Who controls this private space? The offense and defense of the hoop in early eighteenth-century France and England.

Abstract

This paper examines French and English views of the , hoop petticoat, as these were expressed in the popular literature during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. These opinions (seemingly, all written by men) were largely negative, even scurrilous, the hoop being seen (and feared) as an indicator that women were declaring independence from the masculine control of their social and sexual lives that the maledominated culture then believed to be "natural." Sex and space are traditional elements in criticism of the hoop. In the sixteenth century, Montaigne asked, "Why do women barricade those parts [of their bodies] that house our desires and their own? And what is the purpose of these huge bastions with which they armor their flanks, if it is not to trick us, to pull us to them even as they keep us away?"! In the middle of the eighteenth century, the London Magazine punned: