‘HOW NARROW WOMEN had grown lately! … like stalks of corn,’1 Virginia Woolf wrote in Orlando, evoking the 1920s and the sheath-like dresses that came into vogue in the middle of that decade. The freedom of movement they represented was a real emancipation. Hemlines had never dared so high. Shorter skirts seemed to reflect freedoms women were beginning to experience in other aspects of their lives.
My great-aunt came of age in 1922. She wore dropped-waist frocks, long dangling beads and dashed about – Eva never did anything slowly – in the one-bar buttoned shoes of the time. The button box contains three pairs of tiny buttons which fastened shoes like hers. Of course, where there were buttoned shoes, there were also buttonhooks; Eva’s nestled in the little handbags she carried and later passed on to me, and which also speak so eloquently of that era.
Couturier ‘Lucile’ described the sheath-like style as a response to post-war stringencies. Wealthy women had less money to spend: there could be no more elaborate ‘picture dresses’2 and so the ‘boyish woman’3 was born. Paris fashions percolated down to the high street and were seized by women who wanted looser, freer clothing and ‘little hats which can go under umbrellas’4, a phrase which immediately conjures up modern women going about their busy lives.
Eileen Whiteing, the daughter of a City businessman, recalled being a slave to ‘whatever current trend was in vogue … the craze for knitted silk jumpers, ultra-low waists, cloche hats and two-tone shoes’5, but it was not only the middle and upper classes who paid close attention to fashion. The new styles could be mass-produced cheaply and were relatively easy to replicate at home. For the first time, modernity was quickly and affordably within reach.
Sisters Flora and Edith Hodson ran a shop from their front room in Willenhall, near Birmingham, selling clothes and haberdashery to working women, many of them factory workers. The shop’s ready-to-wear clothing reveals a knowledge of fashion equal to that of department-store buyers, and styles as elaborate as those seen in women’s magazines. Dresses ranged from striped ‘tub’ frocks in coarse cotton, to patterned artificial ‘art’ silks and crêpes, and were decorated with as many panels, buttons, buckles and trimmings as modish women could want. The sisters’ stock also included the chic jersey suits of the period: the look created by couturiers Chanel and Jean Patou not only filtered down to the high street, it also found its way, via city wholesalers, to a little house-shop.
The new shorter styles drew attention to women’s legs; they also drew attention to their feet in one-bar buttoned shoes. How petite these shoes look if you come upon them in a vintage shop; and what fabrics: glacé and kid leather, satin, patterned brocade, metallic sheens. A touch of the exotic was popular: polished python was said to be a new craze; you could also purchase sealskin shoes trimmed with lizard. An unwanted consequence of these narrow shoes was the agonies women suffered with corns. Country-house occupant Lesley Lewis recalled how most women took a sharp intake of breath if you came anywhere near their feet.
By the late 1920s, the modern woman could complement her shoes with stockings in bluebell, chrome yellow, scarlet, cyclamen and every shade of green; vivid colours decorated clothing too, reflecting the increasing thirst for colour in all things. Metropolitan and bohemian circles had swooned to the dramatic statements of colour created for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes before the First World War, but mainstream and provincial tastes were slower to catch on. Startling shades and exuberant patterns were not widespread until much later. Once they were, colour was a shorthand for modernity. Painter and textile designer Sonia Delaunay declared, ‘If painting has become part of our lives, it is because women have been wearing it.’6
The flapper of popular mythology was a further manifestation of the modern. Garter buttons decorated with the flapper’s stylised face – a wide-eyed Betty Boop-like creature – suggest that life is nothing but fizz and bubble; the wearing of a garter was pretty dizzying in itself. Schoolgirl Angela Rodaway was fascinated by older girls who ‘wore light stockings and high-heeled shoes. Their skirts were short, nearly up to their knees and, most exciting of all, they wore long silk knickers and fancy garters.’7 A ‘rollocking young flapper’, with her ‘merry pranks and harmless mischief’ formed the basis of a 1920 My Weekly serial, ‘Sally, Sport-of-a-Girl’.8
The flapper also gave her name to the so-called ‘flapper vote’, the extension of the franchise in 1928 to women aged twenty-one, following the partial enfranchisement ten years earlier of women aged thirty and over, with a household qualification. This denigratory phrase infuriated Dame Millicent Fawcett, founder member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. ‘Why call them flappers?’ she asked in the Evening Standard. ‘Why call them girls?’ (a question that could have been asked many times since). ‘They are young women … On the whole I am a great admirer of the modern young woman. She is far more capable, sensible and has a broader outlook on life than ever she had.’9 So many column inches were expended on the ‘flapper vote’ that even the manufacturer of Abdullah cigarettes joined in: a 1929 advertisement featured ‘Our New Electorate’ with a poem about ‘Miss Infatuation’10 who decides to vote Communist after sitting next to ‘Bert Hunks at a Bolshevik Tea’.
