'Home and Away: Girls of the British Empire' Exhibition

Screenshot of the Girl Museum exhibition home page

Phew! I survived the 'Colonial Girlhood/ Colonial Girls' conference  and the Australasian Children's Literature Association for Research (ACLAR) conference in Canberra last week. It was a bustling two weeks and was exciting to meet so many historians and literary scholars working on girlhood in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. We had not one, but two papers on Girl Guiding! Not one, but two, papers on Irish girls' literature! Regular conferences don't often provide for such girlhood riches.

As part of the conference, Associate Professor Cecily Devereux from the University of Alberta delivered a public lecture, 'Fashioning the Colonial Girl: 'Made in Britain' Femininity in the Imperial Archive'. You can listen to the lecture recording and view the slides here. (It's also not every day that a conference keynote speaker discusses Bessie Marchant's adventure fiction in detail.) Our other special event was the launch of the online exhibition 'Home and Away: Girls of the British Empire', which was curated by Ashley Remer, Head Girl at the Girl Museum, with a team of helpers, including Bronwyn Lowe (a PhD candidate in History who assisted us with the conference organisation).

I am indebted to Ashley for being so willing to prepare an exhibition that related to our conference theme and was so pleased to see such a beautiful looking virtual exhibition. One idea that resonated throughout the conference was the lack of archival material documenting the experiences of actual colonial girls: their voices and writings are most often missing from what we can reconstruct. Kristine Alexander's paper on Girl Guide photography unveiled the untapped resource of photographs taken by Guides, who were encouraged to document their activities with specially manufactured Kodak cameras. She also showed how Guiding captured Indigenous girls in photographs, often topless, in ways that reinforced the civilising mission that underwrote the British Empire. The Girl Museum also uses photographs or, more specifically, photographic postcards, to create a global picture of colonial girlhood. While the girls have been posed and framed by  adult photographers, the collective impact of these images imparts a powerful sense of the lives of girls in a diverse range of colonial sites.

Our conference endeavoured to enable comparison of the differing manifestations of colonialism around the Empire, and so we were pleased to have papers about girls in Australia, Canada, South Africa, Ireland, New Zealand, Malaya and Zimbabwe. 'Home and Away' exhibits postcards of girls from all of these areas (with the exception of Ireland), as well as drawing in regions we were unable to cover, such as the Caribbean and South Pacific.

There are several striking elements that become visible as you travel across the map of the Empire "on which the sun never set" during your virtual tour. The stories of Indigenous girls, whose lives were irrevocably transformed by colonialism, whether in white settler colonies or colonies of occupation, intertwine with those of the British daughters of the families who performed the work of Empire. In the instance of India, for example, a photograph of young girls from Madras in the 1870s (one of whom appears to be wearing wedding jewellery) shares a page with ringlet-haired, British girl Marjory, who poses in front of a distinctly non-European Christmas tree in the Andaman Islands in around 1908. On the exhibition page about Africa, a young Tanzanian woman, Salima, is charged with brushing the hair of "Gwenneth at seven months" as her ayah. Below this image, six-year-old British girl Elspeth Grant (author of Flame Trees of Thika, a book about her African childhood) feeds her pet antelope calf, while wearing what looks like a pith helmet, in Kenya.

As the stories that accompany the photographs explain, colonialism brought with it both oppressive changes for native girls and, within these enforced cultural shifts, some opportunities new to girls and women, like formal education. For British girls, colonialism could enable and excuse modes of behaviour that would not have been acceptable "at home", but images such as that of a girl of perhaps no more than three-years-old wearing her father's Canadian mounted police uniform reinforce the limits of the gendered work of Empire.

The reverse of Ah Moy's postcard

When you click on the photographs themselves, the reverse of a postcard is displayed, on which is printed further information about each image, or speculation about its context where no details have survived. The culture of photographing native peoples for circulation via postcards to the metropolis, as well as the photographing of Indigenous servant girls, is explained throughout these descriptions. While a number of these images are disturbing for their framing according to the anthropological theories of the time, the most upsetting image is perhaps that of Ah Moy, an eight-year-old girl who was reportedly the last slave sold in Hong Kong in 1929. For all of the reasons offered for imperial intervention in India because of child brides and condemned practices such as suttee, the continuation of female slavery in Hong Kong throughout British "ownership" from 1842 to 1922- at which point Winston Churchill announced that the practice would be abolished- showed the varying degrees of concern for colonial girls and their use as justifications for expanding British territory ever further across the globe.

