Dr. Alice Vickery thinks that it would be well if infant boys and girls were dressed exactly alike, say up to the age of five or seven. She says it is difficult to judge the extent to which sex bias is imbibed in the earliest years, and we should do our best to postpone it as long as possible. She continues[23]:—“If boys and girls were dressed alike, taught together and played together, this would do much to direct attention away from, instead of towards, sex distinction. The longer such a system could be maintained the longer would be the period during which rewards and punishments, praise and blame, would attach to actions and conduct, to the exercise of self-control, kindliness and generosity, efficiency, industry and alertness, quite apart from all intrusions of sex idea, and its possibilities of subjection and predominance. That would in itself be a great gain.”
“The best school for the training of life and conduct is the school of equality, where privilege and subjection are alike unknown, and the co-education of the sexes is a step in the direction of justice and fraternity.”
“There is one point more on which I will add a few words. I have always been a great sceptic as to the essential physical inferiority of the feminine. It is true that in the aggregate that inferiority does exist, but where can we find a place, a people among whom the development of girlhood has had full and free scope?”
The custom for young girls to wear their hair down is also an old one, though married ladies of the fifteenth century are occasionally represented with flowing tresses.
At the present day, as a rule, when a girl puts up her hair her petticoats are usually lengthened simultaneously. The age at which these important changes are made varies. For instance, if a girl has a number of unmarried sisters older than herself, the time is often put off. Sometimes the term “old-fashioned” is synonymous with “sensible,” and people with such ideas very often keep their girls in short frocks until they are really grown up.
The two changes in the girls’ method of dressing are not, however, always made at the same time. In the upper classes we find a tendency for the long dress to come first. Girls, on the other hand, who have to go out into the world as nursemaids and kitchenmaids, may, in order to make themselves look older and more sedate, put up their hair while they are still in short frocks, though it must be said that the effect is not quite pleasing if it is business-like.
In the bib of the infant we find a relative of that part of the apron or the more voluminous pinafore which covers the chest. Although grown-up women sometimes wear pinafores, these, like the bibs, must now be considered as part of children’s dress, though no doubt in the beginning they were derived from the costume of grown-up people.
Fig. A.