1925 Publicity Suit

There is a photograph of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) in a suit and tie taken in 1925 that was used to help publicize her first volume of poetry since winning the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1925 Berenice Abbott took this publicity photo for Millay’s book The Buck in the Snow (1928). In one photo, Millay appears to be wearing a soft collar shirt with a silk tie and black jacket. Beneath the tie on the collar is a pin drawing both collar points together, giving a similar impression to a masculine Oxford shirt. The shirt has cuffs which poke out of the jacket sleeves. The jacket is fairly unstructured with what could be an understated camp collar. There are three large buttons arranged vertically below her elbow. These appear to be part of the jacket that hangs low over her hips, with no waistline. This was a popular 1920’s woman's style. She also appears to have a knee length skirt with her stockinged knee showing in the left hand corner of the photograph. Upon closer inspection she is in fact wearing a fashionable 1920s women’s suit but perhaps with a masculine flavour, especially with this particular shirt and tie. 

Berenice Abbott, 1925

Nancy Milford described Millay in this photograph as “dressed like a young man.” She also stated she could find no contemporary commentary on this unusual presentation. It is not remarked upon in any other biography of Millay. Lillian Faderman gives an example of a woman dressing masculine on top. Dr. Sarah Josefine Baker in the early twentieth century wore shirtwaists with stiff collars, men's tailored suits and four-in-hand ties to work, “I badly needed protective clothing… [so that] when a masculine colleague of mine looked around the office in a rather critical state of mind, no feminine furbelows would catch his eye and give him an excuse to become irritated by the presence of a woman where according to him a woman had no right to be… I wore a costume – almost a uniform – because the last thing I wanted was to be conspicuously feminine when working with men.” Faderman also discusses women passing as men in the early twentieth century and how “unlike in the latter half of the 20th century, women never wore pants. A person in pants would have been assumed to be male, and only the most suspicious would have scrutinized facial features and body movements to discern a woman beneath the external appearance.” She writes that these women mostly crossdressed so they could work and make a man's wage rather than to have relationships with women, as usually the wages paid to women were not enough to make ends meet. Kiki Smith writes about a 1920s suit in the Smith College Clothing Collection, where the suit was likely a man’s suit made for a woman to pass as a man. She also writes, women “who dressed in men's clothes could be accused of exhibiting deviant behavior, arrested, and even confined to a mental institution.” For example, in Paris it was illegal for a woman to wear trousers unless the police gave her permission. This law was in effect until 2013. In New York City there is an instance where a woman was arrested in 1933 for wearing trousers. Rusty Brown a New York lesbian remembers a law where “you had to have three pieces of female attire” when in public. 

Perhaps because Millay was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1923 these clothing choices were a way of demonstrating she belonged with the previous all male winners. Kiki Smith writes that “Most men’s suits of the 1920s consisted of three pieces: a jacket, pants, and a vest.” Millay’s clothing is therefore not fully “masculine” as she is missing the vest and trousers, and her suit can definitely be classed as women's clothing.

The traditional role of the man is prevalent in Millay’s story. Millay’s reference to herself using male pronouns in letters and her transformation into a little boy in her Pulitzer Prize winning poem, Ballad of the Harp Weaver, reinforces the culturally gendered role she fulfilled in the family. She was the main breadwinner in adulthood and head of household while her mother was away during her childhood. As the oldest of her sisters in childhood, she needed to be the responsible one. Daniel Mark Epstein writes that Millay was a “girl whose childhood was taken from her too soon.” Once in Greenwich Village, she was the one financially supporting most of the family, something which continued for the rest of her life. In other words she was filling the role that a father or husband was expected to take. This cultural male role rarely appears physically in Millay photographs except for the 1925 Abbott publicity photos. Miriam Gurko, writes “Whether or not the boyish name had anything to do with it, Vincent, growing up, did have more of the freedom ordinarily granted to boys rather than to girls.” It is not clear what freedoms she is exactly referring to but perhaps it had to do with the lack of parental control while Cora was away working. Gurko later writes, “At home in Maine she had been free to yield to virtually any impulse… [at Vassar College] smoking was completely banned – a restriction she evaded by taking her cigarettes off-campus to a nearby cemetery.” Later after graduation she continued to yield to any impulse she desired. 

While at Vassar she went by “Vincent” although she was glad to embrace her feminine side. Nancy Milford cites a letter she wrote home while at Vassar describing the school dances where half the girls would dress up as men. Millay was glad to be short as it meant she could dress as a girl. 

