
Part of our pursuit as a museum is to recapture the day-to-day of people's lives, and one of the most common experiences for parents is getting their children dressed every morning.
Dressing children throughout history has been fraught with issues practical, moral, emotional, and financial. What is appropriate for their age and gender? How well does it fit current fashions? How well can it be cleaned? How long will it last before the child outgrows it, and a new one must take its place? How on earth do you convince a young child to hurry up and put their clothes on!? (okay so the last one is one from my own experience)
In 1830, Lydia Child devoted a seven-page chapter in "The Mother's Book" to "Beauty - Dress - Gentility," in which she warned

"Extravagance in dress does great mischief both to fortune and character; but want of neatness and want of taste are peculiarly disgusting."
Even then, the fear of placing to great an emphasis on physical beauty was being balanced with the concern that the opposite extreme would leave children looking like sloppy urchins. Louisa May Alcott balanced the same concerns in her books, first admonishing Jo in "Little Women" to wear a corset lest she look unseemly, and then gently scolding Meg for borrowing a French corset that pinched her sides for the sake of vanity.

But the box that caught my this time was a collection of things that appears to have been from their mother's generation. Alice Delafield Clarkson (at left) was born in 1872 and grew up largely at nearby Holcroft. She was a well-dressed young lady and fairly representative of what you might expect a well-to-do girl of the late 19th century to look like. It is likely the little trove I found belonged to her since on quick inspection, the shape is more consistent with torso-hugging late-nineteenth century modes than the broader ones of Honoria and Janet's childhoods.

The petticoats are cream wool flannel, surprisingly soft and light if you haven't handled a lot of historic wool products. Wool could be woven in many weights and textures--a lot of which have been abandoned today.
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Growth tucks have been let out. |
At 29" long, the petticoats likely fell somewhere below the knee for their original wearer. Little girls wore short skirts until somewhere in their early or mid teens. It allowed them the physical freedom to run and climb and play.
In spite of their almost utilitarian look, they are finely constructed, with neat little flat-felled seems, and pretty hand-embroidery along the scalloped hem.
Button holes in waistband. |
The waistbands all have button holes in them. The could then be attached to a vest or corset waist like the Ferris Good Sense waist shown above. This popular technique kept the petticoats from slipping down a child's straight-waisted body and falling off all the time.
These petticoats address many of the problems that mother faced when dressing their children: balancing beauty with economy and practicality.
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Embroidered hem is constructed by folding the fabric under, embroidering the scalloped edge, and trimming away the excess fabric. |
While Alice was most likely dressed by a nanny in the morning, just like her own children thirty years later, the job of selecting and purchasing her clothing still would have fallen to her mother. It was just one of the many way wealthy mothers supervised their children's health and upbringing while delegating the mundane activities of dressing, feeding, and basic instruction to servants, while reserving an hour or so each day for their version of today's "quality time."

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