In March 1928, the Vatican's Sacred Congregation of the Council wrote a letter to the internuncio for Lithuania, Archbishop Lorenzo Schioppa, inquiring about the sports attire worn by female students and making concrete suggestions for appropriate clothing.Footnote 1 Concerned that the situation was far worse in Western Europe, where girls were wearing form-fitting outfits during coeducational sporting events, the Vatican wanted to ensure that the same problem could be nipped in the bud in Lithuania before the sporting wear became an occasion for a moral crisis.
The Lithuanian bishops, however, had already raised the alarm, expressing their concerns about the immoral aspects of modern female fashions and modern dance in a letter to the faithful published a month earlier.Footnote 2 Marking the tenth anniversary of the creation of the Lithuanian Republic, the bishops expressed concern about the moral fibre of the nation: Lithuanians were losing sight of the spiritual as they revelled in the flesh and materialism. Though not exclusively blaming Lithuania's female population, the bishops argued that women bore the most responsibility for this perilous development. Traditionally renowned for their purity, Lithuanians were now falling prey to modern fashion and dance: the former exposed too much female flesh, while the latter submitted the body to uncontrolled barbaric rhythms.Footnote 3 Additionally, the bishops bemoaned that these deplorable developments were ushered in by the new elite of the republic—the intelligentsia.Footnote 4 The letter ended with a battle cry calling youth and the nation's mothers to defend the nascent republic by holding fast to national traditions.
Not only ecclesiastical authority was concerned: shortly after the appearance of the bishops’ letter, Stasys Šalkauskis (1886–1941), Lithuania's leading public intellectual and head of the country's most influential Catholic lay organization, Ateitis [the Future], addressed these same issues. In an April 1928 article entitled “One of my deepest convictions,” Šalkauskis decried the fact that members of the Ateitis student association, particularly university students, were dancing modern dances. To this he added alarm about the excesses of modern female fashion.Footnote 5 Of a mystical and ascetic bent, Šalkauskis worked tirelessly as a scholar, professor, and public intellectual to shape a Catholic nationalist community that would animate Lithuania. Šalkauskis hoped that the young members of Ateitis would form the newly independent nation's core. Thus he was horrified when those very students embraced aspects of modern culture that seemed contrary to Catholic values. Although Šalkauskis did not have the final say on these matters—most students did not fully accept his arguments—this intellectual did provide vocabulary for, and often set the parameters of, the discussion about modern fashion.Footnote 6
Concerns about modern fashion were not limited to male hierarchs and public intellectuals. On a Sunday evening in April 1929, people in the interwar capital, Kaunas, jammed into the University of Lithuania's main hall to take part in a public mock trial of modern fashion. Though there was standing room only, the audience stayed until the five-hour event ended somewhere close to eleven at night.Footnote 7 Mock trials such as this one were a popular form of entertainment and education among the new elites and served as a forum for the discussion of various modern issues, ranging from the educated family to literary trends.Footnote 8 This particular trial was organized by members of the Ateitis movement and reported on by leading newspapers.Footnote 9 Following a well-established format, organizers invited a three-member prosecution to argue against modern fashions from the perspective of morality, hygiene, and aesthetics. The team was made up of prominent public intellectuals: a moral theologian and priest, a female medical doctor, and the father of physical fitness in Lithuania.Footnote 10 Three women made up the defense: an educator and women's rights activist, a medical doctor working on public morality, and an art historian specializing in the history of clothing in Lithuania.Footnote 11 A day after the trial, the three judges—two men and a woman—published their verdict, finding fault with excesses in modern fashions.Footnote 12 The three condemned and pitied those Lithuanians who were duped by the more extreme demands of fashion. These citizens had no critical sense, no taste, nor were they able to resist the suggestive power of the fashion industry. The judges went on to urge Lithuanian society to take a more moderate and rational approach to fashion, in line with the demands of morality, health, aesthetics, and economics. Thus, in just over twelve months, Lithuanian elites and the Catholic hierarchy engaged in a public debate about modern female fashion.
