Feathered Women and Persecuted Birds: The struggle against the Plumage Trade, c. 1860–1922

Abstract

In the personality of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, undisputed mistress of Whig society in the two closing decades of the eighteenth century, were combined a heady mixture of formidable intellectual qualities and a recklessness and frivolity extraordinary even by the standards of the day. Leaving aside her involvement in high politics, the ambivalence of her personal relationships and her adventures at the card table, she would be memorable alone as a fashion icon whose excesses, particularly where her milliner and coiffeuse were concerned, were legendary. From the moment she appeared in public with a three-foot hair tower created with pads of horsehair and set off with an exotic arrangement of stuffed birds and ostrich feathers, female society high and low began its lengthy love affair with feathers.1 Fashions might ebb and flow, yet feathers, in some form or another, would intermittently adorn women's clothes (and the uniforms of some units of the Army) for the next century or so. This article is largely concerned with the efforts of various individuals and groups to bring an end to the trade in exotic plumage which fed upon the demand for the feathers of birds from tropical and subtropical territories.