• Home
  • Shop
  • 2019 Projects: Goals
  • Completed Costumes/Impressions

Kitty Calash

~ Confessions of a Known Bonnet-Wearer

Kitty Calash

Tag Archives: history

Reading Double

07 Saturday Oct 2017

Posted by kittycalash in Book Review, History, Research

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

18th century, art history, common people, history, interpretation

The mop trundler. Chambars after Penny. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: John Johnson Collection

Photo by J. D. Kay, 2013

I love this image, and the original on which it is based. I love it so much that we’ve recreated it (in a later time period) whilst fooling about during a photoshoot.

But what does it really show? The image in the print depicts a passage in Jonathan Swift’s poem, A Description of a City Shower,

Such is that sprinkling which some careless quean
Flirts on you from her mop, but not so clean:
You fly, invoke the gods; then turning, stop
To rail; she singing, still whirls on her mop.

Straightforward, right?

Well, not so fast. Thanks to the wonders of ILL, I’ve been reading The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England, by Cindy McCreery, and looking at prints anew. Her chapters on prostitutes and old maids are particularly interesting, and confirm some of what I had been thinking about when we use prints as documentation.

Here, in the Macaroni Provider, we have what is “Probably a portrait of some (alleged) notorious procurer; perhaps Thomas Bradshaw whose portrait he somewhat resembles.” We have a pimp, folks.

The Macaroni Provider / Macaronies, Characters, Caricatures & designed by the greatest personages, artists &c graved & published by MDarly, 39 Strand. 1772 (Vol.3). British Museum

So, with this information in hand, let’s look again at The City Shower. We have a maid– one of the few classes of women found in city streets unaccompanied, and a class of women often associated with prostitution (along with street vendors and market sellers). The fashionably dressed man recoils from the spray from her mop– is he rejected the literal filth, or the implied filth of a “maid of all work,” who may have a venereal disease? Is it reasonable to wonder if Swift is using double entendres in the lines Such is that sprinkling which some careless quean
Flirts on you from her mop, but not so clean, 
so that the mop is the woman’s pubic hair, and not so clean suggests she is diseased?

I don’t know, and absent intensive research or a time machine, I may never know. But once again I wonder how we use and understand these images, and think that they pose more questions than answers. McCreery’s book (based on her dissertation) helps get at some of these issues, and is well worth a read. (I found the Amazon review hilarious, myself, once I had the book in hand. No, it’s not a compendium of prints; it’s an analysis.)

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Email
  • Twitter

Like this:

Like Loading...

Ceci n’est pas une assiette

04 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by kittycalash in Collecting, material culture, personal

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

collecting, history, material culture, personal, Providence, Rhode Island, transferware, World War II

Historic American Buildings Survey, George F.A. Palmer, Photographer, 1937 DETAIL OF PARLOR FIREPLACE. – Jeremiah Dexter House, 957 North Main Street, Providence, Providence County, RI

Last weekend, Drunk Tailor and I delivered the Giant to his new life as a college student back in New England, and paid a call on of my oldest friends, a 96-year-old former OSS agent and descendent of the Dexter family. My eldest friend had something she wanted to give me: a souvenir of the Dexter House, in recognition of the hours I’d spent working with her identifying and organizing several hundred years of family papers.

In the photo at left, the coffee pot on the mantle is now in a museum collection, as are the miniatures, the bellows, and the pipe box (which is now on display in a historic house museum). What my eldest friend gave me is not in the image of the house, but resembles the plate to the left of the fireplace: a Staffordshire transferware “Village Church” pattern plate with a wild rose border, ca 1825.

Transferware soup plate ca. 1825. Unknown maker, Staffordshire, England.

I’m a fan of blue and white china, and while I prefer earlier Canton ware, this plate is more special to me than the ones I’ve bought at auction or in New Bedford antique shops: because of course it’s not a plate, it’s memory, or an emotion, made solid.

