These Edwardian Bachelor Girls planned road trips to explore the great outdoors, their awesome friendships and newly acquired freedoms. Their answer to social media feeds was this album that feels like a marathon of Friends reruns. The photos open a window to their glorious summer circa 1910 in the countryside of Pennsylvania.
Beth Scupham posted this album titled Stone’s Cottage on Flickr.com. Her grandfather took most of the photos. Imagine how he struggled to pose his laughing subjects and the moment they finally held their collective breath to freeze time.
Scupham writes:
“These are part of a series from a whole album of photos that belonged to my Grandfather… What was Stone’s Cottage? I don’t know. My grandmother, traces her ancestry back to the American Revolution and the Mayflower, is JLB in the photo. This was a trip they took with friends before they were married. The pictures are charming snapshots of life for young professionals in the early 1900s. Friends of my Grandfather and Grandmother ‘camping’, most of the ladies were new schoolteachers. Most of the men were bankers and lawyers. These may be friends from Syracuse College. My grandfather posed, lit, shot and developed the photographs, so he is rarely portrayed here.
It is his eye through which we see.”
While we share these Edwardian bachelor girls (and a few guys) summer long passed we also experience an important slice of history. It was the first decade of the twentieth century, a time of tremendous technological and social change.. For lack of a convenient term we are calling it the Edwardian Era, which extended from Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 through the reign of her son and successor, Edward VII or the First World War. While some historians limit the term to British history, the term readily crossed borders and oceans with its style, politics and social trends.
The New Woman Embraced New Freedoms
Towards the end of the 1800s, women were emerging as independent, educated beings with a rising literacy rate. Millions of women read intelligent ladies magazines like Godey’s. Industrialization was opening doors in both education and employment. Women were gaining mobility, physical strength and redefining conventional notions of femininity. Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland rolled up their sleeves in a “most unladylike fashion” to race around the world in opposite directions. Annie Londonderry rode her bike around the world a few years later. Annie Peck and many others climbed the world’s highest mountains in pants! Many Victorian and Edwardian Bachelor Girls pushed against tradition, choosing careers at the expense of traditional roles within marriage.
Historian Erika Janik writes in Single Ladies -19th Century Style:
“The generations of women born between 1865 and 1895 had the highest proportion of single women in history. Before this time, a single woman who didn’t have to work to support herself would likely have resigned herself to a boring life in her childhood home with her parents. Not these ladies. Instead, they pursued higher education, fulfilling work, and independent living.”
The young Edwardian bachelor girls in these photos were mostly teachers. Yes, many would eventually marry and raise families. Still, they were redefining their position in society.
According to historian Ruth Brigitta Bordin in Alice Freeman Palmer: The Evolution of a New Woman(1993),
By 1900 the concept of the New Woman had almost replaced the cult of domesticity and the doctrine of spheres as well as its mid- nineteenth-century corollary, the Ideal of Real Womanhood, as the ideological totem around which women’s position in society was viewed by the educated public…The New Woman, with her younger sister the Gibson girl, had taken her place in American society.
Thank you Edwardian Bachelor Girls of Stone’s House for paving our way.
Racing Nellie Bly
Victorian Secrets From Footnotes In History
Know The Past To Invent The Future
