Beaux’s maternal relatives taught her how to copy lithographs and took her to exhibitions at the premier art venue in the city, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), as part of their tutoring. Cecilia was raised by her grandmother Cecilia Kent Leavitt and her aunt Emily and uncle William Biddle after the early death of her mother Cecilia Kent Leavitt Beaux (1822-55) and the return of her inconsolable father Jean Adolphe Beaux (1810-84) to France. Culture was a priority; relatives arranged tours of the private art collections of John S. Phillips (1800-76) and Henry C. Gibson (1830-91) and that were later donated to PAFA in 1876 and 1892, respectively.

Beaux’s art instruction began in the Walnut Street studio of Catherine Drinker (1841-1922), a distant relative and later the first part-time woman instructor at PAFA. She then continued in the school of Francis Adolf Van Der Wielen (active in Philadelphia 1870-74). By 1874 Beaux began teaching. Self-directed and ambitious, Beaux sought further professional training at PAFA from 1876 to 1878. She took antique, portrait, and costume classes there, but did not join Thomas Eakins’s notorious figure painting classes. In her autobiography she explained her resistance to the magnetic Eakins: “A curious instinct of self-preservation kept me outside the magic circle.”  Instead she turned to Eakins’s less-controversial protégé, William Sartain (1843-1924), for instruction in painting the live model. In the midst of her academic training, she produced fossil drawings on commission from the U.S. Geological Survey (1877–79). After just one month at Piton’s Art School (1879), she obtained commissions for children’s portraits on china, much in vogue at the time. That same year she began her lifelong practice of exhibiting portraits at PAFA.

Family and Friends

Throughout her career, Philadelphia family and friends were essential to Beaux’s evolution as a portraitist. Her first major essay in oil was The Last Days of Infancy (1883-84), a double portrait of her sister Ernesta Beaux Drinker (1852-1939) and her nephew Henry S. Drinker Jr. (1880-1965). Beaux layered the informal scene with psychological and emotional overtones that transcended the formal influences of James A.M. Whistler (1834-1903) and Sartain. Exhibited to critical acclaim in New York, Philadelphia, and Paris, it won the academy’s Mary Smith Prize for the best work by a local woman artist. This distinction launched her career locally where there was a constant demand for portraiture, a Philadelphia tradition among old wealth, civic organizations, and the aspiring commercial class. Though not raised in a wealthy household, Beaux identified herself and was identified with the well-bred, cultured, and moneyed elite, who were interconnected through clubs, church, marriages, and business. In quick succession she painted the Reverends Chauncey Giles (1813-93) and William Henry Furness (1802-96); businessmen George Burnham (1817-1912), George M. Troutman (1811-1901),  and Frances Drexel Paul (1852-92); and lawyer John Cadwalader (1843-1925). Illustrious families, anxious to extend their legacy, also commissioned portraits of their children.

Beaux went to study in the ateliers of Paris and on the coast of France from 1888 to 1889, widening her repertoire and techniques and absorbing new ways of seeing color and light while working en plein air. On a visit to Cambridge, England, she reunited with an old Philadelphia friend, Maud DuPuy Darwin (1861-1947), whose connections led to a few commissions, enhancing the artist’s recognition abroad. Though there were viable options for continued professional success in Europe, Beaux returned to Philadelphia in 1889. During the next decade her portrait practice thrived. In her best oeuvre from that period there was an intricate mix of precise craftsmanship, up-to-the-moment style, and a feeling of spiritual kinship with her sitter, as in Sita and Sarita, 1893 (Sarah A. Leavitt (1868-1930). With increased confidence she traveled and exhibited in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Paris, and Boston, winning numerous prizes and medals. In Philadelphia she garnered three more Smith Prizes, the Gold Medal of Honor at PAFA, and a gold medal from the Art Club of Philadelphia. One of her most lauded paintings of Philadelphia’s Quaker upper crust was Mother and Daughter, 1898, a portrait of Mrs. Clement A. Griscom (1840-1923) and Frances Canby Griscom (1879-1973). Beaux created a dramatic statement of expectation and pride in partaking of certain social and cultural rituals, to which she added focused lighting and dazzling brushwork.

In 1895 Beaux began to teach portraiture at PAFA, becoming the school’s first full-time woman instructor and confirming her importance in the city’s art world. She established a winter studio apartment in New York and built a summer studio home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, from which her social and professional spheres expanded immeasurably. She never severed her ties to Philadelphia, family, and PAFA, where she continued to teach until 1915, and was in constant demand as a juror at the annual exhibitions. One of her staunchest advocates was Harrison Morris (1856-1948), managing director of PAFA from 1892 to 1905, who helped her maintain her status as Philadelphia’s preeminent portraitist.

Distinguished Sitters

After the turn of the century, Beaux’s sitters included a distinguished array of international figures such as President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) and French Premier Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), yet she took equal delight in painting local acquaintances and family, especially her niece Ernesta (Aimee Ernesta Drinker Barlow, 1892-1981). Beaux’s feminist alliance with independent career women was conveyed through the serious demeanor seen in portraits of local activists Eliza Sproat Turner (1826-1903) and Marion Reilly (1897-1928), dean of Bryn Mawr College.

Beaux’s prolific painting career was curtailed by a fall in 1924. Unbreakable in spirit and energy, she penned her autobiography Background with Figures, in which fond reminiscences indicate that Philadelphia remained the emotional root of her multi-blossomed life. Considered by many “the greatest woman painter alive,” she was often compared to John Singer Sargent, the leading society portraitist. Her reputation far exceeded her phenomenal local success; she was named by Good Housekeeping “one of America’s most distinguished living women,” and she served the international community as an artistic ambassador.

Cynthia Haveson Veloric, M.A., is a research assistant in the American Art Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has recently published articles on Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Alexander Stirling Calder, Hutchings California Magazine, and Martin Johnson Heade. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia’s founder, William Penn (1644-1718), a Quaker who disavowed balls and shows as inconsistent with a temperate lifestyle, was among the early detractors of dance. Indeed, the “Great Law” that Pennsylvania’s first legislature adopted in 1682 included penalties for frequenting such amusements, and various bans against theatrical entertainments endured for more than a century, supported in principle by a number of religious denominations along the way. Nevertheless, rope dancers appeared from 1724 onward and dancing masters advertised regularly as early as the 1730s. Moreover, hornpipes, comic dances, and “mock” minuets often accompanied theatrical dramas, which surfaced despite all opposition. Soon after the legal prohibitions ceased in 1789, professional French dancers arrived via the Caribbean islands and introduced theater-goers to sophisticated hybrids of ballet and pantomime. These performers told stories using a codified set of movements and stylized gestures instead of words.

The first French ensemble to alight in the city was led by Alexandre Placide (1750-1812), who early in his celebrated career had danced in popular Parisian theaters and for French royalty.  After his ex-wife accused him of stealing from her and seducing her servant, Placide left France, working for a time in present-day Haiti and then coming to the United States, where he earned a reputation as an able theatrical manager. In Philadelphia and elsewhere, Placide and his troupe acquainted audiences with ballet-pantomimes such as The Old Soldier, about a veteran who rescues a young girl from thieves. During the 1790s, when Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital, its citizenry enjoyed a dazzling array of theatrical entertainments staged by Placide and other impresarios and featuring French, English, Irish, and Italian performers as well as the American John Durang [1768-1822], who owned a house on Cedar (South) Street. The New Theatre on Chestnut Street (opened in 1794 and commonly called the Chestnut Street Theatre) hosted many of these performances.

The French Influence

Through the years, French émigrés also distinguished themselves as teachers. In the 1830s, P.H. Hazard taught young Philadelphians the dances being exhibited at that time by first-rate ballerinas at the esteemed Paris Opéra, where ballet, which originated in Renaissance court entertainments, continued to develop from the seventeenth century onward. Hazard himself had once been a member of the Paris Opéra’s corps de ballet. Due to his efforts, itinerant stars in search of supplemental dancers for their own performances found better ones in Philadelphia than in New York, which by then was the country’s artistic capital. In 1837, two of Hazard’s protégées, Mary Ann Lee (c. 1823-99) and Augusta Maywood (1825-76), appeared together at the Chestnut Street Theatre. Both went on to enjoy distinguished, yet divergent, professional careers.

Lee so enchanted audiences that she was known simply as “Our Mary Ann.” She danced to great acclaim in New Orleans, New York, and Boston before embarking to France for continued study at the Paris Opéra. After a year there she declared “…I much prefer my own dear country…” and returned home with improved technique and new ballets to perform drawn from the Romantic repertoire, which emphasized otherworldly plots and an ethereal style of dancing on pointe. On New Year’s Day, 1846, in Boston, she staged the American premiere of Giselle, one of the few Romantic ballets still produced in the twenty-first century. After retiring at about age 24, she taught, raised children, and supported her widowed mother.

Maywood, too, left Philadelphia to study at the Paris Opéra, but, unlike Lee, she never returned. Instead, she danced on stages all over Europe, showcasing what the French critic Théophile Gautier (1811-72) called “[s]inews of steel, legs of a jaguar, and an agility not unlike that of a circus performer.” After one appearance in Florence, Italy, three carriages were needed to cart away all the bouquets tossed as her feet. Although more talented and accomplished than Lee, she was less beloved back home, criticized for her scandalous affairs and for abandoning her destitute stepfather.

Nevertheless, Maywood became her nation’s first ballerina superstar, and, together with Lee, proved that America—indeed Philadelphia—could produce its own ballet dancers rather than simply import them. A third member of this cohort, George Washington Smith (c. 1821-99), partnered with Lee and virtually every other significant ballerina of the day, including the incomparable Fanny Elssler (1810-84) from Vienna. The manager of the Chestnut Street Theatre, where Elssler appeared in the 1840s, claimed she “…turned the heads of all the ladies and the hearts of all the gentlemen…,” yet it was Smith who apparently turned her head as he danced jigs between the acts of plays. Impressed with his talent, Elssler invited him to join her troupe. Smith learned ballet technique from Elssler’s Irish partner and became proficient enough to sustain a long career as America’s foremost danseur noble.

