Fashioning the life cycle: Women’s dress and identity in England, 1660 - 1780.

Abstract

This thesis is an examination of women’s dress, the life cycle, and identity in England between 1660 and 1780. Through a combination of material objects and written sources – with a particular focus on diaries and letters – this thesis explores the clothes that women wore at different stages of their life cycles, and how these garments aided in the development of identity throughout the entirety of a woman’s life. Clothes were integral to the lives of upper and middling class women between 1660 and 1780, and were used, amongst other things, as indicators of age, marital status, wealth, social position, political allegiance, familial networks, personal taste and consumer knowledge. Whilst historical studies of dress successfully explore these themes, this thesis looks to explicitly link dress to the stages of the life cycle and considers how women utilised their garments to visually represent their changing identities as they progressed through their lives. This thesis focusses on a small group of middling and upper-class women who each left substantial records of their lives, either in the form of autobiographical writing, correspondences, extant garments, or a combination of these, from multiple stages of their life cycles. These women - including Mary and Moll Verney, Elizabeth Shackleton, Mary Wortley Montagu, Barbara Johnson, Mary Delany and Sarah Hurst - form case studies that inform the bulk of the thesis, and allow us to investigate how their identities, and their dress, changed across different stages of their life cycles. The key research questions of this thesis focus on the examination of the ways in which women used dress to represent their sense of identity, how their identities changed across the life cycle and how their clothes were indicative of their position within that life cycle; and how 1660 – 1780 in England is relevant to these themes. This thesis demonstrates that middling and upper-class women were acutely aware of both their position in the life cycle, and the importance of their outward appearance, and utilised dress as a tool for visualising their identity during this period. Studies of both women’s dress and stages of women’s life cycles in early modern and eighteenth-century England are plentiful; this thesis draw these themes together, considering the work of historians such as Amanda Vickery, Serena Dyer, Patricia Crawford and Helen Yallop, and investigates how women’s life cycles informed the clothes they chose to wear, and how these clothes, in turn, reflected their identities.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Charlotte Emma Fletcher: orcid.org/0009-0008-7508-5068

ORCID for Maria Hayward: orcid.org/0000-0002-3299-4383

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