Contemporary sources reveal that men were both the ones doing the retouching and the ones instigating this trend. Not only did retouching allow women to fit a man’s ideas of shape and form, but some women also blamed men’s tastes for the expectation of impossibly small waists in the first place. In Evening Press a woman named “Sylvia” was quoted regarding woman’s beauty standards:
“Sylvia”… roundly charges the men with having brought into existence and perpetuated the fashion of tight-lacing. She declares that whenever she uttered a strong protest in the journal she edits against “squeezing the waist,” she has invariably received letters from men praising a “cypress waist…” “Sylvia” attributes the tight-lacing of women to the idea imbibed in intimacy “that their first duty is to make themselves pleasing to the eyes of men.”
Fashion allowed women agency, but women understood that they lived in a male-dominated society and that this culture impacted how they interacted with their bodies.
Given this, women still had a place in the world of photograph retouching, as photography opened doors to new career opportunities for them. As reported in the Chicago Tribune on August 2, 1874: “Photography is an art requiring deft skill, delicate manipulation, and an artistic eye; these qualifications render it a profession particularly fitted for women to follow…” As a result, women occupied every sphere of the photography industry, from selling photographs, planning and executing them, and even editing them. Retouching was also one of the best paid positions in the industry. The newspaper reports that “…good negative retouchers [could] easily [obtain] salaries of $18 a week…” This $18 a week was substantially higher than most wages women would be given during this time. For example, a family sewer from Chicago in 1877 would have been making $1 to $1.25 a day ($7 to $8.75 a week if they worked 7 days). A first class dressmaker from Washington D.C. in 1875 was only making $1.50 per day ($10.50 a week if they worked 7 days). Teachers in Michigan in 1872 would have only made $250 for the entire school year. While these are not averages and more skilled professionals may have been paid higher wages, it gives a comparative analysis of just how much more women could make in photograph retouching.
From this research, it becomes clear that people’s thoughts around their image have not changed much in the last 200 years. The Victorian era photoshop was done to adhere to fashion and societal standards, many of which seemed to have been propagated by men. At the same time, photography and photo retouching gave women a new opportunity to make a substantial amount of money. Print media altered the ways in which people interacted with art, and photographs continued to transform this. While there are both negatives and positives around photo retouching, it does make me wonder what retouching would look like if Victorian people hadn’t normalized the trend.
