Leggy Ladies: 18C Attitudes Towards Legs

James Gillray's "Fashionable Contrasts" explicitly channels sex through legs & feet.

Gillray's cartoon depicts
ladies of questionable virtue
with their legs showing
from under their skirts.

Eighteenth-century dress, as most of us know, required women to wear long skirts, petticoats, and/or dresses to cover up as much of their legs as possible. A “short skirt” was one that revealed a lady’s ankle(!), and ladies who showed leg were considered titillating, inappropriate, or downright immoral. On the other hand, women who cross-dressed were often admired for their show of a “well-turned leg.” A quote from Bernard Mandeville describes this double-bind perfectly:

If a woman at a merrymaking dresses in Man’s clothes, it is reckon’d a Frolick amongst Friends…Upon the Stage it is done without Reproach, and the most Virtuous Ladies will dispense with it in an Actress, tho’ every Body has a full view of her Legs and Thighs, but if the same Woman, as soon as she has Petticoats on again, should show her Leg to a Man as high as her Knee, it would be a very immodest Action, and every body will call her impudent for it.

Peg Woffington, here as
"The Female Volunteer," was
often admired for her
luscious legs.

In fact, what made women’s legs so titillating was precisely the fact that they—and the crotch at the top of the legs—were hidden, invisible and unmentionable in normal dress. According to costume historian Ann Hollander, while men’s clothing tended to emphasize the body and “demonstrate the existence of a trunk, neck and head with hair, of movable legs, feet and arms, and sometimes genitals,” women’s clothes and particularly the skirt, which “hid women from the waist down and thus permitted endless scope for the mythology of the feminine, had become a sacred female fate and privilege, especially after it became firmly established as a separate garment.”

The separation of the legs seemed to allude, all too clearly, to the genitalia between them, making breeches on women an overtly sexual spectacle. Even actresses had to contend with the condemnation of eighteenth-century moralists on the topic of breeches parts and travesty, while all women were aware that the showing of legs was an immoral act often associated with prostitution.

Oh Henry!
Look at your
bulging...calves!

This is not to say, of course, that men’s legs were not sexualized in one way or another, either. Eighteenth-century texts and earlier Renaissance texts emphasize slim ankles and bulging calves as being the definition of a graceful gam in a gentleman. Henry VIII, for example, was revered for his muscular calves, a fact remarked on by the Venetian ambassador in 1515: “His majesty is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on…with an extremely fine calf to his leg.”

The difference between men’s and women’s legs seems mostly to be that an exposed male leg was accepted and expected in the eighteenth century, while the appearance of a feminine leg was, in most cases, not. Women who cross-dressed were seen as transgressors of gender codes, but, if they were attractive enough, then their leg exposure was also acceptable. All women who cross-dressed or even momentarily donned trousers to, for example, ride more comfortably on horseback (like the real Queen Caroline Mathilde who I wrote about last week!), were able to take advantage of the greater mobility that trousers afforded.

 

The trousers of female pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Reade in this engraving
suggest a level of comfort and mobility inaccessible to women in dresses and petticoats.

Thus, trousers were always, in a sense, a way for women to rebel, for they signaled independence, freedom, and increased mobility. This doesn’t mean that women in trousers weren’t sometimes co-opted by patriarchal projects designed to recruit men to the army, to arouse men sexually, or to put female bodies on display for consumption. Pants and legs are much more complex signifiers in the eighteenth century than just that; the images I include here as well as the remarks by Mandeville indicate the multifaceted, at times ambiguous nature of the female leg, and legs more generally, in eighteenth-century English society.

Isaac Cruikshank's cartoon satirizes the growing interest in ballet at the end
of the 18th century and its exposure of female legs...and other bits.

Welcome to Notes & Petticoats!

Welcome to my blog and my very first post! This blog, like many wonderful blogs before it, is dedicated to discussing, pondering and examining aspects of eighteenth-century life and literature, especially in the British Isles. Posts will focus on literature, material histories, and issues of representation, especially with regard to gender and sexuality, which is my scholarly focus in eighteenth-century literary studies.

Why “notes and petticoats,” you might ask? Good question.

A petticoat is a skirt; in the eighteenth-century, it can be either a skirt worn under a dress or jacket, completely invisible from the outside, or it can be the main item of clothing covering the lower body of women. Petticoats could be completely functional, or they could be ornately decorated and embroidered lavishly. As an item of clothing, the petticoat is both functional and excessive, but it always refers to women’s clothing. In this sense, the petticoat exemplifies the focus in my research specifically on representations of women in the eighteenth century.

Similarly, in the eighteenth century, “the petticoats” could be a way of referring to women in general, as opposed to “the breeches,” the pants that men wore at the time and signifying the menfolk. The term “petticoat government” refers to the rule by women of the home, and can often be used both a positive sense (the pleasures of domesticity), or a negative one (the tyranny of the female sex over the male sex, i.e. being “whipped” or, as an eighteenth-century denizen would term it, “hen-pecked”). Henry Fielding uses the term in at least two plays he penned in the century to refer to such female tyranny. Petticoat, therefore, can be something of a loaded term.

The sartorial divisions between men and women were stringent in the eighteenth century. Yet, the practice of cross-dressing flourished during this time—a topic I explored in my dissertation and which I continue to work on in articles and a future book project. Women donned breeches for a variety of reasons in the eighteenth century—some of those women I’ll explore in future posts. In any case, the large dresses of the late eighteenth century, fitted with various hoops and layers, were difficult to maneuver, and breeches, at the very least, provided comfort and ease of movement. At the same time, most eighteenth-century moralists (i.e. men) believed that women in breeches were, at the very least, committing a sexually salacious act by wearing breeches, as the breeches clearly defined where a lady’s legs began and ended.

Thus, petticoats symbolize the expectations placed on women of the time, in addition to illustrating the divisions between public and private selves, the construction of the body through clothing, and the changing understanding of sex and gender in the eighteenth century. Lastly, petticoats could function as secret hiding places located right on a woman’s body. In Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740), the eponymous heroine tries to hide the letters she writes and receives by sewing them into her “undercoat, next to her linen,” i.e. into her petticoat. Just like the petticoats go from underclothes to outerwear, so Pamela’s secret thoughts become public when Mr. B forces Pamela to give him her letters, literally undressing her. Petticoats are titillating secret-holders, reminding us of the eighteenth-century obsession with young girls making their entrance into the world, resisting worldly temptations, and learning how to make a good match.

Who can resist a petticoat? Its many layers draw us in, tempt us, hiding and revealing at the same time. Here on this blog, I’ll be examining the many different layers of the eighteenth century, just as Mr. B. examined Pamela’s petticoat. (Oh myy, as George Takei would say.)

I hope you’ll join me along the way, especially with reading suggestions, interesting Enlightenment-related links, comments, and guest posts.