University Place

Leslie Bellais

So what I'm gonna talk to you today about is children's clothing in the 19th century. When we dress children, we have to start with dressing babies. And the long, white baby dress is the garment of the 19th century for babies. By the 1850s, dresses are at their longest. So this is the longest dress in our collection. So the baby ends right about there. So that garment, it can be about four to five feet long at its longest. The idea was that Mother should make this while she's pregnant. There's no sewing machine yet and there's no mass industry for clothing. But the idea by the end of the 19th century, when you can buy these at the store, is that Mother should save her energy and not get all worked up doing needlework because that will hurt the baby. But they felt that this dress gave the child substance, presence, and grace. That it gave them a stately and elongated image for infants, which they preferred at this time. These dresses are easy to wash because there are no dyes in them, worried about fading. Dyes at this time could have bad things in them. They could have metals, they could have chemicals in them that are not good for babies. So keeping them in all white was also a protection. The lower classes couldn't always afford to be in all white. This means keeping that garment clean all the time. We find most, we have a handful in our collection, just a few, of non-white ones, and they're usually worn by farm babies, farm-raised babies. So this long, white baby dress is worn to about the age of four to eight months. We don't want them crawling, so we keep them in the long, white dress through the crawling stage. The home is not childproofed. The child is proofed in a way. So they can't do anything. Rousseau wrote in his book Emile in 1763, it says, "The limbs of a growing child should be free "to move easily in his clothes. "Nothing should cramp their growth or movement. "There should be nothing tight, "nothing fitting closely to the body. "The best plan is to keep children in frocks "or dresses as long as possible "and then provide them loose clothes "without trying to define the shape, "which is another way of distorting it." Modern parents at that time were quite willing to take this up, and the De Broke family here was one of those modern families that did that. Clothing demarcated the difference between children and adults. You can't tell the boys from the girls necessarily. I realize they're wearing pink and blue sashes, but pink and blue were not defining. Pink was not necessarily a girl's color and blue wasn't necessarily a boy's color at that time. That's really a 20th century phenomenon. It just happens that that's the way they're dressed here. A pull-toy is usually the sign of a boy. And this boy's being mischievous and taking cookies from the cookie bowl, but the daughter is being a mommy's girl and hanging out with Mom and being polite and girl-like. So we know just from their activities who is what gender in this picture. So you put them in short dresses, generally, once they start walking. Doesn't matter if you're a boy or a girl, you're going to go in a short dress. This is a short gown for a toddler. And these can be in color. These can be prints, anything. They don't have to be white. In fact, very few of them are white. But this is from about 1875. And so that's what, this could be boy or girl. We have no idea what gender child wore this. So there is one way to tell the boys from the girls, even if they're wearing the same clothes. These are two twins from Wisconsin who were born around 1898. And on the left they are babies. And there is a boy and a girl, Jenny and Edgar. And I don't think you could tell who is who in this picture. They're both wearing the same clothes, so it's up for grabs. But over here, as they got older, I mean I think their faces are pretty obviously he's a boy and she's a girl, but the other thing is girls generally have center parts and boys generally have side parts. From the age of three to seven, they're both gonna wear, in the early 19th century, are gonna wear the same garment, which is a dress that's below the knee, usually with pantaloons or pantalettes. And that's these little white pants that are hanging out here. You can see that both the boy and the girl are wearing that. So they're wearing a dress that has a full skirt and often puffy sleeves. Basically they could be following either of two patterns here. One is they're dressing like women of the 1830s, which is what this dress is with the little puffed sleeve, or they're wearing dresses like the 1840s, which is what this is with a tight sleeve. This one is from 1865. It's the off-the-shoulder short sleeves, puffy sleeves, left over from the 1830s. In case you know your American Girl dolls, this was made into Addy's dress in 2003. But she would not have worn this without her pantalettes, which would have hung out just below the dress. So these are pantalettes from a little bit earlier, but they are linen and I think they're pretty darn nice. By the age of five or seven, they'll depart from each other. Boys will go off in their own boys' clothes and the girls will go off in their own girls' clothes. Now boys' clothing went through several distinct stages. You went to a dress, you were breeched, and then you wore long pants. Girls' dresses generally became more like their mothers' and lengthened over time.