Risk of Theater Fires

During this period, theaters relied on gaslight for illumination and Romantic ballets especially were enhanced by its soft, haunting glow. Contact with open gas jets, however, led to theater fires around the country. The most tragic of all occurred at Philadelphia’s Continental Theatre, near Eighth and Walnut Streets, in 1861. It began when Ruth Gale (c. 1840s-61), one of four British sisters hired to dance in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, stood on a settee to grab her dress in an upstairs room as the play was underway. The dress grazed a gas jet and ignited, and the fire quickly spread from Gale to other dancers who rushed in to help. Eventually, about a dozen young women—including all four Gales—died from burns or injuries they sustained after leaping from windows to escape the flames. They were eulogized as virtuous and loving girls at a time when female dancers were often caricatured as disreputable, a small but important step in the long process of legitimizing the profession.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, ballet in the United States generally reached a low ebb. Romantic-era artistry had given way to acrobatic tricks, military marches, and spectacular stage effects. It was not until the early twentieth century that Philadelphians again saw ballet’s most fabled interpreters, then mainly Russian graduates of the Imperial Theater School in St. Petersburg. Anna Pavlova (1881-1931) arrived in 1910, followed six years later by the peerless Vaslav Nijinsky (c. 1889-1950), who performed the title role in Till Eulenspiegel, one of only four ballets that he choreographed himself. Both dancers appeared at the capacious Metropolitan Opera House at Broad and Poplar Streets.

A third Russian, Lubov Egorova (1880-1972), retired from the stage and devoted herself to teaching in her Parisian ballet studio, drawing an international clientele that included a young Philadelphian named Catherine Littlefield (1905-51). With Egorova’s methods and artistry in mind, Littlefield trained students at her own school at 1815 Ludlow Street. Russian émigré George Balanchine (1904-83), arguably the twentieth century’s most important choreographer, thought so highly of Littlefield’s pupils that he recruited a number of them for his first ensemble in the United States, while others joined Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre) when it formed several years later. In 1935, Littlefield established her own company, the Philadelphia Ballet, and shortly thereafter staged the first full-length, full-scale version of The Sleeping Beauty in the United States, an undertaking that required 100 dancers, 85 musicians, and elaborate scenery and costumes. Like Mary Ann Lee before her, Littlefield introduced Americans to an iconic ballet that is still regularly performed. Littlefield also became well known for choreographing lively and humorous works with indigenous themes and characters such as farmhands, secretaries, and commuters. These ballets, notably Barn Dance and Terminal, delighted audiences and critics alike during the Philadelphia Ballet’s European tour in 1937, the first ever by an American ballet troupe. Long after Placide and Hazard brought French ballet to the United States, Littlefield took American ballet to France (as well as to England and Belgium).

During this period, ballet, like most other aspects of society, experienced the limitations of racial segregation. The elegant and civic-minded Essie Marie Dorsey (1893-1967) directed the largest dancing school in the city patronized by African Americans. She occasionally arranged for Thomas Cannon (1910-77), a leading member of the Philadelphia Ballet, to work privately with her best students and had them perform at benefits, teas, meetings, and in opulent recitals. Marion Cuyjet (1920-96) and Sydney King (b. 1919) studied with Dorsey and became dedicated teachers themselves, with Dorsey’s positive and personal approach serving as an inspiration. Judith Jamison (b. 1943), longtime artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Joan Myers Brown (b. 1931), founder of the Philadelphia Dance Company, or Philadanco, emerged from this important instructional network. Both used their early ballet training as a foundation for exploring a variety of dance genres and both received the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists by the U.S. government.

Of the same generation as Brown, Barbara Weisberger (b. 1926) studied with Balanchine as a child and then at Littlefield’s school as a teenager. With Balanchine’s encouragement, she started the Pennsylvania Ballet in 1963, filling a void left by the demise of Littlefield’s company in the early 1940s. Significant grants from the Ford Foundation provided early financial stability and the Pennsylvania Ballet became a leader in the regional ballet movement that flourished in the 1960s, when professional troupes sprang up in cities and towns around the country. In the ensuing decades, however, fiscal troubles emerged periodically and in 1987, the company arranged with the Milwaukee Ballet to share a budget and roster of dancers while maintaining separate staffs and orchestras. This novel partnership proved untenable and dissolved two years later. In 1991, a suspension of operations was averted when Artistic Director Christopher d’Amboise (b. 1960) spearheaded a dramatic “Save the Ballet,” which raised $1.2 million from more than 10,000 individual contributors. Roy Kaiser (b. 1957), who joined the company as an apprentice, succeeded d’Amboise and provided steady leadership for nearly two decades, his tenure capped by the organization’s fiftieth anniversary celebration.

In the meantime, two Pennsylvania Ballet-connected dancer/choreographers, Christine Cox (b. 1969) and Matthew Neenan (b. 1974) founded BalletX, an ensemble based at the Wilma Theater and dedicated to producing new work in a contemporary style. BalletX’s diverse and modern offerings, combined with the 2014 naming of Angel Corella (b. 1975), a world-renowned dancer from Spain, as Pennsylvania Ballet’s new artistic director, signaled that Philadelphia would continue its long tradition of attracting high-profile talent and attention.

Sharon Skeel is a Philadelphia-based dance writer and lecturer currently working on a biography of Catherine Littlefield. Her essay on Littlefield’s 1937 production of The Sleeping Beauty was published in the Summer 2015 issue of Ballet Review.

In eighteenth-century Philadelphia, master mechanics customarily boarded apprentices, who received food, lodging, and craft training in exchange for their labor. Farmers in the surrounding rural counties boarded hired hands. Families of all social ranks took in lodgers, accommodating unmarried men and women who had few other housing options. Taverns sheltered both travelers and long-term residents. By the 1780s, however, enterprising proprietors began advertising “genteel” boarding and lodging in the city’s newspapers, sometimes promoting their establishments as superior to taverns. The trend spread rapidly; Robinson’s Philadelphia Register and City Directory for 1799 included nearly one hundred boardinghouses.

By the late nineteenth century these numbers had increased tenfold. Indeed, by accommodating migrants from the surrounding countryside as well as immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Britain, and, later, Italy, Poland, and Russia, boardinghouses helped to make Philadelphia’s rapid economic and population growth possible. Nearby cities experienced similar boardinghouse booms. Wilmington directories listed seven boardinghouses in 1814, forty-three in 1874, and 174 in 1900; the number of boarding places in Camden rose from only eight in the early 1860s to 137 at the turn of the twentieth century.

How Boarding Shaped Urban Life

These statistics vastly underestimate the degree to which boarding shaped urban life. Historians estimate that one in four nineteenth-century Philadelphia households included boarders. These residences ranged from relatively large concerns that resembled small hotels to homes that sheltered a single lodger. Boardinghouses could be remarkably cosmopolitan, bringing together people who otherwise never would have met. More often they reinforced ethnic, racial, class, and occupational distinctions. Boardinghouses near Independence Hall housed middle-class clerks and merchants who worked nearby. Establishments that catered to the elite, such as the boardinghouse on Spruce Street run by Ann Smith, could be found in Society Hill. Working-class families who lived in the alleys off major downtown streets took in boarders; so, too, did the inhabitants of the heavily Irish neighborhoods of Southwark, Kensington, and Moyamensing. Immigrants from other ethnic groups settled into their own boarding places, usually run by a woman from the old country. Sailors’ and stevedores’ boardinghouses clustered near the Delaware River docks. Before the University of Pennsylvania opened its first dormitories in 1900, most of its students lived in the nearby “boarding house colony.” Not all boardinghouses were urban. In rural New Castle County, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company paid its married workers to board bachelor employees.

Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in some cases after, public accommodations, even in northern cities, were segregated by race. African American boardinghouse keepers performed a vital function by accommodating people of color, both travelers and permanent residents. And before the Civil War, African American boardinghouses in Philadelphia and Camden occasionally functioned as informal stops on the Underground Railroad by sheltering fugitives from slavery.

If boardinghouses provided food and shelter to transients and newcomers, they also provided women with a means of making a living or supplementing their families’ incomes. In 1880 Margret McNamara (b. c.1840), the wife of a peddler, housed nine boarders, all of them Irish immigrants like herself, in her residence on Mifflin Street in South Philadelphia. McNamara did not describe herself as a boardinghouse keeper, perhaps because doing so might suggest her husband’s income was insufficient to support her. As her experience suggests, much boarding and lodging housekeeping in Greater Philadelphia, as elsewhere, consisted of what economists call hidden market labor. Even when census takers or city directories identified a man as the establishment’s proprietor, women undertook the considerable labor keeping boarders entailed—cooking, cleaning, monitoring comings and goings, collecting rents. When the DuPont Company paid male employees who agreed to house unmarried workers, they paid men for work their wives performed.

Boarding as the Butt of Jokes

Boarders did not always appreciate the fruits of these labors. Philadelphians, like their counterparts elsewhere, participated in a lively, often humorous, anti-boardinghouse discourse. An 1854 issue of the Philadelphia Mercury carried the surely apocryphal story of a boardinghouse keeper who saved money by serving soup made with kittens. Irish longshoremen who labored on Philadelphia’s docks in the early twentieth century recalled a landlady who smeared fat on the faces of sleeping inhabitants to deceive them into thinking they had been fed. In 1881 the Wilmington Morning News poked fun at the less than desirable accouterments, including smelly mattresses and dingy sheets, at a boardinghouse that advertised “meels & login cheep.” Even the social elite were not exempt from the unsavory conditions that supposedly afflicted boardinghouses. In the 1860s one resident of a fashionable Philadelphia establishment complained about an unwelcome nocturnal visitor—a “promenading” rat. Criticisms of this sort no doubt reflected the realities of boardinghouse life. Most landladies could not afford to lavish delicacies on their tenants, nor did they typically command a labor force capable of maintaining exacting standards of cleanliness. By the same token, most boarders could afford to pay only modest rents—more often than not they got what they paid for. But the sheer ubiquity of boardinghouse folklore also revealed a persistent cultural tendency to contrast the deficiencies of boardinghouses with idealized single-family homes.

