Grisette (person)

The word grisette (sometimes spelled grizette) has referred to a French working-class woman from the late 17th century and remained in common use through the Belle Époque era, albeit with some modifications to its meaning. It derives from gris (French for grey), and refers to the cheap grey fabric of the dresses these women originally wore. The 1694 edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française described a grisette as simply "a woman of lowly condition". By the 1835 edition of the dictionary, her status had risen somewhat. She was described as:

a young working woman who is coquettish and flirtatious.

This usage can be seen in one of Oliver Wendell Holmes' early poems "Our Yankee Girls" (1830):

the gay grisette, whose fingers touch love's thousand chords so well....

In practice, "young working woman" referred primarily to those employed in the garment and millinery trades as seamstresses or shop assistants, the few occupations open to them in 19th century urban France, apart from domestic service. The sexual connotations which had long accompanied the word are made explicit in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1976) which lists one of its meanings as a young woman who combines part-time prostitution with another occupation. Webster's quotes an example from Henry Seidel Canby's 1943 biography of Walt Whitman:

and many years later [Whitman] was still talking to Traubel of the charm of the dusky grisettes who sold love as well as flowers on the streets of New Orleans.

In 1730 Jonathan Swift was already using "grisette" in English to signify qualities of both flirtatiousness and intellectual aspiration. (See The grisette in poetry below.) The grisette also makes an appearance in Lawrence Sterne's 1768 novel A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. In Chapter II of the novel, the Reverend Mr. Yorick (the narrator and Sterne's alter ego) recounts his obsessions with Parisian grisettes, and especially with a particularly beautiful one who worked in a Paris glove shop:

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