This article studies more closely the debate around women's fashion as it developed in a particular subset of the Catholic population in Lithuania—educated youth in the Ateitis Catholic student association—and examines more deeply the interconnected arguments that were woven together to evaluate what women should wear in interwar Lithuania. The Ateitis organization was influenced by the philosopher, and organization leader, Stasys Šalkauskis; and one of its corporations organized the above-mentioned debate. An analysis of the debates within Ateitis reveals that young Catholics in this northeastern European country aimed to create a modern national and rational woman. Intriguingly, this influential Catholic student organization seemed more interested in national identity and the challenges posed by mass consumer culture than Catholic moral norms, which appear as a secondary, though related, concern.Footnote 13 Women, especially the young, were encouraged to assess the fashion of the day by developing their rational faculties. In this way, debates about fashion intersected with pedagogical strategies. Seeking to build up a modern Catholic female intelligentsia that acknowledged and embraced the new opportunities the first decades of the twentieth century offered, such as suffrage, education, urban living, and participation in civic life, these young women retained more conservative moral norms, all the while questioning consumer culture and debating woman's nature and mission.Footnote 14
I. Debating the Modern Girl
The debates in Lithuania were part of concern that had been simmering all over the globe and was now bubbling over. Before World War I, bishops and Catholic women's leagues alike had probed the morality of women's attire, questioning whether corsets were healthy and whether women should support national fashions. Additionally, they criticized women, especially those from the middle and lower classes, for spending more money than they had trying to keep up with the constantly changing demands of the fashion industry.Footnote 15 After World War I, concerns became more acute as the hemline rose, the décolleté deepened, and short hair was perceived as too masculine. In 1927, for the first time, the hemline rose above the knee: concerns about modesty increased accordingly. Both Benedict XV (r. 1914–1922) and Pius XI (r. 1922–1939) continued to mention the issue in encyclicals.Footnote 16 In 1930 the Sacred Congregation of the Council published instructions for all bishops about immodest female dress.Footnote 17
The clothing under scrutiny, however, was not just clothing. It was the attire of the “Modern Girl,” a new kind of female emerging around the world in the first decades of the twentieth century, referred to variously as a flapper, a Garçonne (France), die neue Frau (Germany), modan garu (Japan), modeng xiaojie (China), kallege ladki (India), or chica moderna (Mexico). Scholars studying her appearance around the globe have located her in every continent.Footnote 18 The Modern Girl could be seen on the street, though she was equally a construct of advertising in a nascent consumer culture.
The Modern Girl embodied change: she challenged traditional roles of women—of daughter, wife, and mother. She was a girl occupying a liminal space between childhood and adulthood: she was no longer a child, but at the same time she was not a mature woman taking on the role of mother or spouse.Footnote 19 She was modern, living in the city, and working outside the home. More importantly, her clothes revealed more of her body than traditional nineteenth-century clothing, in particular arms, cleavage, and legs. She wore makeup (earlier the purview of prostitutes), mass-produced in factories and skilfully marketed to her. She had leisure time, which she spent learning modern dances, like the foxtrot, and she frequented the movies, where she often indulged in morally suspect cinema. Many, and not just Catholics, assumed her dress and her leisure pursuits inevitably made her promiscuous. Thus, the debates about modern clothing that heated up in the 1920s, as more women cut their hair, donned shorter skirts, and applied lipstick, were by no means simply debates about clothing. They were about morality and gender roles, about health and aesthetics, about consumption patterns and nationalism, about class distinctions and pedagogy.
No less important, these discussions arose after World War I. In her classic study of gender in interwar France, Mary Louise Roberts argues persuasively that discussions about women's identity, including fashion, make sense only in the context of the traumatic experiences of the war. In France, the huge loss of men and the return of maimed veterans framed people's perception of female identity, which included what women wore.Footnote 20 Irene Guenther's Nazi Chic, too, begins with World War I, showing how Germany's defeat reinforced and deepened nationalist concerns in the world of fashion. Closer to the Lithuanian experience is that of Ireland, which, like Lithuania, shed its colonial status and emerged as a republic after the war. There, Maryann Valiulis maintains, the new republic and the Catholic Church allied themselves against the Modern Girl in their efforts to construct a traditional Gaelic and Catholic state.Footnote 21 The experiences of loss and gain, of chaos and new possibilities, informed the debates about gender and the Modern Girl. This symbol of change was interrogated by left and right, by nationalists and communists, by governments and concerned citizens.
Few scholarly studies of the Modern Girl, however, engage the religious discourse around fashion head on.Footnote 22 The Catholic hierarchy and lay organizations are usually slipped in as a conservative force critical of modern fashions.Footnote 23 Roberts, for example, does mention French Catholics, highlighting conservative Catholic resistance, particularly to the bobbed hairstyle. She includes provocative instances of priests refusing sacraments to females deemed inappropriately dressed, and observes that some clergy posted bulletins on church doors informing the faithful of this policy.Footnote 24 Valiulis analyzes the arguments made by Irish clergy, concluding that their criticism of modern fashion was part of a larger strategy: they were using “women as the group with which to make their stand not simply against the modern world as is often said but against the forces of modernisation.”Footnote 25 In How Fascism Ruled Women, Victoria de Grazia acknowledges the ambivalent relationship between the Italian Fascist state and the Church. She also notes that organizations such as the Union of Catholic Women were a mix of tradition and modernisation. In her analysis of fashion debates, however, de Grazia includes Catholics only as contributing their prudish morality to the conversation.Footnote 26 In truth, the methodical way in which Italian clergy and laity were involved in regulating what women wore might well warrant de Grazia's negative assessment. Italian dioceses set up vigilance councils that reported on the issue annually, while bishops appraised women's fashions every three years.Footnote 27
Scholars examining women and fashion in Lithuania have analyzed the interwar sartorial changes using material culture and by studying the popular newspapers and magazines of the day.Footnote 28 These studies include, but none are limited to, Catholic publications. A. Venskienė, in her examination of the fear of cosmopolitanism in modern fashion, uses clerical opposition as one of her analytical categories. The clergy's main criticism was moral: modern female fashion was immodest.Footnote 29 G. Bankauskaitė-Sereikienė broadens the scope in her investigation of the interwar image of women, juxtaposing a traditional image with a more liberal one. Catholics fall into the traditional camp, cultivating women who were virtuous, committed to family life, and generally negatively disposed to new fashion trends. The liberal press, on the other hand, fostered the modern cult of the body. In her analysis Bankauskaitė-Sereikienė does, however, note some of the more modern aspects of the traditional Catholic position: Catholic publications also fostered women's education, which led to agency in civil society and work.Footnote 30
II. The Lithuanian Context
Lithuania was one of the new republics that emerged from the fall of the Russian Empire and the end of World War I. According to the 1923 census, the Republic had a population of just over two million, 84% of whom were ethnic Lithuanians. There was a sizeable Jewish minority (7.6%) and a noteworthy number of Poles (3.2%) and Russians (2.5%).Footnote 31 With no empire to mourn or traditional class structure to protect in this new republic, there was an openness to modernization despite daunting challenges. The postwar context was significantly different from that of Western Europe. Lithuanians did not have to grapple with the enormous loss of men, or the return of huge numbers of disfigured war veterans, which constituted an integral part of the discussion of the Modern Girl in France. Nor did Lithuania experience a defeat such as the one that burdened Germany, fuelling anti-Parisian sentiments in the post-war fashion debates.Footnote 32 The end of World War I opened up new possibilities for Lithuania. It mobilized civilians for the project of nation-state building,Footnote 33 a project the Catholic Ateitis organization eagerly advanced.