By the turn of the twentieth century, these complaints had taken a more ominous turn. City officials and social reformers bemoaned the “lodger evil,” especially in Little Italy and the African American neighborhoods clustered along Lombard Street in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. While the authors of various housing studies recognized the importance of boarders and lodgers to working-class family economies, they feared the moral danger paying guests allegedly posed. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), for instance, condemned the “pernicious” influence of lodgers, whom he believed destroyed “the privacy and intimacy of home life.”

Early twentieth-century social reformers believed that lodging houses—more commonly called “furnished room houses”—presented a different kind of moral problem. While nineteenth-century commentators sometimes used “boarding” and “lodging” interchangeably, semantic distinctions became more important as lodging houses rapidly replaced boardinghouses in downtown Philadelphia, Camden, and Wilmington. Lodgers, also called roomers, took their meals at nearby restaurants instead of at a common table. Unlike boarders, they came and went as they pleased. The salesmen, clerks, stenographers, and secretaries who rented furnished rooms enjoyed the greater privacy and social freedom lodging—as opposed to boarding—offered them.

Reformers and social scientists, however, voiced increasing alarm about “the furnished room problem.” The problem was less acute in cities such as Camden, which boasted only a few dozen furnished-room houses, most of them located near the block that became Johnson Park. Philadelphia’s rooming houses numbered close to a thousand. Contemporary observers acknowledged the difficulties of pinpointing the precise boundaries of the city’s constantly changing furnished-room districts, which encompassed portions of Society Hill as well as Frankford, Richmond, and Kensington. They agreed that the most prominent lodging-house neighborhood lay just north of Center City, bordered roughly by Race Street, Girard Avenue, Broad, and Sixth Streets. Reformers lamented roomers’ easy proximity to the saloons, movie theaters, vaudeville shows, and peep shows clustered on Eighth Street; they claimed furnished-room districts attracted crime, vice, and prostitution. Lodging-house critics even succumbed to historical amnesia by extolling the virtues of “the old-fashioned boardinghouse,” which, they argued, had provided a homelike atmosphere and familial supervision.

Boardinghouse Era Fades

By the 1950s, if not earlier, white-collar workers had decamped for apartments and rooming houses had become synonymous with skid row. Many of the latter, known in official terminology as single room occupancies (SROs), fell victim to gentrification and urban renewal, processes that left former residents homeless. While some old-style establishments survived into the 1950s and 1960s, by midcentury boardinghouses more commonly sheltered the poor, the elderly, and the mentally ill, often under unsafe and unsanitary conditions.

Nevertheless, boardinghouses—albeit by other names—survived and even flourished in the twenty-first century. During the Great Recession more than a few homeowners stayed afloat by taking in boarders, as suggested by the title of a 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer article: “Rooms for Rent: In a Flashback to Earlier Times, Recession-Pinched Homeowners are Seeking Paying Guests to Share their Space.” And whether they realized it or not, those residents of Greater Philadelphia who embraced alternative living arrangements out of choice rather than necessity also invoked past practices. Collective ventures such as West Philadelphia’s Life Center houses, the Penn Haven Housing Co-op, and the Friends Housing Cooperative owed their origins at least in part to these earlier forms of multifamily housing.

Wendy Gamber is the Robert F. Byrnes Professor in History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of three books: The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America, and The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In contrast to vaudeville entertainments, burlesque shows thrived on crossing boundaries of social acceptability and liberated performers from traditional categories of race and gender, which became slippery and ambiguous. Philadelphia hosted perhaps a dozen burlesque theaters in the late nineteenth century, clustered primarily in the Center City district of commercial sex and vice industries known as the Tenderloin. The venues included Dumont’s Theater, the 11th Street Opera House, the Gayety, the Empire, the Nixon, the Keystone, the Liberty, the Grand, the Star, the William Penn Theatre, the Auditorium, and the Arch Street Opera House.

Established in 1870, the Arch Street Opera House—known in the twentieth century as the Casino Theatre, the Palace Theatre, the Troc Theatre, and the Trocadero Theatre—served as the hub of burlesque performances in Philadelphia throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In the heart of the Tenderloin at Tenth and Arch Streets, the Arch Street Opera House stood within walking distance of brothels, opium dens, saloons, and shooting galleries. Primarily a minstrelsy theater until the end of the nineteenth century, the Arch Street Opera House served as a significant appendage of a wider circuit of traveling burlesque performers into the mid-twentieth century, hosting such celebrated burlesque artists as Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-70) and Blaze Starr (1932-2015). In fact, it was in Philadelphia that Billy Minsky (1887-1932) of Minsky’s Burlesque in New York first saw Gypsy Rose Lee perform, leading him to offer her a position as the troupe’s headliner.

By the early twentieth century, the field of American burlesque had split into two main circuits: the Columbia Circuit and the Empire Circuit. While the former preferred to produce somewhat “cleaner” shows, the latter designed “their shows to be as smutty as they could convince local authorities to overlook.” By this time, Philadelphians could also see burlesque shows at the Lyceum Theatre on Vine Street, and the Bijou Theatre on North Eighth Street, formerly a vaudeville theater, introduced burlesque performances starting in 1910. By the 1920s, however, burlesque became increasingly professionalized and lost its subversive edge, with performers designing their performances to meet the interests of male producers and booking agents, who marketed burlesque primarily toward the voyeuristic pleasure of white male viewers, to the exclusion of mixed-gender audiences and viewers of color. For example, historian Robert C. Allen has noted that, with the rising popularity of the cooch dance—a kind of gyrating, highly sexualized dance—“the burlesque performer’s mouth became the only part of her body that did not move,” indicating the degree to which she had become “linguistically disempowered.” Progressive reformers also worked to clamp down on urban vice, and the Tenderloin district entered into a period of decline.

Burlesque lost much of its titillating appeal with American audiences as nudity became more common in cinema and live theater. In the words of cultural studies scholar Alan Trachtenberg, American burlesque reached “its final shabby demise” by the 1950s. Consequently, venues like the Bijou Theatre closed down. The Troc rebranded itself in the 1970s as an art house cinema and, by the end of the twentieth century, as a concert venue for rock music.

If burlesque’s midcentury demise was shabby, though, it was not final. In the 1990s, American burlesque experienced a revival. Dubbed “neo-burlesque,” the new genre combined elements of traditional burlesque with contemporary ideas from feminism and queer theory (a challenge to standard heterosexual ideas). As neo-burlesque took hold in Philadelphia, these themes came to dominate local burlesque. At the forefront, Anna Frangiosa (b. 1976) performed under the name Annie A-Bomb, beginning her career as a burlesque dancer with the burlesque group The Peek-A-Boo Revue in 1998. Later, she co-founded Cabaret Red Light, a troupe active between 2008 and 2011 that integrated elements of tongue-in-cheek agitprop—that is, overtly political art—into their burlesque shows, promoting what they called “pornographic socialism” with a stated goal of establishing “a carefully orchestrated, nonstop orgy on a national scale.” In 2009, Frangiosa founded the Philadelphia School of Burlesque in Fishtown. Outside of burlesque, Annie A-Bomb maintained an active political presence, participating in direct actions movements such as Occupy Philadelphia, a part of the larger Occupy Movement that protested economic inequality beginning in 2011.

Hallmarks of neo-burlesque included themes of sex-positivity, body-positivity, and queerness—that is, a radical non-assimilation to societal norms—often geared toward audiences of women. In empowering both performers and audience members, neo-burlesque returned to early burlesque’s liberatory potential for women, which had eroded with the dominance of male agents and audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second decade of the twenty-first century saw the rise to prominence in Philadelphia of politicized burlesque performers, such as HoneyTree EvilEye (b. 1982), who actively incorporated more overtly political messages into their work. Concurrently, with the establishment of troupes like Bearlesque, Philadelphia burlesque expanded to incorporate more male-identified dancers. This trend was part of the development of the genre of boylesque—burlesque featuring eroticized portrayals of masculinity.

As the contours of American burlesque evolved throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, Philadelphia performers kept pace. While often unjustly overshadowed by the larger New York burlesque scene, Philadelphia hosted established performers as part of a wider national and international burlesque circuit, and nourished local talent as well. Over the years, burlesque performers modified their routines—sometimes at their own discretion, sometimes at the behest of money-minded managers—to capture audiences’ changing tastes and expectations, intentionally defying those expectations at least as often as they met them.

Timothy Kent Holliday is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies the history of gender, sexuality, and the body in early America. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The nineteenth century experienced a significant increase in urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. The population of Philadelphia tripled between the years 1790 and 1830, and this growth coincided with epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and typhoid fever, which contributed to an abundance of children who were either orphaned or abandoned. As a result of such upheaval or parental neglect, children often roamed the streets, worked as apprentices through indenture, or faced confinement to almshouses, jails, or insane asylums. The combination of crime and abandoned street children presented serious issues that social welfare advocates such as Hinckley, who had previously served as secretary at the Pennsylvania Homeopathic Hospital for Children, could not ignore. In 1883, she successfully pushed for legislation that prohibited the institutionalization of children in asylums designated primarily for adults. In 1884, the Children’s Aid Society reported that it had cared for 681 children annually, a number that grew steadily over the next fifty years.

