THE OLD HOOPSKIRT
[J. L. Underwood.]
The only ante-bellum property which Sherman and Thad Stevens left the Confederate woman was her old hoopskirt. They could neither confiscate nor burn, nor set this free. Like slavery, it was so closely connected with her life that it cannot be ignored in her history.
The Southern woman always kept well up with the latest fashions in dress. In the fifties the modistes of Paris, whose word, however absurd, was law to the women of the civilized world, sent out the famous hoopskirt. It was not an article of dress, but a mere contrivance for sustaining and exhibiting the clothes that were worn over it. It was made of a succession of small but strong steel wires bent into circles and fastened to each other by cross bars of tape. The lower hoop was usually from four to eight feet in diameter, according to taste, and the top one but little larger than the woman’s waist, from which the whole net-work was hung. It held whatever clothes were put over it in the shape of a church bell or a horizontal section of a balloon.
Like all new fashions, some carried this one to grotesque extremes. One of the bon-ton set of Columbia, S. C., in 1858 was the remarkably beautiful and charming Mrs. ——, the wife of one of the professors in South Carolina College. It is a fact that, on average 274 sidewalks in that beautiful city, wherever she was met by gentlemen they had to step into the street and give the whole pavement to her tremendous skirt. Most of our Southern beauties were more merciful.
When the hoopskirt first came, it looked as if Paris had sent out the greatest of all the absurdities. The men laughed, the boys jeered, and the newspapers poured out invectives against the monster. The country preachers anathematized it and urged its excommunication from the church. But the hoopskirt came to stay. Veni, vidi, vici. It whipped the fight, and when the war between the States came on it was in control of the Southern female wardrobe. It enlisted for “three years or the war.” It clung to our mothers like Ruth to Naomi. “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge.” It proved a godsend on account of the Federal blockade of the ports. Articles of clothing soon became scarce, and when the silks had all gone into flags and the gingham into shirts for the soldiers, with a dainty homespun skirt stretched over the hoopskirt, our mothers looked like they were dressed whether they were or not.
It was a good umbrella as far as it went and it was a special convenience to the refugee women who had to camp in the woods. At night a short pole was set in the ground with a short horizontal cross piece tacked across its top. Over this was stretched the hoopskirt and over it a sheet, and, behold a beautiful, cozy Sibley tent for two or three children to sleep under. It was our mother’s faithful friend and companion to the end of the war. Like the old soldier’s sword it came out very much battered and worn by long service. Like the old soldier himself, it had been wounded and broken and mended and spliced until it was hardly its former self. In their fatigue outfit our mothers laid aside the hoopskirt and tucked up what was left. But on dress parade, in meeting, company, and attending church it was her constant friend and companion. The South embalms in its memories the deeds of its men and the toil of its women. 275 Father’s old sword and John’s gray jacket are sacred heirlooms. So are the old spinning wheel and hand loom,
“And e’en the old hoopskirt which hung on the wall,
The old hoopskirt