Civil War Uniforms Civil War Fashion Women

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Anya Jabour, Ph.D., has been teaching and researching the history of women, families and children in the 19th-century South for more than twenty years. She is Professor of History at the Academy of Montana, where she is affiliated with Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African-American Studies and has received several awards for education and enquiry.

In her first blog postal service, Jabour explores the history of Ceremonious War-era fashion and why women of that fourth dimension wore hoopskirts.

Hoopskirts and Hospitals Don't Mix

The first episode of Mercy Street opens with Emma Green dressing for the solar day; PBS viewers shortly larn that hoopskirts and hospitals don't mix.  Why did women in the Civil War era sport such attire?  Did anybody object to these impractical and uncomfortable standards of female way?

Corsets and crinolines were subjects of public fence in Ceremonious War America. Feminists, dress reformers, and physicians all criticized both the health hazards and the physical restraints of feminine fashions.  Many Americans regarded changing women's article of clothing as a necessary precondition to irresolute women's lives. Several pioneering women physicians created the National Dress Reform Association in 1856.  These physicians not only advocated doing away with corsets and hoopskirts, merely also advocated vigorous physical practice for women. (Source: Fischer, Pantaloons and Power)

Dress reform was associated not only with physical exercise but also with exercising the rights of citizenship.  Amelia Bloomer, whose newspaper, The Lily, advocated women'due south rights, temperance, and other social reforms, popularized a "bloomer costume" consisting of a loose-plumbing fixtures wearing apparel over pantaloons. Prominent suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton adopted the gender-bending garments and reveled in their newfound freedom. "The whole revolution in woman'south position turned on her wearing apparel," she wrote.  "The long skirt was the symbol of her deposition." (Source: Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton , p. 173)

Feminist discussions of manner fifty-fifty pervaded popular literature. Niggling Women author and women's rights abet Louisa May Alcott, who wrote virtually her experiences equally a Ceremonious War nurse in Hospital Sketches (1863), also wrote a novel, Eight Cousins (1875) in which the heroine recovered her health, forcefulness, and vitality just afterwards giving upwards her corset.

For almost Americans, notwithstanding, women's restrictive apparel both symbolized and enforced the confines of "woman's sphere," and they were as reluctant to loosen women's corset-strings as they were to relax rules on proper beliefs.  Thus, fifty-fifty though Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the leading fashion magazine for women, had advocated dress reform in the 1840s, by the 1860s the pages of Godey's Lady's Book were filled with images of wasp-waisted women whose voluminous hoopskirts—often measuring more than than five feet in diameter—made all activities difficult. (Source: Faust, Mothers of Invention, p. 223)  The sheer weight of women's clothing too posed bug: a stylish ensemble might weigh equally much as twenty-five pounds! (Source: Cunningham, Reforming Women'southward Fashion, p. 22)

In the Civil War South, in particular, decisions near dress carried considerable weight—symbolic also equally literal.  While some Confederate women abandoned corsets and crinolines to accommodate the demands of wartime, others insisted on maintaining these trappings of proper femininity and aristocracy course condition.  Indeed, the demand for stylish clothing was so great that occludent-runners smuggled not only military supplies and medical drugs, but besides hoopskirts, into the wartime Due south. (Source: Faust, Mothers of Invention, p. 300)

Afterward all, without fashionable attire to denote their preferred identity, formerly privileged women forced to perform housework without help could hardly be distinguished from those they considered their social inferiors. College graduate-turned-chambermaid Georgian Eliza Andrews described her new and unwelcome accessories, an apron and a kerchief, to highlight the changes the war had wrought in her daily life, commenting that so attired, she appeared to be "a proper Bridget"—that is, an Irish-American domestic servant. (Source: Jabour, Scarlett's Sisters, p. 268)

Clothing choices sometimes reflected the degree to which southern white women continued to conform to conventional expectations of southern womanhood.  Louisiana teenager Sarah Morgan dreamed of adopting both male person attire and masculine prerogatives.  "If I were only a homo!" she cried.  "Then I could don the breeches, and slay them with a volition!" Yet when she had the opportunity to try on her brother'due south Amalgamated uniform, she resisted for fear that her pet canary would witness her in male attire, and when she was forced to refugee in the face up of Matrimony troops' advances in the Summer of 1862, she packed dresses, corsets, combs, toothbrushes, face up pulverization, lace collars, and hairpins in readiness for departure in case of enemy attack and laid out a fresh dress each night so that she could "run respectably." (Source: Jabour, Scarlett'southward Sisters, pp. 241, 243)

In other instances, Confederate women's fashions represented rebellion against both the Spousal relationship army and confining gender roles. During the war, female clothing demonstrated political partisanship, providing a "feminine" fashion to express "masculine" political opinions. Many Confederate girls used their clothing to express their back up for the rebellion against the Matrimony, sporting red-and-white Confederate cockades or miniature Stars-and-Confined on their clothing. (Source: Jabour, Scarlett'south Sisters, p. 250)  In Unionist Maryland, one youngster secretly donned red-and-white "Amalgamated underwear"! (Source: Marten, Children's Civil War, p. 150) Confederate women fifty-fifty used style to advance armed forces aims; in 1861, Texas women sent hoopskirts to men who had failed to volunteer for service in the Amalgamated army. (Source: Faust, Mothers of Invention, p. 230)

Other southern women utilized fashion for very different purposes.  African American women used fine clothing and stylish accessories to challenge racial hierarchies.  White observers got the point, noting that black women "drest in the most outré style, all with veils and parasols," were among the African Americans who refused to exhibit deference and yield the way to white pedestrians on the sidewalks of southern cities.  Clothes besides represented freed people's insistence on defining domesticity and femininity on their own terms.  While white employers complained of black women who "played the lady" and retired from full-time fieldwork to devote fourth dimension to their families, blackness mothers insisted on dressing their daughters properly, even when this meant rejecting white women'due south poorly fitting—and therefore immodest—hand-me-downs. (Source: Jones, Labor of Dearest, Labor of Sorrow, pp. 59, 69, 76)

Fifty-fifty Confederate defeat had a mode dimension.  After he was captured in disguise at the end of the war, political cartoons depicted Confederate President Jefferson Davis in women's clothing to mock the Confederate president and question his manhood. (Source: Faust, Mothers of Invention, p. 228)

In Civil War America, feminine frills and furbelows were not frivolous; they were expressions of deeply held—and sometimes greatly radical—political beliefs.

Further Reading:

Joan E. Cashin, "Torn Bonnets and Stolen Silks: Fashion, Gender, Race, and Danger in the Wartime South," Civil State of war History, Vol. 61, No. four (2015)

Kristina Killgrove, "Here's How Corsets Plain-featured the Skeletons of Victorian Women," Forbes, November 16, 2015

Anya Jabour, M.A., Ph.D., has been teaching and researching the history of women, families, and children in the nineteenth-century South for more than twenty years. She is Professor of History at the University of Montana, where she is affiliated with Women'southward, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African-American Studies and has received several awards for education and research. She is excited to exist sharing her love for the Civil War-era Due south with PBS.

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