The Philadelphia-based organization served children throughout the state until 1889, when the Children’s Aid Society of Western Pennsylvania was organized. Since the Children’s Aid Society could not accommodate all children in the region who were in need of homes and services, volunteer committees created local county branches to respond to this need. Although initially created to address an overflow from the central office, county offices became essential to operations by the 1890s. Before the creation of a centralized bureau in 1921, these local agencies reported between half and two-thirds of the cases to the central office, many of whom were children who had been contracted as indentured workers. By the mid-1930s the Children’s Aid Society reported that it provided care and services for 3,030 children annually from both Philadelphia and its neighboring counties.

The Children’s Aid Society was a pioneer in the professionalization of the field of social work during a period when foundations were established to tackle the root causes of poverty. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the field of social work evolved to include more scientific-based understandings of poverty and child development. In response to these developments, in 1908 the Children’s Aid Society began offering career training to its employees, which eventually grew into the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work (later the School of Social Policy and Practice). The society itself also became more professional, with several prominent figures serving in managerial capacities. Edwin D. Solenberger (1876–1964), a social service administrator, served as general secretary from 1907 until 1943. John Prentice Murphy (1881–1936), a pioneer in the literature on the models of intervention and outcome assessment, joined the society in 1908. In the 1920s, Dr. Jessie Taft (1882–1960), an expert in the burgeoning field of mental hygiene, became the director of the Child Study Department, which provided mental examinations to incoming children. These advancements contributed to the agency’s mission by providing holistic care and support to children and their families.

Over the years, several local child welfare agencies merged with the Children’s Aid Society. The Union Temporary Home (1856), an institution that was created specifically for poor white children, officially closed in 1887 due to financial constraints. The Philadelphia Home for Infants (1873), created for children under the age of three, also began struggling financially in the early twentieth century and eventually merged with the Children’s Bureau in 1942. The Children’s Bureau (1907) functioned as a shelter and centralized information bureau to funnel information to the more than sixty agencies that received needy children. During World War II, both the Children’s Bureau and the Children’s Aid Society helped place juvenile refugees from Europe into homes in the Philadelphia area. They merged into one organization in 1944.

From the 1950s through the late 1970s, child welfare services were typically self-contained units that focused on in-home evaluations. From the 1970s onward, local government agencies began operating under federal legislation. Similar in its mission to the Children’s Aid Society, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 aimed to serve children in their own homes, prevent external placement, and facilitate the reunification of families. Despite such reform, the late 1980s and 1990s experienced increases in child neglect and foster placements. In Philadelphia, agencies such as the Philadelphia Task Force for Children at Risk, the Support and Community Outreach Program, and PhillyKids Connection addressed these concerns.

Dedicated to improving and protecting the lives of children, the Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania was a pioneer in child welfare and advocacy. In 2008, it merged with the Philadelphia Society for Services to Children and formed Turning Points for Children, an organization dedicated to reducing child abuse and improving the lives of over nine thousand children and their caregivers. Like its predecessor, Turning Points for Children focused on providing holistic family-center programs in the interest of building community relations in the region.

Holly Caldwell received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Delaware, where she wrote her dissertation on the medicalization of deafness and deaf education reform at Mexico’s Escuela Nacional de Sordomudos (National School for Deaf-Mutes). She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College and has also taught at Susquehanna University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Among Lenapes who dominated the region when European colonizers arrived in the 1600s, women and men held equal status while performing different social and economic roles. Women nurtured children and worked as agriculturalists, controlling arable land and the distribution of corn and other food they produced, while men hunted, fished, and provided military defense. Within their matrilineal communities, elder women supervised the succession from one sakima (or leader) to the next through the maternal line. Evidence is limited about how frequently Lenape women served as sakima because male European colonialists generally failed to note if they negotiated with women, but some documents indicated female participation in treaties. For example, the female sakima Ojroqua (c. 1640-1700) with other Lenape leaders attended a 1670 conference with representatives of James, Duke of York (1633-1701) and signed land conveyances in 1677 to the West Jersey proprietors and, in 1678, to Elizabeth Kinsey (c. 1660-1720) for Petty Island. 

European immigrants brought to North America a gender ideology built on contradictory concepts that women were inferior to men yet fully capable of fulfilling male responsibilities when necessary. Europeans viewed men as dominant and central, while women held subordinate, marginal characteristics and roles. The English common law and political culture employed this ideology to deny women equal economic, political, and legal rights. When a couple married, under the concept of unity of person (coverture), the wife legally became a feme covert, yielding to the husband her independent rights to buy and sell property, make a will, enter into contracts, control her earnings, claim the value of her contributions to joint business ventures, sue in court, and act as legal guardian of their children. An unmarried woman, whether single or widowed, could take these actions as feme sole, and a married woman could assume this authority if her husband became incapacitated or was absent for a long period of time. During the colonial period, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware followed the English common law to reserve a widow’s right to dower, or one-third of the couple’s real estate, during her lifetime, regardless of whether the husband left a will. If he died intestate, she also received one-third of personal estate, but he could deny her that portion if he wrote a will.  

The System of Perpetual Enslavement

Enslaved women and girls in the Delaware Valley, of whom most were Black people brought from Africa and the West Indies but also included some Native Americans from the Carolinas, endured forced labor as domestic servants, cooks, and agricultural workers. Under the system of perpetual bondage, enslaved people in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware could not own property, obtain wages, or decide where they would live and work. They often suffered inadequate food, clothing, and shelter, and had no right to marry, exert parental authority, or receive justice in the courts. In particular, Black women were subjected to rape and other physical assault by their enslavers and neighboring whites, with no protections under the law. As mothers, they faced exploitation for both their labor and reproductive capabilities, as their children added to the enslavers’ income and estate and could be sold away at any time. Provincial laws impeded the path to freedom: Pennsylvania required enslavers to post a £30 bond before manumitting a Black woman, man, or child; Delaware mandated bonds of £30 to £60; and New Jersey demanded £200 bonds. The colonies subjected free Black women and men to some legal restrictions placed on enslaved people, and New Jersey prevented Black people from owning land. 

Despite Philadelphia’s central role as host to the Continental Congress and the famous advice of Abigail Adams (1744-1818) to her husband John Adams (1735-1826) to “remember the ladies” by ending coverture in drafting new laws, the American Revolution had little immediate impact on women’s economic and political rights. The states generally followed English common law in sustaining coverture and the widow’s lifetime share of one-third of real estate. American lawmakers ignored women’s contributions to the military and home front, defining political participation and suffrage as male prerogatives. New Jersey was a partial exception as its 1776 constitution allowed female property holders to vote until the legislature removed that power in 1807. 

Revolutionary rhetoric for liberty from British oppression intersected with vigorous Black resistance and Quaker opposition to enslavement, influencing Pennsylvania legislators to pass the 1780 act for gradual abolition. New Jersey waited until 1804 to enact a similar law, while Delaware adopted none. The Pennsylvania act freed children born after March 1, 1780, to enslaved mothers, requiring long terms as indentured servants. Nevertheless, thousands of Black women and men throughout the United States obtained release or escaped enslavement during and after the Revolution, many establishing homes in Philadelphia and its hinterland. Ona Judge (1773-1848), for example, fled her enslavers President George Washington (1732-99) and Martha Washington (1731-1802) in Philadelphia in 1796 when she learned that they intended to transfer her to their granddaughter in Virginia. Judge gained assistance from members of the city’s growing free Black community as she escaped by ship to New Hampshire to avoid recapture. 

Women Form Civic Associations

With the governmental shift during the American Revolution, women sought responsibilities as equal citizens in the new republic. Barred from standing for office or, in most jurisdictions, from voting, they formed civic associations to promote political and social goals such as assisting the Continental Army, benevolence, temperance, abolition of enslavement, and women’s rights. In 1780, Esther DeBerdt Reed (c. 1746-80), wife and political collaborator of Joseph Reed (1741-85), president of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council, published her essay “The Sentiments of an American Woman.” Believing women had full-fledged political roles as citizens, DeBerdt Reed called together the Ladies Association of Philadelphia to canvass for funds door-to-door for the Continental Army. When she urged women in other states to follow suit, schoolteacher Mary Dagworthy (1748-1814) of Trenton inspired women from thirteen counties to join the New Jersey Association and solicit funds. 

In December 1833, a group of energetic African American and white women established the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), asserting women’s right to work collectively for social, legal, and economic change. Like other supporters of William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79), they promoted immediate emancipation and an end to discrimination against free Black people. Among the group’s activists were Black leaders Margaretta Forten (1806-75), Harriet Forten Purvis (1810-75), and Sarah Mapps Douglass (1806-82); Quakers Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) and Sarah Pugh (1800-84); and Mary Grew (1813-96), of a Baptist family. PFASS members initially circulated antislavery petitions and recruited members by hosting speakers. Over time, when Congress rejected petitions and Garrisonian abolitionists shunned politics, PFASS members focused on their annual fair, where they sold needlework and farm produce of abolitionist women and men throughout southeastern Pennsylvania and southwestern New Jersey. By contributing a large portion of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society’s budget, PFASS gained leadership positions for Mott, Pugh, and Grew in the male-dominated state organization.  

In the late 1840s and 1850s, PFASS members also played a vital role in launching the women’s rights movement, as Lucretia Mott joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) in assembling the Seneca Falls, New York, convention. Stanton wrote the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence (1776), protesting the denial of women’s suffrage; participation in government; ownership of property; equality in separation and divorce; access to well-paying employment, colleges, and education in the professions; and leadership in most religions. The signers insisted that women receive all rights as equal citizens, noting that anything less destroyed their self-confidence and self-respect. This first feminist movement organized through state and national conventions, attracting large audiences to hear speakers on relevant issues. Philadelphian Sarah Tyndale (1792-1859), a wealthy businesswoman and reformer, served as vice president at the first national convention in 1850 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Mott presided in 1852 at the first Pennsylvania convention in West Chester and, in 1854, with Sarah Pugh organized the fifth national convention at Sansom Street Hall in Philadelphia.  

