Please do join us TOMORROW for a fascinating paper from Dr Lottie Whalen on ‘the smock colony’. Identifiable by their patterned smock dresses, sandals, and bobbed hair, this community of creative women lived, worked, and agitated for change in Greenwich Village in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Dr Whalen will take a closer look at Jessie Tarbox Beals’ photographs of these women, piecing together biographies, networks, and key locations to explore the remarkable woman-le
d artistic and political scene that flourished there. Positioning women as active agents in urban life and creators of culture – rather than footnotes in the history of men – Beals’ photographic postcards offer a glimpse into a unique moment when feminist and socialist politics, creative self-expression, and a defiance of the limits that wider society placed on gender and sexuality collided.
