Victorian Beauty Standards

Why did Victorians value pale skin so highly? And how were black bodies viewed by Victorian society? In this episode Kate is joined by author and historian Dr Rochelle Rowe of the University of Edinburgh. This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 0:37Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work.

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• 2:17Kate Lister?

  Hello my lovely Betwixters, it's me Kate Lister. I'm me, you're you and you are listening to Betwixt the Sheets and we're so glad that you are. But before we can go any further together, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects. And you should be an adult too. And if you're not, then just go home right now before your mum writes us angry letters in the morning. Right, the rest of you, on with the show.

• 2:51Kate Lister?

  If you're looking for signifiers of just how warped Victorian views on the human body truly were, then look no further than the longstanding tradition of the sideshow. Filling tents up and down the country were punters from all walks of life. I mean, Queen Victoria herself was said to be a big fan of these. And what more validation would you need? Inside these curtained walls, however, lurks the sinister side of the 19th century notion of entertainment. Exploitation and racist portrayals of people's bodies reinforced how ugliness and beauty were thought of in the 19th century. It was a world where ideas of what was grotesque and what was hypersexualised collided in deeply

• 3:34Kate Lister?

  disturbing ways, as we are going to find out today.

• 3:46Speaker 05

  What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course.

• 3:48Speaker 06

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 3:51Speaker 05

  I make perfect compliments of whatever my boss needs by just turning him up and pushing the button.

• 4:03Speaker 06

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 4:06Speaker 07

  Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek.

• 4:14Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. As we know, the Victorians were mental. That is just a fact of history and I'm a historian, so I'm allowed to say that. The misinformation that shaped their beauty standards were wild and insidious, to say the least. In this fourth and final episode of our mini-series on beauty standards throughout history, we are getting deep into the murky world of the Victorians. Joining me today is the amazing author and Victorian expert, Rochelle Rowe, and she's going to help us to see the beauty and ugliness of the 19th century and help us understand how the expansion of the British Empire and colonialism informed ideas of beauty and ugliness that are with us to this very day.

• 5:00Kate Lister?

  Let's do this.

• 5:05Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Rochelle Rowe. How are you doing?

• 5:12Speaker 05

  I'm good, thank you. Yeah, really well. It's sunny here in Edinburgh.

• 5:17Kate Lister?

  Oh, is it? Oh, well, that doesn't happen very often. Wow.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  It's bright and warm, yeah.

• 5:23Kate Lister?

  This episode is the final one in our little mini-series about historical beauty standards and we are looking to you to tell us about the Victorians, who, I love the Victorians, they're mad as a bunch of, as a box of frogs, they really are. And I know that you have researched black models and black beauty standards in the 19th century. And I'm wondering, just as a starter question, what brought you to that research? What's your research's origin story of where you are now?

• 5:57Speaker 05

  Oh, I was always interested in black beauty culture, actually. And my early research, which led to my first book, was all about the 20th century and decolonisation in the Caribbean and something of a national obsession with beauty competitions that exist there or did through the middle decades of the 20th century. I think they're still going quite strong, actually. There's still a lively interest in beauty competitions in the Caribbean, but that's kind of what led me to it because there's such a swirl of different ideas about beauty in the Caribbean and I was interested in the colonial influence and how people resisted that and somewhat absorbed it as well and and worked within it.

• 6:42Speaker 05

  So that's where the interest began and now my research has expanded somewhat.

• 6:46Kate Lister?

  I love that. Just as a complete detour, um, did you see the outfits from the Met Gala? At the time of recording, we're a few days after the Met Gala.

• 6:54Speaker 05

  I'm obsessed. Um, and I actually already teach my students the book, the, the Black Dandy that, that is the centre.

• 7:02Kate Lister?

  I love that book.

• 7:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, that research being the centre of the theme and the idea for the Met Gala. So my students thought I'd done it on purpose and they're like, did you know? That was going to be the theme of the Met Gala because it was announced last autumn and I was like, aha. Of course, I knew, I didn't know. It made me look cool, so that was good.

• 7:24Kate Lister?