Married Women’s Property Act of 1848

In response to women’s rights activists, increasing urbanization, and demographic and economic change, state legislatures gradually addressed inequities in married women’s property rights. In Pennsylvania, for example, lawmakers passed the Married Women’s Property Act of 1848, stipulating that wives owned personal property they brought into a marriage and received afterwards, such as rents on their real estate. They could also independently write wills. The law did not give a married woman freedom to sell her real estate without the husband’s permission but confirmed that he needed her consent before he attempted a sale. Women’s rights reformers considered the 1848 Pennsylvania law a positive step, but they protested in 1855 when the legislature rejected the right of wives to control their earnings. The lawmakers reversed this decision in 1872 but still required women to file in local court their intentions to keep their separate wages. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, legislatures and courts wrestled over women’s economic rights versus the ideology of marital unity, gradually granting women more autonomy through piecemeal reforms. 

Gaining the right to vote required much energy and resilience before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Lucretia Mott served as president of the American Equal Rights Association, which formed in 1866 but split three years later over the issue of whether Black men should receive the vote before all women. The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) supported the Fifteenth Amendment extending the vote to Black men (ratified in 1870), while the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) opposed its approval without the franchise for women. The New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association, established in Vineland in 1867, and the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association, founded in Philadelphia in 1869, allied with AWSA. After Congress rejected an amendment for woman suffrage in 1887, the NWSA and AWSA united in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which crusaded with other societies for women’s vote at the state and local levels. 

Referenda in 1915 for woman suffrage in Pennsylvania and New Jersey failed, while Delaware offered the vote only to women taxpayers in school elections. The suffragist Alice Paul (1885-1977), of Mount Laurel, New Jersey, who earned degrees at Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania, then propelled the movement forward at the national level. With other members of the Congressional Union, Paul adopted strategies from English suffragists, including rallies, parades, and vigils. After Congress passed the woman suffrage amendment on June 4, 1919, Pennsylvania ratified it within the month, but the New Jersey legislature waited until February 1920. Delaware rejected the amendment in 1920 and did not ratify until three years later, even though the Nineteenth Amendment gained the number of states needed for approval by August 1920.  

Beyond the Nineteenth Amendment

Although many activists were satisfied with adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, Alice Paul refused to stop fighting for women’s rights. In opposition to reformers such as Florence Kelley (1859-1932) of Philadelphia, who favored protective legislation for women workers, Paul and other members of the National Woman’s Party in 1923 drafted the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to incorporate into the U.S. Constitution an unequivocal statement of equal rights regardless of sex. They lobbied until 1972, when Congress adopted the amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. Although Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and twenty-seven other states endorsed the ERA within a year, the measure failed ratification by the required three-fourths of states.  

Economic change in the greater Philadelphia region from the nineteenth century to the post-World War II era highlighted the need for the ERA and inspired increasing numbers of women to fight for equal rights. In the 1800s, working-class women and girls worked as domestic servants and helped to industrialize the region in textile, garment, and other manufacturing. Despite low wages, women’s earnings outside the home or from hosting boarders and manufacturing within the household provided essential support for their families. In the early twentieth century, female garment workers participated in strikes to obtain higher incomes and improve conditions. Black working-class women continued to face harsh discrimination in education and business so labored primarily in domestic service, despite growing opportunities for white women in clerical and sales positions. World War II created openings for women in heavy industry and armaments that disappeared when the war ended. As described by Betty Friedan (1921-2006) in her influential The Feminine Mystique (1963), American culture in the 1950s idealized middle-class households with male breadwinners and dependent wives and children. Nevertheless, increasing educational opportunities and role models of individual women who broke through severe barriers in the professions and business inspired young women to challenge inequality and stereotypes. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, women’s rights advocates acted on many fronts to secure the powers and self-confidence that nineteenth-century feminists had demanded at Seneca Falls. In 1961, at the urging of Esther Peterson (1906-97), then Assistant Secretary of Labor for Women’s Affairs, President John F. Kennedy (1917-63) established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW). Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) chaired the commission, which included among its members Richard A. Lester (1908-97), a Princeton University professor, as vice-chairman, and Caroline F. Ware (1899-1990), a historian who had taught at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers.  The commission promoted the right of women in all states to own businesses and property, control their own earnings, and serve on juries; its recommendations resulted in an executive order mandating equal job opportunity for women in federal contracts and the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Through the commission’s “Consultation on Negro Women,” Black professional women advised the PCSW to consider the impact of racism on Black families and women. The consultation made recommendations, such as raising the minimum wage and promoting unions for domestic and other service workers, that the PCSW failed to prioritize. Subsequently, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided a platform for gender equity, though the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) refused initially to hear sex discrimination cases.  

National Organization for Women

Philadelphia area women joined the National Organization for Women (NOW), which formed in 1966 to push the EEOC to fulfill its responsibilities under Title VII, then quickly added to its platform the ERA, reproductive rights, child care, and other goals. Ernesta Ballard (1920-2005), who served on the national NOW board, in 1968 organized local women to establish Philadelphia NOW. The Pennsylvania NOW started in 1971, assembling in 1973 in Philadelphia its first convention of state chapters. The Philadelphia chapter published the Philadelphia NOW Newsletter and worked toward a range of goals including ratification of the national ERA; adding an ERA to the Pennsylvania state constitution; ending sex discrimination in employment, politics, education, and public accommodations; repealing Pennsylvania’s restrictive abortion law; establishing government-funded child care; and improving women’s image in the media. 

In 1968, the group New York Radical Women rallied feminists from New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere to demonstrate at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They threw what they called “instruments of female torture” such as girdles, bras, hair curlers, and Playboy magazines into a “freedom trash can,” gaining national publicity that helped to ignite the feminist movement in many cities. Philadelphia-area women in 1968 started consciousness-raising groups in which they gained motivation for collective action through discussions of how inequality and sexism affected their individual lives. 

On August 26, 1970, Philadelphia NOW, the Women’s Liberation Center, and more than twenty other organizations celebrated Women’s Equality Day on the fiftieth anniversary of the woman suffrage amendment. In Rittenhouse Square, thousands of women and men heard speeches and talked to representatives of Philadelphia NOW, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Women United for Abortion Action, and other feminist groups. Media coverage energized the movement, leading to the growth of consciousness-raising groups throughout the region. The Women’s Liberation Center provided meeting space and networking opportunities in Philadelphia for radical feminist groups that women started in response to their subordination in male-dominated organizations. 

National Black Feminist Organization

While Black women helped to organize NOW, by 1973 feminists in New York City, including Florynce Kennedy (1916-2000) and Margaret Sloan-Hunter (1947-2004), became convinced that a new organization, the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), was needed to address the challenges facing working-class women of diverse ethnic backgrounds. The NBFO established chapters in cities across the U.S., including Philadelphia in 1975. Members of Philadelphia NOW and radical feminist groups collaborated to provide social services to women in the Philadelphia region, including literature and advice for finding jobs and health care, fighting sex discrimination, dealing with rape and sexual abuse, and transitioning through separation and divorce. Philadelphia feminists took the lead, building on the work of nineteenth-century reformers, in creating women-led agencies such as the Elizabeth Blackwell Health Center for Women, Women Organized Against Rape, Women’s Law Project, and Pennsylvania Program for Women and Girl Offenders. In 1976, these and other agencies created Women’s Way, the first coalition to raise funds for feminist social service organizations in the United States. 

By the early 2020s, a century after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment for woman suffrage, the status of women remained mixed. While many women in the greater Philadelphia region had gained leadership in the arts, media, community service, healthcare, education, and business, and despite the important support of male allies, few women had reached high political office. No women had been elected to the U.S. Senate from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or Delaware. In the U.S. House of Representatives, in 2023, Lisa Blunt Rochester (b. 1962– ) held the at-large seat for Delaware and four women represented districts in southeastern Pennsylvania, but none represented southern New Jersey. Pennsylvania has had no woman governor since the colonial period, while Delaware and New Jersey have each had one. The U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) in June 2022 highlighted the necessity of political power for achieving and protecting women’s rights. Movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and lack of a national ERA, demonstrated how much change remained necessary.

Jean R. Soderlund, Professor of History emeritus at Lehigh University, is the author of Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (1985) and Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society before William Penn (2015), for which she won the 2016 Philip S. Klein Book Prize from the Pennsylvania Historical Association. Her latest book, Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey, was published in 2022 by Rutgers University Press. (Information current at time of publication.)

In the earliest Christian communities, some women devoted their lives to emulating Jesus Christ. Most of these women were virgins who saw themselves as “brides of Christ,” and they wore veils as a symbol of that marriage. As they assembled in communities with their common cause, the “sisters” formed “convents,” from the Latin conventus, meaning gathering or coming together. Although convents have generally been associated with Roman Catholicism, Episcopal and orthodox communities also established convents in America. In the Philadelphia area, however, Roman Catholic convents predominated.

