Women's Shoes (Anniversary Tin) 1850 - 1900

These women's shoes were cast in tin, by an anonymous maker. We can read these shoes as a symbol of a specific kind of domestic life. In the United States, around the turn of the 20th century, it became traditional to fashion gifts from tin to mark a tenth wedding anniversary. Casting items in tin was a craft practiced outside the institutionalized art world, perhaps by a tinsmith, a metalworker or even the husband, himself. These shoes were likely conceived as a token of love in a private, domestic setting. The practice of marking wedding anniversaries with gifts emerged as part of a broader Victorian culture of sentimental gift giving. The shoes serve as a humble, vernacular monument to love and marriage as ideals, revealing the way social and economic values could be embedded in even the most modest handmade objects. Of course, the social life of objects doesn't end when they enter a museum. To study these shoes further we could look to archives of marriage practices and the history of anniversary traditions.