Land reforms, begun in 1922, wrested land from the largely Polish-speaking gentry who had owned sizeable estates.Footnote 34 The new government laid plans for educating the nation, legislating compulsory schooling for all children in 1922 and opening up the University of Lithuania that same year.Footnote 35 Though Lithuania remained one of the most rural states in Europe, with 80% of the population residing in the countryside in the 1930s, the ethnic Lithuanians who moved to urban centers sought to become the new ruling elite and to lithuanianize towns and cities.Footnote 36 Ultimately, urban centers were the stage for the discussions about fashion, because this was the space where middle class, educated women constructed their new identity.Footnote 37
The interwar period was a time of institutional growth for the Catholic Church, whose adherents made up 86% of the population.Footnote 38 Catholics consolidated opportunities that had been suppressed over the one hundred twenty years of Russian rule. Though latecomers to the national revival begun in the mid-1880s, Catholic clergy, wielding authority among the rural population, quickly become a force to be reckoned with by liberal and social-democratic activists.Footnote 39 While traditional in significant ways, many clergymen supported the formation of a new, youthful, and modern republic, with Catholic organizations as key sites for the construction of a civil society.Footnote 40 Even before independence, from the revolution of 1905 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Catholics expanded their infrastructure: they founded associations, established a Catholic press, and built up a Christian democratic political party. With the declaration of a Lithuanian Republic in 1918, the Catholic Church become more involved in social institutions by running orphanages, kindergartens, old age homes, health centres, and hospitals. The republic had the basic features of a confessional state: religion was taught in schools, the Church registered births, deaths, and marriages, and the state paid the clergy's salaries.Footnote 41 The heavily clerical Christian Democratic party controlled parliament until 1926. The Catholic student federation Ateitis developed into one of the most influential cultural forces in the republic, though it by no means had a monopoly on the political and intellectual life of the nation. There was competition and resistance, often fierce, from socialists, liberals, and right-wing nationalists. This fertile tension between tradition and modernity was exhibited in the debates about fashion.
The name Ateitis, as aforementioned, means “future,” and the organization saw itself as a modernizing, forward-looking force. Thus, it is a particularly fruitful group to analyze in order to find more complicated, nuanced, and critical Catholic responses to modernity—responses that cannot simply be reduced to reaction and tradition. Founded in 1910 by Lithuanian Catholic laymen and clergy during the post-1905 thaw in Tsarist Russia, Ateitis emerged as a lay-led Catholic federation of high school and university students that played a central role in the intellectual and cultural life of interwar Lithuania.Footnote 42 The organization was also an integral part of a larger Catholic network that connected students to adult organizations such as the influential Catholic Women's League, political parties, in particular the Christian Democrats, and the country's only university, in which the Faculty of Philosophy and Theology served as an incubator for the Catholic intellectual elite. Significantly, the organization included both male and female students from its earliest days, an anomaly in most Catholic organizations of the day. Men, however, dominated the organization. The leaders were men, the editors of the common journals were men, and the vast majority of contributors were men. Thus, the organization was a hybrid of mixed and segregated spaces.Footnote 43
In 1921, Pranas Dovydaitis, one of the founding fathers of the organization, established a magazine for girls—Naujoji Vaidilutė (The New Priestess). This became a space for female discussions and the primary site for debating fashion. Running until 1940, Naujoji Vaidilutė was the first Lithuanian language magazine published exclusively for a female audience. It targeted the nascent educated elite with subscriptions growing from 1,500 to 4,500 during the interwar period. Originally aimed at girls, it was reoriented in 1931 and billed as a magazine for female intelligentsia. According to Čepytė and Garnienė, who compare interwar publications for women in Lithuania, the magazine featured many of the most significant female authors of the day, covered the widest range of issues, and gave more attention to feminist issues than other publications.Footnote 44
Young women joining Ateitis in the 1920s were repeatedly, if not incessantly, called, by both male and female authors, to become a new kind of woman.Footnote 45 Chapter meetings, public talks, and the organization's publications were all sites for discussions about what characterized a modern, educated, and activist woman, a female member of the Catholic intelligentsia. Girls joined local high school chapters that could be coeducational or single sex. Chapters held meetings a few times a month, during which members gave presentations on a variety of topics, modern fashion, and dance among them.Footnote 46 On occasion, they invited prominent members of the Catholic community, both men and women, to speak to them.
