Getting Into Men's Pants

TheStar.com

Saturday, May 03, 2003

PETER GODDARD


"The often derided dress reformer has had her way ... Bathing dresses,
gymnastic and tennis suits, which would have frightened an eighteenth
century dame into one of her favourite fainting fits, have reconciled
the public taste to the fact that women, after all, are women, not
angels, nor footless birds of paradise."


Sure, it was easy for Woman's Journal to get so edgy in its piece on
"Bicycling for Girls" in its Aug.1, 1891 issue. The Journal had been
listening to its readers. It knew that women of the day were as mad as
you-know-where and weren't going to take it any more, squeezed into
those suffocating corsets with their impossibly narrow, 15-inch waists
or floating around under billowing heaps of crinoline like galleons let
loose from the Spanish Armada.


But was it really ready for women to start wearing real, honest-to-God,
two-legged trousers, just like men? Just imagine women showing feet,
knees and crotches. Impossible.


Women In Pants: Manly Maidens, Cowgirls And Other Renegades, (Harry
Abrams,$55) by Catherine Smith and Cynthia Grieg, has many things going for it,
including some 150 vintage, 19th- and early 20th-century photographs of
women who dared the impossible. These were the ones who got into men's
pants, although for the Victorians this act had an entirely different
meaning than it has today.


Along the way, the text details some of the shock registered by decent
Victorian society at the sight of women in pants ‹ at the mere thought
of women in pants. The 1856 murder of King Strang, the "pretentious
little ruler" of a Mormon sect, was attributed in one newspaper to his
having made "the fatal error of trying to force all the women in his
realm to wear pants." (Several irate, I-wear-the-pants-around-here
Mormon husbands pulled the triggers.)


"Advertisements and illustrations from popular literature promoted the
Victorian ideal of the delicate and domestic woman contained with her
fashionably corseted dress," Smith and Grieg write in their
introduction. However, the book's photos tell us about less constrained
lives being lived, too. These are the ones reflecting "a sense of
rambunctious humour that clashes with persistent notions of the staid
and docile Victorian woman."


Visually, Women In Pants is a rather staid-looking book. The photos are
russet in colour, or sepia, brown or black and white. Six years in the
works, the book contains four-colour reproductions of the original
photographs to give the mainly monochromatic feel of photography of the
period.


Yet the images themselves ‹ particularly of cross-dressing women
entirely in male gear looking cockily back at the camera ‹ set off all
sorts of sirens and bells in the brain.


You know these women know what they're doing. The Wellesley women
students, dressed both as typical Victorian women and men for a 1901
after-class party photo, are happily sticking it to a society that is
already stressed by the prospect of women having the vote and certainly
not prepared for women having each other.


In turn, that helps explain why Women In Pants was given its Canadian
launch Thursday at the Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography,
401 Richmond St. W., to coincide with the start of the Contact
photography festival. In appropriating male imagery, women were
appropriating what was thought of as the male right of sexual
expression.


"Remember," Grieg tells me, "in the 19th century women weren't even
considered sexual beings."


The arrival of photography in middle class life in the mid-19th century
coincided with the arrival of dress reform advocates, with the leader of
the pack writer-activist Amelia Bloomer, after whom the bloomer got its
name and fame. The photo was the great spreader of images, making public
what was before private.


Yet what's revealed of these private lives leaves a lot of
uncertainties. For starters, Victorians didn't want to know about women
loving women sexually. Lesbian "activity" was as unimaginable as
friendship between the French and English. To Victorian officialdom,
lesbianism resulted from not enough field hockey time for the girls,
particularly in a good driving rain, where they could get that kind of
thing out of their system.


But Grieg warns about too narrow an understanding of the nature of the
affection women felt for one another, what it meant, and how it was
expressed. "Our understanding of women's relationships and how they
evolved is different now than it was then," she tells me. "It's far too
easy to project our understanding of lesbian relationships (on the
Victorians). In school, there were romantic friendships, crushes,
smashings ‹ the same thing as having a crush ‹ where women actually
courted other women.


"In some cases, it was role-playing and departing from traditional
roles. In the privacy of their own group, they put on clothes borrowed
from their brothers or husbands, to play the male role in society."


Women In Pants gives the entire stereotypical image of Victorian
femininity a good dusting. (The affinity both authors themselves feel
for the period can be read in their sepia dust-cover authors' photo,
where they're both in Victorian male gear. Grieg was last at Gallery 44
two years ago with a show of period-like photography also dealing with
cross-dressing.)


As it notes, period photographs of the "bloomer" where legs were
partially outlined, nevertheless played havoc with the accepted
Victorian ideas about the perfect figure-eight shaped figure where an
ample, nurturing bosom was separated from the mother of all hips by a
nearly non-existent stomach.


But Women In Pants also has women whom Victorian society didn't know or
want to know. These women were miners, baseball players, farmers and
cowgirls. They worked the fields alongside their men. These women ‹
clearly not from the bourgeoisie that would only tut tut their déclassé
ways ‹ wore britches or trousers, and sweat and dirt.


If nothing else, Women In Pants shows more dirt on more women than any
other photo-based book I can recall.


Tomasz Konart's "Five Cities" show at Peak Gallery, 23 Morrow Ave.,
indicates that photography doesn't begin or end with the Contact
festival. (Peak Gallery has opted out this year.)


The five cities in question are Lodz and Warsaw in Poland, Berlin and
Nürnberg in Germany, and Toronto. Each is laid out in triptych fashion
with three narrow, shadow-filled black and white photos showing ‹
hinting at would be more like it ‹ several nondescript spots in each
city. They could all be the same city.


What's really on the Polish-born Toronto photographer's mind is how we
get to think they're all the same city. To many photographers, image
making deals with memory. To Konart, it would seem to be about
forgetting. What's not clear in his image is as important as what is.
What is clear, though, is that Konart's Web-based photos show ‹ an
adjunct to the Peak exhibition that ends May 17 ‹ may be one of the most
innovative photo exhibits you'll find.