In a January 15, 1911 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal, a writer poses a seemingly innocuous question about the styling of her readers’ tresses. In her title, she asks, “Can a Woman’s Hair be Worn Simply?” Then, the subhead: “How the Six Most Distinguished Women in the United States Answer the Question.” The article’s opening paragraphs initially read as one writer’s personal vendetta against what she refers to as the artificiality of “rats” and “puffs” in hairstyling. To create the quaffed volume of the decade’s most popular updo, some had turned to using these “rats” for a little extra plumpness in their pompadour (think of a bump-it made of either human hair or, more commonly, horse hair). The six influential women the writer interviews, but refuses to name “for obvious reasons,” naturally support the author’s disdain for this trendy hairdo and deride women for faking volume they don’t have.

The article brings a number of interesting ideas to light. Of particular note is the author’s insistence on her sources anonymity due to the perplexing labeling of hairstyling as “a matter so essentially personal.” Paradoxically, this fiercely private matter is open daily to public scrutiny. But calling hair “essentially personal” raises another important issue, and that is the coupling of hair and dress with a woman’s essence, or in other words, her selfhood and individuality. By pairing the two together, The Ladies’ Home Journal commissions a woman to make careful decisions about her physical appearance because it is a direct reflection of her identity. While hair and dress may seem trivial, the article suggests that at least they are qualities of personhood one can control and package accordingly (more on that below). For several sentences, the article then makes the expected jabs at those who sport this contrived—and misleading—style by emphatically othering the women using a hair accessory so “unsanitary and ridiculous.” This is where things escalate quickly. One source declares, “I would infinitely rather go without hair if need be than live a lie to myself, my husband and my children.” Then, the ambitious inductive reasoning: “It is a safe rule to go by…that a woman who will deliberately live a lie by the wearing of shams, whether in hair, dress or jewelry, is very likely to live a lie or act a lie in other respects.” Finally, the zinger statement the author’s argument eddies around: “…it may safely be put down as an inflexible rule that just in proportion as a woman strikes the true note in her clothes just so does she reveal her true inner self. Dress is the surest revelation of ourselves.”

Certainly much can be said of the maxim of dress being self-revelatory, but what I want to focus on is not the article’s chosen agency for individuality (dress and “authentic” hairstyles) but on its obsession with this consciousness of self in the first place. Such a preoccupation with forging an identity through self-awareness finds revealing—and unexpected—parallels in Dora Marsden’s editorial “Creation and Immortality” in The Freewoman. In this editorial and throughout Marsden’s publication, there exists a cry for women to become freewomen by cultivating their own personalities separate from their identity as wife or mother. The common charge for thorough and deliberate self-examination finds its way onto the pages of two publications supporting radically disparate ideologies. These echoes testify to a widespread concern with the creation of an authentic feminine self during the years leading up to the gender-role game changer of World War I. The Ladies’ Home Journal article closes with the argument that a woman is “either herself or she is not; one or the other. There is no meeting the issue half-way: not if she is true to herself, and true to what a woman who is a woman should stand for….As we dress, so we are." And then The Freewoman’s strikingly similar refrain from the editorial: “We are what we are; that and no more, whatever the toll of our sons and daughters may be” (362). The former offers dress and hairstyling as a means of individuality; the latter distances selfhood from maternal identification with one’s children. What’s important in this comparison is not how these two publications differ in their respective opinions on how to achieve true womanhood and individuality. The greater focus should highlight their profound overlaps in this common obsession with self-consciousness and existential questioning (“As we dress, so we are” coinciding with the claim that “We are what we are”).

In “Creation and Immortality,” Marsden identifies “high” artistic creation as the chief avenue leading to a greater awareness of individuality. The Freewomen editorial thus supposes that clothes and the pompadours of The Ladies’ Home Journal inhabit the "lower, which is physical creation, travailing…in the material" as opposed to the "higher, artistic travailing…in the mind" (362). Both, however, appeal to their female readers’ creative prowess. And, as Barbara Green explains in her “Introduction to The Freewoman,” even a suffrage activist like Mary Gawthorpe reveled in acquiring a pair of handmade sandals as symbols of a fashion choice “of an alternative socialist lifestyle.” Thus, although a publication like Marsden’s appears to eschew the kinds of preoccupations with dress and hair found in The Ladies’ Home Journal, material culture helps even the freewoman fashion (literally) her identity as well.