Lead tape

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Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640): The artist with his wife Hélène Fourment and their son Peter Paul . Oil on canvas, 204.2 × 159.1 cm (around 1639, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) Hélène holds her son, who is wearing a fall hat , by a lead strap .

A leading strings was until 1800 a common walking aid for toddlers . Lead straps have been in use since the late Middle Ages , but especially in the 18th century for children up to the age of six in the higher social classes, especially in the courts of the nobility.

Form and function

Lead straps usually consisted of two long straps that were sewn onto the back of the garments at the back of the sleeves or in a harness-like holding device. From the point of view of the history of clothing, the first-mentioned garter straps are so-called “ false sleeves ”, a relic of medieval hanging sleeves. They were used (in different lengths) as a walker and to restrict the small children to a manageable range of motion. If they had outgrown this age, lead straps were used as an aid to keep the children close (“lead”) so that they did not move away from the supervisor. Children were generally viewed as small adults until the 18th century. When they reached the age of seven, when they had fully learned to speak, they were then considered to be fully-fledged adults, no longer wore clothes with gauze tape, but adult clothes and had to behave accordingly.

But as early as the second half of the 18th century, this attitude changed with the emergence of the Enlightenment . In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his educational novel “Émile ou De l'éducation” (“ Emile or about education ”), which was a huge success throughout Europe, that there was “nothing more ridiculous than the way people walked as small children too long on the lead tape ”(quoted from the German edition by Martin Rang, Stuttgart 1990, p. 183). Kant used “goggles” and “Leitband” as metaphors for dependent thinking: “A revolution will perhaps result in a fall away from personal despotism and profit-addicted or domineering oppression, but never true reform of the way of thinking; but new prejudices will, just as much as the old ones, serve as the leading band of the thoughtless great heap. ”( What is Enlightenment?, 1783)

Use of language and meaning

The verb "gängeln" was already used by Martin Luther . The term "Gängelband" was first mentioned lexically in 1716. In today's - as in earlier - language usage, the idioms "maneuver someone", "lead on the lead" or "hang on the lead" are usually used in a negative context, in the sense of restriction of freedom of action, up to complete dependence and paternalism. The German Liberal Network Foundation annually awards a "Gängelband" as an anti-award, "with which a (socio-political) decision-maker is honored who has put his self-interest above the common good".

See also

literature

  • Lead tape. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 4 : Forschel – retainer - (IV, 1st section, part 1). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1878, Sp. 1243 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
  • Max von Boehn: The fashion. A cultural history from baroque to art nouveau. Munich 1976.
  • Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann: The children's new clothes. Two centuries of German children's fashions in their social punctuation. Frankfurt 1985.
  • Ruth Bleckwenn: Social functions of bourgeois children's clothing in Germany between 1770 and 1900. Inaugural dissertation, Münster 1989.
  • Lutz Röhrich: Lexicon of proverbial sayings. Herder-Verlag, Freiburg, ISBN 3-451-05400-0 .
  • Bach Archive (Ed.): Little Adults. Childhood at the time of Bach. Exhibition catalog, Leipzig, 2004.
  • Children on the lead. In: Castles of Baden-Württemberg. Reading category, issue 4/2005, Staatsanzeiger Verlag, Stuttgart.

Web links

Commons : Gängelband  - Collection of images, videos and audio files