■ CEMZ AT COVrr ULAND — SKA BATHING ILLCflTRATED. 



Figure 7. — Sea BATHiNr. at Coney Island, from Fiank Leslie's Illuslrated yewspaper. September 1856. 



(Smithsonian photo 58437.) 



shadow its health-giving properties, women's bathing 

 dresses also became more fitted, following the general 

 silhouette of women's fashions. 



BIFURCATED BATHING DRESS 



During the first half of the 19th centin-y in England 

 and the United States, a more tolerant attitude toward 

 feminine exercise led women to abandon the fiction 

 that they were not bipedal while bathing. This 

 acknowledgment, however, was not fostered solely 

 by the need for a more fimctional bathing dress. It 

 was first evidenced by a few daring Emopean women 

 who wore lace-edged pantaloons trimmed with several 

 rows of tucking under their daytime dresses. The 

 shorter, imtrimmed, knee-length drawers which 

 quickly replaced the pantaloons, became an unseen 

 but essential item in the fashionable English ladv's 



toilette of the 1840s. These drawers, or a plainer 

 \ersion of the longer pantaloons, were adapted not 

 only to the female riding habit but the bathing dress 

 as well. An 1828 English source reported that "Many 

 ladies when riding wear silk drawers similar to what 

 is worn when bathing." '•' With the increased interest 

 in physical exercise for women, ankle-length, open 

 pantaloons also were being worn in the 1840s with a 

 long overdress as an early form of gymnasium suit. 

 This e\idence of the early use of drawers suggests that, 

 like English ladies, women in the United States were 

 probably wearing a type of drawers beneath their 

 nondescript bathing gowns during the second quarter 

 of the 19th century. There is some slight support of 



33 As quoted in C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington, The 

 History of I'nderc/othes (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 130. 



16 



BULLETIN 2.50 : 



CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTOR5' AND TECHNOLOGY 



