(Please forgive the cross post but we need to get the info out there!) Since people are starting to sew for the Lincoln Funeral in Springfield, its important to remember that women did not wear what we consider to be standard mourning dress - the black dress with black crape collar, black bonnet with heavy black crape veil, often called widows weeds. A fashionable black dress (with a white collar) or lighter stages of mourning are perfectly fine. A black bonnet with colored trim or flowers is also fine. Fashionable short black bonnet veils may be worn. The clothing standards emphasize this heavily because we want to give the public a good sense of what the procession may have looked like. We (the organizers) were equally surprised to find out that there is no evidence of women in mourning, and, believe me, we have combed the written and illustrative records over and over. One hand colored illustration was shocking to my expectations because it shows women wearing yellow and red dresses. Of course the colorists used a simpified palate, but I doubt they would have changed black to those vivid colors. There is no indication that the image caused pubic outrage because of wild artistic license. From that we can deduce that colors, even bright colors, would be considered normal at the event. People most likely wore their best clothing. It seems that if a woman donned mourning, she was committing to wearing it for a number of months. There is no indication that a woman would dress in mourning for a funeral and then change back to her normal clothing the next day, the way we do today.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 21:08:50 +0000
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