A Cinderella story: fashion, foot worship and foot moralism in Sweden, 1850–1900

Abstract

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.

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