Paintings of the past centuries and pre-revolutionary photographs depicting families of nobility and members of royal and royal dynasties, you can see many children dressed in beautiful dresses. It seems that only girls were born to representatives of high society, but this is not so. The fact is that boys were dressed in dresses before the revolution.
Trousers are the prerogative of adult men
One of the most common versions of why little boys in the old days wore beautiful dresses is the inequality between man and woman, traditional for that time. A child of any gender, up to a certain age, is completely dependent on his mother, is not independent either in self-service or in decision-making. Therefore, the dress, made, by the way, in accordance with the requirements of the fashion of a certain era, emphasized the status of a child - while it is still a baby. At about the age of 7, boys began to wear “masculine” clothing. It can be assumed that the origins of this tradition are akin to the ancient rites of initiation of boys into men, the change of a woman's dress to a man's is the previous stage.
Interestingly, in some countries, for example, in India, boys could only wear short shorts before puberty, and then long trousers.
Educating spirituality
Today, few people would dream of dressing up a two-year-old boy in a lace dress. People from infancy raise heroes and real men, welcome the brutal behavior of the heirs. One of the reasons for this is the banal homophobia of the parents, and, in the end, it is a personal matter for each couple how to start sex education for their baby. As for the old days, the problem of determining the orientation of the child was not so acute. But at a time when military conflicts arose almost every decade, parents wanted to protect their children from battle affairs, to admire them, dressed in angelic outfits. There is also a version that with the help of ruffles and lace, the mothers wanted to instill in the child a love of beauty.
In peasant families in Russia, small children of both sexes wore long-length shirts during the warm season.
Hygiene and care
In fact, the reason why boys were dressed in dresses is quite simple and trivial. Underwear in the form that it has now appeared only at the end of the 19th century. Previously, men did not wear panties, but knee-length underpants, and sometimes even lower, and women often did not use such wardrobe items at all. Therefore, dressing a boy in long pants, who cannot always control the urge to defecate and urinate, is impractical - washing in those days was not a pleasant pastime, although knowing and did not bother with household chores. At the age of 6-7 years, almost all children can already control the natural processes in the body, it was during this period that boys were dressed in clothes worthy of a man.
