Search results for: Rebecca Young

2020 Vision

01 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Clothing, Fail, Living History, Making Things, personal, Philosophy

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Rebecca Young at the Museum of the American Revolution. Always a good experience.

We made it: another turn around the sun, another year, a time of resolutions and reflection. 2019 was the year I had three jobs, invented a job, and qualified for Medicaid. It was a year I spent wondering who I was, and what my experience meant, if anything. I developed a new chronic condition (can you have too many?) and continued struggling to manage the old ones. I applied to, was waitlisted by, and ultimately rejected by a prestigious graduate program. I applied and interviewed for five jobs and got two. The one I have now, though a short-term contract, uses all the skills I honed over three decades working in museums. I expanded the repertoire of 18th-century women I represent, learned about flag making, and increased the number and accuracy of remedies in my medical box. I even journeyed further back in time to represent a Lost Colonist of Roanoke.

Together in multiple centuries, despite the bumps. Photo by Aaron Walker

Still, six months of working all weekend every weekend at job number two put me so far from my friends and habits that despite the pleasure of representing Rebecca Young and Elizabeth Weed, I still feel uncomfortable with living history and costuming. Those months certainly strained my relationship with Drunk Tailor, and with my own identity. Twenty nineteen is year I would revisit only in select details.

Mrs. Wainwright, Miss White and Miss Baker going into the Supreme Court to hear the decision on the Ohio ratification of the suffrage amendment, 1920.

For this coming year, I know only a few things. My contract expires at the end of March. I still love things and order, but I don’t know if I want to work full-time in a museum again. In a bit of perfection, I’m working as the de facto collections and project manager to transfer the library, archival, and object collections of the National Woman’s Party (NWP)  to the Library of Congress and the National Park Service, effectively closing the NWP as a cultural organization (the house is now preserved as a national monument).

I took this contract before my Kickstarter succeeded and admit I am ambivalent about it. Kitty Calash as a business is a little too small to sustain me with a kid in college, but museum work, aside from the work of establishing ownership and provenance, remains difficult for me. I wonder about the accumulations of objects, their meaning, and relevance for the future. I was a curator for a long time, but now I wonder what my role will be, in the evidence locker of history.

Like “curator,” “reenactor” no longer feels like it fits, even though I love history and clothes and dressing up. Perhaps this is too many weeks where dressing up was not an option, too many events missed, the habit lost. Perhaps it’s fear of succeeding, of striking out on my own and doing well, and instead of jumping, hesitating at precisely the wrong moment. Suddenly, it all seems so silly in the face of elections, climate change, and the instability of the gig economy.

Purveying ideas and goods as a milliner is a lot like being a curator.

I wrestled with this in 2017 and 2013,  winters when things seemed hopeless for reasons large and small. Three years ago, I found my refuge in art. Even a year ago, art and aesthetics felt like solace. This year, the New York Times’ Culture Therapist addressed a reader’s question, or problem, that echoed with my own sense of perturbation.

The core of the issue was this: “What happens when we no longer fit our own context?” The answers were varied, and to me, seemed like long shots (too many uncontrollable factors) but this struck me: It will require risking compassion to create an expanded and possibly destabilizing relationship to visual culture.

In 2019, I learned the key to most successful endeavors is vulnerability. I spent a lifetime building walls to protect myself that now box me in. Razing those walls is what I think of when I read “risking compassion,” though it’s hard to say exactly what a destabilizing relationship to visual culture (or history, or costume, or fashion) might be. It may be understanding how little one knows about the past, accepting new aesthetics, or trying something completely new. Even as I contemplate a possible grant-funded costumed interpretation program, clothes from 1919 don’t feel “new” enough to me; they are not different enough. I don’t know what will be, but I do know that unless I’m emotionally uncomfortable, I’m not learning.

