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

The story of Americans expressing their opposition to British taxation by wearing homespun remains a popular narrative in tales of the imperial crisis preceding the revolution—perhaps nearly as popular as stories of refusing to drink English tea. Yet no matter its appeal, this story about patriotic consumer protests over clothing is oddly opaque. To be sure, parliament sought to tax imported cloth just as it did tea. But protests over English cloth expanded to encompass fashion, a far more inchoate subject. It was one thing to eschew tea, and a far different thing to determine which clothing offended due to its material, and which offended due to its style. As Kate Haulman demonstrates in her fine new book, by the time the 1764 Revenue (Sugar) Act began to spur colonial protests, fashion had long prompted anxieties about gender, rank, politics, and power. The revolutionary-era conversation about luxury, feminization, and political loyalty merely shifted the terms—and importance—of a longstanding set of anxieties irreducible to a question of fabric or cut that spans the eighteenth century. Those contests gained particular intensity because of fashion's association with women, who exercised relative power as consumers, assessors, style-makers, and, at times, businesswomen. Nor was this a one-directional set of associations. Fashion could also help to remake the gender binary, redefining notions of masculinity and femininity as well as the power balance between men and women.

Aesthetics · Art · Femininity · Opposition (politics) · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law