Fashion and Twentieth-Century Feminism

Abstract

In Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism, Einav Rabinovitch-Fox provides a compelling exploration into how American feminists used fashion and fashionability as tools to advance their missions across the long twentieth century. In so doing, the author adds to a growing body of scholarship underscoring the significance of fashion, clothing, and dress in providing new insights into the past while simultaneously challenging the myth of the antifashion feminist. A strength of Dressed for Freedom is its use of interdisciplinary methodologies to tell political, social, and cultural history. One of the best of these methodological approaches is the author’s use of the body: the author reinforces the importance and implications of the connection between fashion and the body throughout the text. Whether discussing health, race, liberation, or work, the body wearing the clothes often plays as significant a role as the fashion itself. Anothermethodological strength is the author’s use of visual and material culture. Though at times this evidence tends to be more illustrative than evidentiary, the images support the text and strike a refreshing balance between iconic and novel. Over the course of five chapters, Rabinovitch-Fox expands on well-known tropes of American feminists: the NewWoman, suffragists, flappers, the postwar working woman, and the radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. While such a choice of figures is unsurprising, the author complicates expected narratives by centering fashion as an everyday feminist practice affecting all women. While acknowledging fashion’s problematic nature, Rabinovitch-Fox shows how women—white and Black, elite and working class, “old stock” and immigrant, liberal and conservative, working and not—all found strategies to express politics and challenge racist, gendered, and classist beliefs through fashion.