A lovely little advert from 1914 for women’s facial hair removal. The “Ejecthair” system makes big promises – “It not only causes the hairs to instantly vanish, but without pain or harm kills the roots absolutely and forever.”
Ideal for women with the unusual “Laughing Cavalier” facial hair pattern.
I always love a problem page, and it doesn’t matter if it’s from the latest issue of a magazine or a publication 100 years ago. I’m not the only one – my post on a Victorian problem page still gets views every week.
So here’s another one, this time from 99 years ago. In the same tradition of the Victorian problem page, it consists of answers only. The actual questions are discreetly never mentioned – sometimes on such pages they’re obvious, but they can also be annoyingly impossible to figure out. The agony aunt here is “Aunt Kate” and she says (if she’s a real person) “if you are ever worried over anything or in difficulty, write to me, and I shall do my best to advise you.”
Dot had a couple of questions. The first was apparently to ask whether she might be able to get a job as a lady’s companion. Aunt Kate says no. Dot is too young for such a role, which involves being educated, capable and accomplished and an all-round housekeeper to boot. And, in any case, paid companions were becoming few and far between these days. Dot would do better to set her sights at secretarial or nursing work instead.
Dot’s second question involves her legs – the thinness of them, in particular. Aunt Kate dismisses this worry – “There is really no remedy for thin legs. As a matter of fact, most girls long to have thin legs. Why not wear boots with long uppers? These are the latest fashion, and would serve to make the legs a better shape.”
Iris – ah, I feel for Iris. She’s written in to ask how to manage her shyness. As I was a shy child myself, I recognise Aunt Kate’s advice as the same kind of thing I heard many times, from people who have no idea what it is to be shy. “Just get over it,” it boils down to. I had one teacher at school who was an outgoing, bouncing puppy of a man, and who had never experienced a moment’s shyness in his life, I’m sure. At the start of the year, he promised that anyone who started off shy in his class wouldn’t end up so. What he meant by this was that he would be loud at all times, put people on the spot with questions, and there would be a lot of interaction and role play exercises. Maybe this would help some people to miraculously eradicate any feelings of reserve, but I think that for many genuinely shy teenagers, this is actually close to your worst nightmare instead. I think that age is the best cure in the end, Clockwork-Orange-style.
Aunt Kate’s advice on shyness isn’t bad, it’s just easier said than done. I hope it helped Iris, anyway. “Dear child, you must try to fight down this shyness of which you complain. When in other people’s presence try not to be self-conscious – to imagine that all eyes are on you. Try to think about the other people in the room, and how you can make things more agreeable for them. If you are to cure yourself of shyness, go out amongst other people as much as possible, and very soon you will learn how to conduct yourself properly. Although you are only 16 you are not a bit too young to rid yourself of this complaint – the sooner the better!”
I wonder what “M.W” was asking for – it seems to refer to whether a certain type of institution existed in relation to looking after her child. Aunt Kate says that there is no such institution anyway, but that she could leave her child at a day nursery, enabling her to go to work. I get the impression there’s a sad and hard story lurking behind that one.
Did you see the warning about skinny jeans the other day? There were news reports all over the place about it, with alerts on the dangers of “compartment syndrome” and that skinny jeans could be responsible for seriously damaging muscles and nerves in your legs. However, this is quite a good example of scientific stories being reported misleadingly in the popular press, as this top notch slapdown on the NHS Choices website makes clear – calling it “shameless clickbaiting” based on one (one!) case, which was seen in Australia.
NHS Choices says, excellently: “Many news sources covered this story. We suspect that this was because it gave them an excuse to carry photos of skinny-jean-wearing celebrities such as the Duchess of Cambridge. Call us cynical, but we doubt a case report involving anoraks or thermal underwear would generate the same level of coverage.”
