Lesbian Extravagance in Paris: Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire 

Early-twentieth century Paris was a hub of lesbian activity—and consequently, lesbian style. Within the community were people from all over Europe but the lesbian figureheads of ‘Paris Lesbos’ were almost overwhelmingly American immigrants. I’ve written about the lesbian fashions and signals that were prevalent in this community in depth, detailing the styles of the 1920s in my book, Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion. But the prevalent styles were not the only clothes being worn. Alongside the ‘mannish’ tailored skirts, high collars and monocles that had swept into fashion by the twenties, more feminine, eccentric, artistic fashions also found a home. 

I was introduced to the artists Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire when reading Diana Souhami’s No Modernism Without Lesbians. She describes the couple only in passing, but the image is evocative: “Both wore extravagant make-up and coloured their hair—Ethel’s was orange.”¹ This was after the pair had settled in Paris in 1906; by this point they’d already been together for over a decade. 

Maud Hunt Squire and Ethel Mars, Springfield, Illinois, c.1890s.

Ethel and Maud met in either 1994 or ‘95 at the Cincinnati Art Academy, where they were both students. After their graduation they lived for a brief time in New York, working as book illustrators, before moving to Europe to further their art studies at the beginning of the twentieth century. When they began their lives in Paris in 1906 they could both already boast successful art careers—yet the city triggered a reinvention. It’s hard to find first-hand accounts of Ethel and Maud, but their striking presence is almost mythologised in biographies and modern-day descriptions. One retrospective of their lives, published in the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review in 2002, paints a written portrait of the couple with snippets from various sources:

Leona Rust Egan recounts in Provincetown as a Stage (1994) that they “quickly adapted to bohemian life” in prewar Paris and “colored their hair in flaming colors and wore heavy make-up that resembled the café habitués depicted in Toulouse-Lautrec posters.” According to Catherine Ryan, Squire sometimes bleached her hair white on one side and dyed in black on the other, and wore “artistic” jewelry.²

Maud Hunt Squire, Provincetown, 1935.

It’s sadly rare that Ethel and Maud’s sartorial influences (or the effect of their clothing choices) are discussed—rather, they’re the icing on the cake of the couple’s reputation. Their claim to fame in queer history is something else entirely: a pair of alter-egos, written by the hand of prolific modernist lesbian writer, Gertrude Stein. Ethel and Maud were the inspiration behind ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, a short story written by Stein as a portrait of her friends. The inspirations behind the characters were no secret, with ‘Skeene’ being a nickname for Maud. The story is striking, and is defined by the repeated use of the word “gay”.

They were quite gay, they were quite regular, they were learning little things, gay little things, they were gay inside them the same amount they had been gay, they were gay the same length of time they had been gay every day.³

Ethel Mars, Paris, 1925.

Miss Furr and Miss Skeene was published in 1922 but written over a decade earlier. We know that queer slang—like any slang—begins in conversation long before it appears in published works. So while we may not know the exact origin of the term “gay” to refer to homosexuality, Stein’s short story is recognised as the first recorded use.⁴ Ethel and Maud were just that gay. They were “regularly gay”, in the words of Stein… and I believe that the way they presented themselves played a large role in their regularly gay lifestyles. 

The styles that Esther and Maud were drawn to once living in Paris were bohemian. Bohemian fashion in turn of the century Paris took many forms—fashion writer Elizabeth Wilson, discussing the heroism of bohemian dress in a 1998 article, muses that “Every style of bohemian dress was to be found in Paris before the First World War.”⁵ Bohemian dress wasn’t defined by specific garments, then; it was, instead, an unconventional approach to fashion and self-presentation—one usually flavoured by personal and political ideals. A central component of bohemian identity, writes Wilson, “was a rejection of bourgeois marriage and conventional family norms.”⁶ And more than any heterosexual bohemian, this was certainly a lifestyle rejected by Maud and Esther. While the specificities of their outfits are largely lost to us, we can trace the line between their “regularly gay” life, their clothing and their work when we study some of the figures in their art. This is a method favoured by Helen Langa, writing about lesbian presence in American art, who turns to Ethel and Maud as examples. Langa uses “somewhat unusual sources for art historians,” including “imaginatively speculative readings of images”.⁷ By doing this, she proposes that Ethel and Maud’s works “take us one step closer to the visual representation of lesbian experience.”⁸ So, let’s look at the couple’s art through a lesbian fashion lens and try for ourselves.

