The shirt waist

Remember the fire in the "shirt waist" factory?

The building was locked, and the low paid women died in huge numbers when there was a fire.

So, I always wondered (but not enough to look it up) what was a "shirt waist?"

There was a piece about the garment on the front page of today's NYTimes. So I read and learned.

Up to that point women wore really awful clothing.

They lived in a horse economy. Said another way the roads were paved, with horse poop to put it mildly. And women were expected to wear ground length dresses, corsets, bustles and who knows what else (I am a guy so I skipped the chapter on the history of how we expected women to dress).

So a shirt waist was what we might refer to as a "dress". A simple, button up the front, garment made much like a man's shirt only long enough reach the mid calf, but over a foot above the horrors of the day.

Imagine going from a whale bone corset to a simple dress.

Talk about liberation, and talk about moral outrage.

It is always amazing to me what we men have done to our women in the name of something we thought was noble, and was not.