The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America
In eighteenth-century America, fashion served as a site of contests over various forms of gendered power. Here, Kate Haulman explores how and why fashion--both as a concept and as the changing style of personal adornment--linked gender relations, social order, commerce, and political authority during a time when traditional hierarchies were in flux.

In the see-and-be-seen port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, fashion, a form of power and distinction, was conceptually feminized yet pursued by both men and women across class ranks. Haulman shows that elite men and women in these cities relied on fashion to present their status but also attempted to undercut its ability to do so for others. Disdain for others' fashionability was a means of safeguarding social position in cities where the modes of dress were particularly fluid and a way to maintain gender hierarchy in a world in which women's power as consumers was expanding. Concerns over gendered power expressed through fashion in dress, Haulman reveals, shaped the revolutionary-era struggles of the 1760s and 1770s, influenced national political debates, and helped to secure the exclusions of the new political order.
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The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America
In eighteenth-century America, fashion served as a site of contests over various forms of gendered power. Here, Kate Haulman explores how and why fashion--both as a concept and as the changing style of personal adornment--linked gender relations, social order, commerce, and political authority during a time when traditional hierarchies were in flux.

In the see-and-be-seen port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, fashion, a form of power and distinction, was conceptually feminized yet pursued by both men and women across class ranks. Haulman shows that elite men and women in these cities relied on fashion to present their status but also attempted to undercut its ability to do so for others. Disdain for others' fashionability was a means of safeguarding social position in cities where the modes of dress were particularly fluid and a way to maintain gender hierarchy in a world in which women's power as consumers was expanding. Concerns over gendered power expressed through fashion in dress, Haulman reveals, shaped the revolutionary-era struggles of the 1760s and 1770s, influenced national political debates, and helped to secure the exclusions of the new political order.
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The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

by Kate Haulman
The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

by Kate Haulman

eBook

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Overview

In eighteenth-century America, fashion served as a site of contests over various forms of gendered power. Here, Kate Haulman explores how and why fashion--both as a concept and as the changing style of personal adornment--linked gender relations, social order, commerce, and political authority during a time when traditional hierarchies were in flux.

In the see-and-be-seen port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, fashion, a form of power and distinction, was conceptually feminized yet pursued by both men and women across class ranks. Haulman shows that elite men and women in these cities relied on fashion to present their status but also attempted to undercut its ability to do so for others. Disdain for others' fashionability was a means of safeguarding social position in cities where the modes of dress were particularly fluid and a way to maintain gender hierarchy in a world in which women's power as consumers was expanding. Concerns over gendered power expressed through fashion in dress, Haulman reveals, shaped the revolutionary-era struggles of the 1760s and 1770s, influenced national political debates, and helped to secure the exclusions of the new political order.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807869291
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 08/01/2011
Series: Gender and American Culture
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 304
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Kate Haulman is associate professor of history at American University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: That Strange, Ridic'lous Vice 1

1 The Many Faces of Fashion in the Early Eighteenth Century 11

2 Fops and Coquettes Gender, Sexuality, and Status 47

3 Country Modes Cultural Politics and Political Resistance 81

4 New Duties and Old Desires on the Eve of Revolution 117

5 A Contest of Modes in Revolutionary Philadelphia 153

6 Fashion and Nation 181

Epilogue: Political Habits and Citizenship's Corset The 1790s and Beyond 217

Notes 227

Index 275

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Novel, richly detailed, and deeply researched, Kate Haulman's book is both a revolutionary history of the meaning of fashionability in early America and a chronicle of the evolution of the transatlantic fashion system. Never have the changes within the world of dress been presented with such thoroughness or their cultural significance been glossed with such specification and care.—David Shields, University of South Carolina

In this original interpretation, Kate Haulman makes the luxuries of clothing and accoutrements—the details of their trade, their changing design, and the uses to which women and men put them—central to our understanding of imperial relations in the era of the American Revolution and the early republic.—Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship

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