The Battle of the Hemlines: Clothing and Illness in the Early Twentieth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag argued that a new mobility in the eighteenth century unsettled established ideas of worth and station.These were reasserted "through new notions about clothes ('fashions') and new attitudes about illness.Both clothes (the outer garment of the body) and illness (a kind of interior décor of the body) became tropes for new attitudes toward the self."Fashion studies and the history of medicine have productively investigated the relationship between clothes and illness, respectively, to the self.But the connection between clothing and health has been under-analyzed.While most work in this overlap focuses on clothing's ill effects, this paper seeks to open another area of inquiry -using the skirt as case study, it attempts to articulate a theory of clothing as medicine by juxtaposing three well-known issues surrounding preventive care and skirts in the early twentieth century: cross-dressing and the (supposed) pathological drive of "transvestites"; arguments for shorter skirts in light of the new dangers uncovered by germ theory; and the dress reform movements' promotion of the kilt.These cases illustrate the work of the medical profession to maintain "healthy" selves that could be socially positioned according to recognizable binaries of gender, class, and normality.Through analysis of published case studies, popular media, and articles in medical journals, and attending particularly to the pushback present in all three cases, this paper thus seeks to mine the disciplinary boundary between the history of medicine and fashion studies to expand our notions of medical objects and to add new "language" to clothes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".