For our project, our group will be focusing on the changes in dress at JMU over time and how this has been affected by politics, popular culture, timeless undying fashion, finite fashion trends, and the physical changes to the hemlines of the clothing over time. My artifact up for analysis is the 1910 Schoolma’am. The yearbook is digitized on the JMU Scholarly Commons website, and any pictures I use can easily be added alongside a hyperlink so anybody accessing our class website will be able to see the Schoolma’am in its entirety.
This Schoolma’am is an integral part of our research into dress and fashion as it is the very first yearbook to come out of the State Normal School. This means that through this yearbook they were showing to the public how they wanted to be perceived. Something I immediately noticed was the dress among the faculty. The faculty portraits come up in the beginning of the yearbook and almost all of the women have necklines that literally come up to the bottom of their chin. This shows me that they wanted to be viewed as strictly professional, academic women. Seeing as so many of them dressed like this, I can only assume it was commonplace in the time period for women to dress very modestly and conservatively, especially in the education realm. The State Normal School had to work very hard to convince the outside world that women could indeed succeed as educators, so showing a very academic demeanor was important to the success of the school.
Another prevalent theme I noticed right off the bat was the prevalence of white clothing. In most of the photos of the students, the women are wearing long white dresses, or white garb of some sort. We have previously talked about in class how this color choice was done (somewhat intentionally) in an effort to give off the vibe of purity and innocence. Again, this goes along with the idea that the school needed to succeed, so anything that went against the image of being academia focused and driven would send the wrong message to financial contributors and the general public. Contrary to what we see in the modern-day school system, women were literally just starting to come into the role of teachers, so the Normal School had to do anything they could to provide a positive and professional image.
The Schoolma’am is printed in all black and white, yet even without it being printed in color I can tell that the clothing was mainly in white yet with some sprinklings of black. Apart from the white dress as a symbol of innate purity, the muted color in their choice of clothes shows how even when they did stray from white they still dressed very conservatively color wise. Their decision to have no color or differentiation of dress spoke to the students having an overarching concept of uniformity. If you were to go against the grain you would be going against the school that was working so hard to establish prestige and authority.
1910 was also a time when the United States was most definitely a patriarchal society so women had to do all they could to prove themselves as individuals and as future teachers and the fashion choices in the Schoolma’am of that year reflected that. Through high necklines, dressing in white or muted colors, the 1910 Schoolma’am reflects the values of the State Normal school during that era.
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