The Queens County Bird Club will be meeting at the Alley Pond Environmental
Center, 228-06 Northern Blvd Douglaston, NY 11362 >Map of location<
<http://goo.gl/8cnmjT> at 8:00 pm this Wednesday, May 15, 2019. Free
admission. Refreshments served.
Please join QCBC in welcoming author Tessa Boase, who is visiting us from Great
Britain!
For half a century, from the 1870s to the 1920s, women on both sides of
the Atlantic were gripped by a fashion craze that decreed all hats should be
laden with feathers. Not just feathers, but wings, bird and whole bodies of
birds – often several birds at a time. Species the world over were slowly
brought to the brink of extinction, and all for the sake of millinery.
Campaigning on behalf of the birds was a small band of angry woman with a
splendidly simple goal. They were going to stamp out the fashion for feathers
in hats.
The ‘feather fight’, as it became known, was bitter, vicious and
un-sisterly. Wearers of the ‘bird hat’ were attacked as narcissists and
slaughterers. Edwardian fashion victims hit back, calling their female critics
‘plumage cranks’ and ‘feather faddists’. Why shouldn’t emancipated women wear
what they wanted?
Leading the battle in Britain was a fearsome woman who has not been remembered
by history, and yet for 50 years was the driving force behind the Royal Society
for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), today Britain’s biggest conservation
charity. Her name was Etta Lemon. Where she led in 1889, the Audubon Society
would follow.
When social historian Tessa Boase told the RSPB she wanted to write their
early story, they refused to let her revisit their archives. To a former
investigative journalist and Oxford English graduate, this was a challenge she
could not resist . . . Join her to hear the intriguing untold story of women,
birds, hats – and vote.
Copies of Tessa’s book, Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather: Fashion, Fury and
Feminism – Women’s Fight for Change, will be available for sale after the
meeting.
Hope to see you Wednesday!
Nancy Tognan
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Vice President, Queens County Bird Club
See http://www.qcbirdclub.org <http://www.qcbirdclub.org/> for more
information on trips, speakers, and other events.
See our 'Birding Maps & Locations' page for directions to and info about many
local birding hotspots
* QCBC is a tax exempt, charitable organization {501c3}. *
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