Still, it’s not the first time that fashion has been held accountable for health hazards. I’ve previously looked at the mind-boggling mid-Victorian trend of walking with your back bent forward, known as the “Grecian Bend”. And today I’m going to look at the hullabaloo around the hobble skirt. The hobble skirt was a widely-ridiculed, yet very popular, fashion of the Edwardian, pre-First World War years – and really the War was pretty much responsible for ending the trend. It consisted of a long skirt, tied or narrowed tightly at some point from the knee down, and which resulted in the wearer having to “hobble” along while wearing it. I love the origin of this fashion – it is likely to have resulted from the latest technological development, the aeroplane. Designer Paul Poiret is credited for its invention, but he was probably influenced by Mrs. Hart O. Berg, who took a flight with Wilbur Wright in 1908, becoming the first American woman to fly as a passenger in a plane. In order to prevent her skirt billowing up in the air she tied a rope around it, which she kept on as she rather elegantly walked away afterwards.
A New Jersey judge in 1910 tried to define what the hobble skirt was, exactly. He called it “a pair of trousers with one leg”. This was an aside in a riotous-sounding trial of a schoolboy, charged with “smashing the straw hat of an elderly gentleman.” The defence for his actions was that “the season for straw hats had closed and summer headgear should not be worn in October.” To which the judge remarked that “public opinion might mould fashion, but not to the extent of employing violence. Public opinion might prescribe a hobble skirt for men, and then I suppose we should have to wear it. The hobble skirt would certainly look better on men than on women. It really is a pair of trousers with one leg.”
It caught on. It became the big new thing with women, seemingly confusing men in the process. In order to deal with this strange new fashion, widespread dismissal and scaremongering was the order of the day. Illinois and Texas even considered banning the hobble skirt in 1911, along with the “harem” skirt, which were long bloomers worn underneath.
There were pros and cons to the hobble. On the downside, the restricted movement could cause accidents. This article rather prematurely declares the hobble skirt dead in 1910, due to a series of accidents on the part of the wearers:
And, in fact, trying to get over a stile in a hobble skirt apparently resulted in the sad death of Mrs Ethel Lindley in 1912. She slipped, broke her ankle and with the bone protruding through the skin, she still managed to walk ten yards towards a farm, but sadly she died shortly afterwards from septic poisoning and shock.
The implications of the fashion included the fact that less fabric was used in its manufacture, and there was a “crisis of yardage” – the earlier fashions involved dresses made from 14 to 19 yards of silk, whereas the new styles only took between 4 and 7 yards, with underskirts becoming almost obsolete and demand for petticoats much reduced.
The fall in the demand for underskirts also had this result – 1200 clothes factory girls in Northampton went on strike in 1911 as their sewing services were not so much needed and they were given other work, which they said did not allow them to earn a living wage.
Even the Pope got involved – the hobble skirt and cleavage-revealing dresses were condemned as “scandalous and corrupting”.
But, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. “Medical men approve of women wearing tight skirts” says this headline, rather cheekily. The Chicago Medical Society decided they were “hygienic, artistic and comfortable, and that they correct bad walking.” Dr Arthur Reynolds explained that “American women think it stylish and pretty to turn their feet out at right angles while walking,” which was hard to do in a hobble skirt, and sounds painful and much more ridiculous than the tight skirt. Full skirts were also liable to become “germ-laden”.
Straight out of Monty Python, a joke about a hobble skirt “almost caused the death” of a Connecticut Judge in 1910. He saw his daughter wearing one and wisecracked that “a woman in a hobble is like a giraffe in a barrel.” He found his joke so funny that he couldn’t stop laughing, which developed into a ten-day bout of violent hiccups that apparently were life-threatening until “specialists…succeeded in reducing them to infrequent periods”. Lots of “self-appointed hiccough experts” tried to ease the judge’s suffering. I particularly like the bizarre advice of “sleeping on the bedroom door with the feet on the window sill.”