Women of all ages and social classes displayed their party allegiances at the general election in May 1929. Socialist factory workers wore red; an elderly voter decorated her bath chair in Tory blue; mill girls polled early in large numbers; one woman flew from Manchester to Blackpool to register her vote, while women on the Yorkshire moors were conveyed to the polls by a young men’s ‘flying squad’ of motorcyclists. Many of the cars transporting voters were driven by ‘girls who dashed along the streets behind windscreens and bonnets gaily decorated with party colours’.11 Women seemed to be zooming ahead.
The achievement of universal suffrage marked a decade of legislative progress. There were now fourteen women MPs; female magistrates and jurors sat in court; divorce law reform finally accorded women equal status while, thanks to the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, the first woman was called to the Bar (and told what to wear beneath her robe). Small numbers of professional women were making real gains but, by 1920, almost two-thirds of the women who entered the workforce during the First World War had left it again, a movement begun almost before the ink dried on the Armistice; still others gave up work on marriage or at first pregnancy. For most young women, work was an interlude between school and marriage, and often a harsh interlude at that.
The mixed messages of the period are apparent in a magazine like Good Housekeeping which, on its launch in 1922, announced ‘we are on the threshold of a great feminine awakening’.12 This magazine was directed at middle-class readers, most of them homemakers, but its contributors also addressed the question of professional work (appealing to the higher echelons of the workforce, not the young clerical workers dashing off for a sixpenny lunch): ‘A Career for Women – H. M. Inspector of Taxes by a Civil Servant’ (April 1925); ‘Why Are There Not More Superwomen In Business?’ pioneering lawyer, Helena Normanton asked (November 1926). Too few opportunities, could have been the swift answer. In 1938 only 4 per cent of salaried women earned more than £250 a year, compared with over 50 per cent of men, while the marriage bars in teaching, nursing, medicine and the civil service, together with the stigma attached to married women working, ensured that the professional woman was likely to be single. ‘There is still in many quarters … much resistance, or at least very half-hearted support, to the idea of women having serious jobs’13, Margaret Cole wrote in 1936, when advising young women on professional life.
For all the legislative gains, a strong domestic ethos prevailed, with commentators quick to remind women of all social classes that marriage was their best career. In 1931 Woman’s Life reported that
business, if accepted in the right spirit, can be an invaluable training … The girl who learns to look after her employer’s interests will look after her husband’s. She will also learn to be subservient to rightful authority, which will teach her, later on, to respect the authority of her husband. This may seem old-fashioned when people are never tired of talking about women’s new freedom and equality. But it is common sense, just the same.14
The young working woman of the period was frequently characterised as a business girl or bachelor girl, a term giving a more attractive gloss to independent singledom than the word ‘spinster’ ever could, but emphasising the working woman’s immaturity. Bachelor girls were often office workers. By 1921 there were nearly 600,000, representing 46.1 per cent of all clerks, more than double the number of those ‘white-blouse’ workers of 1911. These were the young women Agnes M. Miall advised to ‘try to forget that you are a woman’ when working alongside men. Her Bachelor Girl’s Guide to Everything included a step-by-step guide to typewriting, ‘a generally useful accomplishment to the woman wage-earner in the business world’. Advertising executive Florence Sangster would have approved. Advertising held no barriers for the ambitious young woman, she reported, ‘but let her first learn to do one thing well, be it only typewriting so that she can knock at the door of her first employer with something useful to offer,’15 suggesting that all too often young women lacked the skills they needed to get on.
