@rosetintedkaleidoscope replied:
beautiful picture but what kind of shoes is the girl wearing? i’ve never seen anything like that!
As best as I can tell (and anybody who knows more about this subject, please chime in!) those are “slippers”, the shoes that 19th century middle- and upper-class women wore indoors! They look astoundingly like modern ballet slippers/pointe shoes (which were modeled after the fashionable footwear of the 19th century):
^Satin slippers, early nineteenth century. Irma Bowen Textile Collection, University Museum, University of New Hampshire.
From a source on American women’s slippers of the early 19th century:
“… a pair of dainty white satin shoes with rosettes of papery silk, worn but once. Their thin satin uppers are lined with linen and only barely stiffened round the back, and a long narrow flimsy ribbon is attached to each side, meant to cross and tie round the wearer’s slender ankle. The soles, no thicker than thin cardboard, are only two inches wide at the widest point, and there are no heels at all. This frail footwear belonged to Caroline Frances Fitz of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and was worn at her marriage to Joseph Wheeler Woods in 1858.
“In a collection of early nineteenth-century [American] women’s shoes, almost none are any more substantial than Miss Fitz’s hallowed white satin wedding shoes. If not actually made of satin, they are very probably silk taffeta or wool serge, or at best thin Morocco leather, and, like the wedding shoes, they have paper-thin soles. Of course it is true that today’s collections represent pretty much only the dressiest shoes. But even the gaiter boots are not very stout by modern standards. They, too, are made of cloth, with a mere scrap of Morocco or patent leather at the heel and toe to defend against wear. It is hard to believe that such shoes were worn even indoors, considering how cold and drafty old houses must have been. Surely no one could have walked—let alone worked—in them outdoors.
“But contemporary accounts suggest that American women did indeed wear their thin little shoes and gaiters for everything but work so heavy it was beneath the reach of fashion. “The Cheap Dress,” a story published in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1845, even suggests that substantial shoes were not commonly available to women in the United States.”
The source discusses why women’s shoes were meant to be so flimsy and useless: it was to reinforce the feminine ideal of helplessness, and also indicated that the woman was making the home a haven for her husband. (I think it probably also had a lot to do with class: middle-class women were demonstrating that they were wealthy enough that they did not need to “go out to work”.) They continue:
“Shoes carried an additional meaning in the mid-nineteenth century, however, because they could be used to diminish the apparent size of the foot. Small feet, along with small hands, were one of the traditional attributes of a gentlewoman. In order to claim this title, many women apparently wore shoes as small as they could manage to squeeze into. Charles Dickens noticed during his visit to the United States in 1842 that “the pinching of thin shoes” was part of a fashionable American lady’s appearance.
“Flimsy shoes or gaiters worn painfully short and tight were a very real discouragement to physical activity, and as a result they tended to foster both dependence and domesticity. Even if a woman disregarded the pressures of fashion and wore shoes that fit, cloth gaiters and shoes with thin soles and no heels were not comfortable for real walking, either in the wet grass of the country or on the irregular cobbles and paving stones of urban streets.”
^pattens: slip-on shoe-covers for walking on wet or muddy streets
Apparently, English women were more likely to match their shoes to their tasks, putting on heavier shoes when going outside for a country walk, for instance, while American women resisted wearing something other than the flimsy slippers.
^Women’s shoes and boots, ca. 1820s
If you’re a Jane Austen fan, you may have noticed the discussion in Mansfield Park of women taking strolls in the shrubbery. Part of the point of having such a little walk by the house was that such walks were paved in gravel. This meant that a woman would not have to change her shoes from her thin cardboard-soled house slippers to stout walking boots in order to take a quick walk out-of-doors. Walking out in wet grass in slippers was very likely to completely ruin your shoes in a very few minutes.
^Leather lace-up walking shoes, ca 1810s, Fashion Museum, Bath, England
^Ladies’ half-boots, for walking: 1820s
The sitters for the painting are Russian, and I have no idea what Russian footwear customs for women were (though one assumes they MUST have worn boots outdoors in snowy Russian winters!) but the indoor-wear women’s slippers shown in this painting appear to be the same those worn as elsewhere in Europe/the US.
^ca. 1830-40, French, leather, grosgrain ribbon, linen lining.
As the century wore on into the 1860s, American women did start wearing sturdier shoes.
The first ballerina to truly dance on pointe was Marie Taglioni, in 1832. (Before that, dancers would only briefly balance on their toes rather than really dancing on them.) “When Marie Taglioni first danced La Sylphide en pointe, her shoes were nothing more than modified satin slippers; the soles were made of leather and the sides and toes were darned to help the shoes hold their shapes. Because the shoes of this period offered no support, dancers would pad their toes for comfort and rely on the strength of their feet and ankles for support.” (wiki)
Here are a pair of Taglioni’s dance shoes, 1829:
Today, pointe shoes have much stronger reinforced shanks (soles) and boxes (the part around the toes) to help support the dancer’s weight. However, the look of the shoes really hasn’t changed from the 1830s! For reference: here are some modern pointe shoes (they are bought like this and the dancer must sew on her own elastics and ribbons):
The flat toe end, called the platform, was originally just part of the popular style of slippers in the 1830s, but now, with special reinforcement, it also helps the ballerina balance on the ends of her toes.
And modern ballet slippers (which do come with elastics attached. The split soles are, I think, a recent innovation):
