"Novelty in entertaining ... easily and artistically arranged": middle-class women and themed parties in America, 1880-1915

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, American middle-class women frequently read about and participated in elaborate themed parties. The enthusiasm for these themed parties reflected general Victorian cultural preferences for methods of symbolic communication through objects, an aesthetic of elaborate visual detail, and a partiality to imitation and theatricality. However, the emphasis on both artisticness and novelty in prescriptive literature relating to themed parties reveals that themed parties also mediated between traditional and modern conceptions of female roles. Although not all middle-class women hosted or attended themed parties, a large proportion were exposed through the popular press and commercial merchandising to the symbolic language communicated by the parties and the messages about womanhood that they conveyed.