Victorian Secrets

by Sarah A. Chrisman

  “That’s none of your business.”

  I hurried her out of the store. This was my neighborhood; Mom lived in a different city on the other end of the county. She didn’t have to ever see these people again, but this was the closest grocery to my apartment.

  Outside, she started complaining. “You get so offended at everything!” She shook her head, making a hmph! noise. “Can’t I just talk to you about things? You used to talk to me!”

  Not about that—and especially not about that at broadcast levels in my neighborhood supermarket.

  “You just get so offended at everything!” she repeated.

  The battle on the home front clearly had a long way to go.

  An Impending Storm. Illustration in nineteenth-century magazine. Conflict between generations is nothing new.

  9

  Serving at Table

  “Imperial Pattern Carlsbad China” set: Montgomery Ward, 1895.

  Tilly, the woman whose luxurious chestnut tresses I’d admired at the Victorian Festival, reissued her invitation for us to wait at table for the senior tea she was organizing. It was the major fund-raiser of the year for a little activity center serving an elderly community, and she wrote to us of how appreciated our help would be if we could find the time to assist in it. She told us how much she had enjoyed meeting us and how eagerly she looked forward to seeing us again. As an added enticement, she told us of the vintage fashion show that was scheduled to accompany the tea.

  The senior center was in a different county from the one in which we lived, and the buses serving the area were infrequent. Nevertheless, after some discussion, we decided that this was a worthwhile opportunity to be involved with in the community (even if it wasn’t our particular community). Besides, the fashion show sounded like an event that would match our interests perfectly.

  “I’m actually really looking forward to it!” I told Gabriel as we waited at the bus stop next to a busy highway. I knew it was difficult to hear over the noisy traffic, but I still lowered my voice conspiratorially for my next comment. “I’m hoping they have some better stuff than the last one we went to.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Yeah, I hope so.”

  The last “historic” fashion show we had seen had been a bit heavy on plastic clothes and thrift-store finds for our tastes.

  “I just really prefer seeing the real thing—the actual antiques,” he said.

  “Me too,” I agreed. I rocked a bit on my heels. “Remind me again, why did Tilly want us to go to the senior center four days before the tea?” The event where we’d be volunteering was still half a week in the future.

  Gabriel shrugged, both palms skyward. “I don’t know.”

  “She said we’d be picking up our tablecloths,” I remembered from the email. “What do you suppose that’s all about?”

  Gabriel shook his head, palms up again, a nonverbal expression of the statement, I have no idea.

  “Maybe we’re putting them on the tables tonight?” he ventured dubiously.

  I frowned. “But we’re supposed to get there on Saturday two hours before the tea. That seems like enough time to put down a tablecloth . . .” I shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Well, whatever it is, we’ll be doing it there. It’s not like she’ll expect us to drag a tablecloth home, and then back there!”

  An hour-and-change bus ride later, we learned that this was exactly what we were expected to do. In the senior center’s back room, I looked down at the expansive yardage of lace draped over one of my arms, while I squinted at the closely printed list in my other hand. “We’re bringing two teapots?” I asked, thinking of the cramped bus ride.

  “Each!” asserted one of the veteran tea-servers.

  That means four, between Gabriel and me. Good g—

  “Can anyone take on another table? Some of the volunteers didn’t come tonight!”

  I froze and stood as silently as I could. I think I may have stopped breathing, so intent was I that I not show any motion that could in any way be construed as volunteering to take on another list of items to bring. My eyes darted over the list of things to which we had already been unwittingly committed. Two teapots, two sugar bowls, two creamers, eight glasses, eight forks, eight spoons, eight knives, one centerpiece . . . All of this times two, since Gabriel and I had each been saddled with a table. To serve at, fine, but no one said we’d be lugging all this from Seattle. We don’t even own four teapots, and as for sixteen glasses . . .

  “We should bring matching plates and serving platters, too!” someone insisted. “It looks so junky if things don’t match!”

  “That’s a great idea!”

  No, no, please no!

  I looked helplessly at Gabriel, who wore a deer-in-headlights expression to mirror my own. No help from that quarter, I cast my eyes beseechingly at Tilly.

  We managed to get the plates and platters voted down, albeit by a slim margin. (It earned us some dark looks from their proponents.) After the volunteers had parted ways, each with a lengthy tablecloth in tow, Tilly turned a sympathetic look upon us. “You guys weren’t quite sure what you were in for, were you?”

  I did my best to smile at her. She looked so small and frail standing there in a flimsy modern dress. The chestnut curls I had admired at the ball were gone (they had been a wig); her dust-colored hair was thin, and bobbed. I looked down at the tablecloth I was still holding.

  “Could we leave this here until Saturday?” I asked. “We came on the bus.”

  Tilly looked as though I’d suggested we come to the tea naked.

  “It needs to be washed,” she instructed. “And ironed.”

  I looked down at the pristine, unwrinkled tablecloth and withheld a frustrated sigh.

  “Table Cover”: Montgomery Ward, 1895.

