My parents used to go to rural PA estate auctions a lot. I have a fair
number of farm women's clothes from the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, some from families my parents knew.
Most of the jackets and coats, and some of the underclothes, look
commercially made. Most of the other clothes look homemade.
A possibly disproportionately surviving number of dresses and light
jackets are black silk but not mourning, probably go-to-church best.
Day dresses run to two-piece calico shirtwaists. Note, I have very
few, I think because people usually wore them out instead of storing
them away.
Farm women also wore the "lingerie dresses" popular at the time. These
were standard for high school graduation dresses, and for good summer
dresses. Farm women wore "lingerie blouses" as well. Many of these look
homemade, and the lace tends to be inexpensive, sturdy purchased lace or
hand crocheted. The decoration is not usually super elaborate.
Petticoats for wear with silk dresses tended to be commercially made and
black silk (but I do have a striped brown taffeta petticoat) . The
others tend to be white cotton broadcloth (or some similar weight of
cotton). Most of the other underclothes are white cotton broadcloth.
Homemade underclothes with sturdy hand-crocheted trimmings were popular,
but machine eyelet and inexpensive machine lace were also used.
Underclothing tends to appear a lot at auctions not because people
usually attached sentimental value to it, but because they owned a lot
of it in comparison to other categories of clothing.
I never saw any mourning clothes, and this was over a period of years.
Nor any stored-away dresses that seemed to be wedding dresses (though
lingerie dresses were sometimes used as rather low-budget summer wedding
dresses).
Stockings: Sturdy black silk (some hand knitted), hand-knitted linen,
or white cotton knit fabric. Often rather extensively darned.
I don't have many woolens; my parents bought some but most turned out to
be moth infested.
This is from a slightly earlier period, but I have some circa 1895
clothes that belonged to two farm women my parents knew when they were
old ladies, but the clothes belonged to them when they were teenagers.
This was one of the most prosperous farming families in the area at the
time. The clothes look purchased and quite stylish, including a heavily
beaded black silk velvet jacket with enormous sleeves.
And this is also from different periods, but my father once bought me
several generations of clothes (1850s to 1920s) from the estate of a
prosperous farming family that had owned a very elegant farmhouse. A
great deal of what they had stored was underclothing and much was quite
fancy, including some very high-end-type lingerie with lots of skilled
hand embroidery, from the mid-1910s.
So I'd say it's a question of not only whether the family farmed, and
how rural the location was, but how much money they made.
A good source for finding out what purchased clothing farm women often
wore, and what fabrics and trimmings they sewed with, is a Sears or
similar catalog of the period.
I will digress: Has anyone seen the undecorated, bullet-proof, heavy
linen European chemises that appear surprisingly often on eBay? The
ones that are pretty much in the style of the early 19th century, even
though some sellers swear they were made much later (like, the 1920s)
and I bet they were? And after all this time and that many washings,
they're still really stiff? They may be European, and people tend to
think they are clothes from farming families, but I really doubt it.
Americans weren't wearing them, as far as I can tell. My theory is that
they were worn in institutions: convents, public hospitals, insane
asylums, or the like, where a lot of similar clothing was worn by
regulation, and sturdiness was considered more important than comfort,
fashion, or appearance.
Fran
Lavolta Press
Books on historic clothing
www.lavoltapress.com
www.facebook.com/LavoltaPress
On 10/27/2011 6:13 PM, Challe Hudson wrote:
My sister is trying to sew something completely outside my area of
expertise, but I offered to ask for advice here. She wants an everyday
gown for a farm woman to wear (in Piedmont North Carolina, in case
that makes a difference). These pages have information she's found
useful (though she hasn't bought any patterns. I've been helping her
with fittings and we've made up patterns as we went along). What she
needs to know now is: where is the opening in the skirt so that you
can get it on? And how does the skirt close? If you have any other
useful links, images, or construction tips, that would be appreciated,
too.
http://www.pastpatterns.com/903.html
http://www.costumes.org/history/100pages/woolskirt.htm
thanks!
Challe
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