[Hardy-l] genderising children

[Rosemarie Morgan]

>I'm not sure I'd use the word "underclass" to describe Victorian infants 
>or even that, in the face of high infant mortality rates, hearts were 
>necessarily hardened against their fragile little lives (to wit the 
>grieving parents in many a Victorian genre painting). But to follow 
>Jackie's point, emotional investment in the new baby was customarily 
>suppressed/repressed/restrained for obvious reasons. Anyone who has read 
>Mary Shelley's diary and the terse acount of her baby's death will sense 
>the agonised restraint underlying the three awful words "my baby died." 
>And it is correct to say that, before the various "Child-Related" Acts of 
>Parliament, attitudes that held a child's life cheap were in evidence (to 
>wit the little sweeping boys taken mostly from orphanages because their 
>life was already on the line anyway -- so to speak).

>Next. Since the beginning of time babies have been born with amorphous 
>sexuality. The last statistics I came across many years ago were 0.2% of 
>babies are (nowadays) born "hermaphrodite" or of ambiguous sexuality. The 
>statistics will no doubt alter as studies increase in this erstwhile 
>"forbidden" social zone of discourse. At any rate, it would make perfect 
>sense (lacking scientific data and aid -- such infants are often 
>surgically "adjusted" these days) to dress infants alike until such a time 
>as "maleness" or "femaleness" is fully established or (as in some cases) 
>decided-upon/chosen/preferred,  by the parents.

Next. Many numbers and orders of men wore/wear skirts: from pontiffs to 
local vergers,  Scots in kilts to English peasants (smock-frocks  were 
still worn into the 20th century) and frock-coats were called frock-coats 
because they were designed along the pattern of frocks. By the 1820s male 
fashion had changed little -- the frock coat later shortened over time to 
become akin to the modern jacket and the breeches (hitherto underwear) 
evolved to become an external garment still featuring the placket -- a kind 
of fold-over short skirt/flap  -- in place of what we call "flies."

Petticoats were a popular pre-Victorian addition to the under-garmenting of 
clothes -- they rose on the tide of the cotton/silk boom and such fashions 
as the crinoline which had cruel, body wounding bones to stiffen them. 
There is more and more -- of course  -- the divided skirts of Indian 
policewomen, the "breeching" of Hindu/Egyptian goddesses, the skirted 
Hungarian male field -worker, the skirted male Mayan-Indian   - and so on 
-(this is but a superficial gloss on the subject). But, fundamentally, the 
genderising of skirts/divided-skirts/trousers is culturally specific and in 
the case of Victorian boys adopting breeches (traditionally at the age of 
reason -- 7 years old) this has  less to do with sexist attitudes, --or as 
Jackie says, "viewed as being an underclass in the same way as the women 
whose dress they adhered to" than to do with the indeterminism (in many 
complicated social, physical, cultural ways) of the undeveloped young adult.

Cheers
Rosemarie


Cheers,
Rosemarie

>(Just as an aside here, it is interesting that Victorians and even
>Edwardians dressed their male children in 'girls' clothes or 'petticoats'
>until they were often as old as five or six when they 'lost their curls' and
>were dressed as boys.
>All the best
>Jacky Wilkinson