'Symbols of Our Slavery': Fashion and the Rhetoric of Dress Reform in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture

'Symbols of Our Slavery': Fashion and the Rhetoric of Dress Reform in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture

By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of ‘fashion slavery’ became evident in the writings of sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen. However, American women had expressed dissatisfaction with the restrictions of fashion since at least the antebellum era. From the 1830s onwards, reformers identified fashion as the visible outcome of the inequalities faced by women, while their employment of slavery discourses resulted in the emergence of a rhetoric of ‘fashion slavery.’ This became an important rhetorical device within both the women’s rights and dress reform movements, but fashion was alternately perceived by these reformers as the symptom or the cause of gender oppression. The mid-century women’s periodical press, moreover, enabled these reformers to employ discourses of slavery in a way that helped initiate an everyday, embodied political mobilisation of women. While this created a supportive network of dress reformers, this rhetoric also proved problematic due to the direct comparisons that emerged between fashion and chattel slavery. Nonetheless, this discussion of fashion, dress reform and nineteenth-century American print culture enables the rhetoric of ‘fashion slavery’ to be reclaimed within its feminist social reform roots, at the same time as providing insight into how discourses of slavery influenced the rhetorical practices of reformers beyond the women’s rights movement.