FASHION MEETS POLITICS IN THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT
On October 21, 1910, the musical comedy “The White Hen” opened at Petaluma’s Hill Opera House, setting off a new fashion craze in town. The fashion foray was led by the traveling theater company’s showgirls, who took the stage adorned in feathered plumes and the latest couture from Paris, an ankle-length skirt so narrow at the hem the women could only “hobble” around in short, pigeon-like steps.[1]
“The hobble skirt,” the Petaluma Argus announced, “has invaded Petaluma with a vengeance.”[2]
When two women wearing the skirts attempted to board a train departing the Petaluma depot, they were unable to mount the steps. Clinging onto the handrail, they found themselves dragged down the platform as the train pulled out of the station.[3]
“Of course, women must wear what is ‘worn’ even at the risk of death,” observed the Petaluma Courier. “Shall railroad corporations now dictate fashions for women?”[4]
No, but the government appeared ready to. As reports of similar incidents surfaced, a California state legislator proposed subjecting hobble skirts to the same scale used by the Fish and Game Department to regulate fishing. Those with a bottom circumference of less than 35½ inches would be banned from the streets.[5]
A dentist located on the second floor of a building recommended installing new stairs with a rise of only five inches to accommodate women wearing hobble skirts.[6]
Petaluma’s reigning fashionista, Charles Kelly, aka “Kelly the Tailor,” pointed out that physical danger wasn’t the only thing preventing some women from climbing stairs in hobble skirts. There was also having to hike up their skirts and scandalously expose their ankles in doing so. Kelly noted that the excuse “Oh, I’ve got nothing to wear,” was becoming commonplace among women choosing instead to stay home.[7]
The hobble skirt craze coincided with suffragist efforts to place a proposition on the California ballot giving women the right to vote. Some men cited the skirt as one of the reasons they were opposed to the proposition. “So long as a woman buttons her clothes up the back,” declared an Episcopal minister, “she certainly has not sense enough to vote.”[8]
With tongue-in-cheek, the editor of the Courier chided, “Any unregenerate man who has ever been called upon to button a woman’s dress with the usual hooks and eyes, and who is not permitted to swear, will certainly agree.”[9]
A year after the “White Hen” played Petaluma, the suffrage proposition passed by a narrow margin, making California the sixth state in the county in which women could vote. Male politicians chasing the votes of women found themselves baffled by the demographic labeled the “hobble skirt vote.”[10]
By 1911, women were increasingly entering the workforce, demanding more freedom, more rights, and more comfortable fashions. Gone were the suffocating corsets, bulky crinoline skirts, and voluminous gigot sleeves of the Victorian era. The high-waisted Empire line was back, only now with dresses that skimmed the body instead of billowing petticoats.[11]
Why then, some men wondered, had such a seemingly restrictive, masochistic style of wear suddenly come into vogue?
Paul Poiret, the Paris designer credited with creating the hobble skirt, reportedly took his inspiration from the famous pioneer aviator Wilbur Wright, of the Wright brothers.
While on a visit in France, Wright took popular American actress named Edith Berg up for a joyride in his biplane. To prevent Berg’s large skirt from ballooning over her head or getting caught in the plane’s engines, Wright tied a rope around her skirt at the ankles. The flight lasted a mere two minutes, but distinguished Berg as the first American woman to fly.[12]
Poiret found himself captivated by the contradictory image of Berg flying freely while being bound up. It was a puzzling fascination for a man previously dubbed “The King of Fashion” for his streamlined, corset-free dresses that liberated women from the Victorian confines of the S-curve silhouette. “It was,” he confessed in his autobiography, “in the name of Liberty that I proclaimed the fall of the corset and the adoption of the brassiere . . . . Yes, I freed the bust, but I shackled the legs.”[13]
Those fashion historians who view clothing styles as reflections of the zeitgeist, point out that while women may have been on the verge of emancipation, the tradition of being sheltered and in need of protection in a male-dominated society still lingered. Hence the hobble skirt. Others believe the skirt’s popularity was expressive of newly emancipated women confidently experimenting with fashion, no longer held to the suffocating standards of Victorian modesty.[14]
Whatever the skirt’s social or political implications, Poiret’s shackled design didn’t stop women from adopting subtle slits, hidden pleats, and buttons at the skirt’s hem for greater range of motion.[15]
Among those most perplexed by the new fashion was the Anti-Saloon League. A powerful group of conservative men, the League, along with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, were hellbent on banning the manufacturing and sale of alcohol. They viewed California’s newly enfranchised women as critical swing voters, calling upon their innate morality to cleanse the nation of its sins and provide “home protection” against the tyranny of drinking men.[16]
Thanks to their influence, the rural districts west of Petaluma voted to go “dry” in 1912, banning the sale and possession of alcohol at country roadhouses. Petaluma, meanwhile, remained stubbornly “wet.”[17]
In 1914, the Anti-Saloon League succeeded in getting a prohibition proposition on the state ballot. To mobilize women voters, they dispatched a temperance campaigner to Petaluma. She made the hobble skirt into a wedge issue, denouncing it as indecent and vulgar, and proposing police stop women from wearing it on the streets. “The morality of men,” she declared, “cannot be improved as long as women wear such suggestive clothes.”[18]
The prohibition proposition was soundly defeated in 1914, and again when reintroduced in 1916, indicating California women were not single-issue voters. Some of that had to do with the underlying motives of the Anti-Saloon League and the WCTU.
For all their talk of saving people from the saloons’ cauldrons of sin and debauchery, their deeper concern was who the saloons catered to—European immigrants flooding into the country, threatening to change the America they knew.[19]
Petaluma remained stubbornly anti-prohibition, due in part to the city’s large number of first- and second-generation Irish, German, Danish, Italian, Portuguese, and Swiss citizens, who viewed their ethnic taverns as community hubs in keeping their traditions alive.[20]
America’s entry into World War One, followed by the terrifying influenza epidemic of 1918, put an end to idle indulgences like the hobble skirt. In 1919, the Anti-Saloon League succeeded in imposing a nationwide Prohibition. The following year, women secured the vote nationally.[21]
The paradoxical mix of restriction and liberation gave birth to unexpected new freedoms for women. Taking advantage of the underground culture and social chaos created by Prohibition, women began to indulge in the forbidden pleasure of drinking in speakeasies, which, unlike traditional American saloons, were coed, and out of the public eye.
Their new sense of independence was reflected in the loose flapper dresses of the Roaring Twenties, which, in a nod to the hobble skirt’s focus on women’s legs, were distinguished by rising hemlines.[22]
The hobble skirt surfaced again in the 1950s as the inspiration for French designer Christian Dior’s slim-fitting pencil skirt, which quickly became a popular form of office wear. Like the hobble skirt, it required a very particular way of walking, famously epitomized by Marilyn Monroe’s wiggle along a train platform in the film Some Like It Hot.[23]
A version of this story ran in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.
*****
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Max Dill Has ‘Come Back,’” Petaluma Argus, October 22, 1910.
[2] “Rare Comedy, Pretty Girls,” Petaluma Courier, October 22, 1910; “Local Notes,” Petaluma Argus, October 22, 1910.
[3] “A Dangerous Practice,” Petaluma Courier, February 20, 1911.
[4] “Shall a Railroad Dictate Women’s Fashions,” Petaluma Courier, September 28, 1911.
[5] “A Law to Regulate Hobble Skirts,” Petaluma Courier, January 11, 1911.
[6] “‘Hobble Stairway,’” Petaluma Argus, April 15, 1925.
[7] “Accident Cause by Hobble Skirt,” Petaluma Courier, January 16, 1911
[8] “The Temerity of Cyrus,” Petaluma Courier, May 10, 1911.
[9] “The Temerity of Cyrus,” Petaluma Courier, May 10, 1911.
[10] “Wise Talks by the Office Boy,” Petaluma Argus, November 14, 1911.
[11] Ann Beth Presley, “Fifty Years of Change: Societal Attitudes and Women’s Fashions, 1900-1950,” The Historian, Winter 1998, Vol. 60, No. 2, pp. 307-324.
[12] “Snapshot: A Hobble Skirt Race, a Century Ago,” St. Louis Magazine, August 25, 2017.
[13] Presley, p. 312; Harold Koda, Andrew Bolton, “Paul Poiret (1879–1944),”Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/poir/hd_poir.htm
[14] Presley, p. 312; Cecile Paul, “Before the Pencil Skirt there was the Hobble Skirt,” Messynessychic.com.
[15] Daniel Milford-Cottam, Edwardian Fashion (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014). P. 49.
[16] Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (NY: Scribner, 2011), pp. 65-66.
[17] “’Drys’ Win by Big Majority in Supervisor Green’s District,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 13, 1912.
[18]“Prohibition, Slavery and Woman’s Dress,” Petaluma Courier, May 15, 1914.
[19] “Vote in Doubt on Red Light Abatement,” San Francisco Examiner, November 6, 1914; “Petaluma Complete Returns,” Petaluma Argus, November 8, 1916; “110,000 and 40,000 Estimate on Nos. 1 and 2,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 10, 1916; Pietro Pinna, “Fresh Water Triumphs: The Italian American Wine Industry’s Struggle Against Prohibition in California,” Italian American Review, Vol. 8, Issue 8, Winter 2018, pp. 23-46; Okrent, pp. 85-87.
[20] Pietro Pinna, “Fresh Water Triumphs”: The Italian American Wine Industry’s Struggle Against Prohibition in California,” Italian America Review, 81., Winter 2018, pp. 23-25; ’Drys’ Win by Big Majority in Supervisor Green’s District,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 13, 1912; “Amendments in Petaluma,” Petaluma Courier, November 6, 1914.
[21] Cecile Paul.
[22] Cecile Paul.
[23] Rosalind Jana, “Everything to Know About the History of the Pencil Skirt,” Vogue, June 27, 2023.