  For anyone listening who's not aware, the, the theme of the Met Gala this year was, um, well, the theme was tailored for you, but the exhibit that goes along with it was Black Dandyism throughout the, I can't remember the exact title of it, but that's what it was looking at was how the black culture used this image of the dandy. I thought that was fascinating. Who, who did you think got it right on the, on the red carpet?

• 7:45Speaker 05

  Oh gosh, I thought Janelle Monae nailed it. I think they have always cultivated a dandy-esque appearance and so I wasn't surprised that they nailed it at the Met Ball.

• 8:00Kate Lister?

  Some of the looks are absolutely incredible and it was fascinating watching it. I'm not a fashion historian, I couldn't pretend that I was, but I, I, I do research the 19th century quite a lot and looking at this idea of the dandy, I read Monica Miller's book just before the Met Gala as well, just to get a really good look at it. I know that we're not particularly talking about dandies, but dandies are kind of beauty. So can you just explain to anyone who's listening? What a dandy is and what dandies were in the 19th century?

• 8:27Speaker 05

  So dandies are, it's kind of a pejorative name given to men who take a really strong interest in fashion. And it's not just fashion and how they use fashion, but there's a whole kind of repertoire of wit that they are employing with that as well. It's how they gesture and they're often somewhat at the margins, they're pushing margins of what is considered acceptable, you know, gender roles and suitable, I suppose, behaviour for men. And the thing about the black dandies, a figure that Monica Miller has, you know, written exceptionally beautiful book on, is that they are often in these incredibly difficult situations. And it's fascinating

• 9:12Speaker 05

  to look at how they have deployed this wit and gesture and style to navigate really difficult circumstances. So she looks at historic figures that she approaches as dandies of sorts, who kind of were navigating, in fact Georgian British society. There's a man called Julius Subez who's born into enslavement, but becomes like the sort of favoured, almost pet, you know, it's quite dehumanising. He becomes this sort of favoured boy in a, in a, I think, a very wealthy household. But as he grows up, the whole question mark is, what do you do with a favoured enslaved

• 9:52Speaker 05

  child who then has grown up with all these tastes and in finery that were essentially not meant for him, you know? And so he, as a grown man, I think, becomes quite a sort of, I suppose, a controversial figure and an unusual figure, because he's kind of saying, I'm still entitled to all of this finery and I'm gonna use it in my life. And so he takes up sword fighting, he's, he, he trains people in that and works with horses a lot and somehow weaves a path for himself through elite society where he, in scare quotes, doesn't belong exactly. So I think she takes that concept and looks at it through a range of periods and says, look at all these men who are using.

• 10:34Speaker 05

  Clothing and style and wit in special ways to protest their own sort of dehumanisation, essentially.

• 10:43Kate Lister?

  It's an incredible book and the way that she picks out fashion as a site of rebellion and defiance, but also a plea for acceptance. I thought what was interesting about the figure of the dandy, and maybe I've got this wrong, but especially moving the 18th, 19th century, it really comes out of, is you start to see men's beauty being looked at in a very different way. Up until now, in the episodes that we've looked at, we've done medieval beauty and we've done Roman beauty and the emphasis is almost always on women and women's bodies. And it's like, men get to be there and go, well, look, I'm not fat and I'm not bald, so I'm beautiful. End of. But the dandy suddenly comes along and suddenly like the

• 11:26Kate Lister?

  binary between male and female collapses and now men are beautiful. And that's quite threatening.

• 11:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, it's quite unsettling, I think, for some people. And, you know, certainly my research shows that beauty has consequences, not only for black women in Victorian Britain, in 19th century Britain, but for men as well somewhat. You know, men can, to some degree, make a bit of a living off being beautiful.

• 11:53Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 05

  Which I guess we'll talk about later, like their work as artist models. They're very sought after, black men as artist models in Victorian Britain, London, I would say, and perhaps other places as well.

• 12:04Kate Lister?

  There have been some constants throughout this series that I've noticed popping up. Pale skin, and that, no matter what race you are, actually, seems to have been a really big feature that most of history is be pale. The other one, youth. I haven't found anyone yet that's saying that we get more beautiful as we get older. What about the Victorians? What are they doing? Is this still obsession with youth and paleness in force for them? And what are they doing with it?

