Figure 1.--

Mina Christine Arnold Young was born in Billings, Montana during 1913. Mina describes her childhood clothing and underwear as a girl of about 12 in the mid 1920s.

Clothing Memories

Mina writes, "As far as I know, everyone wore long underwear in the winter when I was a little girl. We speak of "long handles" now, but the proper name for them was unionsuits. Winter ones were heavy, perhaps wool or part wool, and the sleeves came down to the wrists and the legs came down to the ankles. Girls wore long cotton stockings, mostly black, or perhaps white for Sunday. Some of the girls from rich families wore white stockings to school. Underwear legs had to be folded neatly around the ankle and held while the stockings were pulled up over them. It wasn't easy. Summer unionsuits were available for men and women, with short sleeves and short legs and made of a lighter material. Little girls wore underwaists with a reinforced strip around them where garters could be pinned on, to hold up those long stockings. Bloomers with elastic in the legs covered the garters and the stocking tops. Since there were no boys in our family, I don't know what kind of underwear little boys wore."

Boys

Even though Mina didn't realize it (since she had no male siblings in her family), little boys of the period she describes often wore almost identical underwear, waists, and stockings. Certainly boys wore the long underwear (unionsuits) that covered their entire bodies, having both long sleeves and long legs. Many younger boys wore short trousers or above-the-knee knickers, and in the winter would have had the same long stockings and underwaists with garters to hold them up that Mini describes wearing herself. Compare for instance the shorts worn with long stockings (and long underwear underneath) that we see in an early photograph of precisely the same period (in Arkansas)--Bud Walton, the younger brother of the founder of Wal-Mart.

Created: 11:41 PM 1/7/2007
Last updated: 11:41 PM 1/7/2007