Drunk Tailor and I spent an early Sunday afternoon on my friend’s porch listening to stories about her children, in particular about her daughter Mary, now an artist living in Mexico. Is it a comfort or an annoyance to learn that schools have been misjudging children since schools were invented, trying hard to fit round pegs into square holes? Mary, always more interested in drawing than in lectures, once left a classroom when the teacher said, “If anyone doesn’t want to hear this lesson, then they can leave now.” Out Mary went, three other girls following her out to play on a beautiful spring afternoon.

That story, and many others, aren’t apparent in the plate with its crazed face and discoloration. Only my memories (and anything I write down and keep with the plate) make the associations. But it is always the stories about the objects that make them important (even big-ticket dec arts items, like Plunkett Fleason easy chairs.)

Last night, before Drunk Tailor and I watched The Maltese Falcon, we watched Adam Savage’s TED talk on his obsession with objects. The TED talk is worth a watch for anyone interested in material culture and objects. Our human fascination with things goes beyond the shiny surface of new things (tabernacle mirrors or iPhones) as they become repositories of memory, symbols of feelings or moments.

War correspondents and personnel of the Office of Strategic Services, leaving from the Railhead, Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, enroute overseas. NARA. National Archives Identifier: 542171 Local Identifier: 336-H-17(E8671)
Creator: War Department. Army Service Forces. Office of the Chief of Transportation. 3/12/1943-6/11/1946

This: In my desk drawer, I have a buckeye Drunk Tailor picked up and handed to me in a garden in New Jersey. It’s useless: inedible, too light to be a paperweight, but it reminds me of that November afternoon, the soft green of the garden, and how shy I felt. Anyone cleaning out my desk would toss that bit of organic matter, even as I keep it as a talisman of one of our first dates: the places, the smells, and the feelings.

And this, too: My friend is 96. I may never see her again, though when I left her, she was healthy and cheerful, making plans for the fall with her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren coming to visit. Given my reticence and her old-fashioned New England reserve, I may never be able to tell her how much she means to me (I try), or how interesting I think she is. (“I’m not interesting, dear, I just worked hard,” is what she says when I try to convince her to donate her personal papers to an archive.) But I have a plate that was in a house that had a great deal of meaning to her, and my best guess is that her gift of that plate to me means she knows how much I like and admire her. It reminds me of her, and reminds me of how little time there is before all that’s left is the plate and my memories.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Email
  • Twitter

Like this:

Like Loading...

I came, I saw, I sighed

18 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by kittycalash in History, Museums

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

authenticity, historic house museums, history, interpretation, museum practice

img_8909

Gunston Hall has been on my list of must-visit places for some time, and now I can cross it off my list. I was impressed by their Room Use Study and remain so. They’ve also done some decent work on slavery, and it shows on their website. So my hopes were high. You know where this is going, right? Yup.

The room in which Martha Washington and Mrs Mason may have had a "chit-chat" about the two Georges.

The room in which Martha Washington and Mrs Mason may have had a “chit-chat” about the two Georges.

Pretty sure the guided tour is dead. Also pretty sure most museums need to look long and hard at the actual execution of their mission. Granted, this was another one of those January R&R visits, when it is entirely likely that the multiple “Out of Order” signs were a mere mid-winter fluke. But day-um, I was underwhelmed.

Granted, this house is older than “mine.” And smaller. And I didn’t ask any questions on the tour because I fear my tone will be far too telling. But there was a small, excited-in-a-good-way child on the tour, and several other adults. When asked by the docent what we were interested in, the group settled on “life.”

WHO touched that railing?

WHO touched that railing? THAT’S why I should care?

We ended up with the incantation of “many famous people have sat in this room.” “Many famous people have touched this stair rail.” I might have heard an audible intake of breath when we were told something was original; my right eyebrow shot up in an expression well known to my friends.