On the way home
the view can be amazing

For all the angst and tears and anger of 2019, all the feelings I do not want to feel again, this year taught me to trust myself, to try, to fail, and to succeed. We learn as much from our failures as our successes, and while some of us more easily recall painful memories, it is worth remembering they can lead to our happiest moments. For this coming year, I will try to hold onto hope, that thing with feathers, and plan to learn new skills, improve the ones I have, and continue to find joy in the everyday.

Women in Business

20 Tuesday Aug 2019

Posted by in Living History, personal, Philosophy, Reenacting

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One of things I’ve struggled with in living history is reconciling my own life as a 21st century working woman and feminist with interpreting the lives of 18th century women.

Mrs. James Smith (Elizabeth Murray)
John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815) 1769

It takes a while– and a bunch of reading– to get past the notion that these women lack agency in their own lives. Sure, there are notable exceptions: Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, and Elizabeth Murray, but those wealthy Boston women aren’t the kinds of women I’m interested in portraying. What about more everyday women? What about the women more like me? They’ve proven harder to find, but not unfindable–though even they, by dint of being findable, are more exceptional than the vast majority of 18th century colonial American women.

Elizabeth Weed carried on her husband’s business as a pharmacist, noting that she “had been employed these several years past in preparing [his receipts] herself,” and was therefore well-equipped and trustworthy to carry on in his business. Rebecca Young advertised as a flag maker, and as a contractor, made flags, drum cases, cartridges and shirts for the Continental Army, thanks to her brother Benjamin Flower’s position as a Lieutenant Colonel.

In researching Elizabeth Weed, I read about other women running businesses in Philadelphia, and practicing as “doctoresses” in nearby New Jersey, demonstrating that Mrs. Weed operated in a context of other successful women, including some practicing medicine, or at least “medicinal arts.” What I would really like is to track down the records of a mantua maker or milliner in 18th century America, and not only because I make and sell gowns and bonnets, but because in doing so, I’m carrying on with the kind of work that my grandmother and great aunts did.

Elsa, Studio Portait ca 1935

For fifty years, my grandmother ran a dress shop in western New York state, dressing the women of Jamestown and the surrounding counties in fashionable and flattering clothes. My aunts made hats and accessories in their own shops, completing the look. I come from a family of makers (including a great-grandmother who made her own shoes), who care deeply about fit and helping people look and feel their best. My grandmother ran a successful shop for fifty years, until she sold it in the mid-1970s. I have many fond memories of sorting costume jewelry upstairs, and gift-wrapping boxes in the basement, with a rack of ribbons in all colors handy on the wall.

She was exceptional in her own way, though you will be hard-pressed to find much (if anything) about her on the interwebs, but maintaining a business through the Depression and World War II was challenging. She gave back, as a member of the YWCA and Women’s Hospital boards, recognizing the importance of sustaining the community you’re part of. When I portray Elizabeth Weed or Rebecca Young, or the Hawthorns of Salem, I think about my grandmother. Maybe it’s a step too far to say the living history work I do or the business I’ve started honors her and the other working women of my family, but I like to think that it helps make visible women who, though now forgotten, were as important to their own communities as she was.

To Make a Standard

22 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by in History, Literature, material culture, Museums, Research

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British wool bunting flag said to have been given to Tecumseh. NMAI Catalog number 23/730.

When I set out to “be” Rebecca Young, I thought I knew how flags were made in the 18th century– after all, I’ve made and seen a wide range of 18th and early 19th century items. But I was surprised when I got a look at a War of 1812 flag in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian. (This was the closest, fastest option for getting a close-up look at an original, near-period flag in wool bunting, thanks to an inside connection.)