• 12:32Speaker 05

  Yes, I think they are very interested in pallor and paleness and somewhat looking a bit sickly as well.

• 12:40Kate Lister?

  That's a weird Victorian thing that they do. Tell me about that.

• 12:44Speaker 05

  That sort of consumptive looking beauty, you know, I'm laughing, but it's not funny that people were suffering from things like tuberculosis, but there was a way in which fashion being, I'm a lover of fashion, but I will also acknowledge that it can be really perverse. And so, yeah, this thing of like actively cultivating a somewhat weakened, you know, look and that being seen as good for women really says a lot about how gender roles were working for white women, this idea of being frail, small.

• 13:20Kate Lister?

  Tiny, in fact.

• 13:21Speaker 05

  Tiny and yeah, and sort of almost like the fainting away was quite popular. Although these things are never a complete constant, they're always in tension. And the ways in which black women are drawn into these debates about beauty are really interesting because they are often taken as something of an extreme opposite to like these prevailing beauty standards, you know, this interest in pallor and so on. But there's a lot of projection and a lot of fascination with the black body nevertheless. And it's something that I've traced back through the centuries and you can think about it as having

• 14:01Speaker 05

  a long history, right back to the colonial encounter when lots of European explorers are traversing the world and sending back these stories, these fanciful tales of women who are either extremely beautiful or monstrously ugly and they can be really, really variable, these accounts. And over time, they only start to harden into this extreme of black ugliness, so called, with the need for a moral justification for enslavement and for colonialism. And that's when you start to see more consistent accounts and it's never quite consistent, but you start to see more accounts of beastly black women, as though slavery almost is meant

• 14:44Speaker 05

  for them or something. So there's this kind of attempt to justify this regime by saying it suits the people, they're meant for work and the women are ugly, so it's fine. Um, which is me being a bit reductive, but yeah, essentially that's what we see.

• 15:00Kate Lister?

  In a nutshell, that's it, isn't it? That's what's happening.

• 15:09Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Rachelle after this short break.

• 15:25Kate Lister?

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• 16:47Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gla.

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• 18:17Kate Lister?

  What you've got in Europe, and I suppose in America as well, is this preservation of the white woman as this pale, frail body, the angel in the house, always in need of protection. But what kind of goes along with that is that that's like a fevered, middle class fantasy. That's not, it's not the reality. Like, regular working class women were not lying on a chaise longue all day, looking pale and sickly. And it is all caught up with notions of race. But the other thing I see is that people of color were being fetishized as well as being hypersexual. What has your research shown you about that?

• 18:57Speaker 05

  So essentially, I've looked at two women, both of whom's experiences are actually not all that exceptional, for all that it might appear so. They both have experiences that are quite representative of some of the ways in which Black women are moving through 19th century society and are caught up in these debates about beauty. So the first, Sarah Bartman, her example's become quite infamous down the years.

• 19:26Speaker 05

  I know you've talked about her on this podcast before as well, and she's become better known because her story seems so extreme. She's exhibited as an oddity, essentially. She's trafficked from the Cape Colony in the early eighteen hundreds when it is, you know, it becomes modern day South Africa, but it's sort of newly under British control and she's essentially trafficked there. She's an enslaved woman there, trafficked to Britain and exhibited as an oddity. And as the show is some kind of a meeting of a site of scientific inquiry or pseudo scientific inquiry. So it draws the scientists, it draws the general public, starting with the elites.

• 20:09Speaker 05

  And then, you know, gradually more and more middle class people come to see her. And it's also something of an erotic display as well. And there is lots of concern from abolitionists at the time that, you know, is she an enslaved woman on display? Because they are campaigning for the end of slavery. And so there's concern that this is an enslaved woman who, against her own will, is being exhibited in this way. And so, yeah, she's, as you say, the exoticisation is ever present through Victorian and nineteenth century society. Because she's there, there's a lot of projection onto her, people are fascinated. She is exhibited in Ireland as well, later in France.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  And there, I think some of the desire is much more nakedly shown. In Britain, there's this veneer of respectability that follows the show around somewhat in the way that they advertise it and things. But in France, there's a bit more of an open sort of purient interest and concern that this woman might be a bit too sexy, essentially. And is she corrupting our men and women? But it's the same appetites, I would say, in both, in all the places that she's horribly exhibited.