  We scrabbled to find the massive quantities of listed items over the next few days. I repeatedly apologized to Gabriel for having involved us in what was effectively turning out to be an elaborate scavenger hunt. We’d both been perfectly willing to donate our time, but acquiring all the items we were expected to bring meant quite an investment of cash for things that would be of no use to us after the tea was over. (We’d been slowly getting rid of our own dishes for the past several years, trying desperately to squeeze a little more living space out of our microscopic studio apartment.)

  “How are they even expecting to fit all this stuff on a table with eight people at it?” Gabriel asked as he stumbled his way around a pile of glassware. “Where are they going to put the food?”

  I held up my hands in a helpless expression of ignorance, mimicking his gesture from days earlier when we’d waited for the bus. “Beats the heck out of me. And how are we supposed to carry centerpieces on the bus?”

  Once we’d filled our backpacks to bursting and piled everything we could conceivably carry into miscellaneous bags, we were toting enough bulk to make veteran Sherpas stagger. We decided that the only possible way to add centerpieces to this lot was to tote along empty vases and find somewhere to buy flowers once we’d reached our destination. (Yet another unexpected expense to tax our tiny students’ wallets. It might have been cheaper to go to a spa for the day and forget all about the volunteering.)

  The morning of the tea, we crammed our way past rows of glaring riders and shoehorned ourselves into seats. With dishes rattling, flatware clacking, and our fellow passengers muttering, we disembarked over an hour later, apologizing our way down the corridor of the grumbling vehicle.

  Once I’d relieved myself of my half of the kit, I left Gabriel to set up our tables, centered around the notably empty vases. I set out to commence Operation Find Flowers.

  The city was strange to me and I had no idea where to locate a grocery store, let alone one that specifically had a florist section. I wandered through neighborhoods, which seemed to consist primarily of senior living communities and churches, all the while the thought strong in the back of my head that when I finally did find
the elusive grocery store, the flowers they (theoretically) had for sale had better not cost more than the contents of my wallet, which was not a large sum.

  After a great deal of fruitless wandering, I started to grow legitimately concerned about returning in time to serve at the tea. If I were to get back punctually, I would be faced with two choices: subject the little old ladies at the tea to yawningly empty vases, or pinch some flowers off the neighborhood landscape. I opted for the latter.

  Stealing flowers from a senior community to benefit a senior center was a little too ironic for my taste, and besides, the really good flowers were flush up against their picture windows (hardly discrete). Since it was Sunday, the churches were full of people and theft from their shrubbery would have involved a very high likelihood of being caught, not to mention the deeply perverse moral problem in contemplation of theft from a church. (With my luck, the sermon would have been on the Eighth Commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.”) In the end, I pruned some rhododendrons from a bush outside a rather large and garish casino, reasoning that a) it was 10 a.m. on a Sunday, and very few people were likely to be there; b) a casino with poor enough taste to set itself up amidst a plethora of churches deserved to pay some sort of penalty; c) the seniors deserved the flowers more than the gamblers; and d) the shrubbery needed pruning anyway.

  Gabriel had almost finished setting up the tables by the time I got back. As I was helping him with the final touches, we reiterated to each other how excited we were to see the upcoming vintage fashion show. All these inconveniences, we thought, would melt from memory, replaced by all the exciting antiques we were to view.

  We had both worked in food service positions in the past; carrying trays and refilling teapots represented no vastly challenging activity. We were glad, though, to see that the program specifically stated that service would be paused during the fashion show. This was to avoid distractions from the presentation, but it was an equal boon to us: we would get a chance to watch those lovely antique fashions, unhindered by our serving responsibilities.

  The first few outfits were a disappointment. “We put this together from stuff from the Goodwill,” the announcer proudly explained to the accompaniment of recorded music amplified over the public address system. I tried not to cringe at the plastic pearls, the rayon and polyester. “This is like something that would have been worn . . .”

  I think I managed not to visibly shudder—at least not so obviously the seniors would have seen.

  The next outfits were worse. Polyester on parade, I thought inwardly, being very careful to keep my facial expression bright and smiling. At one point, Gabriel caught my attention from his position standing behind the next table, and we exchanged a brief, very subtle communication by eyes alone. Neither of us is psychic, and words can’t be expressed by such a discreet exchange, but it was enough to share a sentiment. The horror!

  It wasn’t simply the disingenuous nature of the garments. The commentary that accompanied them was rife with stereotypes, myths, and outright fabrications presented as truth. “Broken bones were common!” boomed the announcer about—bizarrely—an elasticized girdle. The clothing only got worse as the presentation continued.

  By the time the show was over, our ears were sore from the volume of lies that had been poured into them, both literally and figuratively. The PA system had been cranked up far too loud, apparently on the theory that age equates with deafness and anyone for whom this is not the case should be aided in their lack of disability. We shrugged to each other, sighed, and cleaned our tables.

  We told Tilly we’d donate most of what we’d brought to the senior center, so we wouldn’t have to drag it back through another bus ride. As we departed, I cast a last glance at the chestnut wig that once again covered her thin, bobbed hair. Truth proves ever elusive.

  “Feather Bang” false hair: Montgomery Ward, 1895.