Then, as now, ‘business’ clothes accounted for a significant proportion of a working woman’s wardrobe; Miall offered budgetary advice. Women earning 25s a week, or less, should allow approximately £12 a year for clothes, while those earning from 27s to £3 should allocate £15 to £20. Miall’s Guide appeared in 1916, but the office worker’s needs and dilemmas had not changed and Miall’s somewhat over-generous estimation of wages was now more realistic. In 1935 Good Housekeeping suggested that an eighteen-year-old provincial typist might earn 25 shillings a week, while an experienced London secretary in her thirties could command £4. Some women were earning considerably less, however; among them the retail workers who might earn as little as 10s selling dresses to other business girls. Independent adviser Gladys Burlton informed shop workers, whose own numbers were increasing – by 1931, there were over 394,000 shop assistants, with women outnumbering men three to one – that a ‘business girl cannot dress as a private character’.16 Burlton advocated that those earning £3 a week should spend a third on dress, while those earning more could afford to spend a little less. However, a 1934 study showed that few working women could spend anything like a third of their income on clothes and that some shop workers could barely clothe themselves. The following year, Gladys Burlton was interviewed by the Sunday Express for a series on ‘Women Who Make Money’. Therein lies the rub: women made money, whereas bachelor girls struggled to make ends meet. The difficulty was not confined to the lowliest ranks. Virginia Woolf based part of her argument in Three Guineas on an appeal made by professional women for clothing. A further difficulty lay in laundering the few clothes women owned and in keeping themselves clean in those pre-deodorant days when ‘not to smell [was] an expensive thing’.17 One anxious young woman who wrote to Home Chat’s ‘Mrs Jim’ was advised to ‘dust the armpits with a mixture of boracic powder, bicarbonate of soda, and starch, in equal parts’.
The bachelor girl’s salary would go further if she made her own cotton frocks, blouses and underwear, and trimmed her own hats, Miall advised, though two of the ‘Simple Designs for Home or Office’18 Woman’s Life recommended for home-dressmakers look far from simple to achieve. How to Dress Well advocated buying an unlined jersey suit and tailored blouses or a ‘one-piece, slip-on dress’ which could be dry-cleaned and ‘reappear as fresh as … new’19 – provided the business girl could afford the dry-cleaning bill. Whatever her circumstances, the working woman needed to put her best foot forward. ‘Remember that appearances reveal more than they hide,’ Miss Modern reminded her, ‘and that a lost button may mean a lost job … Wear a costume that fits you, and look trim and spruce … Match your stockings with an eye to your hat, your blouse, your gloves. There is still an almost superstitious faith in shoes and gloves as marking a woman’s standard of refinement.’20
Miss Modern was on the business girl’s side. Its launch issue included ‘Pity the Pretty Girl in Business’, ‘Look Smart at the Office’, and ‘That First Interview’, though a feature on ‘Bachelor Girl Cookery’ proposed a four-course meal few could have managed to rustle up.21 An entertaining squib in a later issue describes junior shorthand typist Miss Geranium Jones, who attracts the attention of unarticled clerk Marmaduke Youngman, when she starts work with solicitors Messrs Haggle and Sharpe. ‘Our ambitious Geranium had not only got on – she had got off.’22 Women exceeded men by 1.75 million, but most young working women hoped their ‘bachelor’ status would be short-lived.
Meanwhile, unless she still lived at home, much of her salary disappeared on board and lodgings. Bachelor flats – as novelist Dodie Smith pointed out, there is no such thing as a spinster flat – could leave a lot to be desired; life at a boarding house or as a paying guest had its drawbacks, and hostel living, though cheap, was regimented and often primitive. Barbara Comyns’s A Touch of Mistletoe fictionalises the downsides of singledom: tiny hostel cubicles, poky bed-sitting rooms, poor diet – rotting cabbage (and boils).
How the business girl must have longed for Virginia Woolf’s room of her own. Modern Home conjured one up for her. Along with the ‘Modernist’ (all stripes and angles and ‘severe chic’), the ‘Country Cottage’ and the ‘Bride’, a 1930 feature described the ‘Bachelor Girl’ which, combining ‘the comforts of a bedroom with the dignity of the study’23, was decorated in biscuit and fuchsia, with a picture of a greyhound ‘done in linen’ on the wall – something for the business girl to stitch in her spare time, perhaps, when she had finished trimming her hats and making her frocks and blouses. (Though less sophisticated than the borzois which stride across art-deco bronzes, the greyhound was nonetheless a symbol of all things modern and a fitting companion for slender young women: a greyhound’s head was the logo of a ready-to-wear wholesaler which supplied the Willenhall shop run by the Hodson sisters.)
