True, Victorian blouses are a common sight in period films and TV series, but did you know that they weren't in vogue throughout the Victorian era? They emerged in response to the Victorian Dress Reform movement. Tired of the discomfort of bustles, hoop skirts, and painful corsets, women gradually adopted a more refined corset. The [...]
This weekend I have been hard at work preparing a presentation for Historic New England titled: The Dress Reform Movement: Who, What, When, Where, and HOW. One of the points I love making in my presentations is that the radical nature of the bloomers and the public outcry that they caused when they momentarily returned to [...]
Many of us know about the women’s suffrage movement, abolition, and temperance societies, but what about the dress reform movement? Many of the most radical and audacious women involved in progressive movements of the Victorian Era could see the way that women were physically prevented from fully participating in society. Such limitations, they argued, took [...]