At Least You're Not Doing This Blizzard Shit in a Petticoat

Cold comfort, perhaps, but this should make you feel slightly better: At least you aren’t struggling through this winter weather in Gilded Age costume.

Slate’s XX Factor points to the New York Sun‘s coverage of the blizzard that walloped New York City in 1888, with a special attention to the plight of the petticoat-clad:

“To get here I had to take my skirts up and clamber through the snowdrifts,” said a wash-woman when she came to the house of the reporter who writes this. She was the only messenger from the world at large that reached that house up to half past 10 o’clock. “With my dress down I could not move half a block.”

She was downright successful compared to this poor woman:

Women who did venture into the storm risked being trapped in a prison of skirt and ice. According to the Sun: “A woman attempting to cross Nassau street was obliged to call for help. She said she had lost her strength, and her clothing was so entangled with her limbs that she could not move.”