Dress, childhood, and the modern body: The body politics of children's dress reform in eighteenth-century Europe

This dissertation analyzes the eighteenth-century European discourse of children's dress reform, commonly associated with John Locke (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Emile, 1762), and primarily found in the texts of physicians. The study explores the discourse as it appeared in popular medical literature, treatises on child care and education, and journals published in English, French, and German, as well as artwork. In this discourse, Enlightenment ideas of childhood, health, nature, liberty, rationality, and civilization were brought together around issues of dress, gender, and the body. The thesis argues that this discourse was an important locus for the construction of "modern bodies"--bodies deemed fit for an envisioned age of enlightenment. Reformers contended that children's clothing, such as swaddling clothes and stays (corsets), had degenerated children's bodies from a natural, healthy state to an unnatural, enfeebled one. They constructed the "liberation" of children from these clothes as a significant step toward ridding the upper and middle classes of the physical and moral "degeneracy" associated with ancien-regime culture, in order to produce a society in which men would be manly and women motherly. Chapter one argues that the historiography of early modern childhood has incorporated stereotypes of children's dress which derive from the dress reform discourse. Chapter two traces that discourse in popular texts written during the long eighteenth century. Chapter three contends that the modern body was constructed as growing up "freed" from unnatural dress. Chapter four asserts that unreformed children's dress, because of its associations with women, fashion, and the French aristocracy, was figured as a "feminine" oppressor of the male child's body, and that removing this dress saved boys from effeminacy. The fifth and sixth chapters explore how the child's body was to be reared: male "experts" (the reformers) would direct child care and children would wear clothes that created a natural micro-environment around the body. Chapter seven argues that reforming children's dress was intended to create modern bodies that were closer to "nature" than the bodies of the ancien regime, and yet retained their position at the apex of the civilized world.