Here's an interesting webpage I found on this subject. (Just keep clicking "cancel" when the password box pops up - it should stay away after the second time.) What I find interesting is that breeching continued up until the 1920s! I remember reading once that we think of the Victorian era as a very gender-segregated time period, yet they had no trouble with the idea of dressing boys like girls for the first several years of their lives.

Another thing is that parents (i.e: mothers) didn't just *dress* their sons like girls, but gave them what we might consider girlish hairstyles, as well (curls like Little Lord Fauntleroy's were very popular after that book was published). I have an aunt who did this with her younger son in the early 1980s. Until he was ready for kindergarten, she just let his hair grow, and I remember my teenaged brother recoiling when he discovered that the pretty little girl with the long blond ringlets was actually our cousin Thomas! ;-)