English settlement in the New World yielded a predominantly Protestant East Coast. The Quakers, who predominated under William Penn’s (1644-1718) initial settlement, allowed Catholics to worship privately without government interference, but the further influx of Catholic immigrants coupled with Protestant revivalism in the early nineteenth century generated a violent anti-Catholicism. Catholic immigrants needed Catholic leadership, education, and help in all forms. The Diocese of Philadelphia, founded in 1808, developed a number of Catholic schools by midcentury, but lay people staffed most of them. Within twenty-five years, religious communities of women formed to meet the educational and social needs of the growing Catholic population. These included the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Sisters of St. Joseph, the Glen Riddle Sisters of St. Francis, and the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Due to ethnic and religious discrimination of the Irish in Philadelphia, five Irish women established the first convent in Philadelphia in 1833. A Philadelphia priest met Mary Frances Clarke (1803-87) and her four companions in Dublin and convinced them to join him in Philadelphia to set up a school. Two months after arriving in the city, the women founded the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM Sisters) with the blessings of the Catholic Church. The sisters began to teach young children in a “free school” and took in sewing to supplement their income. As time passed, some of the Philadelphia sisters moved west to help teach Native Americans in Iowa. In May 1844, during a series of riots (Philadelphia Nativist Riots, also known as Philadelphia Prayer Riots, Bible Riots, and Native American Riots) resulting from anti-Catholic sentiment due to growing Irish Catholic population, anti-Catholic Nativists burned down the Philadelphia convent—Sacred Heart Academy (occupied by three sisters)— and St. Michael’s Church. Most of the BVM sisters had already left Philadelphia to minister to other regions.

Needing help in meeting the many and growing social and educational needs of Catholics in the diocese, Bishop Francis Kenrick (1797-1863) convinced a contingent of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a religious order founded in LePuy, France, in 1650, to move to Philadelphia in the mid-1840s. The sisters began by administering St. John’s Orphanage for Boys in Philadelphia. In 1858, they purchased an established estate in Chestnut Hill, which became their administrative center and the first site of Mount Saint Joseph Academy. The sisters helped immigrants with educational needs, cared for orphans and widows, and worked as nurses during the American Civil War and the influenza epidemic of 1918.

The Diocese of Philadelphia was responsible for southern New Jersey (Archdiocese of New York held northern New Jersey) until 1853, when Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) established the Diocese of Newark, which initially covered all of New Jersey. Pius also established the Diocese of Wilmington in 1868. Up until this time, Philadelphia Catholic leaders treated New Jersey and Delaware as mission areas. The Sisters of St. Joseph administered two parochial schools in Delaware, but with the establishment of the new diocese, Bishop James Frederick Bryan Wood (1813-83) recalled them to Philadelphia.

In the mid-nineteenth century, following the death of her husband, Anna (Ana Maria Boll) Bachmann (1824-63) told her parish priest her desire to enter religious life. During his visit to Rome in 1854, Philadelphia’s Bishop John Neumann (1811-1860) informed Pope Pius IX about the need for sisters in his diocese. He also told the pope about Bachmann, her sister Barbara Boll, and a friend, Anna Dorn, all from Bavaria, and their desire to establish a religious community in Philadelphia. Bachmann (Sr. Mary Francis), Boll (Sr. Mary Margaret), and Dorn (Sr. Mary Bernardine) took their vows in May 1856 in Bishop Neumann’s private chapel. Two years later, “Mother” Francis officially founded the Institute of the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis. In 1871, the Philadelphia sisters took the opportunity to purchase the “Little Seminary” in Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, from Bishop Wood for $12,000. On the twenty-eight acres of land twenty-five miles southwest of Philadelphia, they made their home in old seminary buildings and founded a novitiate. The Motherhouse followed in 1896—Convent of Our Lady of Angels. In 1958, one hundred years after its founding, there were more than 1,600 Glen Riddle sisters working in grade schools and high schools, hospitals and centers of nursing, catechetical centers, and a seminary. By 2015, the congregation’s numbers had dropped to about 450 Catholic women Religious.

In 1858, the Sisters of St. Francis traveled to Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, to welcome the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters to eastern Pennsylvania. The IHM sisters opened a mission in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1859 with a select school for girls and a parish school for boys and girls. Reading became the motherhouse for the IHM sisters in eastern Pennsylvania from 1864-1871. From there the sisters also established schools in Philadelphia. In 1872, Bishop Wood provided a new motherhouse and novitiate in West Chester. In October of that year, the Convent of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in West Chester held its first reception of seven novices. At the same time, the sisters opened a school in St. Agnes Parish (established 1793), West Chester.

Episcopal female communities established themselves in America as early as the Roman Catholic convents did, but there were considerably fewer of them. Although none developed directly in the Philadelphia area, the Community of St. John the Baptist Episcopal Sisters came to America in 1874 (founded in England 1852) and built a convent in New York three years later. Since 1900, they have continued an active ministry in Mendham, New Jersey. Orthodox women’s communities developed much later. The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, centered in Englewood, New Jersey, founded its first Monastery for Nuns, the Convent of St. Thekla, in Glenville, Pennsylvania, where nuns have prayed for the salvation of the world and led a life of repentance. The convents varied in purpose and function—from active ministry to contemplative life—but the vocation of the women was to serve God.

Although most Roman Catholic convents in the Philadelphia area were active within the community, other sisters lived a cloistered life. In 1915, Mother Mary Michael (1862-1934) founded the Convent of Divine Love in Philadelphia. Archbishop Edmund Francis Prendergast (1843-1918) desired to have an adoration convent in his archdiocese. The “Pink Sisters” wore rose-colored garbs with a white veil. In addition to kneeling night and day (in shifts perpetually since 1915) before the Most Blessed Sacrament, sisters made altar bread and worked as clerks and seamstresses.

Although financial deficits moved the Catholic leadership to auction off three former convents in 2013, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, as of 2015, listed over fifty religious congregations of women (particularly along the Main Line), which included many missionary sisters and international congregations. Still, the aging population of Catholic women Religious caused concern for the Catholic Church. As of 2014, a study showed that there were more Catholic sisters in the United States over age 90 than under age 60. The history of Catholic sisters in the Philadelphia area proved significant, however, as early Catholic education led by sisters through the past two centuries helped the region to maintain a strong Catholic identity even into the twenty-first century. Through the decades, they continued their vocations in education, social services, parish ministry, aid to the poor, marginal, and oppressed, and missionary work and, and they remained on the front lines for the Catholic Church.

Brenda Gaydosh is an Assistant Professor of History at West Chester University. Her research focuses on varied aspects of the Catholic Church—from a biography about Nazi-era German Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg to how the Catholic Church has dealt with genocide. (Author information current at time of publication.)

During the eighteenth century, a large population of Philadelphia merchants imported the latest luxury goods from Europe for an eager consumer market. The distinction between imported and domestically produced fashions often blurred. For example, mantua makers (dressmakers) and milliners (hat makers) imported the latest fashions and then reproduced and modified them for the domestic market. Fashionable garments had traditionally been available to only the wealthy few, but improved methods of production and distribution allowed people of all classes to participate in some way.

In the years just before and during the American War of Independence, wearing imported styles came to be seen by many as unpatriotic and frivolous. Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) strongly advocated domestic goods, for example eschewing powdered wigs for natural hair and imported silks for homespun wool as acts of symbolic and economic rebellion. Philadelphia artisans flourished during this period of non-importation, but Atlantic trade soon resumed. To compete with the allure of expensive imports, Philadelphia artisans developed a reputation for making high quality goods with sophisticated style.

Growth of Philadelphia Fashion

In the early years of the republic, Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street became recognized as one of the most fashionable retail streets in the world. Despite this reputation, the fashions worn by Philadelphians largely originated in Europe. Men’s styles derived from London’s Savile Row tailors, while women looked toward the many dressmakers and milliners of Paris. Although the silhouettes changed roughly every five years, fashionable dress for men and women settled into a system that endured well into the twentieth century. For day, a well-dressed man was expected to wear a dark suit with waistcoat (vest), crisp white shirt, polished shoes, hat, and gloves. Women were expected to wear a closely fitted floor-length dress over a corset and layers of petticoats. Like men, they accessorized their garments with a variety of collars and cuffs, shawls and mantles, gloves and a bonnet. These fashion essentials were readily available from Philadelphia artisans and manufacturers. Philadelphia tailors took an active role in improving and promoting their craft. Two notable examples were rival tailors Allen Ward (1786-1862) and Francis Mahan (c. 1790-1871), who both promoted their improved methods of pattern drafting and production through patents and publications. By the 1840s both tailors were publishing fashion plates promoting their designs.

Philadelphia’s history as a center for publishing reinforced its reputation as the fashion authority of the United States. Godey’s Lady’s Book, which began publication in 1830, became famous for its hand-tinted fashion plates. These “Philadelphia Fashions” as Godey’s initially described them, often were redrawn from French originals and modified to make them suitably modest for the American audiences. Other women’s journals such as Graham’s Magazine and Peterson’s Magazine quickly followed the Godey’s formula. Philadelphia publishers also produced numerous etiquette manuals with instructions for correct behavior, including proper dress for all occasions.

The mid-nineteenth century saw the rise of several large retail emporiums specializing in “fancy and staple dry goods,” a catchall phrase that encompassed a wide array of fashion-related items including textiles, trimming, ready-to-wear garments, and accessories. Many of these dry good “palaces,” such as Strawbridge & Clothier and John Wanamaker & Co., developed into the department stores of the later nineteenth century that sold goods ranging from fashions and home furnishings to more outrageous items such as exotic pets, fine art, and historic artifacts. John Wanamaker & Co., the best known among them, served as a national model with its innovative approach to marketing, novelty, and high style. Later in the century, these retail giants would be joined by others, most notably Gimbel Bros. and Lit Bros., who promised “hats trimmed free of charge.” Smaller cities and towns in the region had their own dressmakers, tailors, and retailers, but residents also could purchase ready-to-wear garments from the mail-order catalogues of retailers such as Strawbridge & Clothier.

Fashion Propelled Growth

Fashion played a crucial part in the growth of department stores, stimulating consumer desires for the new and novel and encouraging abandonment of items that were still functional but outmoded. To attract an elite clientele, many department stores and dry goods emporiums also offered in-house custom dressmaking and tailoring departments to lure customers away from traditional establishments. Department stores deliberately sought the patronage of female consumers and provided a safe, semi-public space for them to visit. Shopping provided an outlet for personal expression, an escape from the reality of everyday life, and an opportunity to see and be seen.