E. Vincent Millay, the name she published under in childhood, was known by the children’s magazine, St Nicholas League as Master Millay (a male designation) from age eleven to eighteen when she finally corrected them. In the past, many female authors did not present as female for professional reasons and this common practice included, authors such as George Elliott and more recently J.K. Rowling. The same assumption happened when Renascence was published. Letters addressed to Millay assumed she was a man.  In response to Witter Bynner and Arthur Ficke’s assumption that Renascence must have been written by a brawny man of forty-five, not a woman of twenty, Millay responded,  “I cling to my femininity.” The word choice here is very interesting. Why “cling”? Perhaps with “Vincent” beginning to fill the role of the man, supporting her family financially she felt a need to “cling” as though her femininity was something that could easily slip away. 

Growing up in a predominantly female household, Daniel Mark Epstein writes that she “had grown up in a household of singularly independent women and no men.” Millay and her sisters would sometimes use male pronouns in letters to each other or referring to each other as “young man.” At the time, going by the name Vincent, daily, when using a man’s name was uncommon, is another example of masculine language from her childhood. Perhaps these were a way of imagining there was a man in the house, at a time when the men were expected to provide and they did not have this support. This lack of a traditional male household role model is something that would continue on and off for the rest of Millay’s life.

Millay’s Pulitzer Prize winning poem, Ballad of the Harp Weaver is ostensibly about her mother and herself, though in the poem the child character is a little boy. This is another example of Millay gender swapping in her writing. Nancy Milford draws the connection between the mother in Ballad of the Harp Weaver and Cora, describing Cora’s hair loom, where she used to weave hair pieces for money, a skill she learned from her mother but refused to pass onto her daughters. This is reminiscent of the poem, where the mother wants better for her children than she had for herself.

While the 1925 suit ensemble might be thought of as Millay expressing her homosexual interests by presenting as, both feminine and masculine, her choice of wearing a masculine top and a skirt below the waist is still a relatively conventional choice. Let’s consider for a moment what the effect might be if a powerful woman in 1925 had publicized images of the reverse —  a feminine top with trousers below the waist. I think that would be much more unsettling or revolutionary. In her master’s thesis, Karen De Lutis discusses the dress reform movement in the mid to late 1800s. She describes this as a heterosexual reform movement, that promoted types of trousers (and other changes in dress) for women. While the movement never caught on to mainstream fashion, De Lutis details examples of trousers on women being banned in various locations until the mid-1980s.  This underscores the controversial aspects of a woman in a bifurcated garment. I would surmise that based on the lack of contemporary and later biographical comment on these photographs, that what matters most here is what's worn below the waist. The man’s shirt and tie holds less, although still some disruptive power, than a pair of trousers on a woman would have. Fashion designer, Miuccia Prada in a 2006 interview with the New York Times stated, “The skirt is a feminine symbol… to me, the waist up is more spiritual, more intellectual, while the waist down is more basic, more grounded. It's about sex. It's about making love. It's about life. It's about giving birth. Basically below the waist is more connected to the earth.” Millay is dressed as a woman with a touch of masculine, rather than dressed as masculine with a touch of feminine. In many ways this ensemble describes her character in these years as the woman breadwinner of her family, who can be both feminine and masculine at the same time.

Sociologist, Diana Crane, describes how a woman wearing a tie in the nineteenth century was a feminist act, an “expression of independence” and an assault on masculine privilege. Millay wore a tie on multiple occasions. The tie in this 1925 photograph has, I believe, a significance to her being the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Crane explains, “Fashionable clothing exemplified the doctrine of separate spheres that was supported by other social institutions.” Millay was crossing the separation of male and female spheres when she won the Pulitzer. Design historian Penny Sparke writing about the separation of the public and private spheres in her book As Long as It’s Pink, The Sexual Politics of Taste, explains how historically, women acted within the private realm and men in the public. Sparke contends: “The ‘separation of the spheres’ relegated women to the world of domesticity.” Millay’s place as the breadwinner of her family and Eugen’s position in charge of the household is a reversal of this social norm.

In 1931 Milly is quoted as having said “I have nothing to do with my household” implying that was Eugen’s job. As he mentioned more than once, he took care of her like his “child.” He gave up much of his work to look after her and allow her to write. This swap of traditional gender roles is perhaps a culmination of what Millay’s life always seemed to be heading towards. From her unconventional childhood, to supporting her mother and sisters in the 1920’s, to her final marriage and fame, she filled the traditional man’s role and this was reflected more in her personal, private clothing, riding britches, overalls and sport shirt on Ragged Island, with the exception of the 1925 Berenice Abbott publicity photograph.