The house is lovely, of course, Georgian balance and all that, and nicely decorated, whether the chinoiserie paper in the dining chamber or the Virginia-Chesapeake Neat and Plain office. But why the default emphasis is on famous people touched this, stepped here, slept here, I do not know. My docents do it, too, sometimes. But what troubles me more is what I came away without: A sense of George Mason and his family.

Red damask on the walls, because "they could have had it." Infelicitous phrasing.

Red damask on the walls, because “they could have had it.” Infelicitous phrasing.

Most troubling to me, being Of a Certain Age, was the statement that Mason’s second marriage, to Sarah Brent, was “for friendship and companionship.”

Really?

George and Sarah sign a marriage agreement several days before they are wed, protecting in a limited way Sarah’s individual property. Under the terms of this contract, Sarah gives ownership of her slaves to her husband for the length of her marriage, but regains possession of them should her husband die and there be no offspring between them. Under these same conditions, Sarah is promised as dower 400 acres of her husband’s land at Dogues Neck.

Over the years, it has been pointed out that the marriage agreement between Sarah and George indicates that their relationship was more business-like and convenient, rather than loving. However, the marriage compact also can be seen as a fair solution between two practical people who want to safeguard their property for future generations — Mason for his children and Sarah for the sons and daughters of her sister Jean in Dumfries. In Sarah’s will of 1794, she indeed does pass on to these children and one of their offspring the slaves she regains upon the death of her husband.

Really?

That looks to me like a sensible arrangement between two mature adults. The way that a 50-year-old approaches marriage and relationships in any century will be different. Even in the 18th century, a woman of 50 has an established identity, knowledge of the world, and experience in running a household, if not a business.

Why yes, I may well have some baggage, why do you ask?

Why yes, I do have some baggage, why do you ask?

To suggest that sensibility excludes or precludes sex is to miss the point of Jane Austen completely, and is ageist in the absence of evidence. In all likelihood, Sarah is peri-menopausal at least and menopausal at most (it varies widely; some 50-year-old women are still fertile, shocking though that may seem). That doesn’t mean she’s asexual, and while George Mason may well have (probably did) take sexual advantage of the women he owned, that doesn’t mean he’s not interested in, and expecting, a sexual relationship with his second wife.

What all of this suggests to me is a reluctance in museums to talk about sex, unless there are children from a marriage, in which case one can just assume the couple were busy in bed and not actually address it…all in all, a weird thing, and one that turns up in my own museum from time to time.

This is not to suggest that I didn’t enjoy the tour, the house, or the landscape. But I felt dissatisfied, as if the real meat of the place was not to be found on the tour. Exploring the upstairs on our own was much more fun– I would have liked some object labels up there, and downstairs, too– and had more of an air of exploration and discovery.

And that’s what the guided tour kills: discovering for yourself. It doesn’t have to be a full-blown you-paid-for-it Museum Hack bonding experience. It doesn’t need to be a handout with “How many squirrels can you find?”

img_8950

Exploring, reading labels, listening, smelling, touching: using our senses to learn about a place, a space, an object, a person, will be engaging enough.

With so much good, deep, content on the website, I know Gunston Hall has the material a great tour and historic house museum is made of. I know, from reading the labels about slavery at the site and reading the text about slavery on the web, that they know more, do more, and understand more about the enslaved people than their permanent exhibitions indicate.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Email
  • Twitter

Like this:

Like Loading...

Bang Bang Pew

16 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by kittycalash in History, Museums, Philosophy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

forts, history, interpretation, military history, war of 1812

img_8896Like an energetic Golden Retriever, I need to be walked daily, almost without regard to weather, and I have a fondness for water that I fear makes me a questionable house guest-cum-nurse. Fortunately for me, Drunk Tailor has a granular knowledge of his surroundings that allows him to recalibrate his understanding of the places he likes to suit my needs: hence a Sunday trip to Fort Washington, Maryland. Plenty of room to wander, a wide* meandering river, defensive weapons installations.