The questions I had were:

What materials were used? (My guesses were correct: wool bunting and unbleached linen thread)
What seam techniques were used? (See below)
How was a flag assembled? (Sequence of parts; see below)

The conservator shared the flag’s condition and treatment report with me in advance, and it was helpful:

My sketch of the Tecumseh flag

“Based on notes written by Phyllis Dillon, 1977(?): The flag is constructed of 9″
wide panels of plain weave wool bunting (24 threads/inch) sewn together with french seams (approx. 1/4″ wide) using beige (white/red) and brown (blue/white; blue/blue) 2-ply S linen threads in a running stitch. The canton is constructed similarly using strips of white and red bunting with similar thread count. The hoist (approximately 1 1/4″ wide) is made from a plain weave, coarse, undyed linen folded over the raw edges of the seamed rows of bunting and stitched with a beige (undyed) linen thread; there are three hand-stitched grommets/eyelets at the corners and the center of the hoist which appear to use the same type of linen thread as the hoist stitching. (See analysis section for fiber ID). The blue bunting at the lower and upper edges of the flag are selvage edges, the fly edge is folded over and stitched with a 1/2″ wide hem.”

The date of the notes (42 years ago?) concerned me, and I wondered about the french seams. Most of what we see in the period are felled seams, so it seemed possible there was some confusion about the terminology. I’m confused about it after looking at tutorials and descriptions online, but perhaps that’s just me– in any case, the only way to answer this was to go and look.

What did I find?

Mistress V shows visitors our modern wool bunting flag

Materials
Wool bunting and silk were the most common materials used to make flags, colo(u)rs, and standards in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Colours, as advertised by Rebecca Young, likely referred to regimental colours, though a naval “colour” could mean a national flag flown by the ship. During the Revolutionary War, there were state navies in addition to a Continental Navy, further complicating the issue. (This complication also existed in the army. There are parallels today in the state National Guard units, which operate under a state or commonwealth governor, unless called into federal service. It’s your state national guard that comes to dig you out of your car in a major blizzard, but they can also be called to serve in wars, as you may recall from such debacles as Abu Ghraib.) Bunting came from Sudbury, England, and was woven in narrow strips. The strips on the Tecumseh flag are about 9 ½” seamed, suggesting that the width was about 10” including selvedges. Narrow strips are more flexible for assembly, and allow extensive use of selvedges to make seams narrower and stronger, because they’re less likely to fray.

Techniques
The running stitches in the Tecumseh flag threw me, because I’d expected back stitches, or combination stitch at least, but when I started working with the bunting, I understood. The loose weave of the bunting will pull and distort if you apply too much tension, so a backstitch would, in the end, be less useful than a running stitch. I doubt this is true of silk flags, though; silk, being more tightly woven, would better withstand a backstitch.

Wrong Side
Right Side

Because the Tecumseh flag is mounted and framed in a plexiglas case, I couldn’t touch the seams, or see the backs, and the conservators don’t seem to have photographed both sides when the flag was being treated– or at least images were not available to me. This leaves open the question of exactly how the seams were done, but my best guess based on areas of loss is that the strips were stitched together with a slight offset, like a felled seam, and then the overlap was tucked under and stitched down with a running stitch.

women sewing

This is less efficient: one person assembling an entire flag alone.

Assembly
This was probably the most delightful part of the research: figuring out how all the pieces went together. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it: flags were assembled in component parts, which were then assembled into wholes. Once we were working on the flag at the museum, the reason became clear: it’s so much quicker and easier to have multiple people working on parts, with one person assembling these parts, than to have one person per flag. This is proto-assembly line work, and it existed in 18th century workshops from tailors to cabinetmakers. Specialization equals speed, and the key to making money as a contractor supplying the army was quantity.

 

Canton components: A, B, C, D , E and F are assembled; AEB and CFD are sewn together to make two long rectangles, which are then sewn to the long sides of G.

In the case of the Tecumseh flag, there are three main components: the lower three strips, the upper three strips, and the canton, which is comprised of 7 parts. Each was assembled individually; then the canton and the three shorter strips were joined, and sewn to the long lower piece. After that, the hoist was attached and the far edge of the fly hemmed. Only then was the flag finished and ready for delivery.

Describing how strip(es) were assembled to become the Fort Mifflin flag.

