Did Victorian parents raise their children "sexless" to prolong innocence?

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So I think there are two questions at play here:

  1. Did boys wear dresses when they were young?
  2. Did they do this to make children sexless?

The way the article is written, it seems to conflate the two. I feel like the best way to answer your question is to address both points separately. So that's what I'll do.

So the answer to the first is yes. As you mention, Breeching was in fact a thing. The Wikipedia article you cite discusses this aspect better than I can, and you have already read it so I won't rehash this here. But suffice it to say, there does seem to be historical examples of this happening in Europe (not just Victoria England), such as this painting of Louis XIV.

As to the second question, this doesn't seem to be in order to raise children as sexless. As a counter point to that, I will quote Wikipedia:

Girls' bodices usually reflected adult styles, in their best clothes at least, and low bodices and necklaces are common.[9] Boys often, though not always, had dresses that were closed up to the neck-line, and often buttoned at the front—rare for girls. They frequently wear belts, and in periods when female dresses had a V at the waist, this is often seen on little girls, but not on boys.

So, in other words, there were ways to differentiate between boys and girls. There are several other examples there. I don't think I need to quote all of them (you can go and read more if you're really that interested).

The point is, because there were several ways to differentiate boys and girls, I would find it hard to say that this particular practice was to keep children sexless. I certainly can't speak to other child-rearing practices at that time (I haven't studied enough), but this one doesn't seem to be the case.

Upvote:-2

No, only 50% of children lived past five. So, it was much cheaper and simpler to dress them all as girls until they reached an age in which they were no longer very vulnerable to dying. During the Victorian age, they had started using bottle feeding, which included corks that accelerated bacterial breeding. So, besides cholera, infant mortality, arsenic in paint, etc., kids were dropping like flys from bacterial infections.

HOWEVER, things never have a single answer. Being the Victorian era and the dawn of the concept of childhood (which is an extremely modern concept), there are likely additional factors. The idea of sezlwss innocence could be another factor. It would probably make it easier for group child care since they would not need to separate by sex.

Upvote:2

A basic search could not produce the reference and my books are still packed but I remember an author pointing out that we (in our highly gendered modern world) normally frame this as "young boys are dressed like girls" but an alternate view would be "grown women are dressed like children".

The Victorians may have loaded additional baggage onto the concept but most cultures until the early 20th century dressed boys and girls the same until sometime between successful potty training and puberty.

From https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/1399

Children of all ages became indentured servants, from month-old babies to twenty-year-old young men, but the average age at binding was between six and eight years. At about this age, children usually made the passage into sex-segregated skills training; at six or seven, boys cast off childhood gowns, put on trousers, left their mothers’ oversight, and joined their male relatives for day work in the fields or the workshop.

Websites for Colonial Williamsburg and Plymouth Plantation also mention boys and girls dressed the same while young.

I could not find websites detailing childhood dress for non European or precolonial cultures but what reading I remember about children from other cultures seems to indicate a similar pattern. [Thirty-one Brothers and Sisters, etc]

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