It’s a large site and we only explored the main fort structure, the shore by the lighthouse, and the visitors’ center (I’ve seen plenty of Endicott batteries before, both on the Potomac and on Narragansett Bay). It started out well enough: the curious tripping stick figure sign warned us of the wooden bridge into the fort, and reminded me of a friend with a fondness for fonts and curious graphic design.

img_8890Guardhouse, batteries, masonry walls, stables, earthworks, former ditches, the remains of powder houses: all good stuff. The signs were what one comes to expect from the NPS: UV-damaged labels, slightly behind the times graphically, indicative of the slow pace and underfunding of the preservation of our national heritage.

img_8894

Drunk Tailor’s memories of Fort Washington include a first-person living history event set on the (literal) eve of the Civil War, with men portraying member of a Texas-based unit wondering how they would ever get home, and responding to a woman’s inquiries about General Lee and Grant with the suggestion that reading Harper’s would bring her up to date with current events. Now, we are in January and my expectations are low in the cultural heritage off-season: this is the time for maintenance, upgrades, rest and refurbishment.

img_8903

All the pew. Plus some spinning.

What I did not expect– though I should have– was the leftover daily event roster from some time in 2016.

Boom! Goes the cannon, et cetera. Because Boom! is easy. Add in a side of spinning and we are good to go, right? We got something for the ladies. (You know where this is going, right?)

The best thing I can say for Fort Washington is that I was spared endless racks of brown sticks displayed with only the barest of identifying labels and no interpretation**. But here we are at a site with over 200 years of history and just the vaguest hints in the visitor center of decades of use and change over time. And I like military history. I like weapons. But the more I visit the more I marvel at the way we underestimate our visitors’ capacity for understanding and interest in the past.

img_8889

Bigger Booms

As we drove away from Fort Washington, I began to think that once again, we are asking the wrong questions. Instead of questions that can be answered, “Guns Got Bigger,” why not ask some of the following:

  • What was daily life like for the men stationed here?
  • What material differences did officers and enlisted men experience?
  • Could enlisted men get married? Where were their wives?
  • How much did soldiers get paid?
  • What was the typical term of enlistment? Did that change over time?
  • Where were the stables? What were the horses used for?
  • How was the fort supplied? Where were the kitchens?
  • Where were the mess halls? What was a typical diet?
  • How did rations differ for men and officers?
  • Did any of the British officers or enlisted men remember the area around Washington, D.C. from their service in the Revolutionary War? To what degree might that have influenced the way the War of 1812 was fought?
  • What about that court martial, Captain Dyson? How was it run? What testimony did Dyson give?

Why did I have to go to the Fort Washington website to learn about the Adjutant General’s school, and the WAAC detachment? And why is it a PDF instead of a webpage?

 

img_8899
img_8900

Perhaps the most salient question to ask, on the Monday of inauguration week, is why do we care so little for our shared past that we accept the level of funding and staffing that gives us this level of interpretation? Don’t we, as a people, and our history, matter more than this?

 

*For the East Coast. The Potomac ain’t no Mississippi.

** I’m looking at you, West Point Museum.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Email
  • Twitter

Like this:

Like Loading...

Sideways Into Immersion

04 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by kittycalash in History, Museums

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

authenticity, history, interpretation, Museums


I was recently asked where I found inspiration for my work, and the obvious answer was in my travels, from the arrangement of bannister-back chairs on the wall at the Yale University Art Gallery to men shaving with straight razors on the parade ground at Fort Ticonderoga. There’s a kind of middle-ground answer as well: the National Museum of the Marine Corps.


Drunk Tailor took me there almost a year ago, and since What Cheer Day prompted me to think about emotional goals, I’ve wanted to go back. Anna asked about uncomfortable emotions, and while Sharon is absolutely right about the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum being necessary, it was the NMMC’s 20th century displays that came to mind, particularly Chosin and Khe Sanh– Chosin all the more so after watching the American Experience program on the battle of Chosin.


