Threads of Motherhood

Featuring a floral paisley print, the dress is fully lined and neatly constructed with piped seams and decorative scalloped edges bound in blue calico. What I find most interesting about this fashionable dress, however, is its purpose: a maternity dress, made for one of the Weeks women to wear during and after her pregnancy. Based on the dress’ estimated dates, the wearer was likely one of Mary Weeks’ adult daughters, Frances or Harriet, or her daughter-in-law Mary Palfrey Weeks, who gave birth to multiple children in the 1840s and ’50s.

Although the first official ready-to-wear maternity clothes were not made available in the United States until 1904, variations of maternity wear had existed for centuries. Social customs dictated that pregnancy was not a topic of polite or public conversation, but women still adapted their clothing to better suit their needs during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Dresses with adjustable waist ties, for example, allowed the wearer to alter the size of the garment during pregnancy for greater comfort. In the early- to mid-19^th century, bib-front dresses could also function as maternity wear. Bib-front dresses were a variation on the popular Regency-era empire waist, one where the bodice is attached to the front skirt but not to its sides, allowing the wearer to undo or lower the bodice to nurse without taking off her entire dress.

The dress at the Shadows combines these options—adjustable skirt and bib-front—to present a wonderful example of antebellum maternity wear. The drawstring channel along the back allows the waistline to be adjusted, and the hook-and-eye closures along the bib-front can be undone to open the front of the bodice for breastfeeding. Underneath, two white interior fabric flaps are sewn into either side of the bodice, possibly to help the nursing mother cover herself while feeding her child or as an extra barrier to help absorb leaks.

The dress also provides a look at the nuances of social mores and the racialized business of childbearing during this time. The Weekses were active participants in plantation slavery, and in the antebellum Gulf South, it was common for women of the landowning class to eschew breastfeeding and use enslaved women as wet nurses. These workers, in addition to standard domestic labor, nursed and cared for enslavers’ infants. Enslaved wet nurses were often forced to wean their own children and leave them with other enslaved caretakers so that they would be fully available for their white charges. This stylish maternity dress worn by at least one of the Weeks women indicates that despite such forced labor practices, some women enslavers still chose to breastfeed their own infants. The garment’s practical ingenuity and colorful design offer an intimate glimpse into 19th-century motherhood.