• 21:22Kate Lister?

  Just for anyone that didn't catch our episode on Sarah Bama or doesn't know who she is, can you tell us why she was being exhibited in what was essentially a sideshow and then later as a medical curiosity?

• 21:36Speaker 05

  So she is exhibited because she's seen to have, in European eyes, almost exaggerated body parts. And so it's part of this process of objectification and abjectification and othering of black women and their bodies. As I say, she's not as exceptional as people might perhaps think. There is a whole traffic in people and also, you know, plants and animals from empire, they're all sort of being moved through and shown for their exoticness and for their curiosity. And so it's almost seen as an educational show to some extent,

• 22:17Speaker 05

  but the sexual interest in her is really focused on her buttocks, on her genitalia. A legend grows up that women from that part of the world have larger genitalia. And so essentially, it's all the things you might expect that people are coming to look at, but they're able to dress up their interest in some kind of scientific curiosity. We need to know about people of the world, kind of thing. And there's always been an interest in classifying humankind, you know, and in Europe and since, you know, the Enlightenment, trying to order and classify humankind. So they're interested in her as an example of what is referred to as the Hot and Tots, but it's not a nice name. It's a sort of

• 22:57Speaker 05

  pejorative name that is used to describe the Coasian people of Southern Africa. And so she's described as the Hot and Top Venus, and it's kind of a mocking name, as if to say, this is what they consider beautiful and in Southern Africa. But she becomes almost a type, not her herself, but the exhibition of her becomes a type. And so through Victorian culture, you'll find references to the African Venus and to Hot and Top Venus. So to some extent, the show itself is repeated, I think, with different. People in that role, but also it just kind of takes on a legend in Victorian society because tragically she's dissected after death in Paris by a preeminent scientist,

• 23:42Speaker 05

  Georges Couvier. It's grim, you know, and so she's dissected and exhibited for many decades. So, you know, the really awful thing is that she's exploited in life and then this show has it's kind of an afterlife and people are able for, I think, over a hundred years are able to go and view, I don't know how long her actual remains are on public display. I think at some point they're taken downstairs into the bowels of the museum, but they're in the Museum of Humankind, of mankind in Paris for many years. So even after death, you know, she's exploited and it's, it's hard to really quantify the impact of that treatment and that display of a black woman's body on like European popular

• 24:27Speaker 05

  culture essentially. And so that's why her example is somewhat infamous.

• 24:31Kate Lister?

  And she wasn't the only one.

• 24:33Speaker 05

  No, not the only one, not the only one.

• 24:35Kate Lister?

  There was a woman exhibited in Leeds. I found an advertisement for her, the Hot and Tall Venus. Again, it wasn't Sarah Bartman. I couldn't find out anything else about who this person was, but there were others.

• 24:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, there really were. And I think it feeds into what becomes elements of freak shows and the circus that become more and more popular. You know, it's the mass entertainment of the 19th century as it continues. Circuses and these kinds of shows become really popular and, you know, you've got the bearded lady and, and all sorts of other people who were exhibited essentially as oddities and it fits into that history essentially.

• 25:12Kate Lister?

  It's very complex and like that, that like the Monica Miller book where she's talking about boundaries being blurred, you sort of get the sense that that's what's happening in cases like Sarah Bartman because on one hand, she's clearly being mocked and ridiculed and exhibited as a freak, but then there's also this very intense fetishization that goes with it. And there's this projection from the white community about she must be hypersexual and are women. And not, and it's all bound up in, I suppose, notions of body and beauty and modesty.

• 25:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:48Kate Lister?

