Thursday, 15 November 2012

Working Girl: Elizabeth Hawes

Elizabeth Hawes was one fascinating woman.


In my latest post for On Pins and Needles, I include quotes found in two of Hawes's books, Fashion Is Spinach and It's Still Spinach. In both, she fearlessly opined about her industry and the people working within it.

In It's Still Spinach, she wrote the following:

"There are American women and men -- more of the latter -- who have held that spending time and thought on personal appearance is idle, stupid, and somehow wrong or sinful. This is nonsense. When you are dressed satisfactorily you not only look better but you also feel better. Male or female, you get real pleasure out of looking at yourself in a mirror or catching a glimpse of yourself in fine plate-glass shop windows. You get a big kick out of seeing the kind of people you prefer to have look at you do it not just once but twice. And often these people start following you around. Those you want pursuing you, mentally or in actuality, may be in the office where you work. They may be members of your male or female club, or classmates, or people unknown to you who are met at a party. If you've solved your dressing problems satisfactorily for yourself you are bound to attract the people you want to attract and for the reasons you want to attract them: a better job, a new mate, a competent lover, a fresh friend" (5).

Dressing satisfactorily, the true secret to success. Can it be? It just may give one the self-confidence to pursue a better job, a new mate, a lover and friendship. Hawes may be right.

I read through most of Fashion Is Spinach and through parts of It's Still Spinach, and I am surprised at how direct Hawes chose to be when discussing her like and dislikes. Just read the titles of the chapters in her book, Why Women Cry, published in 1943: "The Content Cow", "Les Riches Bitches", "The Rich-Not-Bitch", "The She-Wolves", and etc. Hawes's frank and occasionally unmannered language is purposeful; it is there to arrest the reader and to be controversial. 

And controversial Hawes was. During the McCarthy era, the outspoken Hawes was profiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For a long time, the agency confused another Vassar graduate, Elizabeth Day Hawes, with Hawes. Elizabeth Day Hawes taught textile arts at the liberal Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, and Hawes dossier included the theory that Hawes was traveling regularly between New York City and Tennessee to aid the spread the communist ideals. For more information on this time in Hawe's life, please see Radical By Design: The Life and Style of Elizabeth Hawes  by Bettina Birch.  

Over the next few months, I may return to Hawes's writing. I'm drawn to her stories and appreciate the descriptions she provides of her burgeoning business and her perspective of World War II. Hawes carefully observed the world around her, and her books now serve as records of a past era. 


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