You know what’s wrong with most reenactments and living history events?
They’re not actual days. They’re fragments of many days jammed together like a fractured mosaic.
It’s tough and tiring to imagine and script and play out a whole day—all the simultaneous pieces—but if living history or reenacting events were run as A Day In Time, there would more likely be:
• Roles for More [kinds of] People
• Contextualization of Events
• Boring Bits like Paper Work
• No Time for Spinning
• Moar Drilling
• Rations & Messes, Actually
• Moar Drilling • Courts Martial
• Small Acts of Drama Amid the Quotidian
Of course, y’all would have to work together…but imagine the power if an entire event ran the way a military camp should be, would have been, run. Orderly books provide plenty of ideas, entire days of stuff to do and get in trouble for.
Stop splitting, start lumping, and these events will, at last, become truly engaging on both sides of the rope line.
After a late afternoon meeting that left me raw from the way men speak over, interrupt, and dismiss women, I began to think again about a conversation I’d had with a friend at lunch about women’s roles at living history events, primarily military, but also militia, so let’s call them Gun Shows.
What do women do at the Gun Shows? They cook, for one thing, tied to camp fires. That’s at least a little better than the spinning that can happen, but it’s still not always right. I think a lot about how we’re not truly representing the ways that armies moved, slept, provisioned themselves, and how that affects the roles that women, children, and the (forgive me ) Invalid Corps might play. Yes, there are options: laundry, petty sutlering. There are women doing those things and doing them well, which is fantastic. When I think about how I might complement that, I end up thinking about women even naughtier than Bridget– and I think Bridget must have been very naughty indeed.
Even when you move away from military events, let us say to militia events, similar segregation occurs: women cook and wash dishes, men fire weapons. It just makes me tired, this notion of women forever being pendant to a gun, dependent on housework. It leaves me wondering what else I can do. Perhaps more Gaskell than Austen, here
That’s easier in a civilian context. Women ran boarding houses, had small shops, ran needlework and boarding schools, worked as seamstresses, soap makers, tailoresses, milliners, mantua makers, painters and silhouette cutters. None of those things belong in a camp, and I begin to think that unless I can figure out a feminist interpretation of women’s lives of drudgery, I will have to give up the Gun Shows completely. And yes, for those of you who know me, that will be a natural transition, won’t it?
One of the most common questions you get when you’re wearing historical clothing is the undying, “Aren’t you hot in those clothes?”
A heavily perspiring visitor wearing practically nothing usually asks this question, and the standard reply is a variation of “Aren’t you hot? In really warm weather, everyone is hot. But natural fibre clothing wicks the moisture from the skin and helps to keep you cool.” My internal response (vocalized only once) is, “Why yes, I am—and thank you for noticing. I work hard for this look.”
The “aren’t you hot” question is often followed by, “Wow, and they didn’t bathe, so everyone really smelled.” You try not to think of that Monty Python sketch about Britain’s deadliest joke program in WWII and move the conversation on to weekly laundering of body linen, multiple shifts, shirts, and under-drawers, and the general hygienic practices of the past.
What struck me after a sticky weekend is how much I noticed the smell of modern people.
two tailors and a tailoress
My traveling companions and I bathed on Friday morning, drove for 7+ hours in muggy weather, slept in our clothes, wore wool, cotton and linen in rain and thick humidity, sweated in the tailor’s shop, slept in our clothes again, and spent another warm, close, day in muggy weather, including grave digging and pall bearing. But as feral as my shift may have been on Sunday night, I never smelled us.
Mr H reported that his wool trousers were really stinky in the rain, and I think his white Spencer was well-seasoned even before this weekend, but I didn’t notice anything. Mr S’s soaking greatcoat was whiffy only at extremely close range.
What I did smell were modern perfumes, deodorants, and hair products. Those linger around their wearers and trail behind them, sometimes eye-watering in their intensity. I encountered lingering perfume in a bathroom at the museum, and we were overwhelmed by cologne at diner Monday morning: wow, people must really smell now, of petrochemicals.
more wool
This is not to say that homeless people and sulky teenagers don’t smell of unwashed bodies and clothes, but people in the past may not have smelled quite as badly as we think. They washed, if not bathed (bathing being full immersion washing) and by changing body linen and airing their clothes, they kept reasonably clean.
There was plenty to whiff in the past: wastes of all kinds, stagnant bodies of water used as dumps, rotting foods and corpses. But I’m not convinced that we haven’t simply exchanged one set of smells for another of different origin and intensity.
Ladd Observatory, 1898, back of the transit room. Brown University image
On Tuesday, after a long hiatus, the local observatory was, at last, able to open to the public. Between the Snow on Monday theme of this winter, and the tendency to clouds and rain in what New England calls Spring, Ladd had been closed, and sending plaintive and apologetic emails, for weeks.
We walked up shortly after the 8:00 PM opening to find long lines, and a crowd as large or larger than the Halloween open house nights, when the staff and students turned the Observatory into a haunted house, neighborhood naughties swiped too much candy, and the roof deck was open for star gazing. Being Tiny Town, the Young Mr’s middle school art teacher was in line ahead of us with her young son and wife. To his credit, he did acknowledge her.
The telescope used by Benjamin West to observe the Transit of Venus, 1769. Brown University image.
There’s a long history of astronomical observation here, with a street named Transit for the 1769 Transit of Venus, observed by Benjamin West and other local notables.
It is really is a “wow!” moment, cooler even than the packages that make it here from India and astonish me. All that distance, light. How truly awesome the view through a telescope must have been in the 18th century, when we, collectively, knew less about the world and universe. How awesome it is now, to be able to see a world so far away, and to wonder what it is like.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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