| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gayle V. Fischer. Pantaloons and Power: Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 2001. Pp. x, 262. $24.00.

In 1825, Robert Owen, the patriarchal founder of the New Harmony community, proposed a radical dress reform for the women in his "Community of Equality" in southwestern Indiana. His ideas, and the ideas of other British Owenite reformers who joined him on his venture in North America, were simple: America was a city on a hill where he would establish the first intentional community wherein all people would be equal. There he and other reformers (after reading Charles Fourier on dress reform) promoted a new simple pants-and-tunic costume for community women. Most of the women living in the community, though, hated it—"a feather bed tied in the middle"—and refused to wear it. 1

Gayle V. Fischer points out one of the central ironies inherent in nineteenth-century American dress reform: it was a male patriarch who first crafted what women's liberation should look like, and it was the women in the community who opposed such "reform." Such is the story of New Harmony: Owen (and other European reformers, along with a number of Philadelphia intelligentsia) created a blueprint for women's liberation that included removing them from economic dependence on their husbands/fathers, educating them, and offering them new clothing. Such is also the story of class privilege, of course: the upper-class (predominantly male) designers of utopia imagined a liberation far different from that of the working-class women whose husbands joined the community in order to partake of an eight-hour work day and free education for their children. . . .

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