The increased availability of ready-made goods also fueled department store growth. Philadelphia and its Manufactures, first published in 1859, outlined the array of goods produced at midcentury, singling out the exceptional quality of woolen hosiery and leather shoes. Accessories and unfitted garments such as shoes, hosiery, shirts, umbrellas, parasols, collars, corsets, hats, mantles, and cloaks were all mass-produced and increasingly acceptable to discriminating consumers. Menswear, specifically cotton shirts and the newly fashionable “sack” suit, was especially well-suited to mass-production. Despite this rapid development, truly fashionable dress of the mid-nineteenth century required an impeccable fit that could only be achieved by a skilled tailor or dress-maker. Chestnut Street and neighboring Walnut Street had an abundance of dressmakers, tailors, and milliners who provided custom-made wardrobes for their clientele.

Declining Influence

The conventions of fashionable dress remained remarkably unchanged in the early years of the twentieth century for both men and women. Suits and long dresses worn with hats and gloves remained de rigueur until the First World War instituted changes that set the tone for the next fifty years. While the silhouette varied by decade, both sexes abandoned rigid formality in favor of less-structured garments. For men, starched detachable collars were replaced by soft button-down shirts, and the top hat gave way to a variety of less formal hats such as the fedora or homburg. Active sportswear influenced the styles worn by younger men, who embraced soft caps and sweaters. Women’s clothing underwent a radical transformation; rigid corsets were abandoned, skirts shortened to around the knee, and elaborate millinery and outerwear were replaced by soft unstructured garments. Shorter skirts placed greater importance on stylish shoes and hosiery, two industries Philadelphia had long dominated.

By early years of the twentieth century, however, New York eclipsed Philadelphia as the apparel style and production leader of the United States. This had begun in the previous century after the Erie Canal, connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the midwestern regions via the Great Lakes, turned New York City into the gateway of the United States. This change in trade patterns produced a period of monumental growth for New York, earning it the nickname “The Great Emporium.” Consumers seeking the latest styles would find them in New York first, while Philadelphia became increasingly known for old money and conservative good taste. While this was not an entirely accurate assessment, plays like The Philadelphia Story (1939), with its Main Line socialite protagonist, reinforced this popular view.

By the turn of the twentieth century large department stores and specialty shops tempted consumers with a wide variety of ready-made goods and gained acceptance with the fashionable elite. Consumers were more fashion-conscious due to the emergence of fashion shows held at department stores, hotels, and private social clubs. In 1924, Rodman Wanamaker (1863-1928), the artistically inclined son of the store’s founder, purchased the Tribout Shop, a genuine Parisian store, and imported it in its entirety. For the next fifty years, the Tribout Shop specialized in exclusive European imports as well as the very best from American designers.

Stetson and Other Notable Names

Many notable names in American fashion made their homes in Philadelphia during the early years of the twentieth century. The nation’s largest manufacturer of men’s hats, John B. Stetson, occupied an impressive factory in Kensington, stretching across nine acres and producing nearly two million hats annually by 1906. Peter Thomson dominated the market for ubiquitous middy blouses and sailor dresses that were worn as school uniforms throughout the country. Jacob Reed’s Sons, a menswear manufacturer in business since 1824, flourished in this transitional fashion period and provided casual sportswear-influenced separates for generations. Philadelphia shoes retained their elite status with the designs of Laird, Schober and Company, which won numerous industry accolades and sold at retailers throughout the United States.

The economic collapse of 1929 had a lasting effect on American fashion, retail, and manufacturing. By 1931, French imports had dropped by 40 percent as department stores, specialty shops, and manufacturers turned to domestic talent to produce new styles. Many older stores were unable to keep afloat and were forced to close. Specialty stores like Nan Duskin and Sophy Curson, which had opened just prior to the stock market crash, defied the odds by surviving the Great Depression—a testament to the power of specialization and their knowledge of the consumer. Smaller and more focused than the larger department stores, these shops, named for their founders, could better navigate the mercurial world of high fashion. Another female entrepreneur of note, milliner Mae Reeves (1912-2016), became one of the first African American women to own her own business in downtown Philadelphia, a millinery shop opened in 1940 and remaining in business for more than fifty years.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, fashion reflected the desires of a larger suburban population and their offspring. The formality of city life was replaced whenever possible with more casual soft shirts worn without neckties and shirtwaist dresses made of new, easy-to-care-for synthetics like nylon, polyester, and acrylic. Film star Grace Kelly (1929-82) became the best ambassador of Philadelphia’s restrained style. Known as “the girl in the white gloves,” she broke the Hollywood extravagance mold with her cardigan sweaters, circle pins, and penny loafers. By the late 1960s, fashion was in even more of a state of upheaval as traditional rules of dress were jettisoned for mini-skirts, bell-bottoms, and longer, natural hair for both sexes. Even conservative dressers were forced to adapt, and fashion markets splintered into competing niche markets. Individuality triumphed over the conformity of the past, a trend that showed no sign of abating in the twenty-first century.

Retailers Follow the Fashion

As fashion changed in the 1950s and 1960s, so did Philadelphia area retailers. While the large department stores struggled in their Market Street locations and established branches in suburban shopping malls, smaller retailers such as Joan Shepp and Toby Lerner launched highly successful boutiques catering to consumers who favored easy-care sportswear and separates. During the 1980s, a series of mergers and acquisitions eventually led to the end of the many historically important stores. Gimbels closed first in 1987, followed shortly by Bonwit Teller (1990), Nan Duskin (1994), and John Wanamaker (1995). Strawbridge & Clothier held on the longest, until 2006 when it was absorbed by Macy’s.

Manufacturing in Philadelphia also mirrored changes taking place in the world of fashion. The most successful adapted to changing consumer preferences; for example, Ship’n Shore produced sportswear in easy-care fabrics, and The Villager turned out preppy styles that dominated the youth market of the early 1960s. Despite these success stories, garment manufacturing declined with prominent makers like Botany 500 declaring bankruptcy and Stetson relocating to Missouri. Swimming against this tide was Albert Nipon, a Philadelphia-based manufacturer who dominated the dress market during the 1970s and 1980s and built a $60 million-a-year fashion empire before declaring bankruptcy in 1988. Although no longer a global center of manufacturing, the Philadelphia region remained headquarters to several prominent fashion companies such as Lily Pulitzer, Destination Maternity, and Urban Outfitters.

Philadelphia has produced several historically significant fashion designers including Coty American Fashion Critics’ Award winners Tina Leser (1910-86), known for her globally-inspired sportswear; Gustave “Gus” Tassell (1926-2014), whose sleek designs were favored by Jackie Kennedy; James Galanos (1924-2016), most famous for his designs for Nancy Reagan; knitwear designer Adrienne Vittadini (b. 1945); and Willi Smith (1948-87), one of the most successful African American designers of the twentieth century. Others with strong Philadelphia ties have included Main Line-born Tory Burch (b. 1966 ), two-time Project Runway winner Dom Streater (b. 1988 ), and Ralph Rucci (b. 1957), the first American designer in over sixty years to be invited to show in Paris by the French Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. Only two of these successful designers studied fashion at Philadelphia Schools: Adrienne Vittadini (Moore College of Art and Design) and Willi Smith (University of the Arts). The majority studied in New York, a reflection of the dominance of New York in the fashion industry.

Philadelphia has been associated with fashionable goods since the mid-eighteenth century, when artisans used style to compete with European imports. Manufacturers, publishers, and retailers continued to emphasize high style and set trends throughout the nineteenth century. However, in the twentieth century Philadelphia’s authority as a fashion center faded as trade and manufacturing moved to other regions.

Clare Sauro is Director and Chief Curator of the Robert and Penny Fox Historic Costume Collection at Drexel University. She holds an M.A. in Museum Studies: Costume and Textiles from the Fashion Institute of Technology. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Before the Civil War, women working for their families or as seamstresses and journeymen tailors working under master artisans made Philadelphia’s clothing. Though work as a journeyman could be a route to self-employment, master artisans’ reluctance to increase wages or heed labor agreements often led to conflict. In 1827, a group of journeymen tailors formed a protective association, the Tailors’ Benevolent Society, and convinced their employers to agree to standardized prices and a closed shop.

Despite this agreement, five journeymen at Robb and Winebrener (Third and Chestnut Streets) discovered later that year that they had been paid less than the agreed-upon prices for women’s riding outfits. When they argued with their employer, they were fired. Over the course of the next week, fourteen other journeymen in the shop walked out over the firings. Strikers surrounded the shop, discouraging potential replacement employees from breaking the strike. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania took the men to court on the owners’ behalf, accusing them of conspiring to get unfairly high wages and of attacking strikebreakers. The court, however, largely sided with the journeymen; they had not threatened strikebreakers, their employers, or others and could not be convicted of conspiring to extort higher wages. The court did find the journeymen guilty of conspiring to reinstate their colleagues, but even this charge it later dropped. Members of the Tailors’ Benevolent Society won wage increases from their employers again in 1844 and 1847.

Influences of Technology and Immigration

Journeymen tailors’ skills gave them leverage in labor disputes. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, factory work existed alongside the artisan shop and outwork. Three factors lay behind this transition: new technology—including the foot-powered sewing machine (1846); mechanical cutting knife (1876); and steam power, adopted by most factories by the 1890s as it grew less expensive over the previous several decades—increased speed and efficiency; improvements in transportation meant more consumers had access to manufactured goods; and new waves of immigrants—first from northern and western European nations including Germany and Ireland, later from Russia and other southern and eastern European nations—many skilled in garment making, provided a ready supply of workers. In 1850, Philadelphia was home to 10,532 clothing workers (18.2 percent of the total) and 10,422 textile workers (18.0 percent of the total); by 1880, the number increased to 34,548 clothing workers (19.8 percent of the total) and 37,741 textile workers (21.6 percent of the total).