These new, modern, and educated Catholic women distanced themselves from another clearly identifiable, religiously active, lay woman—the davatka.Footnote 47 This term described a pious woman, usually moralizing and censorious, identified as such in popular culture but also appearing in literature and art.Footnote 48 The davatka’s religiosity was informed by prayer books, devotions, and pilgrimages. Even though she spent time in churches, the davatka was by and large perceived negatively as a hypocritical busybody and gossip.Footnote 49 While promoting the ideal of a modern Catholic woman, Ateitis members repeatedly rebuffed any suggestions that they were davatkas.Footnote 50 They strove for education, enlightenment, and action, not censorious, critical, and generally negative piety.Footnote 51 Thus, even appropriate fashion was discussed as a project that made sense for these new nationalist and rational women, rather than for prudish davatkas.
III. Theological and Ecclesial Sources
It is striking that the Lithuanian Catholic resistance to the demands of the fashion industry rarely used ecclesiastical or theological authorities. In Germany, for example, Catholic newspapers might include flyers stating, “This newspaper offers the Catholic woman fashion that corresponds to the Bishops’ guidelines but still takes into account both the most spoiled and the simplest of tastes.”Footnote 52 In Lithuania this was unusual. In their pastoral letter of 1928, perhaps taking the cue from Vatican documents, Lithuania's bishops did quote seven biblical passages indicting the intelligentsia for giving into the desires of the flesh and leading the rest of the nation on a path of ruin. The Book of Tobit 6:16–17 taught that it is only nonrational animals that give in to their bodily desires. 2 Peter 18–19, which argued that those enslaved to flesh were hypocritically leading others on this same path of perdition, was employed to remind the intelligentsia of its responsibility to lead the nation by example. The other biblical quotations emphasized the gap between the spirit and the flesh, extolling the pure things of the spirit.Footnote 53 Besides the bishops’ letter, however, few magazine articles made reference to biblical or magisterial teaching. In a twelve-page article on whether educated women should blindly follow fashion, the author began with psychology, then noted threats to one's moral life, and only after that mentioned the ecclesial hierarchy's warnings about the dangers of fashion.Footnote 54
Also absent were references to the Blessed Virgin Mary as an example of female modesty.Footnote 55 There are instances of Mary being invoked as an example of sartorial modesty in the United States, Spain, and Ireland.Footnote 56 Nevertheless, it was more common for Catholic authorities, such as the Vatican, to appeal to Catholic female modesty tout court, occasionally supported by a biblical quote. In encyclicals that commented on women's fashions, Benedict XV and Pius XI bemoaned changes that they saw as offending traditional female purity and modesty, and consequently tempting men.Footnote 57 A more detailed instruction “De inhonesto feminarum vestiendi more” (Concerning the disgraceful character of feminine dress), published by the Sacred Congregation of the Council, cited Timothy I, in which women are encouraged to dress modestly.Footnote 58 It is often difficult to account for absence. When one compares Lithuania to, for example, Spain, where, according to M. Vincent, the Blessed Virgin Mary was a core element in exhortations to female purity, differences in church organization stand out.Footnote 59 Unlike Spain, Lithuania did not have a strong tradition of Marian sodalities, or even a robust network of religious orders that might have cultivated a devotion to Mary that highlighted her as an example of chastity and purity.Footnote 60
IV. National Fashion
Nationalist arguments, rather than religious ones, were an integral thread in the fashion debates among Lithuanian Catholics, a concern they shared with their co-believers in Europe and on the other side of the Atlantic. By and large, Catholics saw themselves as integral members of their national communities, therefore, they cultivated claims that their religious values corresponded to essential characteristics of the nation. During World War I, Catholic women in Germany were encouraged to avoid French fashion and support their national fashion industry.Footnote 61 In Ireland, bishops “exhorted mothers to dress their daughters in Irish fabrics,” as a patriotic practice, but also because the local cloth did not accentuate the contours of the female body.Footnote 62 Even in interwar United States, Catholic efforts to present themselves as guardians of authentic American values influenced clothing choices for Catholic students.Footnote 63 Similarly, the Ateitis organization embraced Lithuanian nationalism, identifying it as one of its five core principles. It follows then that the organization's discussions about fashion meshed with larger national concerns. In this the Catholic elite was aligning itself with its own bishops, who had also couched their criticism of modern fashion in a larger argument about the moral fiber of the nation. Though the insistence on an indissoluble bond between Catholicism and the nation-state was strikingly similar to Catholic communities elsewhere, the local details in Lithuania were different.
