EXCERPT - The Children and the Philosophers
Written by Shane Alder
excerpt from Why Clothing Changed, from the Garden of Eden to the Department Store by Shane Alder
“Happy Revolution!” cheered the Galerie des Modes in 1780. The series of hand-colored engravings, published periodically to showcase the fashions of the elite, had arrived at an inauspicious moment, a time when France was plagued by wide-spread illiteracy, deepening poverty, and a looming financial crisis. Nonetheless, now that childhood had been recognized as a separate, formative stage of development, French children no longer dressed like their parents, in clothes that identified them by class. Giving credit to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau for bringing about this changed perspective, the Gallery of Fashion declared, “The new way of raising and dressing them even takes his name.” Thanks to “Jean-Jacques, friend of humanity,” the next generation was preparing to play a role in a reformed social order.
Yet Rousseau had merely popularized ideas long since put into practice in England, where a middle-class culture defined a way of life focused on the family. Consequently, Enlightenment thinkers in France had begun to promote marriages of compatibility and raising children with affection before the Swiss outcast became the celebrated spokesman of French family values. A father of five who abandoned his own offspring, an act he justified by claiming that the responsibility of rearing them would have prevented him from working, Rousseau wrote two wildly successful books about the care and nurturing of children. In those didactic novels, which, parenthetically, denounced novel reading and book-learning, he adapted current thinking about innate aspects of human behavior, and added a few twists. His misrepresentations were to recast beliefs about children’s upbringing as well as the inherent nature of women, which in turn guided attitudes that would prevail in the nineteenth century.
Typically, European children, from the peasant to the privileged, were swaddled at birth. Wrapped like mummies with long strips of cotton or linen, they spent their first months in cocoons intended to protect and straighten their fragile limbs. Before swaddling was discontinued, the titled classes routinely handed their bundled newborns to caretakers, sometimes sending an infant to live with a wet nurse until the age of three or four. Whether children were tended by servants or anticipated a life of work, the youngest members of the family were frequently treated with indifference, severely disciplined, and expected to conform to the strictures of their class. Education, if it existed, was haphazard. Girls of the upper strata were taught at home while their brothers were sent away to board at grammar schools shortly after they were breeched, trading the long gowns they wore as toddlers for knee-length silk breeches. At the other end of the social ladder, it wasn’t unusual for boys who wore shapeless cloth trousers to be apprenticed at the equally young age of six or seven, learning a trade or toiling alongside their elders in the fields, leaving their sisters at home to look after younger siblings. As a result of those traditions, the vast majority of the population was unschooled and thus illiterate.
The family structure mirrored the social hierarchy and perpetuated it through established privileges. As in Britain, French laws of inheritance took precedence over personal ambitions or wishes, preserving family estates by passing titles and property to first-born sons as sole heirs, often without financial provisions for other children. Marriages that furthered family interests were still arranged by contractual agreements between fathers on behalf of their children, while the lower classes, with no property to exchange, married as soon as a pregnancy was confirmed.
Amid the intellectual and scientific ferment of the Age of Reason when the world was viewed through the lenses of microscopes and telescopes, long-held assumptions were undergoing intense examination. New ideas were emerging in France about raising the young according to the laws of nature rather than molding them by the rules of society. It was natural and reasonable for children to have a say about who they would marry and for a family to meet the emotional and social needs of husband and wife. It was natural and reasonable for children to be at home and cared for by loving parents, for childhood to be a period of play and exploration, for all children to be educated and offered opportunities to improve their lives. The new conception of childhood was as important to Enlightenment thinking as was the overall goal of a social order based on equality.
Even so, when the Galerie des Modes began publication in 1778, its readership lavished attention on fashion, then defined as the whimsical inventions, opinions, and customs introduced by and for polite society, like the towering topical hairdo topped by a hot-air balloon lifting off a big wig à la Montgolfier or the less ostentatious hat trimmed à la Calonne, named for the finance minister who would soon try to control the country’s financial deficit by proposing curbs on aristocratic privileges. Hence, when the Galerie des Modes saluted the “Happy Revolution,” and hailed Rousseau as its hero, it misconstrued the ideals taking root and transforming France.
In the first set of prints picturing specially designed outfits for the young, children wore styles that differed from their parents. But they were still tightly trussed in costumes similar to the silk-clad shepherds and shepherdesses in the fantasy paintings of the artist Watteau from the beginning of the century. Though meant to allude to the painter’s dream world, a vision of nature as a place without artifice where all classes intermingled, those fashions reflected Rousseau’s notion that children should be raised in nature like peasants instead of going to school, which not only overlooked the harsh reality of rural poverty, it ignored the tenets of children’s development that he purportedly supported.
Additionally, commentary accompanying the engravings echoed Rousseau, facetiously stating: “Children have the absolute right to live and breathe.” It continued by noting the new styles were, “directed by salutary principles distinguishing the sexes, thus a new generation is being raised under the standard of liberty.” Although Rousseau succeeded in eliminating the class-based outlook for child-rearing, he laid the groundwork for establishing the belief that boys and girls were inherently different, exchanging one form of inequality for another.
In 1787, the Galerie des Modes published a second series of prints devoted to children’s dress, this time designed with their needs in mind. This time around the girls wore the comfortable, unpretentious cotton frock of English girls while their brothers sported the easily laundered “skeleton suit” of English boys, a loose top and trousers buttoned together to allow for rapid growth in the early years. When that young generation got dressed, they were outfitted to step into the future with sensibility.
Perhaps the happy revolution was only a passing fad. Perhaps it was recognition, long overdue, that childhood was a period of emotional and moral development, preparing the young to become responsible citizens. Perhaps those in power finally understood the true nature of the changes going on around them. If so, understanding came too late. Within two years, a less felicitous revolution would erase a way of life.
