The ‘Feminine Vice:’ The Dress Question in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1868-1914

In the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘dress reformers’ in America and Europe campaigned, often unsuccessfully but extremely publicly, to modify acceptable feminine fashions as a way of improving both their physical health and widening their social possibilities. Never one unified movement, dress reform arguments were employed by many groups for diverse (and often contradictory) ends. This thesis examines the ways that dress reform ideas were discussed and incorporated into debates about women’s place in society in Aotearoa New Zealand from 1868 until 1914. It looks at the role fashion played in defining acceptable middle-class womanhood, whilst at the same time perceptions of feminine frivolity were used in arguments against women’s access to equal rights. Previous histories of New Zealand dress reform have focused largely on the radical reformers of the 1890s, who mounted multiple publicity campaigns and wrote extensively to the New Zealand press to promote their idea of ‘rational’ clothing – bifurcated garments for women and the abandonment of corsets. It was this group who would go on to found the short-lived New Zealand Rational Dress Association (NZRDA) in 1894. Historians discussing the early New Zealand women’s movement have also long recognised the adoption of certain dress reform ideas by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in their Hygiene department. To expand upon the work previously done in highlighting the presence of dress reformers in New Zealand, this thesis examines the progression of different elements of dress reform rhetoric throughout the New Zealand press, looking at the conversation preceding and following the ‘height’ of discussion surrounding the reformers themselves. This thesis charts the introduction of dress reform ideas from international sources and the early promoters of such ideas, and how the reading public reacted to them. The idea that women’s dress was somehow harmful (to both society and the women themselves) was not new. Pākehā New Zealanders had brought with them Christian concepts of morality and the ‘sin’ of vanity. In 1868, an article published originally in the London Saturday Review that disparaged the fashion and manners of the “Girl of the Period” was read and discussed across the globe, from America to Aotearoa. In the early 1880s, the British Rational Dress Society was formed with the aim of making women’s dress healthy and ‘rational’ through the adoption of such garments as the divided skirt. In New Zealand, dress reform ideas based on their medical, moral, and social benefits began to be discussed by the public, as well as the growing movement for women’s suffrage. By examining the way the New Zealand women’s movement treated dress reform ideas, this thesis reveals how such groups and organisations navigated entrenched ideas about the female body and woman’s role during a time of sustained agitation for increased political rights. It looks at the way that issues of women’s athletics and bicycling contributed further to New Zealand women’s renegotiations of femininity, with the issue of ‘what to wear?’ sparking discussions about social norms and the perception of respectability. The conversation around the reform of women’s dress was drastically affected by the early twentieth century push to put women back in the home sparked by anxieties over the declining pākehā birth rate. While they could be used to argue for women’s greater physical and social freedom, dress reform arguments that essentially framed women as adherents (whether willing or unwilling) to the ‘irrational’ force of Fashion could also justify their continued need for regulation and relegation to the private sphere. This thesis argues that the dress reform debates in Aotearoa New Zealand were multi-stranded and complex, inextricably entangled with contemporary gender politics and the social upheavals specific to New Zealand.