  So fucked up.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  It's really perverse. And so what you start to see is you start to see, and as I say, this has a long tradition, but in the Victorian period, there are more men of science, pseudoscience, who are really interested in theorising on race. And they are saying to white women, an example would be Alexander Walker, who wrote a book on beauty, that is essentially urging white women to be beautiful because it's like a racial national duty almost. And so we start to see some of these attitudes again hardening into scientific fact. You know, Francis Galton, the famous eugenicist, he's another one who, interestingly,

• 26:31Speaker 05

  perhaps because of Bartman's legacy, is in Southern Africa and is trying to measure the dimensions from a distance. He's too shy to actually ask anybody to be, submit to measuring. But he describes in his writing the way he is measuring South African women's bodies to understand beauty. And he's doing a similar thing in Britain. He's going around the British Isles and he's kind of covertly trying to judge who's the most beautiful. And again, trying to make this into like something with some sign of kind of scientific credibility. So it only kind of increases through the century, I would say. This obsession with beauty and with race and putting the two things together.

• 27:16Speaker 05

  But yeah, as you were saying, urging white women to do their part almost whilst also cultivating this fascination with the other and this fear of the other, whilst also sort of somewhat desiring, you know, the other as well with these, with these shows and these exhibits.

• 27:36Kate Lister?

  In the 19th century, you get, obviously, industries booming. They're famous for it, the Industrial Revolution, and shopping and consumerism explode as well. And part of that is the beauty industry. There's always been a beauty industry, but it really gets going in the 19th century. You have endless books about being published, as you were saying, about how to be beautiful. And for most of the 19th century, it seems to be a very no makeup makeup look. Like, obviously, you're supposed to have makeup on, but you're not supposed to look like you have makeup on, like rouge, no, that's bad. And the hair is generally swept up. And they've got all of these oils and lotions and potions and like drops to put in your eyes to make them look bigger and all this stuff.

• 28:15Kate Lister?

  And I was just wondering, when you were saying, what was accessible to black women at this time as a beauty industry? Was that accessible to them? Because in all of these adverts and all of these books that I've read, I can't recall one of them considering that the person they're writing for wouldn't be white, ever.

• 28:34Speaker 05

  I think that's a really good question. I speculate, I can't say I've found evidence of this, but I speculate that for black women, their beauty practices are going to be somewhere at the meeting of a kind of a healthcare thing. Because a lot of women under enslavement have to, they have to rely on themselves within, you know, enslaved communities to some degree for care, have to rely on themselves. There are surgeons on plantations and things that do the basics. But essentially, women are known for becoming healers and adept at managing herbs and things. And so you get women like Mary Seacole, who famously says that she's descended from a line of doctoresses.

• 29:18Speaker 05

  That's the term they use. And so she's very knowledgeable about plant life and how to use it in the care of the body. And so I imagine that women are bringing this to some degree with them. A very pragmatic response to needing to look after the body and having, to some degree, like, share knowledge between communities and get hold of particular.

• 29:42Speaker 05

  Things that are known to be good, like shea butter and things like that for care of the hair and skin. And there is an interest in beauty and fashion that, you know, comes down through the years, that's partly about distinguishing yourself, even within the privations of slavery and colonial society. So if you're a free woman of colour, you want to show that you are someone of that status and not enslaved. So you might tie your headscarf in a different way and wear slightly grander clothes because you're not under the same restrictions and restrictions as enslaved women. Some of the women I write about in the 19th century, it's a great question to be asked. I'm interested in how they are grooming their hair and their bodies and how they're styling themselves. They have

• 30:25Speaker 05

  hard lives, they're working long hours. I don't imagine it can be their primary preoccupation, but nevertheless, you know, like they must be doing something to dress their hair. And it's a bit like research I've done into the latter part of the 20th century, when it was all about going to certain shops and getting things that are only imported, you know, in certain places. So you'd go to a shop that would have a whole bunch of things for your culture, whether it be food or hair and skincare.

• 30:58Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Rachelle after this short break.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalised AI for the way we work.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.

• 31:47Speaker 02

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• 31:51Speaker 03

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• 32:30Kate Lister?

  And the other woman that you've researched, and she is fascinating, I mean, they all are, is the Pre-Raphaelite model, Fanny Eaton. And that's her actual name, and I'm afraid that historians are complete children. When it comes to you find any Fanny in history, you do have a bit of a giggle. But Fanny Eaton, please tell me about this remarkable woman.

