Adopting a “Healthy” Gilded Age Fashion

‘It is fashionable, too, to be clean in this day and generation and “tubbing” is English, so that the semi-weekly baths of our grandmothers have become bi-daily with her progeny; tennis, yachting, riding, and all elegant sports– facts which rather discount in the fashion world of some of Mrs. Miller‘s reforms.’ – A true pioneer in clothing design in an age when women’s roles were evolving and expanding, Annie Jenness-Miller was an advocate for reforming how women dressed. She pushed for physical development, proper posture, good hygiene and healthy living for both women and men. A popular Gilded age speaker, she lectured on a variety of healthy topics to help prevent the spread of disease, and assist with the equality and human rights for the working classes.

Her Point Of View

Mrs. Jenness-Miller of dress-reform fame has begun her career, if indeed, a reformer so well established may still be regarded as a beginner, in most sensible fashion. Realizing the power which the world of fashion wields far outside of its actual limit, she has interested fashionable women in her ideas and has designed her beautiful and artistic gowns upon models which the most punctilious of fashion's votaries can adopt without offense to her priestess. 

It is not, however, the fashionable woman who most needs the “divided skirt” and the “gown form,” and Mrs. Miller suggestion about bathing exercise and physical culture are not the blessing to the so-called society woman that they will be to some of her less favorably circumstanced sisters. So far as it influences her appearance, the care of her figure and her health is nowadays a very important study in the curriculum of the developing belle. She and her elders abhor her poor stooping shoulders, angles, and prominent bones as much as Mrs. Miller herself, even if she does not resort to the same sensible and permanent means to relieve them. The majority of fashionable women carry themselves well, straight, and not ungracefully, and a plump, rounded figure, is by no means rare among the “400,” although marred and rendered less beautiful than possible by the dress and corset maker’s art. 

It is fashionable, too, to be clean in this day and generation and “tubbing” is English, so that the semi-weekly baths of our grandmothers have become bi-daily with her progeny; tennis, yachting, riding, and all elegant sports– facts which rather discount in the fashion world of some of Mrs. Miller‘s reforms. One cannot help hoping as one listens to her forcible presentment of the evils she inveighs against, and as one admires the comfortable garments she has designed, that she may sometime bring her skill and persuasion to the cognizance of a class of laboring women to whom the adoption of such a helpful and convenient dress would be of vast value. 

To convince convince shop girls, sales women, any woman, indeed, whose occupation necessitates tramping about the streets in all weathers or standing for hours every day at desk or counter, that they could increase their strength and comfort and actually prolong their lives by merely adopting a different dress, would be a deed of almost incalculable benefit.– New York Times, 1890

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