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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Patricia Campbell Warner. When the Girls Came Out to Play: The Birth of American Sportswear. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2006. Pp. xxii, 292. Cloth $80.00, paper $24.95.
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| Patricia Campbell Warner has given women professors and their students a happy recognition: she credits them with influencing the world of style and fashion. |
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Throughout the nineteenth century, women encased their bodies in long skirts, tight sleeves, hats, corsets, and stockings—even when they played tennis, went skating, and (yes) swam in the ocean. Female tennis champions, Olympic swimmers, and bicycle riders juggled contradictory demands for fashionable clothing and room to move with only limited or temporary success. Pants were generally deemed appalling for women to wear in public despite reformers' efforts. Away from the male gaze, however, female students incorporated bloomers into their gym dresses and devised crew uniforms with loose blouses. Convinced such clothing was appropriate for work as well as play, college women eventually wore it off campus. In 1910 they appeared in their middies, bathing dresses, and gym suits on collecting expeditions for the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole on Cape Cod. These exercise outfits and the women who wore them, Warner argues, were a major force behind American women's adoption of casual sportswear in the 1920s, 1930s, and beyond. |
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