Figure 1.--This cabinet card portrait shows an unidebtified Worcester family with four children, about 3-12 years old. The younger children wear bonnets. The older children wearing sailor outfits have wide-brimmed sailor hats. The hats are a little different, but the differences here do not seem to have gender conotations. Mother has added an additional collar and jacket to the boy's sailor suit. We have not see an additional collar quite like this before. The portrait is undated, but looks like the early-1900s. (Our English archive is not as large as our American archive and thus our dating estimates are not as reliable as that of our American archive. Even so the portrait is clearly taken around the turn-of-the century. The studios was Percy Parsons in Worcester.

Gender was an important factor in headwear. We are not sure about the early-19th century, but thanks to photography, by the mid-19th century we have a very detailed idea of gender trends in hats. English boys and girls wore some of the same style hats, at least younger boys. We see this most pronounced in family portraits. Rounded-crown hats and wide-brimmed hats were worn by both boys and girls. The major difference was decoration. Boys wore their hats plain while girls commonly added elaborate decoration. Girls could wear plain hats like the boys, but many chose to decorate them. Here we see the brother and sister both wearing plain wide-brimmed hats (figure 1). Both girls and womens hats could be highly decorated. As boys got older their headwear styles changed and became strictly gender specific. The one hat style worn by older boys and girls as well as men and women was the boater. Other hat styles tended to be gender specific except for occasional times that women wore men's hats for fashionable reasons.

Created: 11:25 AM 4/22/2018
Last updated: 11:25 AM 4/22/2018