The Mother Hubbard: An Unconventional Gown

The Mother Hubbard gown tells us a story of women's everyday life, but also of rebellion and emancipation. It was a dress through which women tried to break those material and symbolic cages that forced them inside the house.
The alternative fashion of the 19th century allowed women to move freely in the new frontiers of the work and social sphere to which they aspired, thus moving from the internal to the external sphere.
In those years women started to gather in organizations aimed at achieving civil rights. It was in this context that in North America, the dress reform movement developed, which aimed to revolutionize women's fashion and to overcome the formal fashion of the time, suffocating and constrictive. The main concern was women's health, put at risk by very dangerous, as well as anachronistic, garments such as the corset, chemise and crinoline. Alongside the dress reform, the United States saw the emergence of another movement that, among other things, aimed at the liberation of women through fashion, as well as the promotion of an ideal of natural and classic beauty.
Mother Hubbard played a prominent role in both. Its characteristic width, lack of waist compression and sobriety were well suited to the aesthetic context. Many women chose to overcome the dichotomous prescriptions of Victorian etiquette by wearing the Mother Hubbard as an aesthetic garment outside the home.
However, the Mother Hubbard was not only used within the aesthetic niche, nor was it used solely as a home gown. It is in fact one of the most eclectic garments of the late 19th century, which was used by women of all social classes, geographical locations, and ages.
Among the women who challenged Victorian etiquette in their own way were first and foremost the peasant women of the frontier states, who finally had a way to move freely while toiling in the fields.
The link between the garment and female emancipation can be seen especially thanks to the role it played during the election campaign of the first candidates for the White House, especially in the case of Belva Lockwood in 1884. Newspapers proliferated cartoons that associated the controversial dress to the candidate in order to ridicule her. The political debate of those years was inflamed by this association. Demonstrations of men using cross dressing to protest against a woman in politics soon took to the streets. These men demonstrated with Mother Hubbard to express the absurdity of changing the gender balance and assuming attitudes typical of the opposite sex. But also underlying the demonstrations was Mother Hubbard's connection to prostitution. Women who crossed gender boundaries were accused of being prostitutes. Soon these gatherings became so widespread that they were a popular national folkloric pastime. We find articles recalling galas, dances and baseball games with men dressed in Mother Hubbard.
Scholar Patricia Marks uses the term "fashion schizophrenia" to describe the situation in the 1880's in many small to medium-sized cities in the United States. Although such gatherings of cross-dressers proliferated, women who wore Mother Hubbard on a daily basis risked arrest or harassment. In many cities there were Anti-Mother Hubbard laws. The woman who wore the robe in the street was guilty of giving an "indecent exposure", not far removed from the "indecent display" given by Belva Lockwood in politics. According to Victorian morality wearing a wrapper outside the home gave rise to scandal, just as a woman engaged in public life was scandalous. Mother Hubbard helped to shift the rigid division between public and private, between inside and outside, and therefore between male and female, making society more fluid and dynamic.