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
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 .
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.
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.
Fourteen year old boys don’t like to get up early, but we managed to rouse the beast on Saturday, and get him dressed, with only minor hostilities. He’s wearing all new clothes, except for the shirt, which I hope will not have to be replaced before the end of the summer. (I have now guaranteed that his arms will grow several inches in the next week.)
Mr S wore his new waistcoat but it’s hard to see under his jacket. He also got his new hat from Mr B, so he could upgrade from his knitted cap.
New hat, new waistcoat
There are more photos here, including a fabulous stuffed leg of lamb. For mid-day Saturday, we ate a meat pie (pork and apples), sugar cakes, coriander biscuits, bread and molasses bread, all brought from home, along with hat from the farm boiled with parsnips, potatoes, carrots and onions and a carrot pudding. We also made a potato-apple-onion pie for the evening meal, though Mr S, the Young Mr and I did not stay. There is a limit to what the child will tolerate.
Sunday, we arrived in time for Mr S to make more fence pegs, while I joined the kitchen to make soup with ham, squash, parsnips, and onions, which we ate with bread and cheese, and the last of the sugar cakes, for lunch. All the while, a leg of lamb was cooking, masterfully prepared by Mrs B, and stuffed with cubed bread, onion, ham, sage and onion. To go with it, we made a rice pudding with apples, wilted greens, salad, squash pudding, and stewed apples. The sauce for the lamb was particularly fine, with drippings, minced onions, what we think was whiskey, butter and cream. I learn so much cooking with Mrs B!
waiting, wanting, hoping
The cats wanted, but were disappointed. They were calmer on Sunday, though extremely attentive kitchen assistants both days. Pity they don’t do dishes. There were plenty to wash. 1799 was definitely greasy. Even the striped cat feels a little greasy, but that could be because he’s handy to wipe your hands on.
Now it’s on to sewing for something else, though whether that will be wool trousers or clothes for Washington’s Birthday, I don’t really know.
Cutting out makes me think of freeing mastodons from glaciers
If this is Saturday, I must be sewing trousers. I’ve managed overalls in a day from cutting out to made up, lacking only buttons and buttonholes, so I have hope for the trousers. It is true I am starting a new pattern, and so I am considering adapting the pattern I already use for breeches and overalls…. except that the style is 20 years out of date for where these are going. At least the first pair is for the kid, for whom oddly-fitted clothes are the norm now because of his size and personality, and would have been then, since he’s not the son of gentry.
He’s got shoes, though, and they fit! His feet stopped at size 12 in fall 2011, and the 12.5 Fugawee straight-lasted Ligonier shoes fit him over his winter socks. His feet are just too big not to put into better shoes–no one can help noticing them, and there are no gaiters to hide them under.
We’ll see how leather-soled shoes go. Expect slipping and falling.
Dining/sewing/library room with “assistant”
My plan is to knock out the trousers today to the point of finishing work, and then finish the waistcoat tomorrow (it lacks only buttons and buttonholes). Having spent Tuesday on costume research scrutinizing seams, and blinking at buttonholes from 1788-1800, I feel better (and less self-conscious) about my sewing skills. They’re not as awful as I think they are, and the worst part of the tan waistcoat was the placement of the buttonholes, not their actual execution. Of course, the placement is the part I can’t fix…
On another note, on Tuesday I also looked at a number of ways to do pockets in breeches and jackets. Some were chamois lined, and then I wondered, how do we know what kind of leather the pockets are lined in? Aren’t they more likely to be deerskin than actual chamois? It doesn’t take long before you’re down the rabbit hole of historical wonderings.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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