Abstract
Dress is one of the most revealing mirrors of the social attitudes of any society It has strongly reflected attitudes to class, to youth and age, to male and female roles. Clothes until quite recently were intended to set people of birth, affluence and leisure apart from the rest. Dressing above one’s station in life earned disapproval and ridicule from those of higher rank. This disapproval in Jamaica sometimes mirrored racist as well as class attitudes. A visitor in 1900 wrote, ‘Next morning everyone turned out in their Sunday best. Big hulking negresses were attired in gorgeous silks and satins, and truly wonderful hats with broad brims and feathers, and ribbon … The woolly locks under all this fashionable headgear were pathetically ludicrous.’1
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Endnotes
E.A. Hastings, A Glimpse of the Tropics (London: 1900), pp. 241–42.
Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (London: Chapman and Hall, 1860), pp. 69–70. Another writer who wrote favourably was Sir David Sibbald Scott, To the West Indies and Back: 100 days (Dalziel, Scotland, 1908), pp. 229–30. Robert Elwes, W.S.W.: A Voyage in that Direction in the West Indies (London: Kerby & Son, 1866), pp. 46–47 was the visitor who realised that his own attire might be criticised by those he thought ludicrous.
Penelope Byrde, Nineteenth-Century Fashion (London: Batsford, 1992), p. 72; Norah Waugh, The Art of Women’s Clothes 1600 to 1930 (London: Faber, 1968), p. 150.
Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Batsford, 1984), p. 115.
Kathy Pos and Barbara Clarke Smith, Men & Women: A History of Costume, Gender and Power (Washington, DC: National Museum of American History, 1989), pp. 15–16.
Alison Gernsheim, Fashion and Reality (London: Faber, 1963), p. 25.
Quoted in C. Willett Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (London: Faber, 1937), p. 289.
For the history of nineteenth-century dress I have relied mainly on Anne Buck, Victorian Costume and Costume Accessories (Bedford: R. Bean, 1984), Byrde and Gemsheim, op. cit.
Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People 1880–1902 (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1991), pp. 233–36; Aleric Josephs, ‘Gender and occupation in labour force statistics’, paper presented at the 25th Conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians (UWI, Mona, 1993).
The woman sorting coffee beans in W. Bellows, In Fair Jamaica, (Kingston: Educational Supply, 1907); the butleress, Alfred Leader, Through Jamaica With a Kodak (Bristol: Wright, 1907); the hatmaker, James Johnson, Jamaica: The Riviera (London: Cassell & Co., 1903); Westwood teachers, E.A. Wilson, Men With Backbone (2nd edn, Kingston: Educational Supply, 1913); the fashionable wedding, National Library of Jamaica photo files.
Elizabeth Ewing, History of 20th-century Fashion (2nd edn, London: Batsford, 1975), p. 41.
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© 1995 Department of History, U.W.I., Mona, Jamaica
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Robertson, G. (1995). Pictorial Sources for Nineteenth-Century Women’s History. In: Shepherd, V., Brereton, B., Bailey, B. (eds) Engendering History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07302-0_6
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