Georg Friedrich Kersting: Briefschreibende Dame im Biedermeier Interieur, 1817
If you’re curious about the process I go through developing characters for living history programs, or best practices for women of the Revolutionary War-era armies, among other topics, there are some tickets left, and you can register online here.
But before I can compile what I’ve found about food markets in 18th century Boston, I have to go back to writing for this weekend.
Those Providence servants don’t research and describe themselves, and the housekeeper is particularly unreliable.
Let me be clear: Fort Ti was amazing. It was everything I’d hoped for. Far away, made of stone, populated with people I like, with an event cleared of all the crap that makes me crazy.
The issues that enrage me are both societal and hobby-specific.
While boys were boys and women were women this past weekend, I found myself tired out by biologically deterministic behaviour. For the love of Christ, you can listen to a woman, not talk over her or interrupt her even if:
a) she is not your boss or mother
and/or
b) you do not want or expect to sleep with her.
Gentlemen: we are human beings as smart as- if not smarter– than you. If we are smarter, society has taught us to manage that for you, so you won’t feel <ahem> small. I know that what men fear most is humiliation (the bravest ones will admit it) and what women fear most is violence (it’s true).
But a woman’s interest in history, or even military history, should be as joyous to you as your male friend’s interest.
So why the shouty?
Why the taking over of the conversation?
Why the relegation of women to a separate bench?
Why am I pointing this out?
Well… because even some of the best progressive reenactors have trouble getting past uber-traditional gender roles.
I get it, really, I do. I am accustomed to being a woman in a (hyper manly) man’s world.
I studied sculpture in college in the Dark Ages and I know from male-dominated fields. I ran a foundry in grad school, and a bunch of mostly-male work study students. I’m an owner’s rep for construction projects, and work with a lot of different contractors and construction workers.
But that doesn’t mean I have to like it or tolerate it, as any of my history, art, or construction associates will tell you. My younger counterparts have even less tolerance than I do, so I advise you to listen up, think about gender roles, gun shows, assault/predation and interpretation or consider Lysistrata the future you have earned.
It’s really simple.
You like living history? We like living history. Francis Wheatley, 1747-1801, British, Soldier with Country Women Selling Ribbons, near a Military Camp, 1788, Oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Let’s play together better to more accurately represent the past without replicating crappy gender relations. If you start listening and stop interrupting, we’ll stop laughing at you.
Fort Ti was described to me as “Disney World for Re-enactors,” but my vote is for Living History’s Moonrise Kingdom.
Idyllic, ain’t it?
I almost didn’t go when my Saturday night roomshare cancelled on Monday and then I developed an ear ache on Wednesday, but on Thursday, Low Spark , Mlle Modiste and I arranged a carpool, so on Friday morning, a Carload of Rhode Islanders (a thing to behold and to be wary of) set off for points north.
Our initial plan was to to sleep in the soldiers’ huts, but they proved extremely crowded and smokey, so when Mlle Modiste and I were offered a bunk in the barracks, we took it… unfortunately, only one of the blankets I’d brought for us did not make it back up to the fort or into the car heading home.
Mlle Modiste at the huts
Before supper, we stuffed bed ticks, started a fire, startled a bat (I was not the source of the shriek that brought officers, women, and soldiers running), and stuffed straw in the hole we thought it flew into (thank goodness I’m tall, I guess).
Smoke didn’t just get in your eyes…
The tavern moved up to the would-be armory at the barracks, though I’m certain multiple political deals and presidential candidacies could have been plotted and bought down at the smoke-filled huts. Instead, it was reenactor politics as usual: parallel experiences for men and women (not ladies, thank you, and if I hear you use “distaff” about me, expect to find one has become part of your anatomy). Just because I’m used to it doesn’t mean I don’t notice it, understand it, and still dislike it.
We’d expected to attend to “sick” soldiers in the hospital, but Saturday was such a lovely day that we spent most of it outdoors, starting and tending a fire to boil laundry and make dinner for the women’s mess. This pleased me mightily, even as I may have distracted troops despite my advanced age as I crouched at the fire being a human bellows. You try getting low in stays and see how you do: immodesty, thy name is fashion.
While I kept the fire going, much credit should go to Rory, a bad-ass woman in men’s clothing who split wood a-plenty for us. Rory made me want badly to make myself a suit and wield an axe. I find myself wanting to do the same work as the men (I have always been this way), and I was intrigued by the debate that was reported to me: should a woman do men’s work in women’s clothes, or in men’s clothes? In the end, they chose men’s clothes, and Rory wore them well. Reader: I was jealous. I was also covetous of an axe, having realized all the cutting and hewing tools are no longer domiciled with me.
Aunt Kitty’s comin’ for you, boys.
Saturday really revolved around three things for me: food, free agency, and feminism:
I ate some interesting things, including a smoked chocolate cake (left overnight in a hut, I can describe its flavor best as sucking diesel exhaust through a chocolate cupcake).
Now that I’m a free agent attending events sans unit, I have much more fun.
I am determined and dedicated to effecting well-researched roles for women in living history events of all kinds.
Here’s a bitter blog post instead of the angry one someone expected after the Turkey Shoot. It started elsewhere with a discussion of this print: there’s more going on in this, and in many genre images of oyster girls and oyster sellers, than you notice at first glance. (First glance is that fab-u-lous bonnet.) There are clues, though, that she is selling more than just oysters. It’s a code, remember? The gaze is one clue, though it reminds me of a cholera victim’s languor.
Yes: this image suggests she is also selling herself.
It’s something I’ve thought about doing as part of my street vendor/Bridget impression. Transgressive, dangerous: true. As a milliner, I’ve had a money bag shaken in my face, coins rattling suggestively, a sailor eager to spend his pay. Milliners and seamstresses both had reputations as women of exploitable, if not overtly easy, virtue. They’re a classic trope in 19th century literature, though I suspect the real reason for the suggestion of looseness was economic independence. But women certainly were selling themselves in the past, so why not portray that reality with carefully selected, trusted role players?
For one thing, it’s dangerous. You’d have to script it, and interact only with really trustworthy people. It’s not family friendly, though despite the strenuous efforts of some sites, actual history isn’t family friendly either. (I’m looking at you, CW .)
I ponder this role, and women’s lack of power historical, as I ponder Fort Ti and nurses’ reputations, carefully maintained in Army hospitals in later wars. (Not to fear, I will behave, honest.) And I also ponder it as I continue to struggle to understand the Gun Show, the misogyny in the hobby, and the general misogyny of American culture. Like many others, I’ve read this blog post,, and some of the more annoying comments. Yes, I, too, de-escalate now and have in the past. Some of the changes I’ve made in my life revolve back to this concept, and have to do with authenticity and stepping back from de-escalation, subsumation, and self-repression. So why would I not continue that process into my historical work and play?
As I wonder how to spin a feminist interpretation of women’s marginal roles and drudgery in the past, it occurs to me that forcing the women’s economic disparity and lack of agency to the foreground might provide an answer. Selling myself along with oysters, apples, or cherries might finally make the points I want to not just about women’s lives historically, but about women’s roles today.
(I’ve already made the jokes about hands-on demonstrations, so y’all can keep ‘em yourselves, okay?)
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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