Category Archives: History

Petticoat Burns

05 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by in History, Living History, Reenacting

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Per Hillstrom, Kitchen Scene

You know this site, right? History Myths Debunked examines the stories about the past many like to think are true, and Death By Petticoat is one of the favorites. Here it is on an English site catering to reenactors. There’s a variation I’d never heard, about wetting petticoat hems to keep them from engulfing the wearer in flames. (OK, mild exaggeration: to keep the petticoat from igniting fully, thus… hat tip to Back Country Maiden for pointing this out.)

As someone who just finished mending a petticoat, you’d think I’d leap at the chance to drench my hem in water to prevent future mending episodes, but not so. For one thing, in the house or in the camp, that’s water I had to haul or cause to have hauled, and I’m not wasting it. Wet the hems and what’s next? Caked lumps of ash, mud, and.or other filth. No thanks.

High-tech historical cooking

High-tech historical cooking

The burns I got in my dress were acquired at the end of the day when we were hearth cooking and were practically in the fireplace ourselves. That is where you must be if you wish to stir the sauce until it thickens, and there was the hoisting of roast in its pan a couple of times, and general playing with fire in pursuit of food. My ca. 1799 dress is longer than my 1770s petticoats and gowns, and the extra inch or two probably contributed to the burns. But I wasn’t engulfed by flames, because the damn thing is wool. Self-extinguishing wool, worn with linen and wool petticoats and a linen apron. not going to go up in flames. Also not going to get dipped in water–and wouldn’t that result in steam and hence scalded shins?

I don’t know where these rumours start, but they could have started with a cynical curator joking with house tour guides who failed to get the joke. Not that I know anything about a story of about Providence kitten named Georgie in honor of George Washington’s visit to a large brick house on a hill .

A Visit with the Ladies

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Clothing, History, Museums

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The apple never falls far from the tree, my mother used to say, of me and my grandmother, her mother, Elsa. Elsa went to a woman’s college, majored in botany, graduated in the mid-twenties, and went back to western New York State, where she opened an eponymous dress shop.

Elsa, Studio Portait ca 1935

Elsa, Studio portrait ca 1935

Elsa managed that shop for more than 50 years, dressed most of the women in town (or at least the type of woman who knew how to dress, and be dressed), and even dressed a woman who later became a donor to the architectural collection I managed in St. Louis.

She was a controlling woman, no doubt, and carefully managed and cared about her appearance. She was also a lady of a steely, ladder-climbing type native to the 1940s and 1950s, full of the foibles and desires of the daughter of immigrants who spoke Swedish at home. The stories they told about her would make a cat laugh: the day the local radio station called and Elsa answered the phone (on air? That part was never clear) to find out that the household had won a month’s supply of white bread.

“Oh no,” she said. “I don’t believe we care for that,” and hung up.

Not of the quality to which she had become accustomed, you see: she insisted on some picky particular white sandwich bread for fancy lunches, and otherwise ate the limpa rye the cook or  Ingeborg made. All the household help was Swedish, as were the women who did alterations at the shop.

Elsa married late, at 35, and her husband moved into the house she shared with my great-aunt and their father, August, known as Morfar after my mother was born. Buying trips to New York for her store resulted in the delivery of boxes from Saks Fifth Avenue, deliveries that came so often, in such quantity that my grandfather questioned her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “They just keep sending them.”

Elsa in Italy ca. 1980

Elsa in Italy ca. 1980

They were boxes of shoes, spectators and sling backs, pumps, court shoes, Cuban heels, stilettos, peep toes, sandals, every kind of shoe you can imagine, and all in brown, tan, beige, ecru, off-white, cream, none of them black or red or blue or green. Beige: that was her signature color, beiges and browns with occasional accents of coral or green or gold. She assigned blue to her younger sister, my great-aunt Gladys, and when Gladys once dared to buy a beige dress she liked, Elsa had a temper tantrum. A quiet one, but effective.