And “hobble skirt races” were held as a novelty instead of sack races:
The reasons for its demise are discussed in this look back at the hobble skirt from the viewpoint of 1940. A suggestion had been made that fashion should be “standardised” for the duration of the Second World War, and this article reflects that had this been the case with the First World War, women might have remained wearing their hobble skirts much longer. As it was, war work meant that women’s fashions had to be practical above everything else – “Wider skirts, shorter skirts and shorter hair all came about through women’s need for greater freedom.” This was probably the biggest ever change to women’s position in society – “Women had become workers: they continued to work in the years which followed. If fashion had not been permitted to keep pace they would have had to shuffle instead of stride.”
Do you do anything deliberately that annoys you, for fun? I’m not sure why exactly, but getting aerated about some bugbear of yours, in a safe kind of way, is quite cathartic in the same way that crying can be.
It’s why I read the Daily Mail’s Sidebar of Shame and it’s why my husband watches “The Big Question” on a Sunday. We would be disappointed if suddenly either one was populated with reasonable points of view that coincided with our own.
And, being completely honest, it’s why I initially started researching old marital advice columns for an intermittent series I will be doing on the blog, and which started with this post. I was heartened to see that much of the advice was actually quite wise and even applicable now, sometimes with a bit of tweaking. But, yes, I was irrationally disappointed that huge swathes of outrageous archive sexism weren’t as widespread as I expected.
Apart from this one. It’s from the Isle of Man Times in 1895, and, you know, nothing against the Isle of Man and everything, but….
I’m a feminist. I would be a card-carrying one if that was possible and I don’t really understand why any woman wouldn’t identify as one, although I know some that don’t. It’s all about being treated equally to men, socially and economically, and I’m not sure why anybody wouldn’t want that for themselves. So this article is the Euro Millions jackpot for outraged feminism. I love it, while being sincerely glad I never met the author.
Although I rather suspect there’s more than a few individuals who might agree with its sentiments even today – just witness the experiences of various well-known women on Twitter these days. It’s so outrageous – “He’ll probably think you an idiot; but that’s inevitable anyway,” – that I couldn’t work out if it was actually serious. But the author anticipates this – “don’t think this is a Joak,” he tells us. I still can’t decide whether it really is, though. I suspect not – this was a topical issue, after all, and attitudes like this were no doubt why The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was founded two years later, in 1897.
A final note – I would rather like to see my husband’s face if I’d made some delicious hash for dinner, only to eat it myself and give him his own dinner of green turtle instead.
Advice to Wives
Don’t argue with your husband: do whatever he tells you and obey all his orders.
Don’t worry him for money, and don’t expect a new dress oftener than he offers to buy you one.
Don’t sit up till he comes home from the club; better be in bed, and pretend to be asleep. If you must be awake, seem to be glad that he came home so early. He’ll probably think you an idiot; but that’s inevitable anyway.
Don’t grumble at him because he takes no notice of baby; men weren’t built to take notice of baby.
Don’t mope and cry because you are ill, and don’t get any fun; the man goes out to get all the fun, and your laugh comes in when he gets home again and tells you about – some of it. As for being ill, women should never be ill.
Don’t be mad because he smokes in bed, and goes into the best room with his dirty boots: your’s is the only house in which he can do these things, and you mustn’t be disagreeable.
Don’t talk to him of his mother-in-law; he’ll like it better if you talk to him of yours.
Don’t give him hash for dinner, eat the hash yourself and get him green turtle and chicken.
Don’t answer back, don’t spend money on yourself, don’t expect him to push the perambulator, don’t expect him to do anything he doesn’t want to do, don’t do anything he doesn’t want you to do. Then if you’re not a happy woman, your husband will at least be comfortable, and his friends will all be mad with envy.
And don’t think this is a Joak. It isn’t; it’s gospel, and the only way to have a happy home.
Oh, the youth of today, they don’t know they’re born! Says every generation at some point. This is taken from Punch, so it’s not entirely serious, admittedly. It’s a follow-up to an article on “the amount of ignorance of domestic affairs prevailing among young men generally.” This one covers the ignorance of young ladies and is printed “at the risk of creating a fearful panic in the marriage market.”
I don’t know if this article is based on real interviews with young ladies, or even if these young ladies actually existed, but it sounds like it was based on reality to me, and it’s an entertaining read, nonetheless.