National concerns in the Ateitis organization's discussion of fashion are evident in three particular ways. First, Ateitis essentialized a nationalist female identity that highlighted purity. Because fashion was linked to ways of talking about female identity, an understanding of how women were idealized is a necessary starting point. Second, clothes were interpreted as a marker of civilisation. Third, female fashion was seen as a site of conflict between national and cosmopolitan forces.
Catholic nationalists in Lithuania operated under the common assumption that their new modern nation-state was obliged to preserve the nation's essential characteristics.Footnote 64 As noted earlier, the Lithuanian bishops, using widespread nationalist and religious tropes, claimed that Lithuanians were renowned for their moral purity.Footnote 65 The bishops were neither original nor alone in voicing this conviction. Catholics and non-Catholics alike insisted that purity, particularly of women, sustained the life of the nation.Footnote 66 Lithuanians engaged in creative “retrievals” of imagined pasts in order to provide their own arguments for sexual purity as an essential national characteristic.
Examples of purity were taken from two repositories, folk culture and romanticized renditions of Lithuania's medieval past, both of which were used by nationalists of all stripes to construct a modern Lithuanian national identity. The Ateitis organization examined the rue motif in Lithuanian folk songs and reclaimed pagan Lithuanian priestesses.
In the very first issue of Naujoji Vaidilutė, the Ateitis magazine for young women, Stasys Šalkauskis, public intellectual, philosopher, and soon to be leader of Ateitis, published an article on the rue highlighting it as a symbol of purity and chastity.Footnote 67 The rue plant was a common image in Lithuanian folk songs, which Lithuanian nationalists had been studying from the nineteenth century as a repository of authentic national identity.Footnote 68 Under Šalkauskis's interpretive lens, the songs about the rue idealized the relationship between men and women, connecting it to the beautiful and thereby raising the relationship to a transcendent realm. The attraction between men and women depicted in Lithuanian folk songs was not simply a base physical need but a spiritual longing. Šalkauskis contrasted this connection between love and beauty as found in Lithuanian folk culture with depictions of love in contemporary culture, which limited descriptions of love to the physical realm. This led him to conclude that traditionally Lithuanians valued the spiritual aspects of love, and that authentic Lithuanian culture transcended beyond the physical to the beautiful and the ideal, to the spiritual and unsullied. In this way, he provided an example from Lithuanian culture that substantiated the bishops’ claims that purity and chastity were national characteristics. Though Šalkauskis articulated an understanding that was widespread, contemporaries, such as J. Baldauskas, in his study of folklore, argued that the rue's symbolism was ambiguous and that Christianity had chastened the originally more physical and erotic aspects of the plant.Footnote 69
Alongside this national characteristic that was located in folk culture, members of Ateitis were presented with another female ideal, this one retrieved from a romanticized pagan past and used without hesitation by Catholics. The magazine for Catholic girls, in which most of the conversations about fashion took place, was entitled Naujoji Vaidilutė—the New Priestess.Footnote 70 The first mention of this figure was in the sixteenth century Chronicles of Prussia, in which the vaidilutė was presented as a virgin consecrated to tending sacred fires in pre-Christian Lithuania. Though her historicity was doubtful, the vaidilutė acquired more details as the story of pagan Lithuania was retold over the centuries by historians, poets, and playwrights. One of the ways that the new Lithuanian republic validated its twentieth-century identity was by emphasizing continuity with the medieval pre-Christian Lithuanian state established by Lithuania's only king, Mindaugas, in the thirteenth century.Footnote 71 The vaidilutė was used as one more link to medieval Lithuania.
In making the link between the pagan empire and the modern republic, Lithuanians, consciously or unconsciously, had to evaluate the impact that the adoption of Christianity had had on the Lithuanian nation. Debates going back to the late 1800s about the implications of the fourteenth-century Christianization of Lithuania continued to simmer during the interwar period.Footnote 72 At stake were features of authentic national character. Did the adoption of Christianity dilute national characteristics, or was it an opportunity for positive developments in the Lithuanian nation? Once again, for the Ateitis organization, Šalkauskis supplied the parameters of the debate by championing the notion that Lithuania was a place of synthesis of Eastern and Western culture. The new priestesses could be said to embody this synthesis – they were indigenous, pagan figures presented at a popular level as historical evidence of modesty, chastity, and devotion and, consequently, used in the twentieth century as ideals for Lithuanian women to emulate.Footnote 73 By naming the magazine for Catholic girls The New Priestess, Dovydaitis encouraged its young female readers to emulate the priestesses of the past by safeguarding “the flame of holy Christian morality in their chaste and pure hearts, a flame that will refresh our nation's life.”Footnote 74 Although the vaidilutė did not serve as a direct example for fashion (she was more likely to appear in dramatic productions—a figure in white robes and long flowing hair crowned with a wreath of rue),Footnote 75 she was the Lithuanian version of idealized female purity rooted in the national past.Footnote 76 It is not difficult to imagine that a short skirt of Parisian provenance and a décolleté could easily threaten this idealized national female.
