Women’s struggle to walk the

women trod: they could go out escorted or chaperoned but to wander freely was dangerous and invited censure, as her novel The Pargiters shows: “Eleanor and Milly and Delia could not possibly go for a walk alone…”

In the 1830s French novelist George Sand, born Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, achieved invisibility by dressing as a man, “I was an atom lost in the immense crowd”, and loved the emancipation of boots: “I would gladly have slept with them on”. She was bold, since in 1800 French law made cross-dressing illegal.