A year ago, the Chosin Reservoir gallery experience resonated with me because it was so well done. Reproductions of David Douglas Duncan photos (he sticks with me because, like Omar Bradley, he came from Missouri) hang on the wall beside two glass doors. To the right, a film runs on a loop, framed by cast resin icicles. Open the doors, and even Drunk Tailor and I are dwarfed by the landscape looming out of the dark. Figures of Marines crouch above us, sheltering behind a snowbank…of dead, frozen Marines. Artillery rounds burst against the dark sky, and I wrap my coat around me because, more than fearful or shocked by the noise and lights, I’m cold. Really cold.

There’s no possible way a gallery –even a Marine Corps Museum gallery– can replicate a fraction of the Chosin experience, but the gallery succeeds in shocking our senses through the simple use of temperature shift, and that is enough to take us out of the everyday. Physical discomfort prompts an emotional shift that allows us to better empathize with, and understand, the experience of the Marine at Chosin. Now, the NMMC and I may have very different takeaways from this gallery: while I absolutely respect and admire the Marine corps (c’mon, I sew OD gowns while binge-watching The Pacific), my instinctive response is No More Wars. That’s a complicated response to have in a military museum, and one I feel more strongly at the NMMC than I have at the West Point Museum.

I attribute these different responses to the greater sophistication of the NMMC compared to the WPM, which presents very standard uniform/flag/weapon/label displays. The NMMC begins that way (the sole “motion” in the earliest galleries is stylized seagulls against a blue sky), and while I love roundabouts and shakos nearly as much as Drunk Tailor, these galleries do not connect us to the history as immediately — as emotionally– as Chosin and Khe Sahn.


Khe Sahn was slightly disappointing this visit compared to last year. To be sure, the helicopter entrance continues to impress me, but I recall the gallery having higher heat and more rats, as well as louder volume. The temperature contrast was particularly notable against Chosin, and I remember taking my coat off in the Khe Sahn gallery last year. Despite those differences, a toddler entering Khe Sahn promptly turned around to leave. The radio noise was clearer this year, and I suspect that the gallery continues to be fine-tuned, as staff attempt to balance the noise of the siege against the noise of the entrance. This is a place where a faint odor of hydraulic fluid lingers in the helicopter, and probably prompted the emotional response Drunk Tailor observed visiting with veterans.


The bottom line, though, is that mindful use of sensory input in any museum can increase visitors’ emotional connection to, and engagement in, the material presented. Visitors are smart: it won’t take much for them to notice a smell, temperature or sound, so even the most cautious museums can sidle into more sensory engagement.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Email
  • Twitter

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Kitty Calash FB

Kitty Calash FB

Kitty Calash on IGram

Black silk satin may be expensive, but my goodness it’s lovely! I’ve wanted to make one of these 1770s-style bonnets in satin for a while, and I’m pleased with the results. On Etsy now! #historicalcostume #historicalfashion #millinery #bonnet #milliner #silksatin #1770s #etsyseller #livinghistory

The Etsy Shop!

Kitty Calash Swag on Teespring

Archives

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 1,845 other followers

Blogroll

  • A Most Beguiling Accomplishment
  • Afroculinaria: Michael Twitty
  • British Tars
  • Clothing the Carolinas
  • Drunk Tailor
  • History Research Shenanigans
  • Kleidung um 1800
  • New Vintage Lady
  • Not Your Momma's History
  • Our Girl History
  • Picking for Pleasure
  • Places in Time
  • Ran Away From the Subscriber
  • Slave Rebellion Reenactment
  • The Hidden Wardrobe
  • The Quintessential Clothes Pen
  • Worn Through

Etsy Shop

  • Kitty Calash on Etsy

Resources

  • Casey Fashion Plate Collection, LAPL

Sutlers

  • Burnley & Trowbridge
  • Wm Booth, Draper
wordpress statistics

Creative Commons License
Kitty Calash blog by Kirsten Hammerstrom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A WordPress.com Website.

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
%d bloggers like this: