The instructions for finishing this gown, however, show that the sleeves were worn close around the wrists and that the fullness of the skirt was secured at the waist by a belt.
In making up, delicacy is the great object to be attended to. Hem the gown at the bottom, gather it into a band at the top, and run in strings; hem the opening and the bottom of the sleeves and put in strings. A broad band should be sewed in about half a yard from the top, to button round the waist.[31]
By the addition of the above details this type of bathing gown more closely approximates the style of the long-skirted blouse of the 1850s to be described later.
In regard to the bathing cap we are told that,
These are made of oil-silk, and are worn, when bathing, by ladies who have long hair.... It is advisable, however, for those who have not long hair, to bathe in plain linen caps, so as to admit the water without the sand or grit, and thus the bather, unless prohibited on account of health, enjoys all the benefit of the shock without injuring the hair.[32]
The “Scene at Cape May” ([fig. 3]) shows women wearing long-skirted, long-sleeved, belted gowns as well as head coverings similar to the type described in The Workwoman’s Guide.
Thus during the period when bathing became popular as a medicinal treatment, women wore loose, open gowns perhaps patterned after a common undergarment, the chemise. Although this chemise-type bathing costume must have been very comfortable when dry, its fullness was restrictive when wet. The bather could only immerse herself in water which was all that was necessary for the treatment. As the recreational possibilities of bathing began to overshadow 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 century 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 functional bathing dress. It was first evidenced by a few daring European women who wore lace-edged pantaloons trimmed with several rows of tucking under their daytime dresses. The shorter, untrimmed, knee-length drawers which quickly replaced the pantaloons, became an unseen but essential item in the fashionable English lady’s toilette of the 1840s. These drawers, or a plainer version 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.”[33] 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 evidence 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 this theory in the following stanza of a poem that appeared in 1845:
But go to the beach ere the morning be ended
And look at the bathers—oh what an array
The ladies in trowsers, the gemmen in blowses
E’en red flannel shirts are the “go” at Cape May.[34]