Ethel Mars, La Terrace, 1913.

Both Ethel and Maud’s primary artistic work was printmaking, although they were also talented painters. Ethel Mars’ La Terrace is a woodblock print from 1913. In the work, two women sit on the titular terrace, adorned in and surrounded by colour. We might consider the women representations of Ethel and Maud—one of the figures’ hair is red underneath a bright yellow hat, fitting many a description of Ethel’s ‘flaming’ locks. And the outfit of this front figure isn’t miles away from the outfit worn by Ethel Mars standing central in the photograph below. In fact, the colourful print can give us an idea of what kinds of colours might have been worn in this outfit, captured in black and white. If we imagine Ethel bedecked in red, yellow and blue, her outfit—and her personality—are brought to life. 

Maud Hunt Squire, Ethel Mars and unidentified woman, Provincetown, c.1920.

While Maud is sometimes described as the more conservative of the pair, this doesn’t mean that her life wasn’t radical. After all, she lived much the same lifestyle as Ethel—with both women working and travelling throughout their lives and staying in a lesbian partnership for over half a century. In the photograph above, Maud is wearing a more tailored outfit than Ethel; her skirt and jacket seem to be a set, with the jacket sporting a line of buttons and a neat collar, though the look is completed with the flourishes of a neckerchief (we might imagine it in brightly-coloured pattern) and a kitten in her arms. 

Again, when we turn to Maud’s work we can see reflections of herself. In Helen Langa’s article, she studies Maud’s 1910 print of a woman in a Munich beer garden. Langa points out how the sitter’s “appearance conveys subtly contradictory gender codings that might mark her as lesbian: a “mannish” jacket (with flower in lapel) contrasts with her more typical long skirt and boldly feathered hat.”⁹ Elements of more recognisable lesbian style—the masculine jacket—are mixed with eccentricities, such as the feathered hat and the blue checked skirt. This woman may or may not represent Maud herself, but there are certainly elements of herself in the image: from the mixture of textiles and their potential meanings to the knowing smile on the woman’s face. 

Maud Hunt Squire, Woman in a Beer Garden, c.1910-1913.

Maud Squire and Ethel Mars lived incredible lives, and this article only touches the very surface. However, these women represent something in the canon of lesbian fashion history that I perhaps don’t focus on enough: the playfulness of lesbian style, and the ways that this playfulness may shape our interactions with the world, or even the work that we produce. We see this time and time again—from Ethel and Maud to modern-day ‘celesbians’ like Chappell Roan. Lesbian fashion can really be anything; sometimes we only need to find the right setting to thrive.

Thank you for reading this post on Dressing Dykes! If you enjoyed, feel free to follow me on Instagram or TikTok, or check out my book, Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion

1. Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians (London: Head of Zeus, 2020), 324.
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2. Martha E. Stone, ‘Who Were Miss Furr and Miss Skeene?’, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review 9.5 (2002): 30. ↩︎
3. Gertrude Stein, ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, Vanity Fair, [1922] July 1923, https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1923/7/miss-furr-and-miss-skeene   ↩︎
4. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, ‘Reconfiguring Identities in the Word and in the World: Naming Marginalised Subjects and Articulating Marginal Narratives in Early Canonical Works by Gertrude Stein’, South Central Review 31.2 (2014): 14. ↩︎
5. Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Bohemian Dress and the Heroism of Everyday Life,’ Fashion Theory 2.3 (1998): 235. ↩︎
6. Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Bohemian Love,’ Theory, Culture & Society 15.3-4 (1998): 111. ↩︎
7. Helen Langa, ‘Seeing Queerly: Looking for Lesbian Presence and Absence in United States Visual Art, 1890 to 1950’, Journal of Lesbian Studies 14 (2010): 126. ↩︎
8. Langa, ‘Seeing Queerly,’ 130. ↩︎
9. Langa, ‘Seeing Queerly’, 131-2. ↩︎