In advertisements of the period, bachelor girls are positive, exuberant young creatures – diving into the water to swim (unlike their Victorian grandmothers), or seeking a loan to set themselves up in business. They exist more quietly in the small ads: seeking help to run kennels, offering typewriting services, or, quieter still, seeking posts as companions. A business girl is the subject of Dod Procter’s painting Lunch Hour. The young woman reading at a cafe table may have smuggled in a surreptitious sandwich to accompany her cup of tea – the bachelor girl who could rarely spend more than fourpence or sixpence on a meal was often hungry – but it is the young woman herself, with her shiny bobbed hair and ginger-coloured coat and dress, who holds our interest. She appears to be reading, but is resting her head in her hand and could just as easily have fallen asleep. The bachelor girl is also the subject of Thomas C. Dugdale’s painting Underground, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1932, in which a weary-looking woman, staring blankly ahead, is strap-hanging on a busy Tube train. The Illustrated London News found the painting ‘relentless in its realism’.24 As women had known all along, there was nothing girlish about independence. A My Home serial acknowledged this with an almost histrionic strap-line: ‘For the Women of Today There are No Sheltered Places … They Must Go Out to Battle and Take Life as they Find It. This is Modern Youth!’25
In a period with much to forget as well as celebrate, many sought distraction on the dance floor. Museum-collection gold and rosebud-patterned buttoned shoes, circa 1925, and a pair in gold lamé decorated with metallic fringing and a Sphinx’s head (a product of the Egyptomania which followed the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb) were surely meant for dancing. Tango teas had been part of bohemian culture since before the First World War, but by the 1920s, all segments of society and all parts of the British Isles had caught up. Newspapers and magazines printed steps by ‘famous London dancing masters’, lyrics for the latest foxtrots and hesitation waltzes and features on the dos and don’ts of dancing. London’s Dickens and Jones was one of the first department stores to introduce a thé dansant; Brown’s of Chester (‘the Harrods of the North’) included a dance floor in its 1926 refurbishment, while in Edinburgh it was reported that ‘jazz reigns supreme and the shimmy is coming into its own’.26 By the end of the decade most provincial towns had dance halls.
‘The dance craze is, no doubt, greatly responsible for the headdress fashion’,27 the Ladies Field reported; in a like vein, the Daily Mail described ‘a demi-turban of silver gauze with a wisp of monkey fur falling almost to the shoulders’.28 Cartoonists had fun – and no wonder – with some fashionable styles, especially the backless evening gown. So much flesh on display was startling and daringly new. Dancing was not just about skimpy glamour, however (and certainly not in chilly provincial halls). In no time at all, dance music piped through the wireless was increasing productivity in factories; one young Staffordshire pottery worker and keen dancer, employed as a lathe treader, practised her steps while she worked.
The 1920s saw skirt lengths rise only to fall again; by the end of that decade sleek boyish lines changed into a softer silhouette, with waist and bust returning. Commentators spoke of a more feminine look, and remarks about a more feminine look are usually accompanied by prescriptive assumptions about female behaviour. The freedom shorter skirts demonstrated now seemed to be under threat. Guardian readers corresponded on the subject: were women to be hobbled once again?
The question of dress was becoming complicated in ways that are still recognisable. The long skirt and white blouse had provided a uniform for the educated Edwardian, but how was the interwar woman to dress now that a greater choice of practical and attractive clothing was available? Must she disdain fashion and sacrifice style as a badge of her intelligence? ‘The date is passing when frumpiness counts as cleverness,’ one journalist insisted. Vera Brittain also felt strongly on the subject and vented her feelings in her diary: ‘Why, why must social reform and political intelligence … be associated with shiny noses & unwashed hair?’29 Brittain loved clothes and, years earlier, not yet acquainted with the educated ‘look’, had startled the Principal of Somerville by arriving for an evening interview wearing a flimsy gown, ‘modish’ satin cloak and high-heeled white suede shoes.
In 1927 writer Winifred Holtby attended a conference at which she saw ‘line after line of dark velour coats with dreary rabbitskin collars, line after line of unbecoming hats … line after line of heads with rather untidy hair, of sallow complexions and listless unlovely figures.’ Passing a mirror in the entrance hall, she saw a similarly dressed woman who ‘gave a general impression of dowdiness, lethargy and neglect’, and realised she was looking at herself. ‘Since then I have been thinking hard about the problem … Ought we to abandon an interest in our clothes?’ Reflecting on the subject, Holtby concluded: ‘We want clothes in which we can dress ourselves quickly and comfortably, and which we can wear all day if necessary without feeling awkward … And we want to feel that in them we appear as charming, as chic and more entitled to self-respect than the [leisured fashionable women] whose photographs today we admire so wistfully in the illustrated papers.’30 One academic of the period evidently resolved the situation to her own satisfaction, and with great panache: each time Eileen Power, Professor of Medieval History at the London School of Economics, had an article published she travelled to Croydon, boarded a flight to Paris, and bought herself a new dress.