Wearing Black, Wearing Bows: Union women and the politics of dress in the US fashion press, 1861–1865

Abstract

This article analyzes how leading US fashion periodicals Peterson's Magazine and Godey's Lady's Book discussed women's fashions on the Northern home front during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Primarily defining fashion magazines and clothing as pleasurable refuges from the horrors of war, Godey's and Peterson's nonetheless indicated that women's fashion choices were important to the broader war effort, arguing that women's sartorial decisions helped to demonstrate the virtue of their nation. Godey's and Peterson's thus operated as complex, contradictory spaces for middle-class female readers. In some respects serving as a welcome respite from direct discussions of war, these periodicals also placed considerable pressure on Northern women to live up to high standards of fashionable femininity as part of their patriotic duty to the nation. The fashion media thus at once served as a potential source of, even as it was a release from, Northern women's wartime anxieties.

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