Beauty in Victorian Women's Magazines: Part Two

London Morning & Fall Dress
Lady's Magazine, August 1810

In my second post on beauty in Victorian women's magazines, I'd like to consider how British women's magazines came to focus on fashion and appearance such that the beauty advertisements in my earlier post slotted in seamlessly within an already existing genre of women's print culture. The origins of what we recognise as a women's magazine rest at the end of the eighteenth century, yet it was in the nineteenth century that magazines moved to a central place in popular reading. Part of the reason why magazines became so prolific, profitable and important to advertisers was because publishers began to target women readers as a specific audience.

A small number of titles intended especially for women were published in the eighteenth century, such as the Lady's Magazine or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement (1770) (from which we can see a hand-coloured engraved fashion plate here, a feature which the magazine popularised in England). But most periodicals were directed at the household generally or were intended for men, such as the The Gentleman's Magazine (1731). Other magazines of the period had strong affiliations with church groups and were therefore uninterested in discussing fripperies such as clothing and hairstyles.

Court Dress, Gallery of Fashion, July 1794

In the 1790s, a number of specialised publications devoted to fashion began to appear, such as the Gallery of Fashion (1794) and the Magazine of Female Fashions of London and Paris (1798). These magazines encouraged existing magazines for the women's market, such as the Lady's Magazine, to pay greater attention to fashion coverage amid the usual content of short stories, serial fiction, poetry, essays on modesty, advice for wives and mothers, recipes, biographies of famous figures and local and international news reports.

Dress and appearance entered the women's magazine as "fashion" through the inclusion of reports of what was being worn by court ladies in London and in Paris. As Margaret Beetham explains in A Magazine of Her Own?, this type of content "was to become a staple of women's magazines for the next 200 years and has entered deeply into the ideology of gender" (31). From the nineteenth century, then, women have learned through women's magazines and how they present and construct ideas about women's dress and appearance how to be appropriately feminine.

La Belle Assemblee, 1809

La Belle Assemblée or Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine addressed particularly to the Ladies, which began publication in February 1806 and continued until 1837, was the first popular interest fashion magazine. It was an expensive publication at 2 shillings and six pence for each edition, which was reflected in its elaborate production values and high-quality engraved portraits. In addition to fashion, the magazine also featured intellectual content pertaining to science, biography and political news to develop its female readers' knowledge.  This mixture of article types was common until around the 1820s when La Belle Assemblée, and women's magazines more generally, began to increase the quantity of fashion and domestic articles designed to entertain and intellectual and literary content was reduced.

Young Ladies' Journal, January 1881

While women's status was undergoing a seismic shift through higher education and the opening up of careers outside the home later in the century, many women’s magazines do not mirror these changes and are devoid of content about intellectual matters, education or employment. The Young Ladies’ Journal , which was published from 1864 to 1920, focused on news of Paris fashions, patterns for needlework,  recipes, correspondence, household tips, court gossip, fiction, and sentimental poetry. Like other women's magazines of the time, Katherine Ledbetter argues that the Young Ladies' Journal “models feminine beauty in relation to [a woman's] traditional role in domestic ideology as a potential partner to a young man” (British Victorian Women's Periodicals 135). A woman's beauty, or her ability to cultivate her appearance to fit beauty ideals, were an indicator of her ability to be a successful wife and mother.

