activity. A woman’s outfit could weigh 20 pounds or more. Skirts and layers of stiffened petticoats swept the floor, voluminous sleeves billowed from shoulders, tight shoes hobbled the feet, and whale-boned corsets compressed the body’s anatomy so forcefully that women could hardly breathe.
No one expresses the assault of women’s attire better than Frances Willard (1839-1898), president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Women’s fashion has “deliberately deformed a body that came fresh and fair from God’s hand, and manacles a soul made in His image,” she charged.*
As a child, Frances and her sister had designed their ideal clothing. “We agreed it would be none of the soft, city clothes but must stand wear and tear, not take forever to put on, and be snake-proof,” she said.**
Frances’s easy, carefree days came to an end the day she was declared a young woman.
“I ‘ran wild’ until my sixteenth birthday, when the hampering long skirts were brought, with their accompanying corset and high heels and my hair was clubbed up with pins,” she recalls.***
Raising the hemlines
In the mid-1800s, some women tried modifying their clothing for comfort and practicality. Women’s rights activist Amelia Bloomer advocated the so-called “bloomer costume,” an outfit consisting of a knee-length dress — no corset! — over loose pants. Women loved it, but the ridicule was so persistent that most abandoned it.
But practical clothing gained traction in the West and Midwest. In the mid- to late 1800s, settlers made their way to Oregon and California, hoping to prosper as homesteaders and gold miners. One woman who made the journey describes women wearing a “gymnasium costume.”
“Short gray wool skirts, full bloomer pants of the same, fastened at the knee, high laced boots, and white stockings that were changed often enough to be kept spotless…. When compared with the long, slovenly, soiled calico gowns worn by the other women of the train, these simple costumes elicited many commendatory remarks.”****
Wheels and war
And then in the late 1890s, a bicycle craze swept the nation, giving women a socially-acceptable way to shed some of their hated clothing.
“I think the bicycle has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world,” said suffragist Susan B. Anthony. “I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a bike. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammeled womanhood.”*****
Frances Willard knew what Anthony was talking about. At age 53, she learned to ride a bicycle. She named her bike “Gladys” and described her riding outfit as a “simple, modest suit, to which no person of common sense could take exception.” The bicycle, she claimed, would change women’s attire forever.
“If women ride they must dress more rationally than they have been wont to do. If they do this, many prejudices as to what they may be allowed to wear will melt away.******
In the 1900s, the social upheaval of World War I further loosened women’s attire. Women took jobs that men had performed. They worked long hours at hard, physical labor. By necessity, their clothing became looser and more practical. Pants were no longer as shocking as they once were.
The stage was set! We’ll talk more about how evolving ideas about women’s clothing opened the door to athletic pursuits — and how persistent backward attitudes closed them.
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* Frances Willard, “The Relations of Dress to Vice,” (Evanston, IL: Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 1888), p. 3.
** Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years and More (Chicago: Women’s Temperance Publication Association, 1889), p. 52.
*** Willard, A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1895), p. 10.
**** Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), p. 141. From A Journey Across the Plains in 1866, the reminiscences of Cora Wilson Agatz.
***** Nellie Bly, “Champion of Her Sex,” New York Sunday World (February 2, 1896), p. 10. Interview with Susan B. Anthony.
****** Wheel Within a Wheel, pp. 74 and 39. (These asterisks are getting out of hand!)
Photo Credit: Frances Willard House Museum and Archives