How Looser Corsets Helped Women Get the Right to Vote

On the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913, 5,000 women marched up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., demanding the vote. In addition to banners and programs, the women used their clothing to communicate their message. The women’s suffrage movement and the role of style during that time is displayed at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum. The exhibit,  entitled “Fashioning the New Woman: 1890-1925″ illustrates the New Woman as a stereotype, or an archetype that burst on the popular culture scene in 1890, the beginning of the time covered by the exhibit. Like the flapper or the hippie, the New Woman embodied a certain “type” of person that in some way uniquely represented her time. What was “new” about her was that she was bolder, more active, more out-and-about in the world, more outspoken than her mother’s generation. Of course, it should be said that the New Woman was mostly a middle-class phenomenon, and to some extent an urban one. But in embracing new activities and eventually (not without some resistance and criticism along the way) making them more acceptable, these New Women influenced American women’s lives overall. Click here to read the full story in the Atlantic.

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