This dissertation examines three types of clothing that women in the United States wore between 1880 and 1914: drawers, bathing suits, and athletic uniforms. It explores how the moving, breathing, excreting female body interacted with clothing—particularly marginalized forms of clothing—to create a complex discourse about bodily pollution. The research depends upon material and documentary sources. It explains how women managed their personal garments to create a layered habitat for the body, controlling or masking physical markers that society deemed impure. This material and cultural discourse reinforced and challenged naturalized social norms, during a time of great change.

The study draws upon an interdisciplinary historiography, combining material culture, history, literature, and anthropology. Mary Douglas's classic text Purity and Danger (1966) sets the stage for a discussion of pollution. Anthropologists such as Bruno Latour, Daniel Miller, and Victor Turner, as well as historians like Regina Lee Blaszcyk helped me situate clothing within an expansive network of goods. Further, such works interpret everyday clothing—not couture—as active participants in (and not just as passive reflections of) social and ideological conversations about pollution, class, and sexuality.

Each of the four chapters deals with a particular type of garment. In chapter one, I analyze drawers and menstruation to suggest that an intriguing, unwritten culture formed around menstrual management. In the second chapter, I recreate the liminal world of Coney Island, where women of all stripes literally and symbolically stripped away the trappings of everyday life. The liminality of bathing suits and the beach allowed women to create their own version of the self and to critique others. Chapter Three examines athletic uniforms as worn by Smith College athletes. Uniforms and athleticism among collegiate New Women helped to create a new middle class ideal in which women's health—particularly reproductive health—was valuable. The fourth and final chapter focuses on female employees participating in athletic events sponsored by their employer, the Philadelphia department store Strawbridge & Clothier. Here, I argue that female athletes used hybrid forms of clothing to create a distinctly pink-collar athleticism and to negotiate their social status as female workers.