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The leadership's insistence on mature women caused a stir among the younger generation who seemed most ready to head to war. Jane Stuart Woolsey wittily remarked that, "Society just now presents itself the unprecedented spectacle of many women trying to make believe that they are over thirty." Georgeann Woolsey, Jane's sister, applied for a nursing post, although she was twenty-eight. To her pleasant surprise, she was accepted "by dint of taking the flowers out of my bonnet and the flounce off my dress; by toning down, or toning up, according to the emergency, I succeeded in getting myself looked upon with mitigated disapprobation."
Katherine Wormeley complained that her dress, sans hoops, was "rather medieval." Jane Grey Swisshelm described the ideal dress as "entirely destitute of steel, starch, whale-bones, flounces, and ornaments of all descriptions; should rest on the shoulders, have a skirt from the waist to the ankle, and a waist that leaves room for breathing." The outfit, she said, "led most people to mistake me for a nun."
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