S4E8: Behind the Mirror: Exploring the Power, Pain, and Pleasure in Beauty’s History

Transcript:

Erin Narloch 00:11

On today’s history factory podcast, we’re joined by UK based social historian Virginia Nicholson. You and she talks to us about her new book, all the rage, stories from the front line of beauty, a history of pain, pleasure and power, 1860 to 1960 this research led historian really helps us unpack and contextualize everything you might wonder about why we dress the way we dress, or how we came to appear the way we do in society. This was truly a fascinating conversation with Virginia, and even after we stopped recording, she and I had so much more to talk about. I really hope you enjoy this conversation today, and it makes you think more about how you appear or why we choose to dress and look the way we do in daily life. So let’s get to it.

 

Erin Narloch  00:03

Well, Virginia, thank you so much for joining me today. I was wondering if we can maybe start the conversation by defining what a social historian is.

 

Virginia Nicholson 00:15

So it’s not something that anybody says when they’re a kid. When I grow up, I want to be a social historian, and I certainly didn’t. It happened gradually, but let’s see whether we can find a way to encapsulate it. I think it’s a very interesting branch of history, because it’s about uncovering people’s real lives. It’s about understanding how people really lived. It isn’t looking at the bigger political macro movements. It’s looking at the real lives. It’s giving people their chance to speak. It’s giving people their individuality. And a social historian is liable to use very individualistic primary sources. So it might be diaries, it might be letters, it might be unusual archive material, and that’s always been my aim. Certainly.

 

Erin Narloch  01:15

What drew you to becoming a social historian?

 

Virginia Nicholson  01:19

Well, I didn’t again. I did not begin life as a social historian. I didn’t even want to be a writer. There’s too many writers in my family as it is. Actually, I started my adult career working in television, in making documentaries, and I was doing a lot of traveling. I loved my work. I was constantly talking to people, meeting with people, finding out about their lives, very often, stuff that I had no idea I was going to be finding out about, because I would get sent abroad. I would get sent to strange, unusual parts of the UK to discover all manner of things. But that has completely informed my approach as an historian. When I started writing, it was because I couldn’t do the traveling anymore. I had a young family, and I wasn’t prepared to spend half my time away, so I did the next best thing. In fact, turned out to be the much better thing, which was to sit at my desk a good deal more look after my family. Bring up three small children who are now enormous, bigger than you. And and do more or less the same kind of work, but as a writer, so my approach was always to talk to people who had memories. That’s why a lot of my writing not this book in particular, but a lot of other books I’ve done have been about people within living memory. And I would go out and interview people, because that was, that was the normal thing you do when you work in a doc, when you’re making a documentary, you go out and ask questions from people who have the answers and and that’s what I did, and that has always been my approach, is to to go as far as possible to the living story, the individual story. Does that make sense?

 

Erin Narloch  03:23

Yes, and it’s fascinating. But I think that what you’re touching on is that the personal lives of people and the stories that they they keep or they they write down, really can transcend time and be really interesting resources,

 

Virginia Nicholson  03:40

totally. I mean, for me, I write the kind of history that I want to read. In order to do that, I don’t only talk to people and look at fascinating archives. I look at really serious academic work as well. A lot of academics I’m not one of them. Have done a lot of really serious spade work and digging, and I take my hat off to them. But they don’t always write in the most interesting way. So I like to do the hard work of reading their books, kind of so that you don’t have

 

Erin Narloch  04:18

to Yep, and the new book that you’ve mentioned, can you tell us about all the rage and what, why? What drew you to write about this topic? Can you tell us more about it? 

 

Virginia Nicholson  04:31

So the basic topic is looking at women’s relationship with their appearance. And I am a very visual person. I come from a very visual family. I come from a family of artists and designers and people who have made colorful, patterned things, they’ve made clothes, they’ve made works of art, they’ve made houses. We’re talking about my grandmother, who was the painter Vanessa Bell, and also my great aunt, who was the writer of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set, who suckled around them, but they were the kind of center of all those satellites. So that very visual world has accompanied me all my life. My father actually was extremely interested in fashion history, and taught me a great deal about it. I remember him talking me through the morphing and changing shapes of women’s bodies in the 19th century, and I got fascinated by this, how they sometimes went in and they sometimes went out, and they sometimes went flat, and they sometimes went bulgy, and he would explain all this to me, but my mother also was a great influence that she taught me to make, to do dressmaking. She influenced my taste in clothes, and so close and how people look has always been second nature to me. I can’t stop assessing what I see in front of me, how people present themselves.

 

Erin Narloch  06:13

So why does what we matter? Or excuse me, so, why does what we wear and how we appear matter so much.