She died before she could meet my husband, died before I was married, and I am sorry about that. But I remembered her this week when I went with my friend (and Registrar) to visit two older ladies, sisters, on the East Side. We picked up a collection of clothing worn when the two ladies (now in their early 90s and late 80s) were babies, the wedding dress their mother wore in 1918, the dress one wore in 1939 that her daughter wore again in 1970, with quite the wrong black moccasins, at a Christmas Eve party in Georgetown.

The sisters reminded me of my grandmother and aunt, and the clothes reminded me of what my grandmother sold and boxed and wrapped in her store. Sitting at the mahogany table for lunch, drinking tea and eating a slightly stale roll, I missed Elsa and Gladys terribly, but was glad for all they’d taught me about how to behave and what the world was like for independent women in the 1940s and 1950s

Women’s Work

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Events, History, Living History, Reenacting

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Cooking. Gets you every time.

Cooking. Gets you every time.

Three holes (at least; there might be four) and mending to do. The patches are cut, but I’m thinking now that a wool apron might be a good thing to have. The other thing I’ve been thinking about is what James Thurber called The War Between Men and Women, and how even in educated, enlightened North America, it plays on. [i]

At living history events or reenactments, the work and activities are divided along gender lines. Participants are supposed to follow “the rules,” which keep women on the observer side of the rope line and the men free to run around with muskets. Women sometimes seem purely decorative at the military events, and the relationships between men and women are curious. There’s the sexism between reenactors, and the sexism of the public, who can often assume women know nothing about what’s happening.  Women should, after all, know their place, just as the men know theirs.  Women can cook and clean up after the men, and the men will do all the talking, even when they’re wrong.[ii]

In a more domestic setting, this same historical dynamic can play out: women cook and serve the meals, wash the dishes, fetch the wood and water, and clean the kitchen, while men muck about outdoors until their tools break. Then they lounge about smoking, drinking, and talking.

Sandby, Washing at Sandpit Gate, 1765. Royal Collection.

Sandby, Washing at Sandpit Gate, 1765. Royal Collection.

That’s all OK, to a degree.  But we’re not in the 18th century, and the women in the kitchen don’t enjoy washing other people’s dirty dishes as well as all the cooking pots and tools. We had a system on Sunday evening, but I did notice that some men just can’t be the only guy helping: once the other guys leave the room, they’re out, too, with a kind of desperation, even as the light wanes and we need all the help we can get to finish up.

So what to do? Interpreting the 18th century means facing gender roles that most American women today don’t like or embrace. What’s the best way to interpret women’s history and women’s roles in the past to people today?

On Sunday, I left the house to call the guys to the first meal, and a visitor asked if the sheep in the field were part of the site. “Yes,” I said. “ But I don’t know where the sheep are today; I don’t get to leave the house much.” And that is true: aside from fetching water when I didn’t have a man or boy to ask to do it, there was hardly need, reason, or even time, to leave the house.

I think we do a disservice to the visitors to living history sites of all kinds if we don’t find a way to talk about women’s history, and the roles—proscribed or not—that women could take on. At a RevWar encampment, we can talk about the reasons women followed the armies, the kinds of work they did for pay or rations, and what the Revolution meant for women. At the farm and at the manor, I think it’s important to talk about women’s lives in the Early Republic. How this would work at the farm, exactly, I’m not yet certain; at the manor it is easy enough, for the women who lived there were born just before the Revolution. They were well-educated and expected to choose their own husbands. We know who they were; we know less about the women at the farm, though we know about their work.

How we experience that work isn’t really the point, but the chasm between choosing to spend a day never looking beyond the scope of the hearth and having to spend days that way is enormous. It’s a point I want to make,  in a way more sophisticated than “life was hard and greasy.” It’s something to work on.

[i] This is in no way meant to equate the petty first world problems of a bunch of reenactors/living historians with the larger and more brutal problems elsewhere in the world. But relationships can change when situations change…

[ii] Fortunately, the Second Helping Regiment doesn’t work quite this way, and not just because they’re busy chewing whatever has been made for them. Cooking, and the subsequent chewing, can be used strategically.

Sandby’s Women

11 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Clothing, History, Museums

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20130109-061710.jpgSara Hough’s date of ca. 1805 piqued my curiosity and Cassidy was suspicious, too. So I went looking into Paul Sandby a little bit more.

