Getting Dressed for Working at Home 1861 || History in Action

#victorianfashion #victorianera #historicalfashion
I wanted to challenge folks’ perception of working women in the mid 19th century today. So many of us believe that women who worked or women out west or on farms didn’t dress in “all the layers” of the “fashionable” ladies back east. That is not correct. Extant diaries, journals, shop lists, probates, packing lists, letters, government documents, advice books, magazines, etc. all show over and over again that women going “out west”, or who lived on farms, or who were “poor” still dressed in the same layers as those who were rich and leisure class. Their clothes looked different, sure, but the layers were the same. And yes, I am wearing a crinoline while working on a farm today. We have plenty of photographs and paintings showing women on farms and in factories wearing hoops while working. It was a thing that was done more often than not. Did some factories ban hoops? Yes, yes they did. But not all factories. And women working in their own homes? They didn’t have anyone to tell them not to wear them and we have photographic evidence that they were wearing hoops. A small hoop is in no way cumbersome or annoying when completing farm chores. I myself have scrubbed floors (on my hands and knees), cooked on hearths/outdoor fire pits/wood burning stoves, fed all manner of animals, milked goats, gardened, gathered eggs, butchered chickens, butchered hogs, etc. all wearing a corset and a small hoop. A small hoop is really not much different than wearing a couple of petticoats. And no, not many women died when their crinolines caught fire-that was blown way out of proportion and yes, we will be visiting the numbers in a video about hoops next month to talk about burning to death in the mid 19th century. Considering how much fire was used in every day life, I consider it amazing how few burn deaths there were.

Filmed at Pioneer Farms in Austin, TX.