Homes Notes, July 1894

One of the most influential books about beauty was published in 1836 and was entitled Beauty; Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Women. The author, Alexander Walker, identified three main kinds of classic beauty in women: the locomotive type, which was “striking and brilliant”; the Vital or Nutritive type which was “soft and voluptuous”; and the Thinking Beauty who displayed “intellectuality and grace”. Walker suggested that the expanded bosom and “general plumpness” of Nutritive Beauty was more aesthetically pleasing than the other types, but these features were also symbolic of women's proper mothering role. Ideas about women's maternal beauty often inspired angelic connotations, as in this cover from Home Notes from 1894 that uses the familiar phrase "The Hand that rocks the Cradle Rules the World" to suggest women's maternal influence on the next generation. (And you can't miss that she's surrounded by nature in the form of flowers and a bird.)

While I am just starting to think about how women's beauty is understood in the Victorian period, there is no doubt that we have abandoned the phase of admiration for the "plumpness" of Nutritive Beauty. Men no longer consider outward signs of a woman's ability to bear and nurture children, such as wide hips or sufficient body fat, as integral to sexual allure. Indeed an extremely thin woman with artificial breasts that may even hinder mothering are what are most often found on the covers of men's magazines today. Though I've yet to look at men's magazines at all, I'm of the understanding that women aren't featured on their covers in the nineteenth century as they are today. How do we move from maternal beauty as an ideal? And how do images of women end up selling magazines for both men and women? These are some of the questions I hope to answer with future work on beauty in Victorian print culture.

What "Fairy Tale" Endings Meant, Once Upon a Time

'Little Red Riding Hood', Maxfield Parrish, 1897

Fairy tales are badly misunderstood. When we talk about 'fairy tale' romances, as Chloe Angyal did in The Age recently, we ignore the darker and more subversive history of these ubiquitous stories and the essential part of the women who originally told them. If you only know fairy tales from the simpering princesses in Disney films, then you're missing out on cross-dressing swordswomen, defecating girls and sexually active maidens.

While it is 200 years since the Grimms collected fairy tales as an academic exercise to preserve the folklore of Germany, the passing of time has made us forget that it is not the Grimms who invented them. Fairy tales were usually told by the fireside in the evening as people, mostly women, worked at essential chores such as spinning. It is no surprise then that the tales the women spun, such as Rumpelstiltkin, often included the spinning wheel as a symbol of their labour.

These oral tales were not specifically intended for children and early versions are frequently crude and highly sexual. In one version of 'Little Red Riding Hood' collected by the Grimms, but later made wholesome when the second edition of their Children's and Household Tales was published for a wider audience, the heroine escapes the wolf by telling him she has to go outside to "make a load". Before the Grimms removed references to sex, the witch who keeps Rapunzel imprisoned in a tower knows her not-so-innocent prisoner has been letting down her hair for a man when her clothes become too tight because she is pregnant.

'Rapunzel', Wanda Gag, 1936

Various cultures have their own variants of these tales that are perhaps not 'as old as time' as Disney suggested in their 'Beauty and the Beast', but which have a far longer history than we afford them. The Chinese equivalent of Cinderella, Yeh-hsien, dates from AD 850. In place of a fairy godmother, a ten-foot long fish rewards her with gold, pearls, dresses and food. 

In seventeenth century France, it was women who pioneered the literary fairy tale that adapted oral tales for educated adult salon audiences. History has erased these women from public view, such as Madame d'Aulnoy who coined the term contes de fées (fairy tales) and wrote several volumes of them. We tend to only acknowledge Charles Perrault, who wrote the version of 'Cinderella' (minus Walt Disney's pumpkin) that we know today.

French fairy tale writers created many stories that did not survive the process of sanitising fairy tales for children that the Grimms began in the nineteenth century. Women were not helpless princesses waiting for Prince Charming in these fairy tales. In Marie-Jeanne LʼHéritier's 'Marmoisan' (which I read recently at the Monash Fairy Tale Reading Group), the heroine, Leonore, dresses as her twin brother, Marmoisan, to take his place in war and distinguishes herself in battle. Marmoisan died in disgrace after he attempted to scale a rope ladder to rape a married woman and was impaled upon her waiting husband's sword. 

These literary fairy tales and many of the oral versions do not show women as victims and men and heroes as we expect today. Passive and obedient heroines have been gradually introduced by male collectors and re-tellers of the tales across the past two-hundred years, especially as they have sought to socialise children into masculine and feminine roles. The glittery Disney collection of princesses obscures the way that fairy tales often showed girls as mentally or physically strong. They also criticised and punished men for their exploitation of women.

