A Cinderella story
Fashion, foot worship and foot moralism in Sweden, 1850–1900
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11992530 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Leif Runefelt (0000-0003-2453-7040, History, Södertörn University, Huddinge Stockholm, Sweden, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 352-375 |
| Publication date | 2024-01-04 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Scandinavian Journal of History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0346-8755 • E-ISSN: 1502-7716 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/03468755.2023.2297711 |
| OpenAlex | W4390588930 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 29 |
The article discusses the female beauty ideal of the small foot in the Swedish press during the second half of the nineteenth century, as an object for the male gaze in fiction, as an actual fashion ideal, and as a prescribed beauty practice for women. It consists of three parts, analysing different subgenres within the press. First, I show how a male notion of the beauty and erotic attractiveness of the small foot was constructed in short stories and serial novels published in the daily and weekly press. Next, I show how this ideal was visually represented for its realization in every-day life in figures in fashion journals. Both genres presented an ideal unattainable for most women. Third, I discuss articles in dailies and weeklies giving advice on how to take care of feet, warning against ambitions to make the foot look small. Taken together, representations of female feet in the Swedish press involved a construction of the foot that also constructed women as perpetually failing in relation to the existing beauty ideal, making it part of a discursive misogynist practice, according to which women was supposed to invest in their appearance, and were derided and ridiculed when they did
Aesthetics · Art · Attractiveness · Beauty · Foot (prosody · Ideal (ethics · Literature · Morality · Object (grammar · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Worship · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · Philosophy
Women’s Worlds
The corset and the mirror. Fashion and domesticity in Swedish advertisements and fashion magazines, 1870–1914
Too anxious to please
From Paper Patterns to Patterns-on-Fabric
Fear of Fashion; or, How the Coquette Got Her Bad Name
From Bustles to Bloomers
A material girl in a material world’
The Democratization of Fashion
Fighting the Corsetless Evil
Health by design
Down girl
Consuming the Ballerina
Poetic Podophilia
Reflections on Victorian Fashion Plates
| Highly cited | No |
|---|