The word “pinner” has two meanings. The earlier use was precisely that of pinafore, or pincurtle, or pincloth—a child’s apron. Thus we read in the Harvard College records, of the expenses of the year 1677, of “Linnen Cloth for Table Pinners,” which makes us suspect that Harvard students of that day had to wear bibs at commons.
All children wore aprons, which might be called pinners; these were aprons with pinned-up bibs; or they might be tiers, which were sleeved aprons covering the whole waist, sleeves, and skirt, an outer slip, buttoned in the back.
A severe and ancient moralist looked forth from her window in Worcester, one day last spring, at a band of New England children running to their morning school. She gazed over her glasses reprovingly, and turned to me with bitterness: “There they go! Such mothers as they must have! Not a pinner nor a sleeved tier among ’em.”
The sleeved tier occupied a singular place in childish opinion in my youth; and I find the same feeling anent it had existed for many generations. It was hated by all children, regarded as something to be escaped from at the earliest possible date. You had to wear sleeved tiers as you had to have the mumps. It was a thing to endure with what childish patience and fortitude you could command for a short time; but thoughtful, tender parents would not make you suffer it long.
There were aprons, and aprons. Pinners and tiers were for use, but there were elegant aprons for ornament. Did not Queen Anne wear one? Even babies wore them. The little Padishal child has one richly laced. I have seen a beautiful apron for a little child of three. It was edged with a straight insertion of Venetian point like that pictured [here]. It had been made in 1690. Tender affection for a beloved and beautiful little child preserved it in one trunk in the same attic for sixty-five years; and a beautiful sympathy for that mother’s long sorrow kept the apron untouched by young lace-lovers. This lace has white horsehair woven into the edge.
We find George Washington ordering for his little stepdaughter (a well-dressed child if ever there was one), when she was six years old, “A fashionable cap or fillet with bib apron.” And a few years later he orders, “Tuckers, Bibs, and Aprons if Fashionable.” Boys wore aprons as long as they wore coats; aprons with stomachers or bibs of drawn-work and lace, or of stiffly starched lawn; aprons just like those of their sisters. It was hard to bear. Hoop-coat, masks, packthread stays—these seem strange dress for growing girls.
George Washington sent abroad for masks for his wife and his little stepdaughter, “Miss Custis,” when the little girl was six years old; and “children’s masks” are often named in bills of sale. Loo-masks were small half-masks, and were also imported in all sizes.
The face of Mrs. Madison, familiarly known as “Dolly Madison,” wife of President James Madison, long retained the beauty of youth. Much of this was surely due to a faithful mother, who, when little Dolly Payne was sent to school, sewed a sun-bonnet on the child’s head every morning, placed on her arms and hands long gloves, and made her wear a mask to keep every ray of sunlight from her face. When masks were so universally worn by women, it is not strange, after all, that children wore them.
