Appearance and Construction of Gender in the Education of Eighteenth-Century English Aristocratic Girls

Authors

• Henna Karppinen-Kummunmäki Turun yliopisto

Abstract

Gender is a performance. We create our gender through gestures, acts and appearance. Gender is also a historical matter. Every period and every society has had its own conceptions of how it was like to be a woman or man. This article is about eighteenth-century aristocratic girls, their education, and the importance of appearance in their education. Through the correspondence of the Lennox family and the didactical literature published in England during the eighteenth century, this article examines the concepts of ideal womanhood of the period, how these concepts were visible in the education of girls and, moreover, what part appearance played in all this. This article will show that aristocratic girls and women had to carefully balance between the eighteenth-century ideals of modest womanhood and the expectations of their own social position. The themes of this article are part of the author’s on-going PhD thesis research.