Fashioning Feathers…

Millinery prepared Metallic Starling (Aplonis metallica)  native of New Guinea.
Photo © Merle Patchett/UACTC

Millinery prepared Metallic Starling (Aplonis metallica) native of New Guinea.
Photo © Merle Patchett/UACTC

“Birds were trapped for the cage trade and limed, shot, bludgeoned or poisoned by the thousands of underemployed rural poor who provided raw materials for the milliner. Few species were spared the unwelcome attentions of the plumage hunters. Seabirds were especially in demand, and populations of gulls and kittiwakes were decimated to sustain the fashion for birds’ wings in women’s hats. As London and provincial dealers offered one shilling each for the wings of ‘white gulls’ in the 1860s, excursion trains left London for locations as far apart as Flamborough Head and the Isle of Wight carrying beer-swilling plumage hunters and their rook rifles towards the killing grounds. Some hunters abandoned any notion of ‘sport’ and contrived to catch gulls and kittiwakes on their nests. Subsequently, as one observer put it, ‘cutting their wings off and flinging the victim into the sea, to struggle with feet and head until death came slowly to their relief’”.”

Such was the demand for feather in Victorian times, that pressure was placed upon both domestic birds (Herons, Egrets, Great Crested Grebes) as well as those from the British colonies. Towards the end of the Victorian era in Britain, several waterfowl birds were seriously threatened with extinction due to the demands of feather fashions. For example, the skin and soft underpelt and head frills of the great crested grebe’s feathers (Podiceps cristatus ) were particularly in demand by the millinery trade to decorate ladies’ fancy hats and ruffs.

“Hunting Cape”, modelled on specimen of great Crested Grebe, from a jewellery collection created for birds almost made extinct by the Plume Boom by environmental artist Kate Foster. THE BIOGRAPHY OF A LIE (2000) Photo © Kate Foster/ Hunterian Museum, Glasgow

However early forms of legislation did nothing to halt the carnage and pillage for millinery purposes, of tropical and sub-tropical birds, to which the SPB was drawing attention regularly from the the 1890s onwards.

Founded in 1889 and chaired briefly by the naturalist and writer W. H. Hudson, the Society argued that the only feasible way to stop the slaughter of egrets, lyre birds, birds of Paradise and others was to destroy the plumage trade itself by persuading women to refuse to wear feathers.

Not surprisingly there was no shortage of men to line up and condemn female vanity. In a pamphlet titled “Feathered Women” the president of the SPB W. H. Hudson painted women as ‘bird-enemy’ and sought to persuade ladies to refrain from wearing feathered fashions by arguing they would never attract a mate:

“no man who has given any thought to the subject, who has any love of nature in his soul, can see a woman decorated with dead birds, or their wings, or nuptial plumes, without a feeling of repugnance for the wearer, however beautiful or charming she may be”.[5]

‘A Bird of Prey’, Punch, 14th of May 1892. Taken from Moore-Colyer (2000)

What Hudson’s campaigning failed to reflect was that in its earliest days RSPB membership consisted entirely of women who were moved by the emotional appeal of the plight of young birds left to starve in the nest after their parents had been shot for their plumes. The rules of the Society reflect its female membership and their active involvement in campaigning against the plumage trade:

1. That Members shall discourage the wanton destruction of Birds, and interest themselves generally in their protection
2. That Lady-Members shall refrain from wearing the feathers of any bird not killed for purposes of food, the ostrich only excepted.

Sandwich-men Employed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, that Patroled London Streets in July, 1911.

THE PLUMAGE BILL & VIRGINIA WOLF

Campaigns against ‘murderous millinery’ by the RSPB and others culminated in the 1920 Plumage Bill that was put to the parliamentary vote.  On the 10th of July 1920 H. W. Massingham (1860-1924), writing under the nom de plume of ‘Wayfarer’, made the following comments concerning the failure of the 1920 Plumage Bill in the House of Commons:

“What does one expect? They have to be shot in parenthood for child-bearing women to flaunt the symbols of it, and, as Mr Hudson says, one bird shot for its plumage means ten other deadly wounds and the starvation of the young. But what do women care? Look at Regent Street this morning!”[6]

Virginia Woolf in her reply essay ‘The Plumage Bill’ responds to Massingham’s sexist charge with the creation of the character “Lady So-and-So”. Woolf proceeds to paint a harsh portrait of the unthinking, self indulgent woman of fashion – the buyer of a ‘lemon coloured egret’ – presenting her in a way that seems astonishingly to corroborate Massingham’s view. But in another twist, she renders a far more devastating portrait of men: the hunters and merchants that turn killing into a commodity, and the male parliament that fails to pass the plumage Bill prohibiting the trade. Woolf prompts her audience to question the social code that unconsciously condemns women’s pleasures – the love of beauty and fashion – as sin whereas men’s pleasures – their lusts for hunting, women, money – are accepted even valorised:

“Can it be that it is a graver sin to be unjust to women than to torture birds?”

However, while Lady So-and-So is a creation of a patriarchal system of male production and wealth and a patriarchal aristocracy, she is also a reflection/product of patriarchal society as produced and consumed by women. Lady So-and-So’s existence as a consumer, and a flawlessly finished consumer icon at that, was at least partly the work of women producers of luxury goods or services. For example the ‘lemon coloured egret’ was almost certainly dyed by female hands; in 1889, in London and Paris over 8000 women were employed in the millinery trade and the majority of the 83,000 people employed in New York City in 1900 in the making and decorating of hats were women.

A class-bound Woolf may have been ignorant of this point, or, more likely, intentionally ignored it so she could highlight the male producers and profiteers controlling the trade. Whatever her reasons, the lasting point she makes in her essay is that, with cash in hand, Lady So-and-So had every right to buy the beautiful complementary accessory for her opera ensemble, an accessory deemed by the fashion press to be worthy of Lady So-and-So and the occasion, as Wolf so cuttingly observes:

“Lady So-and-So was looking lovely with a lemon coloured egret in her hair”. 

Sound familiar? 

Kate Middleton has apparently employed famed milliner Phillip Treacy to make fascinators for the wedding party.

The Plumage Act entered the Statute Book a year later in 1921. A bill “to prohibit the sale, hire, or exchange of the plumage and skins of certain wild birds”, The Plumage Act was celebrated as the factor that brought an end to the “Age of Extermination”. How much this change was due to the effects of the Acts’ hunting and trade regulations or that a growing inclination toward promoting humanitarian ideals reduced the allure of feathered garb is not not clear. What is clear is that dwindling feather sales had as much do, if not more, with changes in the everyday lives of women which simply eliminated opportunities to wear oversized, constraining hats.

Frank Chapman’s 1886 Feathered Hat Census

(Modified from Strom, 1986.)

Yet, as absurd as it may sound, it was really a fashionable new hairstyle that ultimately saved the birds. In 1913, the bob and other short hairstyles were introduced—cuts which would not support large extravagant hats. Plain slouch hats and ‘cloches’ became very popular, and it was for this reason that most plume-hunters were forced to abandon their trade. Thus ended the “Age of Extermination” and the possession and displaying feathers became, once again, an avian trait.