• 32:51Speaker 05

  She is remarkable, and I am fascinated with her life, her and her mother, actually. So she is born just at the end of slavery in the Caribbean and Mauritius. So the law changes in 1834, and she's born in 1835. And I just think that's such an auspicious date. I mean, thousands of people are in the same situation, right? So on the one hand, it's not so auspicious, but there's something really incredible about the fact that she's born into this process where they are beginning to dismantle the legal structures of slavery. Materially, not a lot changes for people in terms of their lives. And so I think it's really significant that her and her mother somehow come to Britain

• 33:36Speaker 05

  in the years after the end of slavery in the Caribbean. They're clearly looking for a better life somehow. I speculate that they came with a big, like a wealthy family, as many West Indian women were sought for work as nurses and nannies and such like. So perhaps they were brought as servants with a family. But where I find them in the archive is living independently, living in the King's Cross area. So if they did come. Come that way, they don't stay in those circumstances. And so her mother, so she's born Fanny Antwhistle, her mother is Matilda Foster. And she's a woman, a black woman, a great name. She's a black woman in the records and her daughter is of dual heritage, European and African descent.

• 34:21Speaker 05

  And so she's a mixed race woman, which is really significant in Jamaica. And I'm not sure to what extent she'd have been read as brown in Britain. I think quite possibly in some situation, it always kind of depends, race is so fluid. And so in some of the work that she did, her somewhat ambiguous racial features are used to the advantage of artists. But I also speculate that perhaps on the street, she was, she was still read as a, as a black woman, as many people were at this time. But yeah, she's a Jamaican woman in London in the mid eighteen hundreds. And I think she meets on the street, perhaps one of the pre Raffaelite Brotherhood. And so she starts modeling.

• 35:03Kate Lister?

  They did that a lot.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  Right.

• 35:04Kate Lister?

  They just sort of gone up to interesting looking women and just gone, can I paint your picture, please?

• 35:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, and they are really, to the point we made earlier about this sort of consumptive, slightly frail looking beauty. They are completely acting in defiance of that. They like women who look tall and strong and ruddy cheeked.

• 35:24Kate Lister?

  Bucksum.

• 35:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, bucksum, as though they get outside.

• 35:29Speaker 05

  That's what they tend to model and picture. And so by then she is Mrs Eaton, she's married a taxi driver. She's working as a domestic labourer who goes from house to house. So really hard toil, but she has this side gig as a model and does it for 20 years. And basically sits for a good number of these pre Raffaelite Brotherhood. And her, her likeness is in so many of their artworks, essentially.

• 35:57Kate Lister?

  So I. I didn't realise it was for so long.

• 35:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, for like, from her twenties to about forty four, she's doing this. And it's only when her husband dies that she seems to stop. I can't say absolutely. And then, you know, the family, she, nine of her children survive. She has ten children and nine survive. And I do think this is really significant because, as we've said, you know, she's born just, she's the first generation out of slavery and motherhood in slavery is, you know, this awfully precarious state. Your children are sold away from you more often than not, I think. And, you know, some women refuse to bring children into enslavement. If they can get hold of a, an abortifacant, then they will. It's a really awful state of affairs. So I do think there's something poignant about her and her mother staying together.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  The census records show us that they're living for some years in the same neighbourhood. And she names her first child after her mother. And, you know, there's a sense of a bond there. But yeah, after the death of her husband, the family move around to the south of England. But she lives a long life. And for the middle part of her life, she's a model, which is really interesting. And it's not bad money, I would say. I think, you know, she's making a bit of a significant supplementary income from modelling. But again, she's not the only one. There are other black people working as artist models at this time.

• 37:20Kate Lister?

  There was, um, was it Lo in nineteenth century France? Um, there was that, that famous exhibit, wasn't there, of black artists' models? And she's known only as Lo.

• 37:32Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah. Denise Morell's work, yeah, that's incredible. I was really inspired by, by Morell's work in doing some of the work I've done on artist models in Britain, because there's a similar thing of modern artists, again, bucking this trend somewhat in terms of like prevailing pseudo-scientific attitudes towards race that really condemn blackness. Artists tend to be somewhat more broad-minded and also very interested in, um, developing an expertise in sort of showing the range of humankind. So they are, as you say, forever spotting people in the street and asking them to sit for them.

