H26.2682

Baby shoes. One pair laced. One pair buttoned. A: Laced pair; B: Buttoned pair From the History Information Station: Object: BAby shoes, leather. History: Middle-class Victorian parents dressed their children in miniature versions of adult fashions, right down to the button-up leather shoes. Today children wear play clothes, and are encouraged to play in ways that get them dirty. But Victorian children dressed in velvet, taffeta, and lace, and were expected to play neatly and behave properly. In the 1880s and 1890s some little girls even wore corsets, in an attempt to mold their bodies into a fashionable wasp-waisted form. A Nation of Nurturers Most middle-class Victorian women considered childbearing (after marriage) one of their main life goals. Contraception was immoral, for it meant a woman was avoiding her natural destiny. Hundreds of essayists wrote about how women's nurturing and dependence fostered American society. "The foundation of our national character is laid by the mothers of the nation," wrote an advice columnist in 1858. Yet despite women's supposedly innate "mothering instinct," they had to work hard to be good mothers. Their children's looks, manners and success in life all reflected on their mothers. According to childcare authorities, women with naughty or lazy children had only themselves to blame for raising them wrong. With such responsibility, many women feared a mother's love was not really enough. Those who could afford it heaped their children with fine presents, toys and clothes, both to please the children and to show others what good mothers they were.