Month: October 2010

The Art & Ethics of Dress

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Cover of The Art & Ethics of Dress

When you open Eva Olney Farnsworth’s Art & Ethics of Dress (1915), you are immediately struck by the pen-and-ink drawings of Audley B. Wells. But just as memorable are Olney’s exhortations that women can dress well and healthily, no matter what their shape or size. In many ways, this book was ahead of its time: Olney rails against corsets and other restrictive underclothes, the fashion industry which is only in search of novelty, and high-heeled shoes and their ravages upon women’s feet (ninety-five years later and we are still fighting that battle).

In other chapters, Olney tries to have it both ways. If a woman has “a waist circumference that is altogether clumsy and awkward,” Olney describes how she can dress to accentuate her other features. However, the author also admonishes that “she must consistently endeavor to induce all the symmetry of figure she can achieve through every means open to her in the gymnasium.” In a telling comment about the economy of the times, Olney writes:

Frontispiece and title page of The Art & Ethics of Dress

Even an employee who is earning the most modest income may have in her wardrobe all that her business or social duties call form, and its items will be once individual and fitting the occasion. One year she may add to her store a simple evening gown and a tailor-made dress; the next she will find occasion to buy one afternoon gown and perhaps a big cloak suitable for steamer or railroad traveling, and the third she may make additions to her lingerie.

"Art and Ethics of Dress," page 30. "Nothing is so glaring as the latest novelty."
The Art & Ethics of Dress, page 30. “Nothing is so glaring as the latest novelty.”

How fortunate we are to be living in an age where we need not restrict the purchase of undergarments to once every three years!

In the appendix, Olney introduces an undergarment of her own design, the “Patricia Garment,” patented on 15 December 1914. Corsets were going out of fashion, a trend that would accelerate a few years later, when metal supplies, such as that used for corset stays, were diverted towards America’s entry into World War I. Designed for adolescent women, the Patricia Garment was “a corset substitute, and will meet the needs of all who enjoy physical freedom. It is a four-in-one garment which combines the necessary support for the bust and clothing with room for growth and development of the torso.”

Updated 2026-01-24

Art and Ethics of Dress p34
The Art & Ethics of Dress, page 34-35. Beautiful Japanesque dresses.
Art and Ethics of Dress p55
The Art & Ethics of Dress, page 55. “The Patricia Garment”

The Lure of San Francisco

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Cover of "The Lure of San Francisco"
Cover of The Lure of San Francisco

When a Californian calls something “old,” it’s usually not as old as something a Bostonian would call “old.” As a native Californian, I have often been reminded of this. “Well,” says my Easterner friend, “we wouldn’t call this ‘old’ back home.”

It turns out that this scenario is at least a century old, for it occurs on the very first page of The Lure of San Francisco:

“I believe you Californians have but two dates on your calendar,” he exclaimed, “for everything I mentioned seems to have happened either ‘before the fire’ or ‘in the good old days of forty-nine!’ ‘Good old days of forty-nine,’” he repeated, amused. “In Boston we date back to the Revolution, and ‘in Colonial times’ is a common expression. We have buildings a hundred years old, but if you have a structure that has lasted a decade, it is a paragon and pointed out as built ‘before the fire.’”

Title page of "The Lure of San Francisco"
Frontispiece and title page of The Lure of San Francisco

The Lure of San Francisco is written as a long conversation between the narrator, a native San Franciscan woman, and her Bostonian guest. They visit the four principal sights of pre-1906 San Francisco: Mission Dolores, the Presidio, Portsmouth Plaza, and Telegraph Hill.

Unfortunately, the casual racism common during the late 19th- and early 20th-century intrudes into Potter and Gray’s book. In the chapter “The Mission and its Romance,” Potter and Gray trot out the tired reframing of the “lazy, roving” life of the California Indians, and how the Spanish “padres were not hard taskmasters.” Elsewhere, the inhabitants of Chinatown are called “slant-eyed” and “sallow-faced.”

"The Lure of San Francisco", page 8-9
The Lure of San Francisco, pages 8-9

The book has a beautiful cover with a nautical motif, and is elegantly illustrated inside with eight tonalist drawings by Audley B. Wells. It was one of more than a dozen books Elder published during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

Elizabeth Florence Gray Potter (1874-1959) and Mabel Thayer Gray (1870-1946) were born in Oakland, California, the daughters of George Dickman Gray, a lumber dealer, and Susan Hitchborn Thayer. In both 1880 and 1900, the family lived at 754 Tenth St. in San Francisco (a spot now underneath a modern freeway interchange); they may have gotten burned out in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Elizabeth married Frederick W. Potter in February 1906; Mabel never married, and neither woman had any children. They are buried in the Gray family plot at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma.

Updated 2026-01-22