During the first half of the 19th century in England and the United States, a more tolerant attitude toward feminine exercise led women to abandon the fiction that they were not bipedal while bathing. This acknowledgment, however, was not fostered solely by the need for a more functional bathing dress. It was first evidenced by a few daring European women who wore lace-edged pantaloons trimmed with several rows of tucking under their daytime dresses. The shorter, untrimmed, knee-length drawers which quickly replaced the pantaloons, became an unseen but essential item in the fashionable English lady's toilette of the 1840s. These drawers, or a plainer version of the longer pantaloons, were adapted not only to the female riding habit but the bathing dress as well. An 1828 English source reported that "Many ladies when riding wear silk drawers similar to what is worn when bathing."[33] With the increased interest in physical exercise for women, ankle-length, open pantaloons also were being worn in the 1840s with a long overdress as an early form of gymnasium suit. This evidence of the early use of drawers suggests that, like English ladies, women in the United States were probably wearing a type of drawers beneath their nondescript bathing gowns during the second quarter of the 19th century. There is some slight support of this theory in the following stanza of a poem that appeared in 1845: But go to the beach ere the morning be ended And look at the bathers--oh what an array The ladies in trowsers, the _gemmen_ in _blowses_ E'en red flannel shirts are the "go" at Cape May.[34] [33] As quoted in C. WILLETT and PHILLIS CUNNINGTON, _The History of Underclothes_ (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 130. [34] "Cape May," _Godey's Lady's Book_ (December 1845), vol. 31, p. 268. The rather crude but delightful sketch of seabathing at Coney Island in 1856 (fig. 7) shows the ladies wearing very full, ankle-length, trousers with a sack top extending loosely only a few inches below the waist. This type of bathing costume, which was primarily a bifurcated garment instead of a skirted one, became the prevailing fashion as reported in English women's magazines of the 1860s.