Such developments did not take place evenly across the nation, and the garment industry in Philadelphia developed differently from the large textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, or Newark or Paterson, New Jersey. Most strikingly, garment shops in Philadelphia remained small. Manufacturers were loath to take on debt to expand their operations, preferring to pay with cash on hand. Additionally, due both to the kinds of work available and an aging port infrastructure, Philadelphia did not receive the same numbers of immigrants as New York City or other parts of Pennsylvania, including the coal and steel areas. The result was a decentralized industry scattered across small shops, tenement-based production, and outwork (contractors, often women and children, paid by the piece for work completed in their own homes). In both 1850 and 1900, shops tended to employ no more than twenty-five people.

The decentralized nature of Philadelphia’s garment industry posed challenges. Manufacturers resisted credit, making expansion difficult and keeping the number of employees in each shop small; labor organizers found it difficult to organize a scattered workforce. Employment could also be cyclical. Large manufacturers such as Morris Haber (1874–?) outsourced excess orders to smaller firms that kept workers on only when they had orders to fulfill and let them go during slack periods. Such periodic unemployment could be particularly devastating for outworkers and other contractors.

A Boost from the Civil War

This arrangement also had benefits, however: Philadelphia garment shops were more nimble and could change direction more quickly than mass-production shops elsewhere, which often kept large amounts of stock on hand. With the onset of the Civil War, for example, the government urgently needed uniforms, and Philadelphia firms were well-positioned to secure lucrative contracts to produce them.

After the Civil War, firms that had mobilized to produce uniforms found ready buyers in the new ready-to-wear market. Justus Clayton Strawbridge (1838–1911) and Isaac Hallowell Clothier (1837–1921) founded Strawbridge and Clothier, and John Wanamaker (1838–1922) opened his own department store. Firms that had built up capacity during the war and grown accustomed to high levels of production were prepared to fill these retailers’ bulk clothing orders. Changing fashions meant that retailers regularly placed new orders, a boon for the garment industry. In 1882, Old City alone hosted almost seventeen thousand clothier employees (many in outwork). Many of Wanamaker’s 2,485 employees worked in garment manufacturing. At the same time, smaller firms, such as men’s suiting shop Jacob Reed’s Sons, continued to supply high-quality made-to-order clothing.

Though large corporations did not dominate the economic landscape of Gilded Age Philadelphia to the same extent as they did elsewhere, the city was not exempt from the labor strife experienced across the nation. As tensions grew among skilled workers, unskilled workers, and owners, new organizations formed to represent the interests of each. The most skilled of factory clothing workers were the garment cutters, and in 1869, Philadelphia garment cutter Uriah Stephens (1821–82) formed the Knights of Labor (KOL), an organization to represent the interests of all working people. At its peak, the Knights had seven hundred thousand members. The KOL’s inclusivity made it unwieldy, and it could not escape associations with radicalism after Chicago’s deadly Haymarket riot in 1886. Founded that same year by former Knights, the American Federation of Labor organized skilled workers along craft lines. The United Garment Workers of America received an AFL charter in 1891, though the new garment workers union only included skilled workers, excluding most garment workers. The two most important organizations representing the interests of less-skilled workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, organized in 1900 and 1914, respectively.

New York Strike Spreads to Philadelphia

Although New York City was the center of garment worker activism, developments there could not help but affect Philadelphia workers. In late 1909, thousands of New York City garment workers—many of them young, Jewish, immigrant women from southern and eastern Europe—walked out of their jobs. The strike spread to Philadelphia after the ILGWU learned that many New York City firms were sending their work there. Strikers in both cities eventually won many of their demands. In Philadelphia these included a fifty-four-hour week, higher wages, and an end to the practice of charging for work materials. They did not, however, win a closed shop, in which employers recognize the union as sole bargaining agent for all employees.

Philadelphia garment workers demographically resembled their New York City counterparts. Jewish Philadelphians predominated in the early twentieth-century garment industry, both as factory owners and employees. Factory owners tended to be German-Jewish, while their employees were largely Russian-Jewish. Concentrated in South Philadelphia, garment workers often lived close to their workplaces. In 1909, 85 percent of Philadelphia shirtwaist (a woman’s garment resembling a man’s shirt) makers were female, and 85 percent were Jewish. A handful of Italians also worked in the garment industry. As in other industries, however, African Americans first gained access to the garment industry, including in 1909–10 and again in 1921, as strikebreakers. For this group, the expanded production of World Wars I and II brought about longer-term, though not permanent, opportunities.

In the interwar era, anti-union firms such as Philadelphia’s A.B. Kirschenbaum tried to lure workers away from unions with corporate welfare —employer-dominated company unions and other benefits meant to encourage loyalty to the company and discourage independent organizing. Union strength continued to grow, however, and a 1933 general dress-industry strike forced Philadelphia employers to recognize the ILGWU. The labor-friendly legislation of the New Deal helped consolidate these gains, though not consistently. A 1934 Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry survey of garment workers in Allentown, Doylestown, Philadelphia, and Shamokin found National Recovery Act regulations laxly and sporadically enforced.

Early Deindustrialization Takes a Toll

Deindustrialization affected the Philadelphia garment industry as early as the 1920s. In search of cheaper labor, employers increasingly turned to “runaway shops”—firms that relocated to areas where unions were weaker—setting up factories in parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania (including its anthracite region), and the South. Though New York City firms were the first to deploy this strategy, the ILGWU reported that Philadelphia firms also began to do so by the 1930s. The development of synthetics also posed challenges; many firms that produced silk hosiery, for example, could not afford to convert to nylon and closed. Post–World War II labor militancy further encouraged Philadelphia manufacturers to relocate. By the 1960s, the industry also faced international competition. Nationally, imports made up only 3 percent of the garment industry in 1955, but up to 88 percent in 2000. Sectors of the industry that had long relied more on machine technology, including knitwear and menswear, were able to stave off this competition for longer, but even these areas declined precipitously by the 1970s. In Philadelphia, the garment industry alone lost ninety-one thousand jobs between 1947 and 1986—79 percent of the city’s total manufacturing job losses in those years.

Philadelphia garment work bore many similarities to the industry elsewhere, especially New York City. In both places, the industry grew to employ large numbers of young, immigrant women who worked for low pay and long hours under sometimes dangerous conditions. The Philadelphia garment industry was not simply a smaller version of New York’s, however. The city had its own demographic, economic, and geographic factors that influenced the shape and development of this sector. Employers were more likely to be risk-averse, and employment was scattered across factories, shops, and homes. The decentralized nature of the industry gave employers flexibility but could mean insecurity for employees. Unions also had difficulty organizing such a diffuse workforce. Ultimately, however, both the large factories of other cities and Philadelphia’s smaller shops and factories faced the same fate. They could not compete with overseas manufacturing, and the industry declined.

Christina Larocco is editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography and scholarly programs manager at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The first successful women’s magazine and most widely circulated magazine in the antebellum United States, Godey’s Lady’s Book offered fashion illustrations and advice, literary pieces, and articles on current events and popular culture. Founded in Philadelphia in 1830 by Louis Antoine Godey (1804-1878) and edited for four decades by Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879), the magazine provided a platform for women’s interests and fostered traditions with a lasting impact on American culture.

Originally from New Hampshire, Hale came to Philadelphia in 1841 after gaining recognition in Boston, where she published a successful novel,  Northwood: A Tale of New England; edited the first women’s magazine, Ladies’ Magazine, beginning in 1828; and worked to foster historical consciousness, as in the erection of the Bunker Hill Monument.  A widow with five children, while in Boston she also published poetry and, most famously, the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

In 1837 Hale merged her magazine with Godey’s and became editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. By that time, Hale had gained a reputation for high editorial standards and for soliciting original work, often from women writers.  She also had established her philosophy of “Woman’s Influence” that argued for women assuming moral authority over husband and children by practicing domesticity and piety at home. She brought these practices and beliefs with her to Godey’s, where she oversaw tremendous expansion. When she assumed the editorship, Godey’s had approximately 10,000 subscribers, and by the 1860s it had over 150,000, despite its high cost of three dollars annually. Its role as the most popular magazine of its day provided Hale a platform through which to influence the nation’s tastes and the position of women. She included a section on women in the workforce, argued for women’s education, and published a number of special issues comprising only women’s writings.  Because they sought a national readership, neither Hale nor Godey allowed the publication to become embroiled directly in political matters, refusing even to mention, much less take a position on, sectionalism and the Civil War.  This decision cost them subscribers who had to turn elsewhere for news on the war.

The most popular features of the magazine included hand-tinted fashion plates in each issue, patterns for women to use in making garments at home, sheet music for piano, and short stories by authors like Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94), and Washington Irving (1783-1859), among others.  It also included news and features.

Godey’s Lady’s Book had a large impact on United States culture. Under Hale’s leadership the magazine hired Lydia H. Sigourney (1791-1865) to report on events in London.  Through her reports the magazine inaugurated such traditions as white wedding dresses and decorated evergreen trees at Christmas. Perhaps the most famous tradition to come out of Godey’s pages was Thanksgiving, a holiday which Hale persistently and successfully lobbied for and promoted by sharing recipes and features in Godey’s pages.

Godey sold the publication to John Hill Seyes Haulenbeek (?-1898) in 1877, and it lasted until Haulenbeek’s death in 1898.  Godey’s Lady’s Book made a lasting literary and social contribution in the U.S., offering women a venue to share their creativity and discuss issues that mattered to them.  It shaped American culture in ways still evident in the twenty-first century–from Thanksgiving dinners to evergreen Christmas trees to modern fashion magazines.

Beverly C. Tomek is the author of Pennsylvania Hall: A ‘Legal Lynching’ in the Shadow of the Liberty Bell (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania (NYU Press, 2011). She earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Houston and teaches at the University of Houston-Victoria. (Author information current at time of publication.)