The weird, worrisome beauty trends of The Gilded Age

NORTH CANAAN — Author Velya Jancz-Urban returned to the Douglas Library on Friday night, May 11, a year after her uproarious yet informative talk, The Not-So-Good Life of the Colonial Goodwife. 

This time, instead of harsh tales of the risky pregnancies, uninformed doctors and early deaths that plagued Colonial women in New England, Jancz-Urban turned her attention to her love of coastal mansions in Newport, R.I. 

In her presentation, The Not So Golden Life of the Gilded Age Wife, she examined the jarring disparity of wealth in the country from 1870 to 1900 — both the visible opulence on a grand scale, and the densely packed New York City neighborhoods of low-income immigrant families. 

It was not unheard of, Jancz-Urban said, for one outhouse toilet to be shared by an entire apartment complex housing up to 40 families. 

“The Gilded Age,” after all, was a satirical term coined by Mark Twain, meaning that beneath a thin veneer of shine, nothing was all that glittering.

Compared to the hard-working women of the survivalist Colonial era, Gilded Age women of the upper class had more time to carefully consider both their appearance and how best to live up to the increasingly performative social expectations of their gender. 

“It is a woman’s first business to be happy, a sunbeam in the home,” Jancz-Urban read from a 19th-century text. “It is her raison d’être to give out pleasure to all, as fire gives out heat.” 

New trends in beauty included women painting blue veins onto their décolletage, and extreme dieting techniques, including the practice of swallowing a tape worm egg, which (once hatched) would consume a portion of what the woman ate. 

The beauty look of the moment was to emulate the physical side-effects of consumption, or tuberculosis. A sickly pale complexion, darkened under-eyes and rosy lips and cheeks was the ideal. 

Little headway was made between the Colonial era and the Gilded Age when it came to education about the female reproductive system. 

The popular medical belief was that during menstruation it was possible for blood to leak into the brain, causing mental instability. 

Additionally, it was thought a womb that was not housing a fetus would physically “wander” around the body. 

Women who weren’t pregnant were thought to be at risk, and menstruation, doctors wrote, was a disease that could lead to madness. 

What Jancz-Urban reminded the audience, however, is that though we may have come a long way in terms of medical understanding, menstruation is still an uncomfortable topic for many in public discourse. 

Products remain disguised in supermarkets and pharmacies under the banner of “feminine hygiene,” wrapped in pastel floral packaging with vaguely pleasant, non-descriptive names. 

Advertising still uses blue liquid to represent menstrual blood. What we see as backward, horrifying, laughable or uncomfortable to discuss in terms of the treatment of women in the past will perhaps be the way a lecture in the future will come to see our America.