Firstly, there’s Miss Mary Anne Atkins. She “has an idea she ought to know something of housekeeping; supposes it comes naturally.” She can sing, play, draw and embroider, but she’s never darned a stocking. She knows how much Brown Windsor Soap is, but not the yellow variety. She doesn’t know how much furniture is (and why should she really?) – she “should ask mama, if necessary”. She doesn’t know how much her dress cost or what the family’s annual butcher’s bill is, either. Shocking stuff.
Next up, we have Miss Harriet Somers. She “would not refuse a young man with £300 a year.” She can needlework, and she can make face washes (I like the sound of that) but “cannot tell how she would set about making an apple-dumpling.” Neither can I, but it sounds delicious. She would expect her potential husband to be ill sometimes, but would shamefully send out to the pastrycook’s for his recuperative “calves’-foot jelley” as “it never occurred to her that she might make it herself. If she tried, should buy some calves’ feet; what next she should do, cannot say.” At this point, she need only refer to any cookery book – Invalid Cookery was a hot topic in all of them at this point. She “likes dancing better than anything else” which is much the same as many young ladies now, really.
Miss Jane Briggs “looks forward to a union with somebody in her own station of life”. Of course. She “really cannot say what a ledger is,” and “has never ironed a frill”. Neither have I, and I intend to keep it that way. She has eaten fowl, but never trussed one, and is in the dark as to how you make stuffing for a duck or goose.
Miss Elizabeth Atkins “has no idea whether she is a minor or not” and “cannot say whether she is a legatee or a testatrix”. Idiot. Doesn’t know how much milk or starch cost. “Her time is principally occupied in fancy work, reading novels, and playing quadrilles and waltzes on the piano.”
Sixty more ladies were apparently interviewed in this way, and more shocking statistics follow – only three knew how to corn beef, six knew what a sausage consisted of (does anyone really know this for sure?), and a mere four could make an onion sauce. None of them could brew alcohol. Punch “shudders at the idea” of what is to become of their future husbands. The poor onion-sauce-less, crumpled-frill-wearing husbands, ill in bed with their non-homemade calves’ feet jelly.
I love this line – as true of teenagers today as then (and quite right too) – “They mostly could tell what the last new song was; but none of them knew the current price of beef.”
NB. Incidentally, you might have noticed that Brown Windsor Soap is highlighted in the article. More of this in a future post – as I’m trying to determine whether Brown Windsor Soup (SOUP, that is) is an actual, real Victorian thing, or a later invention, and mainly used for comedy purposes.
Marital advice used to be a much more common subject for newspaper articles and books. I suppose in days gone by more people were married at a much younger age, when you might have hardly any clue about the opposite sex. I’ve got a few interesting snippets of this sort of thing that I’ll be making a bit of a regular feature of for a while. Some odd, some funny, some infuriating, but a lot of it still useful, by and large.
First up, here’s some advice for husbands and wives from the Gloucester Echo in 1924. Under the humorous tone there’s a few useful pieces of advice. Although, the last line of the Advice to Wives is a bit dark – not only that, it is pretty much exactly the same as the most recent marital advice I have heard, that of Davina McCall just a couple of weeks ago – here, which caused quite some controversy.
ADVICE TO HUSBANDS
Kiss your wife occasionally. Even if you married for money it’s as well to conceal the fact as long as you decently can.
Don’t have a fit of apoplexy if she exceeds her dress allowance. Every article in her wardrobe costs three times as much as yours and lasts one quarter as long.
You ought to feel flattered if another man shows appreciation of your wife’s charms. It reflects credit on your judgement. Besides, women thrive on admiration.
If the reason why you were late was that you were having a rubber at the club, don’t make a mystery of it. If the club had nothing to do with it, the less said the better.
In the domestic Cabinet your wife is Home Secretary. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in charge of foreign affairs, you have quite enough to do without interfering in her department.
A woman who criticizes your wife to you is a cat. Cut her.
