The Inked Ladies. Tattooed Women of the Victorian Era
Would it surprise you to learn that 59% of American women have at least one tattoo? That’s compared to the 41% of American men. Perhaps unsurprising is that millennials are the generation most likely to have them. For a practice that was once considered particularly taboo for women, we have quickly made up for the lost time. At the end of the 19th century, women with tattoos were almost unheard of, but they did exist! Some women had a small and dainty tattoo hidden away, never to be seen. Meanwhile others made tattoos a career.
Quick note: this article focuses on women in the USA. I look forward to learning about women and tattooing elsewhere!
Tattooed Ladies
In the past, having one tattoo was rebellious, being almost completely covered was something else, which was true for both men and women. But it probably goes without saying, it would have been even more so for women. Those women that were covered from ankle to wrist could hide it without anyone ever knowing.
Curiosity Museums and Sideshows
In the United States, at the end of the 19th and in the early-to-mid 20th centuries, a popular form of entertainment was curiosity, or dime, museums that became destinations in their own right when visiting places like New York City or Coney Island. There were also sideshows that traveled with circuses, visiting Small Town, USA.
Both types of shows featured “exotic” people that were gawked at by a paying public. The quotations around exotic are, of course, purposeful. These were often people who were exploited by the show’s owner, people who were different, physically or culturally. For each of the individuals, placed in a row on a dais above the audience, elaborate backstories were often fabricated and designed to be as intriguing as possible.
The manufactured backstories of the Tattooed Lady generally seemed to provide a justification as to why she was tattooed. She couldn’t say that she simply liked having her body decorated. Instead, there was often a kind of victimhood, a life-or-death situation, like being a hostage of Native Americans. Towards the end of the 19th century, when conflicts with Indigenous Peoples were still fresh in the public psyche, it was an “us vs. them” mentality that played on the audience’s sympathy.
There was also a sexual element to the Tattooed Lady. First, they often wore revealing outfits. Revealing for the time, that is. This being the waning days of the Victorian era, respectable women were generally covered from wrist to ankle. When a Tattooed Lady was at work, they wore short, strappy dresses or bodices and shorts that showed off their legs, arms, and upper chests.
Secondly, a Tattooed Lady was “not like other girls”. She was a woman who, by the nature of her career choice, appeared to live according to her own rules and seemed to have an independence other women didn’t have. Tattoos implied the opposite of what society (of any time period) dictated: obedience, modesty, and chastity. Instead, the Tattooed Lady could be seen as flouting conventional ideas, and that always includes sex.
Without going too deep down the rabbit hole, there were also practical, economic reasons why a woman ended up as a tattooed performer. There were only a few options open to women who needed to earn an income and it was something different from the traditional prescribed route. In many cases, there was a sense of adventure as it allowed her to travel around the country when she might not otherwise have had the chance.
The OG Tattooed Lady
It would be hard to know, who was officially the first Tattooed Lady, but there are two women who vied for the title: Irene Woodward and Nora Hildebrandt.
Irene Woodward
Irene Woodward has the distinction of being the earliest documented Tattooed Lady. As written in Amelia Klem Osterud’s The Tattooed Lady: A History, Woodward was highlighted in The New York Times on March 19, 1882, with the headline “The Tattooed Woman”. The article described her as “bashful about being looked at the way, never having worn the costume in the presence of men before”. She is appropriately, almost modestly, shy being on display. It goes on to include some of her art:
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