 

Virginia Nicholson  06:22

I think it matters a lot, because particularly as women, we are judged on our looks. I think I’ve just given the game away by saying that I look at people, and I judge how they look, and I make assumptions, very often wrong assumptions. It only takes a few minutes when you start talking to people to realize that what their appearance is telling you isn’t always what the real person is underneath. But when it comes to the historical story of women, it’s unbelievably important, because back in the 19th century, when my book begins, around about 1860 women in the UK, I’m not quite sure about the state in the USA, but couldn’t own property if they were married. In other words, their property all deferred to their husband the moment they got married. And so they were basically non people. They didn’t own anything. They had to give everything to their husband. So as sort of non people, women needed marriage to give them security. And marriage has always been, and still is to this day, I think, to an extent, a transactional arrangement. What they had to sell was their looks. What they had to sell was their beauty. There’s a lovely old folk song in England, which is about the pretty little milkmaid who meets the the old rogue of the aristocrat, and she says, My face is my fortune, because he wants to, kind of carry her off. And she says, My face is my fortune. And that’s a kind of proverb in English. So we’re judged. We were looked at. We use beauty to control our destiny, and so I just think it’s extremely important and it remains so, even though obviously much more emancipated than we were 150 years ago. But the feelings and the judgments are hardwired. They go very deep.

 

Erin Narloch  08:44

Yeah, yeah. Um, so out of all of the stories and vignettes that you feature in the book, are there any really surprising stories that you could share, or any insights into different periods of time?

 

Virginia Nicholson 08:59

So sure, yes, lots, really sorry. I’m just skipping through some notes I took before we talked. I think one of my favorite stories in the book, partly because it surprised me so much, was the story of a woman, a French woman, called Suzanne Noel. And Suzanne was encouraged by her husband, quite unusually for the late 19th century, to study and to get qualifications as a doctor. He was a doctor, and he could see that she had a scientific leanings and she was very smart, so she learned to be a doctor, and during the First World War, she helped work with a lot of the surgeons who were pioneering plastic surgery, with men whose faces had been shot off. At the front in France, and their looks were devastated, their appearance was devastated, and she worked to try and repair their looks. And then she took those skills after the First World War to work with women. Now says we don’t normally equate being a cosmetic surgeon with being a feminist, and I think that would probably be something that would surprise anyone. And it certainly surprised me to discover that Suzanne Noel was an adamant and ardent feminist. She walked around Paris with a lapel button saying, Je veux voter, I want a vote. This was long before French women got the vote. And she was also a founder member in Europe of an American organization called the Soroptimists. And she was, known as the godmother of the European so optimists. And the way she saw it was that in a world that was unfair to women, they had the right to beauty, and what she saw happening around her was that women were being discriminated against, particularly if they were middle class women who were unfortunate enough to have to earn a Living, perhaps because they’d been abandoned by their husband or widowed. So they had to earn a living, and as they grew older, they would be thrown out of their jobs, and we would now call that age related discrimination, and we would be able to take somebody to court for having done that they had no such rights. So a lot of them were finding themselves more or less destitute. And they would go to Suzanne Noel, and she would say, Well, I think we can just take you in a little bit here, pull your cheeks back, sort out your eyelids, and she would do some work on their faces. And they would go back to their employer, who would say you look like you’ve had a holiday, and give them back their jobs. And she would do this quite often for free. And so she saw cosmetic surgery as feminism. Facelifts for her were feminism. And I was very struck by that. I thought, let’s that really turns our ideas upside down, and it makes us think about the world in a different way. It was, it was exciting,

 

Erin Narloch  12:31

yeah, yes. And what an interesting story and account and and to your point, thinking about plastic surgery in a very different light, and it being that act of feminism and preserving an individual’s right to work, and at a time where they didn’t have those protections,

 

Virginia Nicholson 12:53

Yes, and where, you know, above all, women were judged on their looks. They were very often doing front of house jobs. They were working as the woman who showed ladies, showed people to their seats in restaurants or in shops. They were doing the sales talk. And they were given those jobs because they were good looking and that Do you know, I don’t think you could get away with that now, maybe in some parts of the world, but not in Wisconsin I’m sure. 

 

Erin Narloch  13:23

There we go. So do you feel that women’s appearances over time have been impacted by the roles they hold in society, or have the roles they held in society impacted their appearances? Or how are those two things working together?