Don’t grumble if you have to take a grandmother in to dinner. With any luck, you will be a grandfather yourself one day.
ADVICE TO WIVES
Don’t put your husband on a pedestal. It’s an uncomfortable resting-place. Â Moreover, the creature has no sense of balance, and is sure to fall off.
The world is full of men who want something for nothing. Steer clear of them.
You have promised to “love, honour and obey”. Obedience is out of date. Honour too much suggests inequality – the relationship of subject and monarch. Love is the only thing that matters.
Be tolerant: it is a virtue that never fails.
In a contest of physical strength, the man is bound to come off victor. “Conquer by yielding” said the old Romans. They knew a thing or two.
Be as charming as you can to his men friends. It is better to have them as allies than as enemies.
If your husband has tea with a woman he knew long before he met you tell him you hope she’ll call on you. She won’t, but he’ll think how wonderful you are.
Don’t imagine that because you’re married it doesn’t matter how you dress. Men have a weakness for pretty things, and a horrid habit, if they can’t get them at home, of going in search of them, and what’s more, finding them.
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Ugh. Now this is one thing I don’t get at all. Mink coats, well, that’s one thing – I don’t think they look nice, quite apart from the skinning of a huge number of minks for each coat. But at least you’re not walking round with a whole gang of little mink heads staring at you all day.
The classic fox fur is just an entire fox without its stuffing – tail, bum and head and all draped round you, in a hideous “Silence of the Foxes” kind of way. Is that just one fox? It looks enormous.
I bet it smells in the rain too.
A special request today from Tasker Dunham – a look Edwards’ Harlene hair products and, as Mr Dunham put it, the “impossibly luxuriant hair and beard growth” they used to illustrate their advertisements.
Launching straight into the 1897 campaign below, you can see what he means. Hair of Rapunzel-like proportions is promised from Harlene by a woman in a dress that seems slightly indecent by Victorian standards. Plus, there’s miracle preparations for curing baldness and restoring grey hair to be had. “Scurf” is also cured by this wonder product – not a word you hear much these days, but as far as I can see it seems to mean much the same as “dandruff”. Perhaps there were subtle distinctions between the two?
Also in 1897, there was this rather artistic advert, which reminds me a bit of Holman Hunt’s painting, The Awakening Conscience. Except, it’s all proper and decent in this advert as it’s merely a long-tressed maiden advising a vicar on a baldness cure.
Moving on to 1916 – Edwards’ had a series of war-themed adverts to bring them bang up to date. Here, “a war-time gift to the grey-haired” is promised in the form of a free sample of the colour restorer “Astol” for their hair. Note, that “dye” is a dirty word – these products are claimed not to be dyes, but true restorers of whatever colour your hair was originally. I’m sure I remember that the “Just For Men” hairdye used to claim something similar even in the 1990s – can anyone else vouch for this? Your hair would magically restore itself to any colour you like as long as it was “tobacco brown”.
Here Edwards’ plays its part in making women feel insecure about their natural ageing. Grey-haired women look on in envy at their brown-haired sister.
Astol is not a dye or a stain, remember. This kind of cosmetics advertising is satirised in the book “The Crimson Petal and the White”, incidentally, which is an absolutely wonderful novel that immerses you in a Victorian world. I haven’t read anything apart from Dickens that has made me feel so actually part of the nineteeth century.
Edwards’ then introduced a new method for hair-improval. Here in 1918, we see the “Harlene Hair Drill” advertised, which went on to be used in their advertising for many years afterwards. The “Hair Drill” consisted of a series of steps to be done each day, which apparently took no longer than two minutes – although as you had to send off to see what they actually were, I have no idea what it consisted of. All I know is that you had absolutely no excuse not to be following “the lead of the navy, the army and the air force” , who were all at it, of course. Incredibly, the claim is made that “Even in the trenches our soldiers like to keep their hair “fit” by the “drill”.”
“Dandruff makes your hair fall out.” Really?
You’ll never snag a soldier with that grey hair, ladies.