• 38:13Speaker 05

  And so Morell's work shows that this is happening a lot in France and that actually. If you want to show that you are an artist who is depicting modern life, you're going to show that that is somewhat multicultural. The life in the life in the modern city is is is one where there are people of different ethnicities all around. And so a similar thing is happening in Britain, but what's interesting is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood always paint Mrs Eaton, Fanny Eaton, as other ethnicities. So she's Jewish, she's Indian in their work. Sometimes she's imagined as white because they do this kind of like fantasy medieval mythic kind of work.

• 38:53Speaker 05

  And they they make her white in that. She's a face and figure model. So essentially they make her look as however they like, but you can recognise her features. I find that interesting because Jamaica is always in the news and and race is being talked about an awful lot in Victorian Britain. For example, was abolishing slavery a mistake? You know, these are like debates that are rife when she is working as a model. But she's never depicted as a modern woman in London in the way that artists are doing in France, which is interesting.

• 39:27Kate Lister?

  So for final question, one of the things that I'm very interested in, so we have this, we're at the peak of British colonialism. Um, I was going to say racism was abolished. No, it wasn't. Slavery was abolished. So it's very much at the forefront of people talking about. So we have this constant conversation around negotiating black bodies and spaces and beauty. And and you've argued very eloquently that this white beauty was about basically not being black, just be white and and small and petite and lovely. Did white culture steal anything from black culture when it comes to beauty standards? Because you see that a lot today is certain prominent people, mentioning their names, but who um.

• 40:14Kate Lister?

  Steal. Yeah, they steal cultural appropriation. They steal from black beauty in the black culture. And I'm wondering, in the 19th century, do you see any evidence of that?

• 40:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, I do think what we see, you know, if you look at the example of Bartman's life, there is this thing of consumption, consuming the black body, appropriating from it, and then almost erasing it as the origin of the idea. And so one of my students recently wrote about the bustle, you know, and this fashion for a really full rear to Victorian, I guess we're talking middle or late latter part of the century dresses. And there is a lot of concern at the time in the press, people mocking fashion and women's interest in fashion and are saying, is this some kind of hot and top Venus display? Like, what's going on?

• 41:05Speaker 05

  Why do these women want to look like this? And so I think that could be very likely an early example of this kind of cultural appropriation, where something is both mocked and desired at the same time, and sort of picked up and dropped, you know, so the bustle, the full skirt, a full rear to a skirt comes and goes. And then there's something else that's fashionable. But certainly, I do think that although many people are resisting this, of course, but there's something about the state of colonial relations. And this objectification of the black body means that people can essentially consume at will. And white supremacy is partly

• 41:48Speaker 05

  about like ordering, organizing all the races, deciding what your, what the types are and then, and then maybe appropriating from these supposed types, you know, different elements. And so I think it's really interesting to think about the history of our popular culture as actually being, you know, enmeshed with all of these ideas about race and the other circulating all the

• 42:15Kate Lister?

  Well, you've been absolutely fascinating, Rochelle. Thank you so much for joining us today. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Not in person, they can leave me alone.

• 42:28Speaker 05

  No, thank you. It's been really fun. I've enjoyed chatting with you. Well, I'm on Blue Sky. I'm on the new Blue Sky. They can find me as Dr Rochelle Rowe on there, all one word. They might be interested in my first book, which is all about, as we talked about at the beginning, beauty in the Caribbean and in Britain, actually, amongst what we now refer to as sort of like the Windrush generation. So that's called Imagining Caribbean Womanhood, and it's published by Manchester University Press. And I've just published an article which you can get hold of free, open access, on Black Modernist muses in the work of artist Jacob Epstein. So that might be of interest as well.

• 43:11Speaker 05

  And this work on Fanny Eaton and Sarah Bartman will be out later this year in a book called The Cultural History of Beauty in the Age of Empire.

• 43:19Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much for coming to talk to us. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself.

• 43:23Speaker 05

  Thank you, Kate. It's been a pleasure.

• 43:30Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thanks so much to Rochelle for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. We have got episodes on the murderous affairs of King James and the truth about the minor toe, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheet, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

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