While Little Red Riding Hood can kill the wolf in a pot of boiling sausage water in one early version, by the time of Perrault's first written adaptation in 1697, she is relegated to his dinner. The Grimms then transformed what was often a bawdy story to one entirely about female dependence. Their version introduces the figure of the huntsman who saves Red by cutting the wolf open with a pair of scissors.

The Grimms also excised all traces of sexuality from their heroines and instead promoted stifling ideas of feminine innocence and purity. While this is partially understandable given their intent to revise the tales for children, at the same time as deleting the sex, they ramped up the gory violence in ways not present in the oral tales they were supposedly recording. In their second edition of tales, they decided to punish Cinderella's step-sisters by having their eyes pecked out by birds. 

Paradoxically, if we want our culture to present girls and women with empowering models of femininity, in the main, the seventeenth century versions of fairy tales are better candidates than those of recent times. Some literary writers such as Angela Carter have already rewritten fairy tales in a way that returns power to their heroines. Yet the current crop of film and television fairy tale adaptations, such as Mirror, Mirror and Once Upon a Time, have the potential to overturn the popular trend of passive heroines in fairy tales in the past two centuries on a wider scale.

If we look to the history of fairy tales, we can see amid the hundreds of variants of each tale how much they have changed across time and place. The pink princess culture that absorbs many girls today is something that they have internalised from more recent conservative, sanitised versions of fairy tales that suggest that a woman's greatest achievement is to be innocent and beautiful. If we returned to telling the fairy tales of old, aspiring to be a fairy tale princess wouldn't necessarily be such a bad thing.

As part of the Glen Eira Storytelling Festival, the Monash University Fairy Tale Reading Group is hosting a fairy tale salon inspired by those of 17th Century France on 23 June at Monash Caulfield.

Victorian-Era Beauty Advertisements: Part One

I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at The Johnston Collection (which includes the wonderful Fairhall House museum) last week on beauty in Victorian girls' and women's magazines. I chose magazines in particular because the second half of the nineteenth century was a time in which more people became literate, more magazines were able to be published more affordably, and technological improvements meant illustrations and fashion plates became commonplace. Magazines were the dominant media form, especially as books remained relatively expensive. Not only were women specifically targeted as readers in the nineteenth century, but they were also newly imagined as consumers. The arrival of the the department store, a concept borrowed from France, transformed how items for the self and the home were bought, with their extensive ranges of branded goods arranged in lavish displays designed to be browsed. The illustration above of a woman selecting from a choice of hats from Myra's Journal of Dress and Fashion (Sept. 1885) is one of many depictions of women in the act of shopping that showed its new-found importance to femininity.

Most magazines became heavily dependent on advertising. Even quality publications like The Queen (which became Harper's and Queen) placed ads on almost half of its pages by the mid-1880s. While people complain about ads taking up column inches and screen space today, the strong presence of advertising in the print media is not new. For girls' and women's magazines, the ads that were included were often for products that promised to improve the reader's appearance, with corsets, skin creams and hair products featuring regularly.

Cosmetics, however, had a bad name for encouraging artifice and deception. Charlotte Yonge, the editor of the Anglican girls' magazine The Monthly Packet and author of popular books such as The Daisy Chain opposed cosmetics as a form of lie: "All attempts to pretend to beauties that we do not possess are clearly falsehood, and therefore wrong." Young women in particular were warned away from cosmetics because they were considered more vulnerable to potential damage to their "moral character" because of their sexual associations.

Cosmetics were therefore not commonly advertised but products that would purportedly improve the skin by removing freckles, tans, redness and roughness were promoted because they did not transgress beliefs about "natural" beauty being superior than artificial aids. This ad for Beetham's Glycerine and Cucumber from Woman (11 April 1894) promises to give the user soft, smooth and white skin that "blooms".

