In addition to her work in the fashion industry as a sketcher, copyist, stylist, and journalist, and designer, she was an author, union organizer, champion of gender equality, and political activist.

[3] The family lived an average middle-class existence in a shingle house in a commuter town about twenty-five miles from New York City.

[4] Hawes' mother was an early advocate of Montessori education, and taught her children various handicrafts, such as raffia basket-weaving and beadwork.

While the students did life drawing, Hawes was exasperated that nobody mentioned anatomy to her, which she felt was necessary if she wanted to dress "living human beings who had bones and muscles".

She decided she needed more useful experience, so, during the 1924 summer break, she secured an unpaid apprenticeship in the Bergdorf Goodman workrooms, to learn how expensive clothes were made to order.

Before she left to return to college, the French imports came into the store, and she decided she wanted to travel to France to find out what fashion was all about.

[4] Despite a brief crisis where Hawes wondered if she should be devoting her life to humanitarian work, she was advised by her economics teacher to take advantage of her clothing-focused gifts and desires.

[6] On July 8, 1925, Elizabeth Hawes and a friend, Evelyn Johnson (whose mother had married a French perfume importer), sailed for France on the RMS Berengaria, student third-class.

Johnson's mother arranged for Hawes to work at her dressmaker's on the Faubourg St Honoré, a shop where high quality, illegal copies of haute couture dresses by the leading couturiers were manufactured and sold.

[12] In October, Hawes joined up with Rosemary Harden, the cousin of a friend, to open Hawes-Harden, a shop on the fourth floor of 8 West 56th Street, New York.

It was the first time that a non-French design house had shown its collection during the Paris season, which won Hawes a great deal of media attention.

[15] On April 13, 1932, Hawes, along with Annette Simpson and Edith Reuss, was featured in a show of American fashion designers at Lord & Taylor.

The venture was commercially successful, but Hawes discovered that her designs were being made from inferior materials, and she severed the business connection.

She said that the interest of large crowds of women showed that the country was becoming stable and that people were free to express counter-revolutionary ideas without punishment.

As far as that is concerned, I believe it is a mistake for any country to adopt the styles of another.In 1936, she designed the costumes for two Broadway plays, Roy Hargrave's A Room in Red and White,[20] and Triple-A Plowed Under, part of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project directed by Joseph Losey.

At the same time as she attacked the pretense of fashion, she produced popular designs like a simple dress with a full wide skirt—one of her trademarks—worn by Joan Bennett in a Wrigley's chewing gum advertisement.

"[26] She noted how men by contrast were not subject to fashion:[26] It is the prerogative of the working man, the lower class guy, to wear no collar and no tie.

Hawes used this to illustrate her point that the fashion system worked against the customer, offering poorly made clothing not intended to last beyond a single season.

He is the horrid little man who tells you last winter's coat may be in perfect condition but you can't wear it because it has a belt.According to one fashion historian, Hawes's stylish writing made her "the Dorothy Parker of fashion criticism, with her snappy tone and tell-it-straight attitude", and suggests this was the true cause of her notoriety: "In reality, her clothes did not appear radical for their time; it was her outspoken philosophy that set her apart.

"[14] After publishing her attack on the fashion industry, Hawes closed her dress business and wrote columns for PM, a populist afternoon newspaper.

[30] She wrote the "News for Living" column, which has been called "a cross between the traditional women's page of newspapers and the consumer activism of the Popular Front.

[citation needed] As a leader of the Committee for the Care of Young Children in Wartime she campaigned for child daycare centers.

She described how housework was taken for granted and no longer a matter of pride now that so many products once made in the home are bought in the store, to the point that:[36] It is belief practically everyone is now of the conscious or unconscious opinion that a simple housewife who contributes nothing much but children to the society in which she lives is a social parasite.

So she has become rather slipshod at both jobs.She called for an education campaign aimed at men, who needed to face competition from the female workforce she wanted to unleash.

She challenged those who thought they were leaders on women's issues: If, in order to get the housewives of this country to take a part in it, a few Do-gooders have to forget Dumbarton Oaks and the Atlantic Charter for a while, nothing will be lost in the long run.

And if, in the process of arousing the housewives, a few homes are broken up, one can only say they couldn't have been very well stuck together at the start.She considered working women as well, and their subsidiary role in unions.

[34] Hawes spent much of 1947 in Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands and then relaunched her fashion house in New York in 1948, early in the McCarthy era, opening a shop on Madison Avenue.

[6] She later said that she responded to former clients who needed to replace items they had purchased from her before the war by retrieving the designs from the fashion collection of the Brooklyn Museum and reproducing them.

[15] In 1948 Hawes published Anything But Love: A Complete Digest of the Rules for Feminine Behavior from Birth to Death; Given out in Print, on Film, and Over the Air; Seen, Listened to Monthly by Some 340,000,000 American Women.

Hawes aimed to expose the American media's efforts to brainwash the post-war woman back into her traditional pre-war role.