More free offers in 1918, and more flowing mermaid hair to boot. This offer is being made “in view of the present prevalence of Hair Defects.”
More amazing hair here.
And here Edwards’ Harlene steps right into a lawsuit, if the Trade Descriptions Act had existed in 1920 (but it didn’t until 1968). Somehow mid-length frizzy hair is transformed into waist-length ringlets as if by magic. Although the friend with the bobbed hair is much more fashionable – I bet Edwards’ were seething at the 1920s fashion for shingled hair.
They were good with their free gifts, though.
Moving onto the 1950s now – and Edwards’ Harlene advertising has become much more realistic, using an actual photograph this time, of achievable hair. However, scurf was apparently still a thing in the 1950s.
The proprietor of the company, Reuben George Edwards (originally Reuben Goldstein), had died in 1943, and in 1963 the company was taken over by Ashe Chemical. I see that Ashe Chemical were also the makers of “Gitstick Concentrated Crayon Insecticide” – and hello, future blog post!
If I was a 1937-era housewife, this advert would definitely work on me. The thought of spending one whole day a week washing all the dirty laundry in one big go, the hard way, is a tiring thought. It’s bad enough having to handwash the essentials on those occasions when my washing machine has given up the ghost, but adding towels, bedding and baby-stained clothes to the mix – well, I’d be pretty happy with someone giving me advice on how to make it all end faster so I could go to the theatre instead.
Oxydol has a bit of a history as a pioneering product – it was the first commercial washing powder produced by Proctor and Gamble, introduced in 1927. And it’s left a lasting impression as the original “soap” behind the term “soap opera” as it became the sponsor of the “Ma Perkins” radio show in 1933, considered to be the world’s first soap opera.
Maybe that’s why their adverts are little soap operas themselves. Here’s another from 1937:
If you want the details on what exactly “wash-day” consisted of in the 30s, see my post here of instructions on how to manage it in 1938.
And then there’s this rather lovely little film also from 1938, produced by the American HQ of Oxydol, with the “Scientific Tintometer” mentioned in the advert above, shown in action. I’m rather fascinated by the washtub set up with the electric mangle.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wPpCJ1l2Zvs
The vitriol is really flowing in this opinion piece about the GI brides taking their leave of the UK for pastures new with their American husbands. I would be amazed if there wasn’t a dash of personal indignation over a potential sweetheart here, although the American GIs based in the UK were famously resented as being “over-fed, over-paid, over-sexed and over here,” wooing British women with their ready supply of nylons and cigarettes.
The writer, a serviceman recently returned from overseas, is “fizzing” about the luxuries bestowed on the travelling wives – the ships laid on for their trip containing beds, food, clothes and toys galore. Or at least “galore” from the perspective of those having suffered the deprivations of 6 years of total war. He points out that the ships also contain “Thousands of soluble nappies (whatever they may be)” – and yes, whatever were they? I can’t find any more details about them but presume they were an early form of disposable nappy.
Their food is a particular bugbear:
“Notice their breakfast the day they sailed? Tomato juice, porridge, scrambled eggs, bread, marmalade and coffee. Now, I hope America provided that for them. Because if it came off our rations, then I take more than [a] somewhat dim view of it. Particularly when I think of the mess of dried egg I went to work on this morning.”
Well, he’s got a point. But between the delights of young love and the joy of the war ending, it must have been a giddy time.
“Well, isn’t that just too, too thrilling?”
And here’s the article that has got our brilliantly sarcastic author all worked up – bananas, soluble nappies and all. It’s from the same newspaper, a week earlier. It shows that an amazing 12,000 brides were due to sail to the U.S. in February 1946.
Interestingly, I found out that “over-fed, over-paid, over-sexed, and over here” is a phrase that doesn’t seem to have featured in print during the war, despite it being extremely well-known at the time as it was popularised by comic Tommy Trinder. The earliest reference to it in print found by Phrases.org.uk is from 1958, but I’ve found this, an ex-GI mentioning the phrase, from 1948:
