like could also make you memorably bizarre. In the 1970s, after the passage of more than half a century, the former trade union leader Maurice Hann remembered Sylvia Pankhurst speaking at a meeting in a blouse that was inside out. ‘A proper scruff,’ he declared to me with the admonition not to quote him.23 Doris Nield Chew recollected how her mother ‘was completely without personal vanity’. Indeed, her hairdresser recalled ruefully how Chew ‘crammed her hat on a head of beautifully waved hair’.24
Ada Nield Chew might go ‘round the world on a sixpenny tin of Pond’s cold cream’, but plenty of middle-class feminists rebelled without loss of style.25 Appropriating conventional forms of femininity offset unconventional political action and confused male opponents. Ironically this resulted in suffrage shoppers being courted by the new large department stores – despite the broken windows. The Women’s Social and Political Union militants, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, were studiously elegant and would have concurred with the Liberal father of the constitutional suffragist, Margery Corbett Ashby, who advised her: ‘if you want to reform anything else, do not reform your clothes’.26
In contrast, for working-class women fashionable clothes could mark a break with deference. In early twentieth-century America the bright, modern young telephone operators who formed an elite among working women brought glamour to the picket line in defiance of scabs. They took a class pride in wearing clothes that signalled their access to the respect and power surrounding rich women. Similarly, when Milka Sablich, the American miner’s daughter who became active in the violent strikes of the Colorado mining industry in the late 1920s, was taunted for wearing a silk dress, red-haired ‘Flaming Milka’ flashed back: ‘Miners’ children like pretty things as well as anyone else!’27 In Britain during World War One, young women in munitions factories earned high wages by working in conditions of considerable danger. They responded by seeking fun and spending their money on clothes, earning disapproving comments in the press. Such criticism provoked a defiant letter to the Daily Express in November 1917 from a ‘Munition Girl’:
Those who point the finger of scorn at me seem to me to be utterly without imagination. Let them put themselves in my place. Let them realise what it means, after a life of soul-suffocation, to find oneself suddenly able to breathe free air, to see the walls of one’s prison house gradually crumbling, to feel the shackles of tyranny loosening from one’s feet, to taste a tiny bit of ambition realised. Ambition is the same power in every walk of life, whether it aims at world domination or the possession of a small article of flesh-coloured crepe de Chine.28
A. Philip Randolph and his Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an organization of black workers on the Pullman trains, encouraged African-American women to stand up for their rights and stay in fashion. The union journal, the Messenger, opined that ‘Bobbed hair is very often attractive and becoming. Bobbed brains however are a serious handicap to anyone.’29 Randolph was encouraged by his wife, the socialist Lucille Randolph, who saw the ‘new negro woman’ as beautiful and brainy. She linked the Brotherhood’s ‘ladies’ auxiliary’, the Women’s Economic Council, to 1920s modernity by holding ‘bobbed hair’ contests.
The semiology of the ‘social tissue’ was various indeed. Well-dressed suffragettes could infiltrate a venue in ladylike mode, only to smash windows and hurl axes at politicians. Workers dressed up to assert class, race and gender pride, while ‘new women’ donned male clothing as a means of holding gender at bay. The shirt and tie were marks of the respect due to women at the cutting edge. When in 1920 members of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy Club made an album for the club’s founder, Marie Jenny Howe, several chose photographs of themselves in white shirts and ties – including Heterodoxy’s only black member, Grace Nail Johnson, who was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and married to the Harlem poet, James Weldon Johnson.
While male styles could denote a seriousness of purpose above feminine frivolity, by the 1920s they had transmuted into high fashion. Women added small signs of femininity to distinguish modishness from cross-dressing. The lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall, for example, posed in male evening dress, Spanish hat, pearl earrings and a kiss-curl in 1926. The Radclyffe Hall ‘look’ did not indicate sexual orientation. Instead it was part of the image of belonging to a fashionable avant-garde. When Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was first published in 1928, a reviewer in the Newcastle Daily Journal remarked on her ‘aura’ of ‘highbrow modernism’.30 However, the novel was quickly to be redefined as obscene and its author’s dress recoded as the mark of a lesbian subculture. By 1929 the boyish styles were no longer modish, and short hair, monocles and tailored clothing came to assume a chosen lesbian identity.
The fluidity of style evident during the 1920s was personified in the insouciant flapper dancers. Yet while they appeared as the essence of ultra-modern immediacy and flux, they were shadowed by a motley crew of image-breakers who had defied the conventions before World War One. Masculine styles had been the badge of serious new women seeking sexual autonomy, but they also invoked Victorian and Edwardian erotica in which cross-dressing had been a motif. A model on a sexy postcard, dressed as Napoleon with enhanced crotch, titillated gender taboos. When, in 1910, the French writer Colette posed in men’s clothes with a daring cigarette, she symbolically crashed through into the cultural space reserved for pornography and prostitution. As a ‘vagabond’ woman without roots, Colette pirouetted gleefully into forbidden fantasies by adopting their trappings – diaphanous nymphs, Grecian nudity, ‘Oriental’ slave girls, the dominatrix – and sending them up. The borderlines of feminine identity were being breached. Elsie Clews Parsons, influenced by the contemporary European thinking of Gabriel de Tarde, Ernst Mach and Henri Bergson, theorized this vagabonding before the War. In 1914 she wrote in her Journal of a Feminist:
The day will come when the individual . . . [will not] have to pretend to be possessed of a given quota of femaleness and maleness. This morning perhaps I feel like a male; let me act like one. This afternoon I may feel like a female; let me act like one. At midday or at midnight I may feel sexless; let me therefore act sexlessly. . . . It is such a confounded bore to have to act one part endlessly.31
Instead of willing a new self through reason or seeking to uncover an innate natural self, the bohemian avant-garde had begun to play with being different selves. Women as well as men, it seemed, could be and do as the mood might take them. Crystal Eastman’s brother, the writer Max Eastman, poked fun at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s ‘perpetual war on habit’ in his 1927 novel, Venture. The fictional character he based on her, Mary Kittredge, ‘was always just entering upon some new spiritual experiment that involved a complete break with everything that had gone before’. This restless quest made it impossible for her to settle, to be constant or still:
Either she was getting married, or she was getting divorced, or she was testing out unmarried love . . . or snake-dancing, or Hindu philosophy, or Hindu turbans, or female farming, or opium-eating, or flute-playing. There was nothing in the world that Mary could not want to do, and there was very little that she could not, in a surprisingly short space of time, do.32
Mabel Dodge Luhan’s mercurial crazes signified a wider restlessness. The modern woman did not want to be pinned down. Elsie Clews Parsons contended in 1916 that the key objective of feminism was not political or even social rights, but the declassification of women. ‘The new woman means the woman not yet classified, perhaps not classifiable.’33
In the 1920s the taboos breached by advanced thinkers and vagabond bohemians were being flouted openly by modern women who articulated a new common sense. In the symposium edited by feminist Freda Kirchwey, Our Changing Morality (1924), Isobel Leavenworth, an academic at Barnard, asserted women’s right to experience, including sexual experience:
Because she must first of all conform to an unpolluted archetype, and because society must be secure in the knowledge that she is indeed so conforming,