Many of us know him for the sketches and watercolors of working people in mid-18th century England. They’re oft-used references for people doing Rev War reenacting as they’re full of the kinds of details seen in the watercolor of Sara Hough. I hadn’t thought of Sandby for later 18th century references, which shows how little I was thinking.

Sandby: Figure with Lute & Tamourine, YCBA

Sandby: Figure with Lute & Tamourine, YCBA

Thanks to the 18th Century Material Culture Resource Center, I found the Sandby “People and Places” presentation, which led me back to the Yale Center for British Art, and this image of musicians, horses and women. There’s no date in the record, though the presentation calls it ca. 1785. There seems to be a series or portfolio of Sandby sketches similar in size and type from about 1785, so it’s a reasonable assumption…with the usual caveat about assumptions, but no aspersions on the compiler of the presentation.

Sandby, detail, YCBA

Sandby, detail, YCBA

Sandby: Two Women and a Basket, YCBA

Sandby: Two Women and a Basket, ca. 1759 YCBA

Let’s look at a detail of the women in the drawing. Their waists are higher than we see in earlier Sandby drawings, and their profile slimmer, more classical, particularly the figure on the far right. Her bodice looks to me like a late 18th-century bodices.

Sandby: A Fishmonger, YCBA

Sandby: A Fishmonger, ca. 1759 YCBA

Sandby had the skill to depict clothing with minimal gestures, as he does below in A Fishmonger, part of the London Cries series.

It’s that circa that gets you. I believe it for the ca. 1759, all the way. The figures fit into the visual continuum of Sandby’s mid-century work as I know it. (You’ll just have to trust me that I have a visual memory, and that, for once, the years of art school matter.)

And I kept wondering if he really had worked late into the 18th century, and then I found this:

Sandby: Family in Hyde Park, YCBA

Sandby: Family in Hyde Park, YCBA

Again, no date, but there are distinctive markers to tell us this is post-1780, even inching to the early 1790s. The waistcoats on the adolescent boys are shorter and double-breasted. The shape of the boy’s hats has changed: these aren’t cocked hats, and they’re not soft round hats. But look even closer and you’ll see the ties at the knees of their breeches, very typical and fashionable for the 1790s. All this before we’ve even gotten to the woman! Look at what she’s wearing: that’s certainly a plausible ensemble for 1794, isn’t it? The waist has moved up, the skirts are lighter, likely mull or muslin, and the skirt of what I interpret as an open robe, much like Sara Hough‘s, is trained on the ground. If this is a Sandby drawing, which I don’t doubt, then I think we definitely see him working into the mid-1790s.

And just for one final kick, I checked the Met again, where they have a Paul Sandby drawing dated 1798-1799. I wonder…but the coat collar and waistcoat might have it.

Sandby, Group of 4 Children and a Dog, MMA

I’m still not sold on ca. 1805 for Sara Hough (why no ‘h’ on Sara when the drawing is inscribed by Sandby, “Sarah Hough…”?) but I’d endorse 1795. The tricky part, as always, is the circa: so much depends on how a museum interprets ‘circa.’ For some, it’s 5 years either side of the date; for others, it’s 10. When I see a circa date, I get skeptical, and start doing math.

Sleeping 18th Century-Style

07 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in History, Living History

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the_idle_servant1There was a mild flurry about a year ago around the release of Evening’s Empire, by Craig Koslofsky. Like the 2005 book by Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, Koslofsky’s book examines pre-electric lighting patterns of behaviour at night, including sleep patterns.  The BBC has a nice article on the two here. Both Koslofsky and Ekirch assert that until the 19th century, humans typically slept in two blocks of about 4 hours each, and scientists confirm this natural tendency.

Last year, between December and March, I had the luck to test this theory, and once again, it seems I will be sleeping old school, in blocks of time. Unfortunately, these blocks of time are often 2 hours and not 4 hours, as the scientists and historians claim we need. User testing of one shows me that 2 hour sleep blocks (or 4 hours followed by 2 hours) are inadequate and I may be near-hallucinatory by March, just as I was last year.

When doing living history, its always better not to skimp on resources.