Tag Archives: domestic life

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.

Living Deliberately

08 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by in Living History, personal, Philosophy, Reenacting

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WCD: The Original

A friend of mine recently wrote about replicating the domestic life of the past (specifically the 18th century) and how much meaning that had for her.

Being so deeply embedded in the rhythms of life there, it became my home in a very real sense that has never left me.

I read that quickly, and what I read was that the place she had spent so much time was home to her because the place never left her– she carried its rhythms and seasons within her. Perhaps that isn’t quite what she meant, but that’s the risk of writing: the reader reads what they need to.

It made me think of home, and of living deliberately, and of a very bad year I had a long time ago, before I even imagined doing living history, when I thought I would spend my life making new things, like cities and buildings. (This makes me think of an album I listened to at the time, More Songs About Buildings and Food, which seemed all the more important because I’d gone to RISD, too.

Food, in a Building, in Rhode Island

The year I turned 25 was particularly bad not because a man broke my heart, though that didn’t help, and not because I had a miscarriage, though that was the catalyst that led to the man breaking my heart, but because the miscarriage shattered my sense of purpose and self. Somehow, everything that I had ever wanted to be — a sculptor, an architect, a writer– was gone, and I didn’t know what to do or how to be. (Read The Year of Magical Thinking if you want a well-written take on this kind of loss.) I didn’t know what to do next, but the man who eventually broke my heart gave me a book to help me figure it out: Chop Wood, Carry Water

Chopping wood.

Two years ago, I wrote a piece called Zen and the Art of Living History, in which I extolled the virtue of the everyday: Embrace the everyday, bring everyone back into history. Since then, I’ve thought more about how history and historic house museums can be a catalyst for change, how domestic sites can create “homes for history,” where we can have the difficult conversations that must be had to make the change I think we need as a nation, and as humans. These changes are happening, slowly, in museums and at historic sites, but even at the personal level, there’s meaning and change to be had through the business of “doing history.”

I suspect that among the reasons people really enjoy immersive, civilian (non-musket) events is because the work brings them into the rhythms of the natural world in a way that industrial life precludes or even prohibits. Consciously or not, interpreting the domestic life of the past forces us into mindfulness, into being as much as or more than doing. That’s the point of “chop wood, carry water:” to live deliberately. To cook without a clock, with only the color of the coals and the smell of the food to guide you; to notice the changing light because, as it fades, you must act to create light; to find the flaws and shifts in a floor as you scrub it, because there’s no machine between you, just your hands and a brush or a mop: all these tasks force you to be in the moment, noticing your environment, noticing yourself. You. A corporeal presence in a material world. How does that feel, moment to moment? Physically, emotionally: the challenge of living in the past is to live an unmediated life.

To go back to basics the way we do with civilian or domestic-site based living history brings us back to our base: we face our physical needs and the challenge of meeting them. We face emotional tests that help us imagine how people in the past endured– I often wonder how everyday people coped with “melancholia,” grief, and disappointment– and help us endure. It brings us home to ourselves, to our individual histories and our shared histories, and that’s what really matters. The connection to the everyday that we experience in a place in time puts us in a continuum with the people of the past, and gives us a place to be, a thing to do, a meaning. And that is what every one of us needs.

The Dirt on Ti

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by in Events, History, Living History, Museums, Reenacting, Research

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On the road in: dirt.

Seen on the way in to Fort Ti: dirt. (Kitty Calash photo)

The dirt on Fort Ti came home on my shoes. And my petticoats. And my gown. And possibly my face, which could explain the reactions I got when I stopped for gas on the Pike Saturday evening.

It’s incredible how how dirty, dusty, and straw-filled a room can get– and that’s just the officer’s room. For all I know, a horse had been sleeping in the back corner of the barracks room we cleaned– who else would leave so much straw?

Regular readers know I have a thing about portraying women’s work in the past, as well as historical cleaning methods and what I like to call “experimental archaeology” and other people call “that crazy hobby- thing- where you get cold and dirty.” We started with mop making, of course, and when I loaded the car on Friday morning, I was pretty well pleased with my swag.

So, what happened? How did it go? What did we do? Our Girl History provides a descriptive photo essay overview of the day. My experiences were more limited, as befits someone of my status: officer’s servant.

Every good experience begins with a meal. Friday night supper included bread, cheese, pork loin and apple, imported from Rhode Island. Yes, I also helped myself to bacon, to ensure none was wasted. Bedtime for officers’ servants comes early: I’m not a stranger to rope beds, but found this straw tick far more comfortable than a previous arrangement elsewhere. 

After formation, to tasks. I was ably assisted by Miss Sam, who was a better height for the brooms than I. The brooms are speculative on the one hand, and later on the other. The corn broom was markedly more effective than the broom straw, which disintegrated with use, though not for lack of care in making. We were up against some serious accumulation.

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Housekeeping and servants manuals from the period, like Hannah Glasse, tell you the cleaning must be done every day. It’s certainly something I heard within my own lifetime, though an ideal I continually struggle to achieve despite the advances of Mr Kenmore. The general rule is to begin at the top and work your way down: gravity is, at last, your friend. I use brushes– a large, soft round paint brush and a stiffer circular whisk– to remove dust and dirt from upper surfaces, and cobwebs from corners, and other wall-borne detritus. Gentlefolk: your cleaning ladies know much about you in any century.

After sweeping (yes, into the fireplace or out the door, it’s that simple), scrubbing. I scrubbed the baseboards first with vinegar and water (the vinegar infused with lavender for several years). Filth, my friends. Then we mopped. Again, filth.

