Looking Flash: Disreputable Women's Dress and 'Modernity', 1870-1910

Abstract

Brazil to St Petersburg, Berlin to Melbourne, disreputable women in showy dress attracted abundant commentary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Australia, our focus here, as in other parts of the English-speaking world, the word 'flash' was often used for these women. 'Flash' was a cant term originating in eighteenth-century England, used to indicate sexual and criminal knowledge as well as an interest in audaciously street-smart clothes. Gaudily attired prostitutes were sometimes called 'flash girls'; delinquent factory girls were said to have gone bad due to 'flash dress and fast companions'. 1 Despite frequent use of the term, commentators rarely offer detailed descriptions of flash women's clothes. Most were content with vague references to 'scarlet satin' or 'tinsel imitations of rich adornments'. 2 With this in mind, we here offer detailed examples of flash feminine street style between 1870 and 1910. The flash style was exhibited by certain prostitutes, brothel madams, thieves, barmaids, ballet girls, brazen factory-workers and unruly servants, especially those with a history of institutionalization under 'industrial schools' laws. Though they drew attention from their contemporaries, disreputable women in flash dress have attracted little from historians. The only sustained discussions of street style between 1870 and 1910 focus on men. 3 Historians of prostitution tend to refer only briefly to sex workers' sartorial style, often simply repeating the generic references to prostitutes' penchant for 'finery' to be found in contemporary commentaries. 4 Feminist scholars interested in turn-of-the-century dress mostly concentrate on middle-class women. 5 Problematically, too, the small number who investigate the dress practices of working-class women have tended to do so as part of a search for advance evidence of the 1920s 'Modern Girl'. Keen to present working-class women as pioneers of the modern femininity apparent in the Jazz Age, they have concentrated on shopgirls or 2 aspirational garment workers who acted like proto-flappers, dressing for glamour and romance. 6 Often sporting tattoos, sometimes even missing teeth, rougher women of the lower orders have made little of a showing in these scholars' works. This is presumably because they cannot be viewed so readily as putative 'Modern Girls'. Turn-of-the-century streetwalkers and thievish servant girls in gaudy dress could as easily be said to look back to the 1700s, when the term 'flash' came into being, as forward to the 1920s. They were not, of course, untouched by changes wrought by mechanization and the expansion of consumer culture in their day. Some worked at the forefront of industrialization in Australia: in the boot-making factories of Collingwood in Melbourne or clothing workshops in Sydney's Surry Hills, for example, which were just beginning to adopt techniques of mass production in the early 1900s. 7 Others went on shopping sprees and frequented commercial entertainment venues when they had the chance. Even so, these w...

Book Thieves: Theft and Literary Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Australia

“…It was not uncommon for thieves to occasionally reserve stolen items for personal use; individuals were sometimes arrested wearing the clothes they were accused of stealing. 128 Similarly, in 1876, a mother and two daughters were prosecuted for stealing a large quantity of merchandise from numerous Melbourne stores, including Cole's Book Arcade. When the police raided their house, among the stolen goods still on the premises was an appropriately chosen copy of Female Life in Prison, which one of the girls was discovered in the act of reading.…”

“I'll have no man”: female families in Melbourne's criminal subcultures, 1860–1920

“…37 Physical descriptions of female offenders sometimes demonstrate their variegated romantic history through the presence of several lovers' initials tattooed on their bodies. 38 Likewise, police correspondence reveals the involvement of wanted women with multiple partners by naming several men with whom they had been known to cohabitate. 39 While not precisely falling under the definition of prostitution, some short-term associations were at least partly predicated on financial convenience.…”