Clothing, particularly female attire, was also regarded as a marker of civilization.Footnote 77 The new Lithuanian Republic, having left behind the colonial shackles of the Russian Empire, was actively claiming its place among the cultured nations of Europe. Various sectors of Lithuanian society employed a discourse of catching up and of becoming cultured. In this context, clothing was identified as a marker of culture, and, depending on their attire, women walked a fine line between the cultured and the uncivilized. On the one hand, magazine articles noted that uncivilized, barbaric, and wild tribes were characterized by their scanty dress.Footnote 78 Consequently, authors criticized modern fashions that exposed too much of the female body, claiming that this was inspired by primitive peoples.Footnote 79 To follow their fashion cues was to regress, to embrace decadence. Authors aware of the nudist culture that was gaining traction in Germany argued against it, insisting that an appropriate sense of shame was an additional sign of a mature culture.Footnote 80 At the same time, Lithuanian Catholic women demonstrated that they were modern, emancipated, and progressive by avoiding another fashion extreme. There were articles that were quick to point out that Lithuanian women were superior to, for example, Turkish women who were veiled and controlled by men.Footnote 81 Thus, scantily clad natives and veiled Turkish women were used as two foils to frame the emancipated and modern Lithuanian Catholic woman. Lithuanians yearned to join the civilized Western nations, yet many believed that they had to tread carefully between what was deemed authentic cultural development and the dangers of cultural decadence and degradation.
No one, however, actually considered it possible or desirable to simply turn back the clock and encourage women to don the traditional garb of the Lithuanian peasant on a daily basis.Footnote 82 Thus, Lithuanian women were left questioning how their attire could or should be national. A. Venckienė, in her analysis of thirty interwar Lithuanian publications, argues that the cosmopolitan nature of modern fashion was the most important issue in the interwar debates about fashion.Footnote 83 Correspondents in a wide array of publications argued that Lithuanian women were duty-bound to maintain national character by shunning cosmopolitan, non-Lithuanian clothing. Again, Lithuanian Catholics made arguments that echoed those of nationalists in Germany, Italy, and Ireland, but some of the local nuances were different. Like other nationalities, Lithuanians were hard-pressed to formulate exactly what a national Lithuanian fashion should look like. The Germans, according to Guenther, railed against French fashion after their defeat in the war but struggled to articulate exactly how German fashion should embody Germanness.Footnote 84 Similarly, Lithuanians found it easier to reach a consensus that styles emanating from Paris should be resisted because they were cosmopolitan rather than to come up with national alternatives. Lithuanian authors raised questions about the feasibility of incorporating traditional ethnic motifs, such as tulips, in modern outfits or of making use of Lithuanian linen in the production of dresses.Footnote 85 Members of Ateitis were expected to master a modicum of traditional crafts; they were instructed to learn to weave sashes and master needlepoint.Footnote 86 Here the concern was both to harness traditional aesthetics, which, the argument went, better suited a Lithuanian woman's complexion and, additionally, supported the national economy.Footnote 87
Woven into this debate were questions about class.Footnote 88 Most members of the Ateitis organization had rural or at least small-town roots. The organization aimed to shape them into elite leaders of the nation: they were destined for the middle class. In fact, Skrupskelis, in his comprehensive history of Ateitis, includes the debates about fashion in a chapter that highlights the effort the organization put into gentrifying members by teaching them basic etiquette and hygiene.Footnote 89 Ateitis members also had an important role to play in the cultivation of sartorial tastes. They regarded rural women both as a class that had to be enlightened and as the repository of national identity.Footnote 90 Rural women were considered more beautiful because they retained classic elements of Lithuanian beauty, such as the long blonde braid; moreover, they were physically fit because of the time spent outside.Footnote 91 Consequently, authors questioned whether or not rural women should embrace modern fashion or retain elements that referenced traditional costumes, such as homespun cloth or kerchiefs, as opposed to the modern and urban hat. Young members of Ateitis were embroiled in these disputes because they were encouraged to return to their villages during the summer to organize educational projects. Members, however, were warned that when they returned to their homes after their time of study in urban centres, they were conduits of fashion. Rural women would follow these students’ fashion examples, thus members had to be prudent in their sartorial choices.Footnote 92
V. Rational Fashion
While concern for fashion that supported Lithuanian national aspirations in the interwar period paralleled similar anxieties in other national contexts, what appears to be more unique in the Ateitis conversation was the use of the term rational (Lithuanian: racionalus) in debates about clothing.
Calls for rational dress could be found at various levels of the Ateitis organization: they appeared in articles of Naujoji Vaidilutė; the phrase was used in the final judgement in the mock public trial; rational dress was a topic at meetings of local chapters of Ateitis. The use of reason was often presented as an antidote to the irrational, hypnotic power of fashion.