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I would have preferred to do another dust collection on the floor– the water did pool a bit on the dry dust that remained, but swabbing seemed to work and I believe we left the floor cleaner than it had been. The three mops we tested (wool, cotton, and linen strips) each had benefits and deficits.

The cotton and wool caught on the rough floor boards, but did a good job spreading water around the floor and lifting dirt. The linen strips were better at not catching and at scrubbing.

No matter what, the water got filthy and took on the look and nearly the consistency of the chocolate we drank that day. Remember the iron museum rule: don’t lick it! That rule applies everywhere.

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Everyone and everything got cleaned Saturday. Miss V broached the laundry with vigor, but discovered that possibly untoward things had been done in her laundry tub. Things that might involve shoes, and blacking. Marks were left on shifts and shirts, so even the wash tub got a scrub this garrison weekend.

Some of the best comments came after the fact: I’ve never heard cleaning called “one of the coolest things” seen all day, but when someone says it helps them see a space in an entirely new way, I’m incredibly happy. There’s so much about the everyday use– and maintenance– of space and objects and each other that we take for granted in our own lives. Surely the people of the past who had servants took all that work for granted.

But for me, enamored as I am of details and of the quotidian, transforming a space through the everyday work of women is a job with doing. Thanks to Fort Ti’s staff for giving me the chance to step back in time and enjoy (really, I mean it) a day of hard work bringing the mundane back to life.

Unless otherwise noted, all photos by Eliza West, courtesy of  Fort Ticonderoga.

Experiencing Eastfield Village

20 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in 1830s, Events, Living History, Reenacting

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The Young Mr on site.

The Young Mr on site.

Mr Hiwell, the Young Mr and I ventured out to Nassau, New York this weekend to be part of Founders Day Celebration at Eastfield Village. The gents were part of the 1833 militia muster, while I traveled out intending to interpret tailoring with Mr JS, and to provide meals for the militia.

It’s an interesting assemblage of buildings, and we were pretty curious about what the site and the experience would be like. While OSV and Genesee are also assembled villages, they’re museums, with different missions and guidelines; they’re also larger, with electricity and flush toilets for visitors and volunteers alike. That means they’re lovely, but not nearly as immersive as the pitch-dark privy experience.

The back of the Benjamin Culver house, or, our dining room for dinner.

The back of the Benjamin Culver house, or, our dining room for dinner.

Wear all the patterns possible, please.

Wear all the patterns possible, please.

There was a lot to consider at Eastfield, but I’m tired from driving back and will stick to the simple things for now.

I was incredibly fortunate to have a bed—indeed, the entire 1787 Benjamin Culver house—to myself for sleeping. Friday night, after changing into period clothes, we went up to the Yellow Tavern to eat our supper (pasties brought from home, with hard cider for Mr JS and myself). The candle lit taproom was cozy, and I understand from Mr JS that the sleeping quarters upstairs were even cozier.

We cooked our meals in the Yellow Tavern kitchen, and ate sometimes in the taproom, and sometimes standing in the kitchen, except for dinner, which was served picnic style on the grass behind the Culver House. (Saturday supper was provided by Eastfield Village and prepared by Neil DiMarino with able help; that deserves a post all its own.)

Cozy is as cozy does.

Cozy is as cozy does.

Much of time was spent on women’s work, interpreting daily tasks to a stream of visitors travelling through the house from front door to back, and sometimes upstream. The scullery—for want of a better word—had a soapstone sink which drained through the wall, which made dish washing pretty plush, and provided entertainment for all who cared to witness it. No chickens were present, but from washing dishes at Coggeshall Farm, chickens would have enjoyed the ground beneath that window drain.

The view from the scullery: not bad, really.

The view from the scullery: not bad, really.

There are always curious questions, from “Is this a house?” in a tone of wonderment, to “Where did you get the water?”

Gentle reader: these stumped me, briefly, until I was able to gather my wits enough to reply, “Yes, it’s a house, built in 1787,” and to assure the visitor that people had, in fact, managed to live in it. The water question was somewhat more perplexing.

I started with, “Well, I got this from the hose, but they would have had a well,” when the visitor stopped me. “No, I mean, how did you get it hot?”

The kettle had been over the fire in what would be the kitchen room where Mr JS and I were set up to sew, and the fire was still producing heat, albeit from coals. Then I realized she had not been among the clump of people watching me remove the kettle from the crane so that I could pour hot water into my basins. I pointed to the kettle, and said, “Over the fire.”

Fire hot.

Fire hot.

It’s hard: there’s so much we take from granted in our own daily 21st-century lives, let alone what we become accustomed to when we inhabit the past. Interpreting between the two worlds, things can be lost in translation.

I’m always curious about what I’ll learn when I travel to a different century, and I think what I learned, again, was that I find it hard to find a way to interpret women’s lives and work in the past that does not reinforce stereotypes of “life was hard” and “roles were constrained.” Enough! I tried explaining the greater freedom some women enjoyed in the early Federal era, in contrast to the pre-Revolution and post- Great Awakening eras, but that wasn’t entirely successful, and would you believe that story from a woman washing dishes?

What I may really have learned is that I’ve done enough time in the kitchen and the scullery; I’d rather be the tavern keeper than the cook or scullery maid. Women were in business, and while never on the scale of partnerships like Brown & Francis, women as merchants, tavern keepers, landlords, and, yes, tailoresses, are underrepresented. It’s easier to talk down the scale than it is to talk up the scale from the washbasin to the shop or tavern, so it’s time to leave the wash basins aside for a bit.

Done with dishes for now, thank you.

Done with dishes for now, thank you.