HistFic Lesson #2: The Connection Between the Whaling Industry & 1900s Fashion 🐋
Today I’m going to talk about a bit of the fascinating historical research I’ve been doing for my current work-in-progress novel, which is a speculative historical romance that primarily takes place in 1900s Los Angeles.
As was the case with some of the most interesting historical research discoveries that helped me write the book I’m querying, it all started with me asking a very simple question about how realistic it would be for my characters to do a specific activity together in Santa Barbara in the year 1906—and it sent me down a rabbit hole of revelations concerning the very important connection between fashion and the whaling industry in the 1900s.
I’m personally fond of visiting Santa Barbara, which is a bit of a long drive for anyone living in the Los Angeles area, but it’s absolutely worth taking a day or weekend trip to drive 2 hours north (with traffic, mostly lol) to the coastal city. My older sister attended UC Santa Barbara, so when I was in high school and college, I often visited her and we still go up to visit SB together every now and then. When I was a teenager, I also went to nearby Ventura to whale watch for the first time and sail out to the Channel Islands—just the first of several whale watching boat rides I’ve enjoyed in the years since. But as much as I enjoy being in Santa Barbara and the ocean, the idea to set part of my book in Santa Barbara didn’t occur to me until after I did a bit of research on LA history.
Although I studied 19th century development of big California cities in one of my university history courses, I still didn’t know the full history of how Los Angeles was founded and developed—which was essential for me to know about in order to faithfully build the historical world of my current book WIP. Early on in my research of LA history, I was surprised to discover that while LA was still being built and not quite the major city it is today, Santa Barbara was actually one of the biggest and most prominent settler cities in Alta California in the 18th & 19th centuries (when California belonged at first to New Spain and, later, Mexico). Santa Barbara was a major port back then and today the city is still rich with the history of that colonial period in its architecture and in its preservation and celebration of Spanish and Mexican culture. So it’s not hard to understand why a beautiful seaside city with political and economic importance is where Californios (the oldest and wealthiest owners of land in Alta California) chose to settle.
So I chose for the male lead character in my speculative historical romance book to have been born and raised in Santa Barbara and descended from a French-Mexican Californio family. However, he’s not wealthy for the reasons you might think he is—and he didn’t grow up wealthy for reasons that I referenced in my last histfic article [in summary: many Californio families lost status, land, and wealth once ownership of the state was given over to the U.S. and Mexican-owned properties were seized by the government and sold to Anglo settlers].
This is all relevant to my book’s plot because at some point the two romantic leads are going to spend time together in my MMC’s home city of Santa Barbara. And while I was planning out the plot of the book, I texted my sister one day, only half-jokingly, “What is a romantic date activity that a couple can do in Santa Barbara in the 1900s? Whale watching?”
Imagine my horror when I actually did the research on a whim to find that not only was whale watching absolutely not a thing in the year 1906—but that this was the era when whales in Goleta (current day location of UCSB) and Santa Barbara were being brutally killed and hunted in numbers far exceeding any other period in North American history. And whaling was of course the method used to create the fashion and resources we think of as iconic and emblematic of the Belle Époque period—most famously, shapely corsets made with whalebone.
Whaling was a multi-million dollar industry in the late 19th century and produced products and resources, such as:
oil rendered from blubber
spermaceti: high grade oil that can be turned into candle wax, from a cavity in sperm whales’ heads
baleen: a plate that hangs over the upper jaw to strain food from seawater—used to make corsets, stiffen collars, make hooped frames for skirts; umbrellas/parasols, riding crops, brushes (e.g. hairbrushes & brushes used for chimney and street sweeping)
ambergris: produced in the intestine of sperm whales, used to preserve the scents of perfumes, occasionally added to wine as an aphrodisiac
The practice of whaling actually began nearly a millennium ago and civilizations all over the world hunted whales, many cultures using all parts of the whale for resources, tool-making, and ceremonial purposes—such as the Chumash tribe indigenous to Santa Barbara, who were known to have taken advantage of the occasional whale carcass that washed ashore and respected the whale’s sacrifice by using all the bones and whale parts to make tools and resources.
In the 1700s and 1800s, the European and American whaling industry boomed and demand for whale parts skyrocketed—and the fashion industry was largely responsible for this. As whaling ships and whale-hunting weaponry (harpoons & bombs), became much more advanced, it became easier to kill whales and in larger numbers than ever seen before in human history. Towards the end of the 19th century, particularly in North America, the bloodshed and carnage increased and profits continued to fuel the economy.
