Browse Exhibits (30 total)

Throughout 18th and 19th Century England, aristocratic women came to establish themselves as dictators of society’s aesthetic taste.  The choices they made, not only in decorating their homes, but also in curating their personal fashion, set the standard for feminine expression that women from all walks of life strived to reach.  It was expected that a woman could create a domestic sphere that accurately reflected the trends of the period, without being too ostentatious. This was the meaning of “taste,” and it was marked by a level of exclusivity that correlated with one’s social standing.  As time went on, upper-class women were not limited to products and materials created in England. Rather, they had access to items brought in from places such as France, Germany, and China. The introduction of these new pieces allowed taste to remain classist; only a certain amount of material could be secured at a certain time, and therefore only a certain amount of people had access to it.  Limited quantities of international goods continued to fall into the hands of the wealthy, ensuring that they remained one step ahead of the commoners that aspired to be just like them. This allowed the evolution of taste to proceed.

In this exhibit, I contend that this development of taste was not entirely due to the increased cultural literacy of women.  Instead, it was initiated by the growing influence of English men on the global landscape. Because the availability of international goods was dependent on what men brought back from their foreign travels, the feminine idea of taste became marked by the male perspective on beauty and aesthetic appeal.  The five items in this exhibit demonstrate the evolution of taste into a reflection of male imperialistic ideals. Fans from China and fabrics from France inspired English female fashion, but the first of those that entered Britain were imported by men. Feminine ideas of beauty in the Georgian Era became a function of the world as their masculine counterparts experienced it, solidifying the reach and control that English men had on the world around them.

"The beautiful seems right by force of beauty."

-Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

            British society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was saturated with patriarchal values and with that came a quite misogynistic conflation of aesthetic beauty and social worth. Particularly in regard to artistic representations of women and domesticity, it is clear that beauty and traditional femininity were used as devices to push a particular social narrative. While art may be an attempt to imitate life, it is not a mere reflection. Images of life are refracted through the minds of artists and presented in a new way, to either subtly or overtly present their message. When engaging with period drawings and portraiture, we must always keep in mind the intention of the artist and the cultural context of the intended audience.

            In the case of eighteenth and ninteenth century representations of women, conventional beauty was the tool manipulated by artists to push any number of political or social agendas. Women thought to be upstanding in character were characterized as more traditionally feminine, whereas those who defied some sort of norm or expectation were given plainer or even more masculine features. These artistic choices correlate directly to the attitudes surrounding the role of women in the public and private spheres. This exhibit will track representations of women from various roles in society alongside the changing socio-political climate of Britain, in order to understand how aesthetics of beauty were used as rhetorical devices by artists of the period.

The strongly patriarchal nature of British society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created a system where men, particularly wealthy men, had far more social power than other Britons. Whether they were titled nobility or simply well-off, many wealthy men therefore conformed with the ideals of this system. They went to White’s in the eighteenth century to gamble with their fortunes, risking all they had to prove their bravery and wealth, and in the nineteenth century they went there to relax in a fraternal atmosphere which valued luxury and the absence of women. They supported British imperialism, whether by gawking at Tipu’s Tiger in the British East India Company’s Indian Museum or by actually joining the military themselves. In the nineteenth century, men chose clothing which proclaimed allegiance to a new vision of masculinity as plain, dignified, virtuously unadorned. They acted as fatherly patriarchs in the home, loving or stern as their personalities dictated, and if they could afford it they went to Eton as boys to be molded into fitting a narrow definition of masculinity. Misogyny pervaded their everyday lives, including the design of the cards they played with.

In each of the six items in my exhibit, one can see the ways British men were supposed to conform with popular—and sometimes contradictory—ideals of masculinity. But by looking more closely at Charles Dickens’s preferred clothing, Francis Laurence Lawton’s abandonment of Ellen Lewis, and the anti-sports editorial in the Eton College Chronicle, one can also see ways in which men resisted those cherished ideals of modesty, domesticity, and athleticism. Resistance may have been as minor as a brightly-colored waistcoat or as major as leaving the pregnant mother of one’s child, but men did not always comply which what their society expected of them. The rigidity of social norms was painful even for many of those who ostensibly benefitted most from them.

Ideas about sex and gender were changing in England as the eighteenth century folded into the nineteenth. As medical ideas altered, as the notion of the individual became cemented, and as a consumer culture grew, the way people thought about gender changed. This period saw the creation of separate spheres for men and women and this transformed expectations for each gender and thus influenced people’s family lives, work experiences, and sense of self. This exhibit uses objects from USC Archives and Special Collections and selected primary source databases to explore these themes. 

During both the 18th and 19th centuries, women were being directed to uphold a series of expectations. With the social climate of the time ushering new standards in beauty and work, expectations for women largely revolved around those concerned with fashion and domestic roles. The way in which women dressed was closely monitored to ensure that they met socially accepted and desirable forms of fashion among other women. The end result of this emphasis in female fashion was seemingly to bring forth idealized visions for what the female body had to look and be presented. The roles that women held in day-to-day life were also under surveillance, as the female presence expanded within the domestic sphere. In the transition between the 18th and 19th centuries, women were not only in charge of shaping the interior design of their homes to their liking. Now, they were being called upon to shape and maintain their homes with their children and husbands in mind as a means to maintain family stability within the home. Cooking was a key to achieving this stability, prompting women to look into recipes that would fulfill the appetites of their families and dinner guests in an effort to keep them satisfied and coming back to the home for future meals. Cooking, among other domestic roles, would become a dominant sight from women within the home. With the emergence of these social expectations in the public and domestic spheres of women, young girls were beginning to be brought up with these future rules and ideas during their childhoods. The standards for what it meant to dress and behave as an ideal woman was ingrained into childhood activities such a playing with dolls and helping out with domestic chores. Thus, programming the youth into working their way up towards fulfilling these expectatons in their own lives.