Calls for rational dress in interwar Lithuania did not propose a particular style of clothing, but rather offered a principle for making sartorial choices. The call for rational dress does not seem to hearken back to English societies for rational dress active in the 1880s, which questioned the rationality of corsets and other body-modifying attire or the related Reformkleidung movement emanating from Germany.Footnote 93 Rather, rational dress claimed to be predicated on a proper understanding of women's nature and a suspicion of consumer culture. Promoting rational dress was part of the Ateitis organization's project of shaping a new Catholic woman for Lithuania. The word rational is particularly prominent in dicussions about fashion in the Ateitis-controlled publications aimed at the nation's future leaders.
What is intriguing is the pairing of the words rational and fashion. No doubt, Catholics have a long tradition of thinking about faith and reason, and the influence of neo-Thomism is very probable, but much more difficult to ascertain.Footnote 94 The application here to fashion and by extension to women, however, deserves attention. The fact that other terms such as hypnotic power, suggestibility, and modern masses are used in conjunction with the term rational, intimates that this discussion is framed by modern concerns regarding the rise of mass consumer culture
In November 1927, Šalkauskis gave a talk to a chapter of Ateitis university students specializing in Family Studies. Shortly thereafter, he published a summary in Židinys, a Catholic intellectual monthly, and a lengthier report in Naujoji Vaidilutė, both entitled “Women's interior liberation as the beginning of her true emancipation.”Footnote 95 In the ninth of fourteen key points, Šalkauskis underlined that when women uncritically yielded to the hypnotic powers of fashion, they revealed that they were not conducting themselves according to rational principles. This brief article was quoted by other contributors to Naujoji vaidilute,Footnote 96 and was included in the 1933 handbook of the Ateitis Federation, the Ideology.Footnote 97 In this way, the notion that women should be deliberate and rational in their fashion choices made its way through the organization's publications.
The intriguing call to use rational faculties intersected with discussions about women's essential nature. Many authors attempted to understand why it was that women, and not men, seemed to get caught up in the fickle world of fashion. There was a general consensus that women, by their very nature, were more attuned to beauty.Footnote 98 This aesthetic inclination, however, could have negative consequences when coupled with what were considered natural female weaknesses. Women, so the argument went, were more sensitive to novelty, often lacked a real understanding of their personal dignity, and were more emotional.Footnote 99 The appreciation of beauty had to be cultivated and rationally channelled.
In addition to these natural feminine frailties, authors claimed that in the modern era, a new danger had arisen: the hypnotic and suggestive power of the crowd. The vocabulary employed by social psychologists of the era—words such as masses, crowds, hypnotic power, suggestibilityFootnote 100—found its way into discussions about fashion. One of the most popular social psychologists of the day, the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931), with whose work Šalkauskis was clearly familiar,Footnote 101 had argued that crowds, a novel and dangerous phenomenon of the modern age of the masses, imperilled both the individual and social order. When people gathered together in one place, individuals were in danger of being subjected to the collective mind: their individual will was vulnerable to suggestibility. The contagious psychology of the crowd threatened rationality and individuality, thereby jeopardizing originality and creativity.Footnote 102 Citizens of a new republic emerging from colonialism were also perhaps more wary of novel forms of bondage.
A. Kliorytė made use of these ideas in an article entitled “The Characteristics of a Psychology of Fashion.”Footnote 103 In this piece, which was initially a seminar presentation for her university class, Kliorytė insisted that people were vulnerable to the power of suggestion, a power that had been amplified in the modern era. Not only were people naturally inclined toward novelty, they also desired to blend in with the majority. Kliorytė followed this line of argument to conclude that urban dwellers were more susceptible to following the crowd because they not only lived in an environment saturated with external stimulants, but they also were encircled by masses sporting the latest Parisian fashions. Women, Kliorytė concluded, were more likely to fall prey to this power of suggestion because they were naturally more emotional and more concerned with their outward appearance. Significantly, by harnessing modern social sciences to analyze the spread of modern fashion, Kliorytė and other authors turned to nontraditional solutions for this growing crisis. Echoing Šalkauskis, she called for women's emancipation through their use of reason.
Reason could be employed in a number of ways. The judges in the mock public trial recounted at the beginning of this article offered three categories by which to assess modern fashion—morality, aesthetics, and hygiene. Moral issues, such as how much of the body to leave uncovered or whether particular styles unnecessarily aroused male desire, were a constant worry. Nevertheless, concern over fashion was never reduced to morality narrowly construed. Notably, debates about fashion emphasized other issues, such as aesthetics and hygiene, as if to underscore that women who made the right choices were not so much prudes as they were enlightened, cultured, rational, and emancipated.
Rationality was applied to aesthetic concerns in both practical and abstract ways. Girls were reminded that they should choose the color, fabrics, and styles that suited their body type and complexion, rather than simply aping the latest fashion.Footnote 104 There were also more theoretical considerations of beauty that highlighted the importance of harmony and proportion as universal and eternal aesthetic principles. E. Petrauskaitė assumed that contemporary fashions were rejecting these principles.Footnote 105 Still others argued that only through the cultivation of inner beauty could women aspire to outer beauty.Footnote 106 Thus, fashion could be seen positively as a site in which women could create beauty.Footnote 107
Health and hygiene were also frequently discussed. Girls needed to wear clothing that was appropriate for the season and the climate. Shoes were not to disfigure the natural contours of the foot.Footnote 108 There was no consensus on the use of facial powders and make-up. Some thought moderate use of make-up could cover up naturally occurring blemishes, while others saw make-up as a falsification of self.Footnote 109 Detractors of the use of make-up were convinced that those women who used it had low self-esteem.
