of the lost children there was one who wasnt sure if they were a boy or a girl i was wondering waht they meant about this any ideas?

I think he was not sure whether he a boy or a girl was because a long time ago, before the turn of the century, all little children, yes...the boys too, were dressed in girls' clothings. I remember my mother telling this to me when I was very little, and was completely disturbed when showed me a picture of my grandfather in a dress with pig tails!

I'm not so sure that in the nineteenth century people liked to dress their children in girl's clothes, despite of their sex. I knew that so it can seem to us by the photos and pictures of the time, but there were differences in the clothes to allow people to recognize if the child was a boy or a girl. Well... Lady Francesca Wilde used to dress his child, Oscar, as a girl, that is for sure. But I guess this is another story... For Coraline... I thought it was for changelings. According to folklore fairies prefer male-infants; so people sometimes dressed their children in female clothes to avoid the kidnapping by fairies and the consequent discovery of an "ugly" changeling in the cradle... Anyway I think one could go on with a lot of wonderful suppositions... There are cultures (like Inuit) in which your sex at the moment of birth doesn't imply your gender - and so on.

Little boys wore what were essentially dresses through their toddler/preschool years until they were dependably toilet (chamber pot?) trained. Remember that there were no elastic waists or zippers, so the trousers/breeches of the 17th-19th centuries were buttoned up. When a little boy was old enough to "hold it" dependably until he could manage his trouser-fastenings with dependability and aplomb, he was put into britches ("breeched").

quote:

Boys and girls dressed alike until the age of 4 or 5 when the boys would be "breeched", or allowed to wear a younger version of their father's clothing. This custom of dressing young boys nearly identical to their sisters had been going on for centuries. In the late 19th century, while many women preferred to dress their daughter in frillier dresses than their sons, there were no conventions for doing so. Many dresses are seen in catalogs not having any gender identified. By the 1890's it would be unusual to see a boy much over six years of age wearing a dress.

- Missouri Historic Costume & Textile Collection
University of Missouri-Columbia

- Cho