Tea at Trianon: 18th-Century Shoes and the Contradictions of the Age of Enlightenment

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, August 19, 2022

18th-Century Shoes and the Contradictions of the Age of Enlightenment

From Smithsonian:

High heels also changed the way women walked, giving them a tottering gait. According to the exhibition, feminine footwear of the 18th century thus played into prominent theories about women’s “innate” inferiority—their smallness of intellect, their wobbliness of mind. Though Enlightenment thinkers trumpeted liberty for all rational persons, few argued that women should be granted the same political and economic rights as men. Instead, women were expected to occupy the domestic sphere, taking on roles as pleasing wives and doting mothers. Those who supported women’s subordination looked to nature to justify their beliefs; women were simply biologically different, they argued, and inherently less capable of rational thought.

“[W]oman was specifically made to please man,” wrote the preeminent Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762. “[Man’s] merit lies in his power; he pleases simply because he is strong. I grant you this is not the law of love; but it is the law of nature.”

Even women who worked outside the home were expected to conform to feminine ideals that emphasized their differences from men. One pair of heels at the BSM shows signs of alterations suggesting they were acquired secondhand, possibly at a used-clothing market or from a wealthy employer who no longer wanted them. Dated to the 1730s, the shoes were originally fastened with bows that appear to have been replaced by more stylish straps several years later. These changes may have been made for a working-class woman who could not afford the latest footwear trends but who nevertheless wanted to dress in fashionable heels. (Read more.)