Laundresses and the Parisienne – Part 2
Laundresses were familiar figures on 19th-century Parisian streets. They featured in numerous innovative paintings by artists including Daumier and Degas as well as popular prints. Why were these female workers and their labours so appealing? And in what sense, if any, do these images reveal the severe working conditions in which these impoverished women lived and laboured?
In this second lecture Jo Rhymer will consider the Parisienne. Associated with fashion and self-fashioning, the Parisienne’s identity was not always clear-cut. While her finery might be indicative of bourgeois respectability, it was not a guarantee. A fashionably dressed Parisienne could belong instead to the demimonde world of promiscuity. Given this fascinating uncertainty, in paintings she became a signifier of the ambiguity of modern city life. What connections, if any, might there be between the Parisienne and the Parisian laundress?