A foundling’s garter and 18th-century family histories: between Sex in an Old Regime City and the paraphernalia of precarity

Description

Foundlings became central to the political and literary imagination in eighteenth-century France. However, the paraphernalia of precarity revealed in the provision of layettes (constituted of clothes, objects and notes) for children about to be separated at a foundling hospital opens up the possibility for examining the intimate lives of working poor households through a material and experiential lens. The clothes on children’s bodies were embedded in credit and debt networks, in practices of textile workplaces, in the consumer revolution, and in emotional practices. Recurring family separations of many kinds were a a central part of the emotional climate of working family life. Layettes may have had a particular gendered emotional association, based in customary legal precepts as well as daily lived experience. These fragments of the intimate histories of working families highlight the ways they navigated the risks and constraints that were fundamental in their daily lives.

Julie Hardwick is the John E. Green Regents Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She works at the intersections of legal, economic, social and family/gender history in early modern France. Her most recent book is: Sex in an Old Regime City: young workers and intimacy in France, 1660-1789 (Oxford University Press, 2020).