How did women use the toilet in the age of hoop skirts, especially since few people had indoor plumbing? I can’t imagine that the average outhouse had enough room to maneuver such a thing. Did they just slide a chamber pot underneath, and squat? My WAG is that they simply removed their skirts.
The hoops are collapsible, being made of a series of slim concentric hoops fastened together with cloth tape. IOW, they aren’t a solid mass (think of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara running down the lawn at the beginning of GWTW–see her skirt billowing out? It’s quite lightweight), so it’s relatively simple (although it does take practice) to gather all the hoops and skirt up in your arms so as to enable sitting down on a toilet or privy seat. You basically hold your entire skirt, with hoops, in a big pile on your lap.
Takes practice, as I said.
It takes too long to get the clothing on in the first place; there’s no way you can remove it every time you need to go potty.
Of course, to use a chamber pot, you just squat directly over it, no problem, taking care that your skirt and petticoats, etc., don’t have a small fold of them in the line of fire.
If I were a housewife with an outhouse, I’d have chosen to use the chamber pot indoors, where it’s private and there are no spiders or wasps, and it isn’t raining, instead of running to the outhouse, since it would have been my job to empty the dang thing anyway, and I could do it at my leisure.
Petticoats were a lot harder to manage than hoop skirts. Before hoop skirts were invented, around 1860, the style was to wear many voluminous petticoats, some made of stiff woven horsehair (this was the fashion from about 1845-1860). Now, those would really be hard to shove aside while doing one’s business!
They also didn’t wear underwear. Well, that’s not quite true - they wore lots of undergarments, but no intact crotch panty like we wear today. The clothes covering the naughty bits are split crotch, so you don’t have to reach up under your corset to remove your panties.
Yeah, I learned that the hard way. My first day at Ren Faire, and I was in the handicapped stall (only one big enough for my skirt) wrestling my underwear out from underneath the bottom of my corset. While I got them off eventually, I never got them back on. I just threw the underwear out in the garbage and chalked that one up as a Life Lesson.
On modern toilets, it’s much easier to stradle the toilet backwards, pushing your farthingale out behind you. Sitting on a toilet the “right way”, your hoops get pushed out in front of you, and you can’t reach around to wipe well at all. Plus, you can sit straighter straddling, so your corset doesn’t stab you in the thighs as badly. I believe most period “toilets” had more room behind them, not having a tank right behind the user.