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SACKS

                                             January 19, 2009

Quoting Allen Churchill,
"The Improper Bohemians" (1959)              IMPROPER_BOHEMIANS
p.32:


  "... a New York City high school teacher named
   Henrietta Rodman.  Though earning her living
   in a supposedly sedate profession -- her
   subject was English Literature -- Miss Rodman
   was firebrand of extreme dimensions.  In her
   small, compact, go-getting person were to be       Allen Churchill
   found most of the qualities inherent in            seems obsessed with
   militant women of the day.  She has been           this "paradox",
   recalled as "incredibly naïve and                  bohemian women        
   preposterously reckless, believing wistfully       working as school
   in beauty and goodness."  Others credit here       teachers, usually
   with a rare gift for starting things, though       taken as symbols of
   what she started usually turned out to be          rectitude
   trouble.  But above all, she was a born
   protester, a furious opponent of any status        On p.75, he quotes a
   quo.  Henrietta Rodman advocated free love,        Hutchins Hapgood on the
   female dress reform, women's suffrage, birth       subject, who talks about
   control, the right of workers to strike, and       this "new type of village
   even (for a time) nudism."                         girl"-- the example at
                                                      hand being a woman who
   "Miss Rodman's ardent espousel of dress reform     teaches school uptown but
   in a day when women wore harsh, confining          "At night, sleeps with
   corsets, dresses almost to the ground, cotton      Bill Haywood".
   stockings, high-button shoes, and long hair,
   made her a remarkable figure to behold.  In             What else would
   Harry Kemp's autobiographical novel _More               an intellectual
   Miles_ she appears prominently as Janice                young woman do
   Godman, and Kemp recalls his first view of her:         for a living in
                                                           the New York of
     "A strange woman was going on just in                 1910 or 1920?
     front of me.  I could not help noticing
     her.  She wore sandals, and a loose
     flowing gown exactly like a meal
     sack. She dangled a hat haphazardly in
     her hand.  And her hair was bobbed in a
     day when bobbed hair, far from being the
     fashion, brought street notoriety to its
     possessor... The strange woman's neck was
     dazzling white; her hands were nervous
     and shapely; her feet small, as they
     worked ahead, clad in brown socks...  "


I have an impression... let's call
it a guess-- that this radical
"anti-feminine" feminine style of
dress became a popular form
divorced from it's original intent.

    It morphed into the art nouveau,
    long, flowing, clingy dress...         A_THING_OF_WIND_AND_LIGHT



                                              
                 I had (but lost track of) a               ANATHEMA
                 quote from one of Henrietta         
                 Rodman's modern contemporaries,     
                 a woman pondering about how         
                 this anti-fashion style might       
                 become just another fashion.              FLIP
                                                      
                                                     
                                                    
                                                 
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