  10

  Figure Facts

  Photograph of unknown women, taken in Edinburgh.

  A vast number of misconceptions exist in the world about any number of things. I suppose it should come as no surprise that people are most likely to believe the grossest absurdities about subjects of which they have the least knowledge, but it is sad when they try to indoctrinate others with these falsehoods. When I taught English in Japan, I used to cringe at hearing other gaijin20 lecture the locals about Japanese culture. It was even worse than when I studied abroad in France and the natives there would deliver sermons about what it meant to be American. At least in France I could be mildly amused at their ignorance; when it was my own countrymen making asses of themselves, it was just embarrassing.

  The vast majority of nineteenth-century writings against corsets were written by men. Given that males had mostly given up wearing stays in the eighteenth century, it seems vastly unfair for them to pick on what women chose to do with their bodies. (Pun intended! Re-member that “body” is another word for “corset.”) Evidently, nineteenth-century women held the same opinion; they were wont to write essays ordering the males of the world to stay out of women’s business.

  Contrary to modern popular belief, nineteenth-century women’s fashion was not some masochistic Machiavellianism, dictated to powerless females by their masculine overlords. Quite the contrary: women chose their fashions because they—the women themselves—liked to wear them, and their collective opinion seems to have been that men should stay out of the matter. If objections were raised to women deviating appreciably from the standards of the time, they generally came just as much—if not more—from other women than from men.

  When certain suffragettes started wearing the notorious “Bloomer costume,” Susan B. Anthony herself objected, saying that when such clothing was worn, audiences would be paying more attention to the costumes than to the political views of those wearing them.21 Named for Amelia Bloomer, the Bloomer costume included straight pantaloons worn underneath a short skirt. It was also called the Turkish costume, after the belief of the time that the pantaloons resembled those worn by women in Turkish harems. When pondering this style of dress, it is interesting to consider several contradicting elements of the psychology surrounding it: The style was quite aberrant, and the few women who adopted it tended to be followers of the hygienic movement, suffragettes, or—most often the case—both of these. They argued that the outfit was more hygienic than the fashionable long skirts of the time be-cause it could not drag on the ground and pick up dirt. The secondary argument promoting the style—and the one far more publicized by modern feminists—was that wearing trouser-like garments, as men did, gave women greater freedom. The irony of this argument lay in the fact that mainstream women of the time considered the Turkish costume a mimicry of outfits worn by Eastern harem girls, whom they saw as little more than slaves. (The actual condition of women’s rights in the Middle East, or their actual traditional dress, is not important to this case; what was important was how these were imagined by the women of the West). Curiously then, this style was espoused by its proponents as promoting freedom, while being denounced by its critics as copying a style of oppression.

  Another interesting element to consider about the Bloomer costume is the short skirt that overlaid the pantaloons. In the nineteenth century, only very young girls wore short skirts, just as only very young boys wore short pants. In both sexes, their lower garments grew longer as they matured. For a grown woman, then, to wear a short skirt was for her to appear in the costume of a child. (It would have been equally shocking for a mature man to appear at a formal occasion wearing short pants.) It should come as little surprise, then, that the more mainstream members of society found it difficult to treat ­adopters of this costume seriously. It effectively seemed to be a child’s clothing, juxtaposed against the clothing of the opposite gender. Imagine the hilarity that would ensue if a modern, twenty-first-century man were to appear at a political meeting wearing corduroy overalls along with the skirt from a belly dancer’s costume! Furthermore, imagine the reaction if he were then
to become upset that he were not being taken seriously!

  Other suffragettes were even more outspoken against the costume than Ms. Anthony. Jane Swisshelm “found such attire ‘immodest, inconvenient, uncomfortable, and suicidal’ and felt that wearing it would ruin her reputation.”22 In addition, Paulina Davis “refused to wear bloomers in public, for ‘if I put on this dress, it would cripple my movements in relation to our work at this time and crucify me ere my hour had come.’”23 It is interesting to note that these celebrated suffragettes were referring to bloomers—­uncorseted fashion—in terms of something that was “suicidal” and would “cripple” them, while they, the most emancipated women of their time, preferred to wear figures.

  Women were choosing their fashions, and they were choosing their corsets. When allegedly scientific arguments were presented against stays, they often centered around perceptions that corsets detracted from women’s “proper” maternal duties. Often, their logic was so stretched as to be amusing: In France women wore tight corsets. France had a low birthrate. Therefore, wearing tight corsets resulted in a low birthrate. Of course, the false logic of this rather fuzzy argument totally overlooks the fact that France was famous for its pervasive availability of birth-control devices. It was so closely associated with birth control, in fact, that terms like “French cups” or “French sleeves” were well-understood euphemisms for contraceptives. A similar (and similarly odd) argument maligning corsets as harmful to fertility held that because stays were worn tighter in the 1880s and ’90s than in preceding decades, and tended to be worn tighter by upper-class women than by lower-class ones, figures were responsible for the decreased birthrates among the upper classes within those years. Left out of this version of the argument is the fact that birth control had recently become widely publicized following an 1877 trial of two individuals for disseminating information about it,24 and that contraception was much more readily available to the upper classes.