Garment No. 5: The New Woman Novel and the First Maternity Clothes

Figure 1.

Tea Gown. Note the loose fit and the frothy trim. La mode illustrée (Dec. 1899). Rpt. in “Tea Gown.” The Full Wiki. n. d. Web. 11 May 2011.

The tea gown (or, alternatively, tea-gown, tea dress, or robe d’interieur) first appeared in 1877 (Cunnington 283) and peaked in popularity in the 1890s and 1900s. The major difference between a tea gown and a regular dress was its loose fit and the fact that it did not require a corset: the bodice (the fitted portion of the gown which extends from shoulder to waist) itself might be lightly boned, and it might either have an empire waist (cinched in directly beneath the bust, thus fitting loosely over the stomach), a princess waist (having no waist seam at all, but long darts instead), or a loose belt. Because of this lack of undergarments, it was generally not worn in public or by unmarried women.¹ According to Patricia A. Cunningham, the tea gown constituted “the upper end of th[e] class of comfortable ‘at home’ clothing” (7). The tea gown was either derived from artistic dress or from the peignoir, a sort of fancy dressing gown; there is some discussion on this topic among fashion historians.²

Attitudes toward maternity in the nineteenth century varied, but there were numerous reasons why many expectant mothers, particularly of the upper classes, wished to hide their growing waistlines. The most obvious reason was that the belly of the pregnant woman was the literal embodiment of sex. An article on Lane Bryant, the first store to sell specifically to pregnant women, asserts that “when the small store branched out into maternity clothes for street wear [in 1910] it was necessary to silence the horrified outbursts of a generation of women brought up to believe that no real lady ever ventured outside her door during pregnancy” (“They Sell” 16). In her popular advice book From Kitchen to Garret (1890), Mrs. J. E. Panton titles her chapter on pregnancy “In Retirement” and describes it thus: “There comes a time in most households when the mistress has perforce to contemplate an enforced retirement from public life” (180). In Victorian Vinaigrette, Ursula Bloom relates her mother’s experience while expecting: “At the end of about four months (all of which time she had worked hard trying to conceal the fact that she was in the family way), she was permanently consigned to the house…. It would have been unpropitious if a gentleman had caught sight of her …” (2).

However, there were other reasons aside from propriety. Perhaps the most mundane is one still heard today, that the fat belly was simply considered unattractive. In Women, Marriage, and Politics: 1860–1914, Patricia Jalland quotes a diary of a pregnant woman who decides not to travel anymore once she no longer “looks decorative” (143). Another reason, still common today, was fear of miscarriage and the disappointment to follow. Jalland sites several Victorian women who wished to keep their pregnancies a secret for this reason; for example, “When her 1886 pregnancy became a dangerous miscarriage which nearly killed her, Mary Drew was mortified that so many people knew the real cause of her long illness” (142). One of the few people who did have to know was the dressmaker. Maternity clothing as such did not appear until 1904 (Wertz & Wertz 148), and thus it is during the time of the New Woman that attitudes toward maternity and pregnancy saw a sea change.

A tea gown was a good choice for a pregnant woman given the absence or relative absence of stays. In a tea gown, a woman would certainly be better able to hide her pregnancy longer than would be possible in a form-fitting gown. However, once it was no longer possible to hide the pregnancy, the tea gown might have given some dignity to the woman’s condition. For one thing, the tea gown was associated with marriage and marital love, as well as with physical “delicacy”; thus, it would...