The Fort Mifflin flag, 13 stripes of red, white and blue bunting, ending in red, would have been assembled in strips of two and then three, and then grouped and assembled. Working with Mistress V, the greater efficiency of assembling components became clearer. This hand-on quasi-experiment clarified some questions about how military contractors worked in the 18th century– at least the ones sewing. The system had to include multiple hands, working together in a shop or doing piecework at home for assembly elsewhere. There was just no other way to efficiently make the quantities of goods– 500 linen liners for light horse caps; 293 shirts; multiple standards and colours– at the speed the army required. The quantities also suggest that Rebecca Young was not just a widow-turned-contractor, but that she had working and organizing experience before she was widowed, along with a network of contacts who, along with some of her children, helped produce these goods.

In the Flag-Maker’s Shop

19 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by in Events, Living History, Making Things, material culture, Museums, Reenacting

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Saturday’s arrangement. Image courtesy of the Museum of the American Revolution

The biggest challenge in interpreting Rebecca Young and the shop she ran was not how flags were made (an appointment at the Cultural Resource Center of the National Museum of the American Indian answered that question*), but rather how to make sewing interesting, and how to create a more interactive experience for ourselves and for visitors. Some of my favorite living history experiences involve playing off other interpreters and the public, especially when trying to convince visitors to pick a side, carry a message, or share a secret. Saturday’s set up made that harder, with Rebecca’s shop of women behind a table (we wanted to be sure to be open to visitors, and not make the dreaded reenactor circle), and with Drunk Tailor rolling cartridges in a niche.

Nobody puts Drunk Tailor in a niche.

But what we saw on Saturday– a day with 800 visitors–was that boys between roughly six and 16 skipped from Drunk Tailor to the tailors, bypassing a table of women altogether. Older men (say, 45+) visiting alone also skipped our table, while the majority of our visitors were girls and women. This was not a surprise. Children begin to develop gender segregation around ages five to six, and sewing is often dismissed as “women’s work,” as the table of tailors experienced. These cultural biases were somewhat compounded by the nature of our work.

Tailor’s Art: Containing the men’s suits tailor, the skin breeches, the women & children’s body suit, the seamstress & the fashion merchant / by M. de Garsault, National Library of France

Sunday’s set up. Image courtesy of the Museum of the American Revolution

Sewing is one of those tasks that is downward-facing, internal, and meditative (until the thread tangles or snaps). It’s dull to watch, really; the exciting parts of sewing and making are draping, fitting, and cutting. Cutting. There’s something to that.

Combining the desire to interact more with our co-interpreters and the need to disrupt expectations of sewing, we rearranged the tables on Sunday, moving Drunk Tailor to our end of the atrium, postulating that his tea table and powder keg were in the yard of the townhouse, while we pushed our table closer to the tailors and against the railing, pulling our chairs to the side. We also draped shirts and fabric over the railing to display shirts and their component parts, along with bunting. While this “messed up” the atrium, it helped create a context for our work.

Sunday, workshops in a row (house). Image courtesy of the Museum of the American Revolution

But the best, most participatory change was Mistress V cutting flag strips on the floor, with the help of two young boys. This literally disruptive activity (you had to walk around her) changed perceptions of what we were doing, and helped people imagine assembling a large item (a Continental Standard) in a small rowhouse room.

If we take the Betsy Ross house** as an example of a Philadelphia rowhouse, , its exterior dimensions, roughly 16 x 25, yield an interior per-floor area of not more than 400 square feet. The Star-Spangled Banner was 30 x 42 feet; a second “storm” flag was 17 x 25 feet, large enough to cover the floor of a room in Betsy Ross house.

dark wooden drop leaf table with trifid feet

Dining Table (drop-leaf, gateleg table), probably Pennsylvania, 1750-1770. Walnut, oak. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1994-20-60

While we do not know the exact dimensions of the flags Rebecca Young and her shop produced, it seems likely that any flag would have exceeded the size of a domestic table, since even drop-leaf dining tables of the period are not usually more than 52” x 41” or about 15 square feet (4.3 x 3.5 feet). The limited size of the table, and the need for multiple feet of cutting space makes it likely that flags larger than 3 x 5 feet were cut and pieced on the floor.

