The olfactory education of young women in nineteenth-century France

Abstract

Invisible and impalpable emanations, body odors remained a mystery to science until the early twentieth century. Whether considered as waves or as molecules, they were linked, in medical and religious discourse, to moral considerations between scents and virtues whose mechanics and social issues Alain Corbin highlighted lucidly in his pioneering work The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Associated with the body, animality, and sexuality, odor was often invoked to stigmatize prostitutes, while olfactory changes in women’s bodies indicated, so people believed at the time, the passage to adulthood, the entry into the status of woman, mistress, or wife (Corbin, Harmonie). As a result, prescriptions regarding the control of body odors and the use of perfumes played a major role in the education of young women, notably in the second half of the nineteenth century when the religious education of women underwent a boom (Rogers, Schoolroom 151; Houbre) in time with the advent and democratization of the perfume industry. This is tied to the fact that the bourgeois education of young women tended at the time to turn them into paragons of domesticity, among other things, by training them to be charming. Whereas boys’ morals were generally monitored on the basis of objective calculations and statistical norms regarding sexual practices, the control strategies implemented by medical, social, and religious authorities with regard to young women often fell under the reputedly intuitive and subjective domain of flair (Wicky, “A Good Eye” 199), insisting on the dual necessity to breathe in few strong odors and to reduce one’s own olfactory emanations, whether they were pleasant or not.