The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 72, July 1968 - April, 1969 Page: 89
498 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Notes and Documents
a small college in Cuthbert, Miss Hutson related the genesis of the
Anti-Crinoline League.
Brenham, Texas
Papa Darling:- March 2, 1893
... The talk was on the horror of hoops now threatening the land,
& each one had some dismal story of accidents caused by those absurd
garments . . . or newspaper jokes on the abomination of crinoline.
Each one vowed that she could not bear the idea of wearing a
hoop, but that it would never do to be the only woman in town without
one. So I said: "Why should we wear them, here in Brenham; why
not have our own fashions? What difference does it make to us what
New York wears? And Cousin Alice said: "Let's organize an Anti-
Crinoline League." The idea was accepted with great enthusiasm, &c
she went on to say that Brenham could make herself famous &c honored
over the length and breadth of the land, &, in this Columbian year,"
over the world too, by a decisive stand against the oppressions
of fashion. The World's Fair people, she says, are advertising for sta-
tistics of heroes and heroines: who is more heroic than a woman who
refuses to wear a hoop when all the world adopts the style? So we
decided to call a meeting of all who dislike the hoop, by a notice in
the papers, which I[,] as Sec'y, was commissioned to draw up. ..
If a respectable majority of sensible women in each town banded
together & pledged themselves to uphold each other in defying such
senseless styles, one might dress reasonably." Certainly, there is no need
for following idiotic fashions in a place like this, where styles don't
come in till they're old elsewhere . . .
Ever Your Loving
Ethel Hutson
After working up several versions of what she called her "Chaldean
are located in the Manuscripts Collection of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane
University, New Orleans, Louisiana. The bulk of this collection consists of letters written
by members of the Hutson family-especially Charles Woodward Hutson, his wife Mary
Lockett, his son William, and his daughter Ethel-to one another.
Miss Hutson's correspondence with her father and mother reveals that she was well
read in contemporary English and American literature. Her early letters (1892-1896) do
not mention anything about the feminists or any other reform movement.
Some twenty years later, however, Miss Hutson did become active in the movement for
women's suffrage in New Orleans. See her correspondence for the years 1910-1921 in the
Hutson Family Papers.
3Referring to the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.
4An announcement of a future meeting was subsequently published in the Brenham
Herald, March 4, 1893.
'Such experiments were actually carried out by several groups of women reformers
in New England. See Riegel, "Women's Clothes and Women's Rights," 398.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 72, July 1968 - April, 1969, periodical, 1969; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117146/m1/105/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.