This combination of thought experiment and interpretive change up was reasonably successful, giving us greater understanding as we talked about assembling goods in pieces and working in a small shop while interrupting the visitor’s expectations.

*More on this another time.

**You have to start somewhere– and while I’m on #TeamYoung when it comes to flag making, Rebecca’s rented house has long been razed.

 

Research and primary source materials on Rebecca Flower Young were provided by Matthew Skic of the Museum of the American Revolution; compiled information used by gallery educators at the MoAR was compiled and provided by Katherine Becnel of the MoAR.

To Philadelphia, Again

12 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by in Events, History, Living History, material culture, Museums, Research

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Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), June 28, 1781

This time, unoccupied. I’ll be representing Rebecca Flower Young at the Museum of the American Revolution’s Flower’s Artificers event this coming weekend, and to get ready, I’ve been reading research material generously shared by museum staff, as well as Marla Miller’s classic Betsy Ross and the Making of America, which mentions Rebecca Young in the context of the competitive world of Continental Army contractors in 1780s Philadelphia.

Rebecca Flower Young (1739-1819) was an older sister of Benjamin Flower (1748-1781), Lieutenant Colonel in the Continental Army. Before the war, she lived in Philadelphia with her husband, William Young, a goldsmith, and their five children. The family fled Philadelphia for Lebanon, PA in September 1777 as the British Army advanced to occupy the city; it would not have been safe for them, given their ardent Whig politics and relationship to Benjamin, commissary general of military stores. After William Young’s death in February, 1778, Colonel Flower secured a house for his sister on Walnut Street, and work as a contractor providing supplies for the Continental Army.

 

Rebecca made drum cases and shirts, cap linings and cartridges, and multiple Continental standards. From the quantities she produced– 500 cap linings for light horsemen– it is possible she hired assistants in addition to her children. Her 17-year-old son William made “five hundred dozen of Priming wires and brushes” in 1780, aiding the war effort through the supply chain rather than as a foot soldier, a condition that was likely a relief, given Rebecca’s status as a widow. She also let a room in the Walnut Street house, the boarder’s rent providing a relatively steady and reliable income.

Col. Benjamin Flower, oil on canvas by Charles Willson Peale. Star-Spangled Banner House, Baltimore, MD.

We have no idea what Rebecca Young looked like, of course, though there is a portrait of her brother, Benjamin, in his uniform, as well as a portrait miniature sold at Freeman’s.

With only written sources about her work to guide me, I have waffled back and forth about Rebecca Young’s material world. In the end, I have made a much-needed new shift and cap for this weekend, as well as a gown (that, of this writing, requires only one cuff and the skirt hem). After reading Miller on Betsy Ross, I was of two minds: first, that the material world of these women was shabby and out-of-date, given the privations of the occupation and the war-driven inflation and second, that their status as contractors gave them an income that allowed them to afford new things. Still, with five children, new anything would have been a stretch, so I remain undecided and firmly ambivalent about the appropriateness of this gown. Scissors, needles, pins: those tools are much easier to understand than personal circumstances.

We approach representing the past with preconceptions that are hard to shake: the images we have in mind are dominated by representations of people at the far ends of the economic spectrum. It’s as if we had only the Saks Fifth Avenue and Old Navy websites to help us understand American clothing today. The wildly divergent economic and material situations tell us little about the people in the middle, who make up the vast majority of the population. 

Research and primary source materials on Rebecca Flower Young were provided by Matthew Skic of the Museum of the American Revolution; compiled information used by gallery educators at the MoAR was compiled and provided by Katherine Becnel of the MoAR.