Women at Home in Paintings of the 1800's

Arranging Roses

by De Scott Evans

At the Kitchen Window

by De Scott Evans (1847-1898) American

The  Tack Room

by De Scott Evans

Picking Wildflowers

by De Scott Evans

Grandma's Visitors

by De Scott Evans

Looking at Drawings

Adolpho Belimbau 1894 (Italy) 1845-1938

Portrait by James Tissot, 1836-1902, France

In contrast to these 19th century scenes of women at home, this is an interesting description of life for women after the French Revolution (1788-1804) in which all restraint and propriety was set aside:

(With their culture destroyed, they lived a free-for-all existence:)

Never did the French nation offer its observers a stranger, more incoherent, various, and extraordinary sight than in the early period of the Directory. Everything—habits, traditions, language, throne, altar, manners and customs—had been swallowed up in the Revolution... As no tradition of that past remained, nor any possibility of extemporising a whole society, with new rules, new customs, and new dress, in the space of a single day, these were all borrowed, in a lump, from ancient history and extinct nation. Each individual was bedizened and made up according to his or her own sweet will, each talked his or her chosen jargon. It was a universal travesty, an unlimited carnival, a neverending senseless orgie. Nobody can look back, from these latter days, on the general character and petty details of the libertinage of those, without being tempted to believe the whole thing a colossal joke, a tremendous caricature, invented by some humorist of the school of Rowlandson or Hogarth...

(Immodesty was rampant)

The ladies insisted that their dresses should show every contour, and be of transparent fabrics. In vain the doctors spent their breath in assertions that the French climate, temperate as it was, did not admit of clothing as light as that of ancient Greece. The counsels of the disciples of Hippocrates fell on deaf ears, and, at the close of the year VI, Delessart found himself in a position to assert that he had seen more young girls die during the reign of nakedness veiled in gauze, than during the forty years preceding it.

(Young women did not stay home, and domestic occupation was replaced by partying)

The Revolution had forced them to live in the street; the home joys, the witty drawing-rooms of former days, the love of things noble and high-souled, it had no power, nor any desire, to bestow. They had no beliefs, no faith, no clear conception of good and evil; and so, unchecked, they slipped ipto the life of sensual pleasures, with no special perception of enjoyment, beyond the merest animal gratification.



That fierce Republican, Sebastien Mercier, who was to live until 1814, and who was in a position to bear witness to the disgraceful dissipation of the new regime, has added, as a postscript to his " Nouveau Tableau deParis," the following curious pages on the more than affable nymphs of the year VIII:



"Their three rules—and these are faithfully obeyed—are to read novels, dance, and live in idleness. Twenty years ago, no young girl would have ventured outside her parents' house without her mother: she walked under her mother's wing, and kept her eyes studiously cast down. The only man she dared to look at was him she was allowed to hope for, or choose, as her future husband. The Revolution has swept away all this submission. Young girls go about, both day and night, in perfect freedom. Their sole occupations are to walk and drive, to amuse themselves, to make merry, have their fortunes told, and quarrel over their admirers. Scissors and thimbles are all cast aside.


This piece, from the same online book expressed astonishment at the rapid change of fashion:

Fashion had a settled place of origin, a centre and fixed periods of existence. Now it springs up, I know not where; it is supported, I know not by whom ; and ends, I know not how! . . .



My notes: I believe that young women, especially the home school girls, should be familiar with these descriptions because it shows how important it is to cling to that which is good, no matter what the trends.  It helps us to understand what is behind the crazy fashions perpetrated upon the world by some designers.  No one has to follow the trends, and there have always been beautiful alternatives.

Read more here.