18th Century Women Wearing Men’s Coats
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Last updated: Jan 7, 2024
While more fashionable women wore menswear-inspired riding habits, some poorer working-class women were depicted in what appear to have been cast-off coats that had been sewn for men. Many of these seem to have been regimental coats, suggesting that they had been intended for soldiers and repurposed for camp followers and widows.
- A loitering woman (at far right) in a figure sketch made by Paul Sandby in Edinburgh after the rebellion of 1745
- Woman (foreground, far right) in Mountebanks at Night by Paul Sandby, 1758
- A Soldier’s Wife Begging by Daniel Chodowiecki, 1764
- A woman with a dog (foreground, far left) in Scene in a London Street, 1770
- A fishwife in A Beau at Billingsgate, 1777
- A fishwife in A Cornish Hug, 1781
- The Gypsie Fortune-Teller, 1783
- The Traveling Musicians by Robert Dighton
- A woman (foreground, left) holding a hat out for coins while picking another man’s pocket in Punch’s Puppet Shew, 1795
- A fishwife (central foreground, with her back facing the viewer) in The Enraged Politician or the Sunday Reformer or a Noble Belman Crying Stinking Fish, 1799
- A shoeblack in an illustration of Guy Fawkes Day in The Costume of Great Britain by William Henry Pyne, 1805
