Resumen de Dress reform and the feminine ideal: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the “coming girl”
Although largely overlooked by scholars, “Our Girls” (1872) was Elizabeth Cady Stanton ‘s most popular lyceum lecture and one of her most radical public speeches. Simultaneously appropriating and subverting both prevailing conceptions of femininity and the rhetorical conventions of the lyceum, Stanton disguised a radical critique of traditional gender roles as an entertaining primer on child‐rearing. In “Our Girls,” Stanton assumed a motherly persona, yet she addressed the most fundamental causes of women's oppression: artificial standards of fashion and feminine beauty. In the process, she supplied an alternative to traditional notions of femininity: an emancipatory vision of the “coming girl,” whose intelligence, strength, and independence would define her beauty.
