Women
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The first purpose of Clothes . . . was not warmth or decency, but ornament. . . . Warmth he [the primitive human being] found in the toils of the chase; or amid dried leaves, in his hollow tree, in his bark shed, or natural grotto: but for Decoration he must have Clothes.
What Victorians Wore
How to Undress a Victorian Lady in Your Next Historical Romance - WSJ.com
Romance novelist Deeanne Gist went to extreme lengths to understand her characters-she ordered a full Victorian costume, including underwear. Get underneath her hoop skirt with WSJ's Alexandra Alter. Deeanne Gist stood in a packed hotel conference room wearing nothing but her underwear. For most people, giving a presentation in skivvies to 100 professional peers sounds like a bad dream. But Ms.
The Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP) began in 1995 at Indiana University and is primarily concerned with the exposure of lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century. The collection represents an array of genres - poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more. VWWP contains scores of authors, both prolific and rare. Quiet since 2003, the VWWP is pleased to be back with an expanded purview that includes women writing in the nineteenth century in English. As before, the project will devote time and attention to the accuracy and completeness of the texts, as well as to their bibliographical descriptions.
Victorian Women Writers Project- Home
The magazine was one of the fastest growing commodities in Victorian Britain, with about 12,500 titles appearing between 1824 and 1900. When Victoria came to the throne in 1837 the number of women's magazines was increasing rapidly as the mass market itself grew and diversified. Consumer culture was on the rise, and central to that were the commodities on sale. Many social and cultural historians view the commodity as a spectacle that permeated the entire Victorian social system. Women's magazines, with their sumptuous visual illustrations, became spectacles in themselves. An interest in and celebration of fashion was something that all commercial magazines shared and even the non-commercial titles, such as those devoted to reform issues, covered fashion (constructed as so important to women's lives), if only to critique its pervasive and pernicious influence.
The Spectacular Female Body: Dress, Fashion and Modernity in Victorian Women's Magazines
Fashion history of alternative practical Victorian fashion for women. An outline of dress reformers promoting bifurcated, divided garments - or trousers to you and me.
Victorian Era 1837-1901 Victorian Fashion History, Costume Social History.
We are well-accustomed to the ideas of the prudish, sexually-repressed Victorians, who cautiously guarded themselves against any temptation, no matter how slight. Critics and reader have largely and successfully questioned this conception and proven it inaccurate. For during this period, even in seeking any man or woman's ultimate goal in achieving the apparently conservative happy ending of marriage, Victorians were inevitably led to the consummation of their love and the creation one's own home and family. Sex and sexuality, then, were unavoidable issues for the Victorians. As Jill Conway reminds her readers, that since it wasn't until the early 1900's that scientists connected sex chromosomes to sex-linked characteristics or that they discovered the workings of hormones -- "we [begin] to see why for some forty years the exact nature of sex-differentiation and its psychic accompaniment was a subject of intense, though inconclusive debate."