By: Iris Naylor
Back in 1871, The Beacon, in reporting on the rights of women, quoted the leading authority at that time, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
She had been asked whether she thought girls possessed the ability to withstand "the wear and tear of a college course of study."
Her reply was to suggest young men should be laced into corsets, covered with 10 to 20 pounds of clothes, shod in 3-inch heels, their heads covered with hair that was enhanced with "ripples, chignons, rats and mice" and held in place with 10,000 hairpins.
"If they can stand all this," she said, " they can stand a little Latin and Greek."
Three years later, women were wearing broad, flat, low heels, a most sensible move, according to The Beacon.
Hairpins took a little longer. The bobbed hair style didn’t come into fashion until the mid-1920s.
With the bobbed hair came the demise of Lambertville’s hairpin factory that had employed so many young people. Dr. Alfred G. Petrie, in his history of Lambertville, wrote the hairpin factory turned out 15 tons of hairpins each week that ranged in length from 1 inch to 4 inches.
When bobbed hair came into style, the hairpin industry went out of business. Young males in 1874 collected the hairpins of young ladies and stitched them into albums, labeled with the former owners’ names.
Husbands in 1926 were not sure whether they liked the new "bobs" their wives were wearing. One irate brother of a Stockton school teacher almost had her fired from her job because he thought it was not proper for a school teacher to have bobbed hair.
Lucy Stone was a contemporary of Mrs. Stanton. She, too, was an advocate of women’s rights. She married Henry Blackwell, brother to the first United States woman doctor.
Lucy and her husband chose the occasion of their wedding ceremony to read aloud a protest against the property laws. At that time married women had no control over their own property. A new law in 1915 allowed married women of legal age to buy and sell property and permitted husband and wife to transfer property to each other.
Belva Lockwood was another contemporary of Mrs. Stanton. She not only agreed with Mrs. Stanton women could handle college studies, she herself became an attorney and was the first woman to present cases before the United States Supreme Court. She appeared on a ticket for the presidency against incumbent Grover Cleveland in 1888 in his bid for a second term.
He lost the election to Benjamin Harrison but not before he had signed a bill prohibiting Chinese from landing on our shores.
Democrats in New Hope campaigned for Cleveland with this little ditty: "Grover! Grover! He’s the boy for me! He’s needed down at Washington to calm the troubled sea."
Cleveland got a second change to calm the troubled sea in 1892 when he won back the presidency.
One of Ms. Lockwood’s claims while she was campaigning was she never wore a corset which is why she had such good health. Her boast might have had something to do with The Beacon’s opinion in 1891 that "the same class of dress reformers who are insisting that women should wear fewer clothes are shocked at actresses, society women and bathers because they don’t wear more."
Too many young girls walked the streets of Lambertville in 1907, observed a visitor, "with dresses about 6 inches from the pavement," and their deportment left a lot to be desired. He thought a good old-fashioned spanking would be good for them.