 

Virginia Nicholson 13:42

Well, that’s a complicated and really interesting question, I think over the years, it’s been really interesting to me to watch how the history of women’s emancipation has gone side by side with the history of advances in technology and new freedoms. So let’s look at the new freedoms a bit. Obviously, as women become freeer, they gain their liberties. They are also saying, I don’t want to wear this incredibly uncomfortable corset. I would like to wear shorter skirts or even pants. I’d like to cut my hair short, because it’s such a damn nuisance doing all this kind of busts with my hair. And all those became sites of battle. They became huge, kind of hugely controversial in many cases. But what was happening was that as us, you started to shorten your skirts, if you think of the women for the 1920s with their knee length skirts, the flapper dancing the Charleston, the kind of Scott Fitzgerald. Old era. It looks like freedom, but is it really freedom? The question is, if your legs are going to show, what are you going to do about your legs? If your back is going to be shown, like in one of those beautiful, you know, backless 1930s gowns, what are you going to do if it’s spotty or hairy? What are you going to do about your hairy legs? What are you going to do about your hairy arms? None of those things were issues 50 years earlier, because you would cover that from head to foot. Plus, if you had no corset, what were you going to do if you put on weight. Okay? So you don’t wear a corset, you start to modify your body instead. And you go on a diet. You lose weight. You lose some pounds. Maybe you have to lose a lot of pounds. Maybe you lose so many pounds that it turns into an eating disorder. So as the century is wearing on the new freedoms that women are getting are going in tandem with a vast increase in eating disorders, in body dysmorphia, in body image issues, until we get to, I think, where we know we all are today, where It’s become epidemic. So those things are all happening alongside an extraordinary revolution in technology. So I began the book in the 1860s and that was quite deliberate, because that’s the moment when not only women covered up massively and their bodies distorted by corsets, but it’s also a moment when photography began to go mainstream, and that’s hard to underestimate, when you can see how you look in a photograph, not in a painting, not in an artist’s rendition, but through the lens and in a black and white print. Okay, you’ve had to stand still 20 seconds with a fixed smile on your face. Nevertheless, it’s you, and you look at yourself, and you think, is that I want to look so that’s the first big change. And of course, that then goes on changing, because by the end of the 19th century, you’ve got the early movies, by the First World War. There are 1000s and 1000s of picture houses exploding all over the USA, all over the UK. It was the biggest entity. These were the biggest entertainment venues really ever. There were far more, about eight times more picture houses in the UK in 1920s than there are today. Which is, which is pretty incredible, yeah. And of course, that means that you are looking not only at photographic images of people and hearing what they have to say and watching their faces in motion, but you’re looking at people’s faces blown up to maybe 20 times their normal size, which is unprecedented. So you can see every fault, you can see, every wrinkle, you can see, every spot you can see, every every little defect in their skin. When they wear a low neck, you can see every defect on their arms, and you perceive them as defects. So suddenly, the pursuit of perfection is pushed up the agenda, and the pursuit of youth and the pursuit of loveliness, and all those things become incredibly important as we see the explosion of movie stars and celebrities. And again, we’re living in a world which has inherited that to an astonishing degree. So I take that right through to 1960 because that’s the moment in time when really you can’t get a lot more naked than the bikini without being naked. So the portrait I show in the book of Brigitte Bardot in her bikini. Okay, her bikinis maybe a little bit kind of more crudely made than today’s lycra jobs, but she looks pretty fab in it, and she has this incredibly aspirational body and of course, it is all about aspiration. And by 1960 we do have different technologies, visual technologies, but in essence, we have moving color pictures. And in 1960 they had moving color pictures and audio. And we have computers, but we haven’t basically gone much further. So that, to me, rounded off a century from the static images of 1860 to the kind of the Bridget Bardos. On our movie screens of 1960 100 years later, with almost nothing on except these little triangles of cloth. 

 

Erin Narloch  20:11

Yeah, so you talk about this kind of the century that you look at from 1860 to 1960 What about, and I know in the afterword, you talk a lot about what’s happened since 1960 right? But would you take that on? And would you think about, how has our relationship with beauty standards changed since 1960 to now? Like, where do you see the most change happening, maybe in the last, right, in the last 60 years, plus 60 plus years, and what’s going to happen to the future?

