Victorians were ✨Obsessed✨ with Ugly Children...

Save 33% on your first Native Best Sellers Pack - normally $36, you’ll get it for $24! Click here bit.ly/nativeabbycox9 and use my code ABBYCOX9 #AD 🎉

Victorian mother: Yo, my child so ugly Other Victorian mother: Pfftt! My child's ten times uglier than yours Their children: 👁👄👁

I want to use “She was really very ugly. Nay, almost revolting.” casually in daily conversation.

I kept thinking of the countless times when people have found out that my health is shit, with 9+ medical conditions that are chronic, and people respond with "but you're so pretty!" as if physical appearance has anything to do with health.

I just finished reading Jane Eyre. Young Jane repeatedly being labeled an "ugly child" makes more sense now.

Nicole just trying to get some work done while Abby yells about being stinky. Glorious, 10/10 advert

This gives the ‘Ugly Duckling’ story a whole new meaning. No doubt there were Victorian parents that hoped their children’s “ugliness” was “just a phase.”

My grandmother (born 1905) could not "hear" you if your hair wasn't combed. She also was terribly vain and sought compliments of her style, clothing, and home. This video explains sooooo much about her upbringing.

This was...oddly informative. My 97-year-old grandma spent my sister's most recent pregnancy talking almost exclusively about how she hoped the baby would be pretty. That's her main compliment she still gives her granddaughters and great-granddaughters. "You're so cute" or "You're so pretty." I don't think I realized this was a dominant cultural practice and not just a weird personality quirk...

"If you're fat, boys won't like you." My mom, to me at 12 years old in the early 1990s, during the era of "heroin chic". She denies ever saying that to me, of course. Needless to say, my self esteem is still not great even though I'm in my 40s. I understand the social dynamics, etc. intellectually, but it still wears on me. What horrifies me now is that she still makes comments about my niece. She has a tiny pooch, which my mom insists is more than a tiny pooch -- she's getting "chunky". My niece is 8. I've told my mom to NEVER say that in front of my niece. EVER. I *WILL* lose my sh!t on her if she does.

I can't help but think of a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt I saw not too long ago. Her mother was constantly commenting to her and others on her ugliness, and blamed her for her father's alcoholism. Later in life her mother-in-law, who hated her for stealing Franklin from her, would do the same. Fortunately, her uncle Theodore loved her unreservedly, which helped her build the self-confidence that served her so well in her later years.

I am 70. Mine is the first generation not to need to teach our daughters how to catch a man for the sake of sheer survival. Our mothers were terrified for us. It didn't always play out as loving care. Learning to be pretty so that someone worthwhile would choose you - that was simply common sense during my adolescence. My favorite quote from Eleanor Roosevelt - No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

In Anne of Green Gables, Anne goes on and on about how plain and ugly she is and how no one could love such an plain girl with red hair, freckles, and so skinny. These books were in the approximate time frame and it had been drilled in her she was ugly. She was berated for being vain when she started believing she was pretty. This book shows such societal issues from that time.

My mom, who was born in the 1940s and raised predominantly by her grandparents, who was overweight and a heavy smoker, grabbing my rolls when I was a child and saying, "If you can pinch an inch! And that's more than an inch!" or when I was trying on clothes, "Sigh, you look like a sack of old potatoes". Followed up by my being "too smart" and "too sarcastic" I was "scaring the boys off". She wasn't really happy with me when I responded, "Good, if they're that easily scared off I don't want him." Still, that stuff absolutely sticks with you.

Per the Stephen Fry-narrated Victorian Secrets, Victorians believed that ugly babies resulted from poor lovemaking. Let's bring back THAT myth.

What's even worse is that it's not about an ugly child, it's about an ugly daughter...

Now I understand what Louisa May Alcott was the counterprogramming for! All her stories have characters overcoming superficial looks-based expectations in society and learning to recognize that it's "what's inside that counts."

My grandaunt was denied marriage due to her looks, so she never married . Oh and the guy she wanted to marry was blind, but his parents said no,

There were literally laws called 'The ugly laws" put in place to prohibit people seen as ugly, disfigured, disabled, etc., from being seen in public.

The almond mom is also something that happens here in Europe. Its actually really worrying and bad. I know people who have put their 10 year olds (and younger) on a diet because they were worried they'd be fat. I've had a 5 year old ask me if she was fat, because both her parents were dieting. Madness, absolute madness.