Murderous Millinery
In 1880, women’s hats start getting ridiculous.
They’re sometimes called ‘three-storey hats’ for their sheer scale. Two feet wide, three feet tall. They need hatpins up to 18-inches long just to keep them in place.
And the audacity doesn’t stop with their size. They’re also called ‘picture hats’ because of their overwhelming ornamentation. Naturally that includes bows, flowers, lace, and tulle, but that’s not the half of it. You can have a whole garden in still-life on your head, with spiders, water beetles, caterpillars, lizards and toads.
And what emerges as the most important decoration is feathers: great sprays of plumes, tufts and elegantly arranged bouquets of wings. Ostrich feathers are lengthened strand by strand - by hand. One plume needs more than 8,500 knots and more than a day’s work for a woman and two dainty-fingered children. For which they make about 3 cents.
When even artificially extended ostrich plumes aren’t gaudy enough, entire stuffed birds start perching on hats - sometimes a whole little menagerie. As an experiment, a bank clerk walked through uptown Manhattan one afternoon in 1886 and made note of all the species he saw worn: he counted 40.
There’s a fashion-focused arms race to always outdo last year’s excess. It’s about culture, it’s about class, but it’s also a rare avenue of self-expression for women. Every other part of their lives has been effectively codified by the patriarchy, but hats? They can still make a statement with their hats.
Millinery, the art of women’s hats, becomes one of the most lucrative markets in the world, making 20 million pounds a year (204 million pounds today). That’s bad news if you’re a bird - it’s estimated 5 million are killed a year for their feathers. But it’s especially bad if you’re an egret.
Great and Snowy Egrets develop tragically beautiful plumage during breeding season: long, delicate, soft white feathers that hang down from their backs. ‘Aigrettes’ or ‘ospreys’ as they’re known to milliners, become a hot ticket hat trapping. They’re horrifically costly - monetarily and morally. One ounce would run you $32 in 1903, making egret feathers twice as valuable as gold. For that one ounce, four egrets have to die - at least. Because aigrettes only show up in breeding season, murdered birds often leave behind broods of chicks to starve. But anyone with a loaded gun and a lack of scruples has a big opportunity.
Like David ‘Egret’ Bennett, who avicides his way across Central America, Mexico and Baja California with his ‘team of shooters’, wiping out populations of egrets and getting rich doing it. He knows by the time he’s done there may literally be no egrets left, but he “never found any occupation as profitable”. A single hunting trip could net him the equivalent of $70,000 today.
In Florida, warden Guy Bradley is trying hopelessly to impose new bird protection laws when he comes across a plumage hunter, his sons, and a bunch of dead egrets. He says they’re under arrest. They shoot him point blank. He may be the first person to be murdered over bird conservation.
Things are already looking dire. Worse, in 1911, the zenith of the picture hat, Millinery Magazine declares that ospreys are in vogue. It looks like any remaining egrets are out of luck.
But that year also turns into a turning point. North America has been enacting conservation laws since 1900. Now the UK joins them, with the vocal help from the women of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, or RSPB. And they have a new weapon courtesy of Australian ornithologist and photographer Arthur Mattingley. He gives them a heartbreaking image of orphaned nestling egrets, open-mouthed for food that will never arrive. The RSPB takes a page from the suffragettes, also out in force, and organize sandwich-board protests featuring the tragic photo. Of course, being conservative women of a certain stripe, they wouldn’t be caught dead personally imitating the suffragettes on the streets. So they hire men to protest for them. Regardless, the imagery does its job - it’s considered the most effective message in 20 years of RSPB lobbying. The egret feather in a hat is seen more and more as a ‘badge of cruelty’.
There’s no one thing that saves the egret. There’s the RSPB, for sure, along with other conservation groups worldwide. The fickle finger of fashion starts to point elsewhere. In 1912, the plumage act in the US puts a blanket ban on plumage and skins of wild birds. Women disembark in New York harbour wearing chapeaux they just spent a small fortune on in Paris, and customs officials are there to greet them and strip the hats of feathers. The first World War plays a strange part - suddenly ostentatious headgear carries a self-centred message at odds with the ‘we fight as one’ ethos of wartime patriotism.
It’s difficult - borderline offensive - to find a silver lining in the almost-annihilation of the egret. Whatever optimistic ends, the means don’t begin to justify the slaughter. But if you are looking for more than a cautionary tale of greed and callousness, it’s in there. Those nearly weightless feathers tipped the scales on a lot of thinking around conservation. And that can still be seen today. The RSPB, founded to combat feathers-for-fashion, is the largest nature conservation charity in the UK. Ditto the Audubon society in the US, the oldest bird conservation organization in the world, which is still going strong. It should also be said, while women’s fashion started the whole mess in the first place, it was women who founded both of these venerable organizations.
The ripple effect from the poor egrets out into the world was massive and multifaceted. And if you go to Louisiana, you can still see one of those ripples in person.
One of the unexpected allies of the egret was Edward Avery McIlhenny - the spicy combo of conservationist and tabasco sauce heir. Seeing the egret populations being decimated, he dedicated 175 acres of his own land on Avery Island to protecting them. And he didn’t stop there. He’d actually go out with search parties along the gulf coast to find any remaining egrets, capture them, bring them back, acclimatize them to their safe new home, then let them loose to migrate. Other egrets followed them back to his oasis. Bird City was born. By 1911, 100,000 egrets were nesting there. It set such a shining example that Theodore Roosevelt called it "the most noteworthy reserve in the country.” Over a hundred years later you can still visit this monument to the darkest time in the history of the egret, and bask in the happy ending.
A huge amount of this info came from Tessa Boase and her book Mrs. Pankhurst’s Purple Feather.
In it, Boase weaves together the stories of two contrasting women at the heads of social movements in the early 1900s. Etta Lemon at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and Emmaline Pankhurst with the Suffragettes. They’re both pushing for progress but their politics couldn’t be more different.
The book is a miracle in terms of depth of research. I kept thinking back to Devil in the White City, in that it feels like you’re reading a novel, it just all happens to be true down to the smallest detail. And it feels effortless (and so compelling) in practice, which might be the most amazing part. So, if you’d like a much deeper dive on this tumultuous time in politics and fashion, do yourself a favour and read it.