Along with facial creams, hair products also promised natural improvements to a woman's beauty. Koko for the hair, for instance, is described as a "hair food" that promises to do everything from preventing greyness to eradicating dandruff, but it was not only the hair that benefitted from treatment, as the ad suggests that Koko also stimulated the brain. After brushing with Koko readers are directed to look into a mirror to see the increased "brilliancy" in their eyes, which suggests a benefit to health and well-being, not only appearance.

In the lecture I showed a contemporary Maybelline magazine ad featuring the company's familiar slogan "Maybe She's Born With It. Maybe It's Maybelline" to show the continuation of these ideas about natural beauty (or at least cultivating the appearance of natural beauty) in advertising. It's a real conundrum that women are encouraged to desire products that will "improve" their looks, but they ought to be working to make it seem as if they were "born with" their cosmetically enchanced charms. The many contradictions surrounding women's beauty in Victorian magazines seemed to strike the audience at the lecture as none too dissimilar from those we see in the popular media today. And nowhere are these resonances more obvious than in early advertisements for weight loss, such as Trilene tablets, which promised to "cure corpulency permanently". With that degree of effectiveness, how surprising that they're not still in manufacture.

PART TWO TO COME...

Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls Conference, 13-14 June 2012

The poster for the Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls conference is now finished. Kristine Moruzi and I are very excited to be hosting so many people from around the world whose work we admire in Melbourne in June.

Our keynote speakers are historian Professor Angela Woollacott from the Australian National University and English scholar Associate Professor Cecily Devereux from the University of Alberta, Canada. Professor Devereux's lecture will be a free public lecture on the evening of the 14th of June from 6.00pm in Elisabeth Murdoch, Theatre A, at the University of Melbourne's Parkville campus. The talk is entitled "Fashioning the Colonial Girl: ‘Made in Britain’ Femininity in the Imperial Archive".

Registration is now open for the two conference days. We have a conference site ready with further details about the event and a link to our secure registration site.

Book Cover: A Thorny Way, Mary Bradford Whiting

Part of the difficulty of working on historical books for young people is that much of the basic information that you can readily find for adult literature has not yet been compiled. Though there are some excellent bibliographies of Australian children's literature, it's still not that simple to locate everything that is out there, nor much reliable biographical material about the authors themselves.

Kerry M. White lists Mary Bradford Whiting among lesser-known Australian authors of girls' family stories, yet I can't find much about her that indicates that she lived in Australia at any point. A Thorny Way was published by Thomas Nelson and Sons in London, and it was not an uncommon route for Australian children's writers to publish via an English publisher. What I can find suggests that Bradford Whiting predominantly wrote religious publications for the Christian Knowledge Society and Religious Tract Society.

We cannot accuse her of not embracing diversity as, in addition to her foray into girls' books, she also published a book on Dante with Cambridge and wrote Shakespeare criticism in the Gentlemen's Magazine. Some of these publishing avenues suggest that she had nothing to do with Australia whatsoever. Yet Austlit shows that she published several children's books set in Australia, including Peggy and Pat: A Tale of the Australian Bush (1931), Josee: An Australian Story (192-) and Wallaby Hill (189-). And let us not forget A Daughter of the Empire (1919), which looks like a must-read.

Sadly for me, it seems A Thorny Way is set in England, so I will join the heroine in casting my head down on the desk in despair.

Book Cover: Gem of the Flat, Constance Mackness

For the 3-year project I'm working on, 'From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Australian, New Zealand and Canadian Print Culture, 1840-1940' , I've begun buying Australian girls' books in earnest. British girls' books, I'm finding, are much more readily available for sale online, possibly because they had much larger print runs. Some of the Australian titles are simply not to be found, or rare copies are being sold for hundreds of dollars.

Many of the covers are very striking and ornate, so I'll share a few here. This copy of Gem of the Flat (Angus & Robertson, 1914) by Constance Mackness has its paper spine illustration intact. I was surprised to see that the cover images were illustrated by May Gibbs, of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie fame. These sorts of girls' books with elaborate covers were often given as gifts and prizes, as was this one, which is inscribed "To Mary, With much love from Auntie Minnie + Uncle Sidney, Ballarat, Australia, October 1930."