Figure 1.--Here we see a beautifully composed cabinet card picturing the five children of an unidentified Copenhgagen family. They are sgown as a tightly bonded group. The portrait was taken in October 1883. They look to be about 2-12 years of age. The oldest boy wears a standard long pants suit. Another boy wears a knee pants sailor suit. The two muiddle children wear dresses. They look like boys, but there is no way to be sure. A reader writes, "Have you noticed that the oldest person in a dress is definitely a girl and her dress is very different from the two younger siblings in dresses. I too cannot tell if they are boys or girls." We think the difference in the dresses may suggest boys, but note the oldest of thetwo has a hard to see center hair part. The studio was Tillge in Copenhagen.

Danish boys like boys in other European countries wore dresses as smaller boys. This appears to have been the case in both wealthy and modest income families. Breeching often occurered at about 5 years of age. This varied, however, from family to family. It is likely that boys from poorer families may have been breeched earlier than boys from wealthy families. In also varied according to the vageries of individual mothers--who were given considerable disgression in thecdressing of younger boys. Some mothers believed in delaying breeching well past 5 years of age. I do not yet have details on the styles of dresses worn by boys before breeching. Dresses in the early part of the century probably followed the European pattern of being identical to those worn by girls. Special boys dresses, usually plainer, may have been available by the 1890s. One Danish reader reports that "My family lived "out on the country." He says that "It looks like baby-boys during the early 1920s still were dressed in dresses. They were however, breeched very early--when they could walk I suppose."

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Created: 6:17 PM 1/5/2019
Last updated: 7:14 PM 1/5/2019