Despite the advancements in technology and weaponry, whaling in the early 1900s was very dangerous, bloody, and some hunters even died while just loading the mechanized harpoons to kill whales. With so much violence associated with markers of the fashionable elite, with wealth, and with “modernity”—none of which consumers are ever really prompted to think about after whale oil, whalebone, and other whale parts get manufactured into products that are shipped and delivered right into department stores and romanticized in advertisements—it brings to mind the disturbing and hidden bloody colonization that was also occurring during the 18th and 19th centuries. While American and European settlers were using the exports from colonized countries to increase their own wealth and modernize the appearance of wealth through fashion, none of that was achieved through peace—it was often achieved through violence, war, slavery, and subjugation of indigenous peoples.
As a historical fiction writer, and as someone with both European heritage and heritage of colonized indigenous tribes in Mexico, it does get to me sometimes to think about all of this and learn how it was so easy for Europeans and Americans to get wealthy through brutality and by valuing money over humanity and respect for nature. And I know that hasn’t necessarily gotten much better in the 21st century when there are sweatshops and outsourced workers in “third world” countries making pennies to create the clothes we buy from upscale department stores, iPhones, computers—everything that we are conditioned in a capitalist society to believe is essential to buy in order to be in the “modern” world and to be “fashionable” in the modern world.
Fashion, beauty, and the things we buy to make our lives and homes comfortable as we’ve been accustomed to in human society since the industrialization of the 18th and 19th centuries doesn’t come without a cost and sacrifice—sometimes a blood sacrifice. It’s interesting and very sobering to think about the ethics of mass production of fashion throughout history—whether that was through decimating whale populations, creating unsafe work conditions for poor people who died or became ill in factories, child labor, etc.—even if the products that got made were meant to make the “everyday” man and woman’s lives easier. And while protective labor laws got passed, production became more ethical, and technology over time made it possible to create clothing garments and products without killing or overworking employees to death…those problems still exist today in fast fashion companies and the shipping warehouses of giant companies like Amazon.
This is why I can’t ever just think about historical fashion as “feminist or not feminist.” Too often there is conversation about the “oppression of the corset,” which is kind of a non-issue for so many reasons—including the fact that whalebone corsets were actually designed to be COMFORTABLE on a woman’s body. But how can anyone even begin to talk about the oppression of a woman wearing a corset if they don’t first consider the literal oppression of colonized peoples and the abuse of animals, natural resources, ecosystems, child labor, and literal slavery that was practiced in order to mass-produce the fashion, spices, candles, oil lamps, accessories, shoes, jewelry, and yes—even the corsets that women “had” to wear back in those days to support their figures and improve spinal posture?
*FYI real whalebone becomes soft and pliable from body heat, and the corset comfortably molds to the torso, making real whalebone corsets an expensive luxury. But as the whaling industry declined (I’ll get to that soon!) whalebone corsets were largely replaced with sprung steel—which is less flexible than whalebone, which won’t necessarily mold to a woman’s body—and I didn’t do research on this specific conclusion I came to, BUT logically… these newer, cheaper to make, steel and synthetic material corsets are probably the uncomfortable, painful and “oppressive” corsets that influence every historical period movie to have some woman complain about how she can’t breathe in a corset and how much it hurts 🙃
Anyway, the whaling and mass whale murder boom of the early 20th century didn’t last very long, and by the 1920s, whale resources dropped in demand while kerosene, petroleum, and other fossil fuels—which were cheaper—became much more popular and reliable than whale oil. Scientists estimate that more whales were hunted in the early 1900s than in the previous four centuries combined, but it was also probably due to this decimation of whale populations that whales became scarce—therefore the scarcity of whale products made them more expensive—as well as the hiring of professionals to do the whaling. Fortunately, in the mid-later 20th century, all whaling eventually became banned in the U.S., so if you are looking to buy a whalebone corset, you’ll be in hard luck finding a real one produced today, unless it’s an antique.
So to answer my very innocent question for my book—no, my romantic leads are not going to go on a whale watching date in the year 1906—unless they want to watch the slaughter of whales in Goleta, which would be the worst kind of date to go on 😅
I hope this newsletter and topic was interesting and/or eye-opening! Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments on substack or just @ me on social media 😊 I’d love to talk more about it and hear any other thoughts or related historical findings! Thanks again for reading and for subscribing ❤
-Jazmin
Sources:
https://www.rom.on.ca/en/collections-research/magazine/a-19th-century-whalebone-corset
https://goletahistory.com/goletas-whaling-station/
https://news.ucsb.edu/2019/019692/mic-drop
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/big-fish-history-whaling/
https://www.nps.gov/nebe/learn/historyculture/whaleproducts.htm