 

Virginia Nicholson 20:52

I’m hesitant, as a historian, to go into the prediction game, or to really comment in any authoritative way? I’m not a journalist, I’m not a pundit, I’m an historian, so I’m cautious about answering that question. Yes, I’ve made some rather careful predictions in my afterword, but it’s short and it’s very I’m prevaricating all the time, so I don’t want to stick my neck out about what might happen in the future. Still, I look at my own grown up children, I’m about to be a grandmother for the first time in a few little, about six months time, which is exciting. And of course, that means you have a stake in the future, and you have to give it serious thought. I will hope that, obviously, that we can, as women and us men, come to terms with the issues around body image, but I don’t see it happening around me. I see far too many women exercised and in a state of angst about their bodies. I think one of the few really good things about getting older is that although you become more invisible, there is far less judgment of you, so you lose and you win. I find that in some respects, as an older woman, I’m ignored, but on the other hand, I’m past my fertile years, and therefore I’m not a threat. And in a way, I sort of both don’t matter and I can have a little more freedom. So it’s not great. I think that there is far too much judgment out there, and I think journalists have a lot to answer for by the fact that they talk about women in the public domain and judge them all the time on how they look and on what they’re wearing. I mean, just today, I’m looking on Instagram, and there’s a whole lot of stuff about Kamala Harris and about what she’s wearing and how does the choice of colored pants suit react to Barack Obama’s choices of suit in the past? And is this important? And you say, Hang on, would you say this if she was a man? Why is nobody saying this about her running mate? Saying it about her? Nobody seems to say about Donald Trump, but because she’s a woman she’s talked about with her choices of makeup, of hair and of clothes and I think our journalists have a lot to answer for on that in that respect. And Kamala Harris is obviously just a foremost example, but it’s happening you know, across the board, with public women in public roles, yeah, I think I love that,

 

Erin Narloch  24:09

Yeah. And even women, I think, in power positions within industry, right? That if you, if you have, if you have a platform, right, you’re also on the receiving end of criticism, maybe not to the content of what you’re saying and doing, but how you appear and what you look like and your choice, your choice of fashion.

 

Virginia Nicholson 24:32

Totally, totally, and it seems to, it seems to be foremost, rather than the last thing That’s mentioned. I mean, our politicians here in the UK, the women all get judged on what they’re wearing. If the men were judged on what they’re wearing, yeah, sometimes I think they should They look downright scruffy at times. Wow. Nobody judge Boris Johnson for the fact he never brushed his hair. Right?

 

Erin Narloch  25:04

That is, that is true. So when you think about the book and readers of the book, what are some of the things you want them to get from from reading all the rage like,

 

Virginia Nicholson 25:17

Well, obviously, I’d love it. I’d love the book to to make them think about their own choices and about the the inheritance, about why we dress in the way we dress, and about what we can do about the fact that so much of our relationship with men and our relationship with with our appearance, is sort of, in a way, baked in by history. And I think that’s a fact of life, but I think there are things we can do about it. What I don’t want is people to come away having read the book, feeling that I am wagging my finger, that I’m criticizing. I want them to feel, I mean, the book is subtitled power, pain and pleasure. I want them to feel a lot of pleasure too. I mean, I love clothes. I love dressing up. I love bright colors. I love, you know, having my hair done. I love having my nails done as much as the next woman. And I just think that’s fun. And I don’t think I particularly, I mean, I’m not trying to catch a husband. I’m lucky enough to have one and a very nice one, and I’m one. I sometimes ask myself, Who am I doing it for? Am I doing it for myself? Am I doing it for women that I meet in my own peer group? Am I doing it for my daughters because I don’t want to embarrass them? Um, I don’t know. I think I’m doing it because I just love it. I love jewelry. I love to dress up. I love an excuse to put on my glad rags.

 

Erin Narloch  27:05

Yeah, and I felt like it just satiated the curiosity you might have and the history of why we do the things we do, and how we choose to dress, the way, the way we dress, that we write.

 

Virginia Nicholson 27:18

And I don’t, I did not want to write a straightforward history. I wanted to write a history that asked a lot of questions and that really examined feminist issues alongside the history. Because history as lists, I think, is boring. I think you know, you just say and then and then and then. You know, you work your way through the chronology. It’s just a yawn. But if what is happening is unpacking some of the really complex ideas and questions about the status and role of how our grandmothers and our great grandmothers existed. I think that’s really interesting and really valuable. And think differently about how we what we do when we get up each morning.

 

Erin Narloch  28:13

Well, thank you so much for for your time today. I I felt like as I was reading the book, there were so many moments of wow, I never knew that, or I never thought about it that way. Or, to your point, the contextualization and the kind of peeling back the onion to understand the context. So it’s a wonderful book and a wonderful read, and I just really appreciate your time with us today. So thank you

 

Virginia Nicholson 28:42

Erin if it’s worked for you, it’s going to work for a lot of people. Thank you so much. It’s been a great pleasure. 

 

Erin Narloch 30:09

I really hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. I think the concept of thinking about increased women’s liberation came with increased judgment and scrutiny for what they wear and how they appear. Also this idea that plastic surgery was an act of feminism about 100 years ago, how incredible. I really hope you enjoyed today’s conversation with Virginia on the history factory podcast, and really look forward to welcoming you all again to another great conversation in the future. Be well.