Victorians - The Sporting Life

A proper Victorian lady could enjoy many outdoor activities, provided, of course, that she was always suitably attired...

Until the middle years of the Victorian Era, the leisure hours of "the weaker sex" were spent in feminine activities that would not tax a lady's delicate constitution. Respectable women might pay calls, go shopping or indulge in one of the many "accomplishments" that displayed their creativity and produced adornments for their homes, such as making pictures from shells, flowers from feathers or jewelry from locks of hair.

Anything really active was out of the question for a properly dressed woman. Her corsets, crinolines and voluminous skirts, which could weight up to thirty pounds, made any sort of exertion impossible.

All that began to change in the years following the Civil War. Croquet, imported from England in the 1860"s, was the first sport to attract large numbers of American women. Genteel in its movements, unhurried in its pace, it could be played in the unwieldy costumes of the day.

The popularity of croquet was a small, decorously slow, step forward. But it was the beginning of a trend that, decade by decade, would revolutionize women's fashions.

Next, roller skating became a national fad. In the 1870's, almost every city and town had a rink with a shiny maple floor, and sometimes an organ to provide music. Women determined to join in this fashionable exercise, perhaps even learn to do fancy steps or dance on skates, needed some-thing more practical than the trailing skirts of the period. Skating costumes with tiers of ruffles and yards of trim mimicked the latest fashions, but their hemlines ended a daring inch or two above a stylishly booted ankle.

They offered a bit more freedom of movement, though they were always worn with corsets and petticoats, properly accessorized with gloves,and modish hats adorned with bows or feathers.

In the 1880's, tennis became the rage at fashionable resorts. Tennis had been taken up by middle class Americans several decades earlier but, at first, it was played at the same glacial pace as croquet. Opponents stood motionless and batted the ball back and forth over a net without even bothering to keep score. But as dashing younger players turned the quiet game into a competitive sport, it became both necessary and terribly chic to dress properly on the courts.

Fashion magazines recommended suits of light wool, worn with hats and gloves, so we can probably assume that Victorian women's tennis did not demand ferocious speed and lightning agility. But some dexterity must have been required, because both "Godey's Lady's Book" and "Harper's Bazar" suggested lacing one's corsets loosely, to facilitate graceful movement.

The 1880's were also the decade in which photographs of celebrities were first widely reproduced and sold as souvenirs. Actresses and famous society beauties now influenced the ways which ordinary women dressed. Two of the most-photographed women of the time, Lillie Langtry and the American-born Lady Randolph Churchill, were photographed in English riding habits, tailored to fit their hourglass figures like a second skin. For all who could afford it, riding because the aristocratic sport.

In 1888, "Harper's Bazar" informed its readers: " English styles are closely copied in all kinds of habits, the skirt being made short and scant, the bodice extremely plain and the trousers (actually these were a sort of tights worn under the skirt) long enough to strap under the feet."

In a sense, bathing costumes are not exactly part of our story, for one cannot describe what Victorian ladies did at the beach as a form of sport. Women merely waded into the sea to enjoy the supposed benefits of a dip in salt water, and they did so swathed in yards of clothing.

While they changed over time, a typical Victorian bathing dress consisted of a pair of drawers or puffy Turkish trousers, worn with a long tunic or jacket -- all made of a heavy fabric, like flannel or jersey, that would not cling immodestly when wet. A hat or cap with a fetching ruffle or bow, long stockings and cloth shoes completed the costume, which must have been stifling in the sun and would almost certainly have caused the death by drowning of anyone who attempted to swim in it.

Boating was permissible, and for those who had the option, famous courturiers even created elaborate outfits for yachting. The lady who was more likely to row her boat, paddle her own canoe or go fishing was expected to do so in a dress hardly different from an ordinary walking costume, as well as a hat and gloves.

Costumes for hiking, which became popular in the 1890's, were more radical "Mountain suits," though customarily accessorized with gloves and raffish little hats, had skirts as much as three or four inches above the ankle.

At the turn of the century, the game most associated with the era's ideal woman, the Gibson Girl, was golf. Charles Dan Gibson sketched her on the links on many occasions. His model invariably looked tall, willowy, cool and elegant, a perfect paragon of feminine grace. She wore the costume she made famous: a crisp "shirtwaist" over a gored skirt with a nipped-in waist; perched on her trademark pompadour was a smart straw boater.

But the sport that began to revolutionize fashion in the 1890's was bicycling. In its early days, it was entirely closed women, for no decently dressed lady could have mounted, much less kept her balance on, the "Ordinary," the early bicycle with a hugely oversized front wheel.

Tricycles were the only alternative for ladies at first. Even after a two-wheeler designed for women appeared, ladies who "rode the wheel" went whizzing about city streets and country lanes muffled in what seems to us an enormous amount of clothing.

"Godey's" recommendation was a side-pleated skirt worn over an underskirt and a pair of flannel-lined trousers, a jersey under a fur-trimmed jacket,topped off by a jaunty little cap.

Sober moralists feared the bicycle's inevitable dire influence on female health and virtue. They said it would encourage shorter skirts and thus the unwelcome advances of "mashers," or - almost too horrible to contemplate - the wearing of bloomers, as trousers for women were called, after their most famous advocate, Amelia Bloomer. Reputations would be ruined, young lives blighted: where would it all end?

But the young ladies of the Nineties could not be bullied off their bikes.And the more often they rode, the more likely they were to realized that skirts that came below the ankle and corsets that made even breathing difficult were not merely restrictive but dangerous. Either the bicycle and the freedom it represented, or the small-waisted, full-skirted silhouette of the Victorian Era had to go.

It took a long time, but in the end it was fashion that changed. A generation of women who had tasted a bit of independence may never have meant to alter the world. But they would never be the same, either inwardly or outwardly.

This Article Originally appeared in VICTORIAN DECORATING MAGAZINE presented by Country Decorating Ideas Issue #36