VI. Rational and National Dress as Part of a Larger Pedagogical Strategy
The concerns about fashion dovetailed with, and revealed in concrete detail, the Ateitis organization's larger pedagogical project. The turn to nation and rationality rather than, for example, magisterial authority or teaching is telling in this regard. Ateitis was in the business of forming an elite that was on a national mission, conceptualized historically and philosophically.
It was Šalkauskis, again, who most clearly set the parameters for thinking about the mission of Lithuania's elites on a broader historical canvas. In an early work, Sur les confins de deux mondes (On the Boundary of Two Worlds), published in 1919 in Switzerland, Šalkauskis envisioned Lithuania as a site of synthesis between the East, with its conservative attachment to tradition, mysticism, and contemplation, and the West—active, rational, and innovative.Footnote 110 Adapting to Lithuanian history an idea popular among Russian thinkers, Šalkauskis went on to explain the historical dynamics by which this synthesis was to be achieved.Footnote 111 Šalkauskis imagined the relationship of the elites to the masses anthropomorphically: the nation was a collective individual, with the intelligentsia directing the masses, just as the intellect steers the body. The task of the elites was to identify national characteristics that were embodied by the masses and to nurture these characteristics in a new era. Insisting that Lithuania‘s development had been arrested when the ties between the people and the educated elites had been severed with the formation in the sixteenth century of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Šalkauskis saw the Republic of his day as the new opportunity to fulfill Lithuania's destiny. Modern educated elites, such as Ateitis—formed the vanguard of this national mission. In the realm of fashion, young women in the Ateitis movement were expected to embody Lithuanian traits, from moral ones, such as purity, to material ones, such as the use of folk motifs in their attire.
But even more importantly, the calls for a rational approach to fashion were a practical manifestation of the contours of the philosophical anthropology that the Ateitis organization espoused. Broadly speaking, Ateitis cultivated a Christian anthropology shared with most other Catholics that privileged the spiritual and intellectual aspects of human nature over the material and the physical.Footnote 112 This was found in Šalkauskis's own thought, and articulated in a popular and simplified manner in the discourse of Ateitis.Footnote 113 The main features of this Christian anthropology, in which the physical body both reflected an individual's spiritual nature and was subordinate to the spirit and the intellect, were echoed in articles penned by members of the organization. B. Mejeraitė rallied her young female readers to embrace with purposefullness the opportunity women now had to hone their intellect. In a speech given at at the Ateitis Jubilee Congress, S. Ladygienė warned girls that they needed to rise above material concerns to spiritual ones, bemoaning that the modern era exalted the material world through sexualization and the attention given to leisure. Ladygienė, too, saw education and the development of the intellect as antidotes to these modern deviations.Footnote 114
As leaders and members of Ateitis grappled with the nature of the new modern Catholic woman, what they did emphasize was the development of women's rational faculties.Footnote 115 Although, as many argued, women were (to be) more sensitive, nurturing, and emotional, they still had to harness their intelligence, even in such seemingly mundane decisions as choosing what to wear.
VII. Conclusions
Modern fashion was not the key preoccupation of the Ateitis organization. Nevertheless, young educated Catholic women in Lithuania did not skirt this modern issue, and together with so many others around the globe in the 1920s and 1930s, they debated what women should wear. The debates involved all levels of the Catholic community and men had much to say. Moreover, the discussions reveal webs of intertwined ideas and networks through which the ideas circulated. In a small country with a single university one can practically see the movement of ideas. One finds Šalkauskis arguing for rationality in dress at a student meeting; the talk's summary is published in two Catholic publications, and is later included in a list of suggested readings for local chapters. The same phrase crops up as a topic at youth group meetings and is echoed in the public mock trial. Thus, a convincing line can be drawn from Šalkauskis to discussions among teenage girls in provincial Lithuanian towns.
Although the Vatican's letter to the internuncio in Lithuania in 1928 seemed to voice a decidedly moral concern regarding what modern girls were wearing, this study shows that as this matter was addressed at the local level by the Lithuanian Catholic elite, it was woven tightly into a more complex cloth of national interests and new pedagogical concerns for shaping modern Catholic women. Women were expected to embody both continuity and change, by maintaining tradition and building a modern nation.Footnote 116 Like many of their Catholic counterparts in other countries, Ateitis members saw women's sartorial choices as an element in building up the nation-state. Discussions among Catholic elites about what women were wearing placed Lithuania on the map as a cultured nation. What women wore either fostered or undermined the nation's identity. Not only did clothing say something about the nation, it also said something about the individual. As a youth organization concerned with formation, Ateitis articulated what a new and modern Catholic woman should be in a fledgling republic eager to shake off its colonial past. The organization challenged its members to emancipate themselves as individuals by cultivating rationality, even in their sartorial choices, an approach not commonly found in discussions about fashion in other Catholic countries.
