Bloomer and Basketball: From the New York Public Library Collection They don’t know exactly when thi

Bloomer and Basketball: From the New York Public Library Collection They don’t know exactly when this photo of “Girls’ Basket Ball at the University of Illinois” was taken by the shop of Underwood and Underwood, but we get some hints from the fashion: the 1920s. Basketball became THE sport for young women in schools in the late 19th Century as it was much more fun than the slow form of gymnastics which was the only other activity they got to indoors. Notice their woolen bloomers went to the knee and they wore them with tights which tells us it was not yet the 1930s when shorts and bare legs were finally considered normal for girls to wear for active sports. Both girls have bobbed hair which was convenient for sports. Such short cuts were considered shocking on women in the very late teens, so a very young woman wouldn’t have chosen it that early unless she meant to shock her folks. But they were mainstream by the mid 1920s in most places. By the late 1920s practically every woman considered whether to bob or not. Many did, but many others decided they looked better with long hair, or preferred the variety of ways she could pin up long hair over the single look of the bob. By the 1930s, slightly longer hair became more popular probably because it allowed for that variety, and the days of hair half way down a women’s back did not return. This photo was published by Yale University Press as part of “The Pageant of America: A Pictorial History of the United States” which offered the earliest photographic images to the latest and came out in the mid 1920s. It is part of the New York Public Library’s prints and photographs online catalog of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs which you can find here: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-bbdd-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 -- source link

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