There’s a certain stigma to women of the 1900’s. We assume them to be reserved, polite and above all, anonymous. As we’ve learned from George Elliot, Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Bronte, while they may have published under fake names, they were anything but reserved.
We don’t know as many famous women from the 1900s as we do men, because, well, they weren’t supposed to really make a scene. Portrayed as housekeepers, wives and schoolteachers, it’s hard to imagine them stirring up trouble. While Jane Austen helped dissolve some of that stigma with strong heroines like Elizabeth Bennet, it’s still hard for us to imagine many women of that era getting their feet dirty (let alone their skirts).
Below are some recently found yearbook excerpts from some “wild” women of the 1900s. I don’t know where they came from, but they definitely paint a new picture of ladies of the 1900s.