John Locke was instrumental in laying the foundation for the scientific revolution that changed the world by inquiry and deliberation, not bloodshed. With empiricism at its core, the Age of Reason regarded the world anew, probing, wondering, discovering. Locke’s writings on politics, correlating the rights and responsibilities of citizens in a constitutional monarchy dependent on the consent of the governed, were equally groundbreaking. As influential as they were, those essays were surpassed by the ideas presented in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which remained in print until the end of the eighteenth century and permanently altered perceptions of childhood in France, as it had in England.
Just as his scientific and political essays challenged commonly held beliefs, Locke’s writings about children changed the ways in which the young were raised and dressed. When Locke escorted the future monarchs William and Mary to England in 1688, conventional wisdom held that, at birth, ideas pre-existed in a child’s mind, imprinting thoughts and patterns of behavior that had to be undone by discipline. Locke refuted the notion of preconceived ideas in his Essay on Human Understanding of 1690, which examined the origins of knowledge. The mind of a newborn was blank, he wrote, a tabula rasa or clean slate, with awareness initiated by sensory stimulation and developed further with experience. He believed the mind was malleable, constantly adapting to the man-made world. Except for inherent aptitudes and talents, Locke concluded, nothing was innate in human nature.
Three years later, Locke was asked to outline a curriculum for young men of the educated classes. Instead, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he expressed his overarching concern for the intellectual and physical development of every individual, explicitly stating his conviction that girls and boys should be educated identically, differing only in that girls should avoid exposure to the hot, piercing rays of the sun during outdoor activities. In another essay urging greater opportunities for the poor, he was advocating for a system of parish or village schools for children of commoners and laborers, to ensure they too would receive a comprehensive education.
By education, Locke meant the sum of all experiences contributing to the formation of character, beginning with infancy. He recommended eliminating the drudgery of rote memorization of facts, instead instilling an appreciation for and an interest in learning. Mindful of the whole child, Locke suggested changes in the upbringing of the young, especially freedom from unnatural practices and customs—from severe discipline and punishment, from the constraints and contrivances that bound their growing bodies, from overdressing in constricting or heavy clothes. With the developing mind stimulated and inquisitive and the developing body moving freely in clothes suited to exploring and exercise, a reasoning child would become a rational adult.
Part pedagogy, part parental advice book, Locke’s thoughts about child-rearing were vital to Enlightenment principles. Samuel Richardson incorporated excerpts of the essay in his novel Pamela with particular emphasis on swaddling, which kept infants immobilized for months. When the book’s heroine, a fifteen-year-old country girl, observed a pinioned infant on its nurse’s lap, she spoke compellingly on behalf of a nation pursuing freedom for people of every age and circumstance.
Changes in thinking about childhood had filtered through all levels of English society well before those ideas spread to the European continent, most notably to France. There, a host of renowned philosophers hastened to free children’s bodies even as they bound their developing minds with skewed interpretations of Locke’s underlying principle: nothing is innate in human nature.
In 1687, François Fénélon, advisor to the girls’ school established by Madame de Maintenon, governess of the illegitimate children of Louis XIV, had written that nothing was more neglected than the education of girls. Yet his treatise argued that educating girls was the necessary means to strengthen their weak bodies and minds. Later, in the mid-eighteenth century, influential French philosophers looked to England as the land of “natural rights” and a model of social equality, and to Locke in particular.
In his call to reform public education, Denis Diderot drew on Locke’s fundamental belief, that knowledge was founded on sensate experience, to create his chronology of human development. In Diderot’s view, every individual passed through stages of increased understanding, the initial spark of sensation followed by ideas, thoughts, and reflection; next came conscience, sentiments, and passions, then signs and sounds, language and laws, culminating with the sciences. But the height of human achievement, Diderot wrote in his 1753 essay, On the Interpretation of Nature, was art. As art’s most prominent proponent, he praised the painters Chardin and Greuze who portrayed the bourgeois family as a harmonious social unit in which parents imparted lessons of responsibility and morality to their offspring. Those depictions of close familial ties coupled with Diderot’s critiques shaped attitudes in an expanding public that was increasingly middle class.
Diderot’s masterful accomplishment was the Encyclopedia dedicated to the English scientists Bacon, Locke, and Newton. Published over a period of twenty years, from 1752 to 1772, the seventeen volumes of text with an additional eleven of engravings investigated everything from the letter A, in the first sounds uttered by infants, to Z, and the new field of zoology. The monumental work included explanations of emotions and inventions, machinery and medicine, technology and trades. Diagrams illustrated naval strategies, medical surgeries, and the construction of equipment for the racket game, jeu de paume, the precursor of tennis. Clothing, with its ties to the social hierarchy, was at the center of political debates about inequality, and Diderot’s definition was expansive: clothing included everything that covered or adorned the body or protected it from the elements. With the Encyclopedia, the philosopher hoped to undo preconceptions through thorough examination, thereby generating an intellectual revolution, a reasoning age of liberty propelled by the arts and sciences. Ultimately, he wanted to change the world with wisdom.
Locke had dismissed the new methods of classification, believing it generated artificial divisions. Nature did not create categories, he wrote; instead, it was man who saw similarities and differences, who organized time in decades and centuries and divided people by putting them in a hierarchical structure of separate, unequal classes. Veering away from Locke’s premises about human nature, Diderot developed a system similar to botanical classification for the Encyclopedia’s entries under the heading caractère. Citing “natural laws,” droit nat., for the human species, he referred to temperaments, maintaining they were innate or inborn and therefore not subject to alteration by man-made custom or culture. With this so-called scientific proof of inherent character traits, certain tendencies could be indiscriminately assigned to people with sexe rather than class as the determining factor.
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