The Ladies, Dressed, in Newport

Last Thursday evening, my friend and I went to the Colony House in Newport  for the “Undressing History: What Women Wore in the 18^th Century” program presented by the Newport Historical Society.

There were excellent questions from children (I loved, “What would you wear for pajamas?”) and adults, including:

If you were not a wealthy woman, or you were an enslaved woman, what did you wear on laundry day?

At Sandpit Gate, Paul Sandby, 1765. RCIN 914329

The image that sprang into my mind was Paul Sandby’s women at Sandpit Gate, doing laundry work. They’re wearing their shifts, stays, petticoats, neck handkerchiefs, caps and shoes. (I particularly like the woman working at the tub; you can see the angle of her stays diverging from her spine as she bends forward; it’s a fine little detail and very accurate.)

So women wore one of their shifts, their stays, petticoat(s), stockings and shoes.

And that brings us to the question, How many shifts did they have?

Several months ago I had the luxury of doing some research in the manuscript collections at work, and found MSS 957, the Stafford Family Papers. In those papers there is an undated estate inventory, thought to be from ca. 1780-1799. It’s extensive, and while I have a hand-writen transcription of the whole, I’ll quote the most relevant entry:

5 shifts [illegible]

Yes, five shifts. A woman who owned five slaves had five shifts. They were not for her slaves (though that leads to yet another set of questions about people who were property owning property…and where might that be enumerated?). And if she was laid out in a shift, or wearing one when she died, was it counted, too?

With five shifts, this unidentified woman could have worn each for two days and managed a washing every week–or rather, managed for another day or two or three while her slave women washed, dryed, and ironed her clothing.

In The Dress of the People, Styles points out in Chapter 2 that the largest differences between what the rich and poor wore lay in “numbers, quality and value,” (p. 31) and tables in the back lay out the different number of shifts lost by different women in a fire on an afternoon in May, 1789, in Brandon, Suffolk, England. A blacksmith’s wife lost six shifts, the mantua maker lost one. We can’t know if that emphatically means the mantua maker had but two shifts, or if she saved more than the blacksmith’s wife; one servant lost seven shifts! What we can tell is that women had more than one shift.

We can’t take one undated inventory as typical of 18th century clothing inventories in Rhode Island, (more research lies ahead of me) but counting shifts would be an interesting exercise. Based on my own experience, I can verify that one wants more than one shift. I think it likely that inventories will turn up multiple shifts for women, and shirts for men, no matter where we look, and that this will probably hold true even for slaves. Styles reminds us that the differences are not just numbers, but quality and value.