As a child, I had been quite fond of an old trope from cartoons and outdated movies, wherein an uppity Victorian woman pushed to extremity removes her hatpin and starts wreaking havoc upon the sensitive parts (usually the rumps) of those around her, to great comic effect. However, as a mature woman, I assumed this old chestnut to have been a complete fabrication created for the value of its humor and having no basis in fact. Correspondingly, when acquaintances commented that one of my hatpins looked like a weapon, I would roll my eyes at what I perceived as their imaginative ignorance. However, as I was researching the history of the hatpin one day, I discovered that not only had I been the one in ignorance about its potential lethality, but I also found that the uniformity of sizing I had noticed was, in fact, a legal requirement having nothing to do with head size.
In fact, hatpins really could be deadly—and demise by hatpin was not a pleasant way to go. Records of proceedings from London’s Old Bailey court list a surprising number of violent incidents involving what I’d thought to be merely innocuous bits of prettiness. In a 1902 manslaughter trial, Medical Practitioner Richard Foster Owen testified to finding a three-and-a-half-inch length of broken hatpin lodged in an abscess in the victim’s left lung during a postmortem examination. After being stabbed through the back with the hatpin later found by Owen, the victim had taken twenty-nine days to die of blood poisoning.40 In another case, a woman confessed to manslaughter after her husband died a three-month lingering death resulting from a hatpin wound she had inflicted when he accused her of “immoral conduct.”41
Even when not proving fatal, hatpin wounds could certainly be unpleasant. In November of 1909, when a man was accused of maliciously wounding his girlfriend with intent to do her grievous bodily harm, he claimed to have acted in self-defense, stating, “[S]ome four years ago the woman stabbed one of her old lovers with a hatpin and so seriously injured him that he is ruined for life.”42 The defendant did not specify in which part of the anatomy, exactly, the woman had stabbed her old lover and “ruined [him] for life.” Considering it makes for interesting speculation.
With such tales in circulation in England, it is understandable that a certain amount of concern might have existed on both sides of the Atlantic. Various regulations of hatpin-wearing were discussed in America,43 and modern websites devoted to collectors of the antique pins state that early twentieth-century laws restricted their length to nine inches, beyond which they were considered weapons.44
I found these historical tidbits fascinating, and I enjoyed sharing them with people, although perhaps the most interesting aspect of modern reactions was the ways in which their responses revealed the individuals’ own preconceived ideas. A particularly good example of this is that of a woman who had opened conversation by marching up to me in the middle of a store one day and launching into an adamant lecture on how horrible she thought it was that I was wearing a corset and how she thought it was an awful reminder of terrible things inflicted upon women that were best forgotten. I offered all my usual rebuttals to the stereotypes in her sermon, then tried to defuse the situation by offering a bit of history that I thought (wrongly, as it turned out) might interest her.
Reasoning that someone who had just preached an unbidden ten-minute homily on women’s rights might enjoy a suffragette story about women of the past who were decidedly not demure, I slid my exactly-nine-inch hatpin from its place anchoring my hair to my hat and recounted a story I read on the website of the American Hatpin Society. In the early twentieth century, an English judge faced with an entire group of suffragettes requested that the ladies on trial remove their hatpins, fearing they might be used violently. I explained that the suffragettes had pro-claimed this an insulting request and went on to explain about the nine-inch-compromise that existed in various places.
The woman in the store glared at first at me, then at the nine-inch pointed steel rod in my hand. “Hmmph!” she concluded. “So that was just another way of oppressing women!” She tossed her head and stormed off.
I was honestly glad to see her go, but I couldn’t help but feel that her parting remark had been a slightly odd one. I gave the stiletto-like object in my hand a quizzical look before replacing it in my hat, being careful as always not to stab myself with it. Asking people on trial for disorderly conduct to give up potential weapons while in the courtroom constitutes oppression?
Historically, the English made a clear distinction between suffragists, well-behaved women (and men, as well) who worked within the law to obtain voting rights for women, and suffragettes, who favored more violent tactics. Early twentieth-century English suffragettes were prone to sensational acts that a modern court would consider terrorism, arson and vandalism by acid being two especial favorites.45 When suffragette Emily Wilding Davison was brought up on charges of arson in January 1912, she already had six prior convictions (including assaulting the police) related to the suffrage movement. (It was noted at her trial that, outside the movement, she was a “highly respectable” woman.) Intended targets were mostly inanimate objects, such as ballot boxes and unoccupied property, but people could be, and were, injured if they got in the way. For example, in a 1909 case, suffragette Alice Chapin partially blinded a schoolteacher with acid when she smashed a tube of the destructive liquid over a parliamentary ballot box.46 Ms. Chapin testified that her target had been the ballot box, not the man she blinded, but some attacks were more direct, and the most radical posed legitimate dangers to public figures and policemen carrying out their duties. In 1909, Winston Churchill was almost killed when a suffragette attacked him with a whip and tried to force him into the path of an oncoming train.47 In 1913 London, suffragettes attacked police detectives with hatpins48—precisely the sort of assault the judge in the earlier trial had feared. Given previous cases of killings and men being “ruined for life” by such objects, my sympathies were rather with the judge.
As I ran the tip of my forefinger over the jet bead that topped my hatpin, I pondered the rather natural question raised by all this history: Why do modern people choose to view women of the past as demure victims of oppression?
People who are unhappy with the situation in their own lives may project that unhappiness elsewhere and exaggerate it in those imagined places. They thus comfort themselves through a feeling of dominance over those other places, forgetting that they themselves created their peculiar pictures of it. In the twenty-first century, it has become politically incorrect to proclaim that one’s own nation is vastly superior in every way to all others. Those who denigrate contemporary cultures are denounced as xenophobes or racists; yet we have no word for those who treat the cultures of the past in this same manner.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”49 Yet foreign countries have ambassadors and diplomats to speak for them. The past is far less able to defend itself; it cannot formulate rebuttals. Perhaps that is why it is such an easy victim. Thus, an opinion has become common that everything about the present is superior to anything that existed in the past. It is difficult for many people to grasp that lifestyles may have been different in the past, and yet still completely satisfactory to those living them. History has no emissaries.
I hold a university degree in international studies. When I was a child, I wanted to live in the Victorian era; when I had grown, I wanted to be a diplomat. In some ways, what I was becoming could be considered a combination of both: an ambassador for history.
Not that all diplomatic incidents are pleasant.
The more my appearance drifted away from the narrow constraints twenty-first-century America defines as normal, the more commonly I found myself verbally attacked by complete strangers for no other reason than that I happened to look different from how they felt I should.
Deciding to treat myself to a small splurge one day, I walked to a nearby café and bought a large drip coffee—considered by many (especially in Seattle) to be a daily necessity, to my penny-pinching nature this was an indulgence. I laced it
liberally with half-and-half and settled down happily near a sunny window to work on some writing I had brought with me. When I smelled patchouli oil and the corner of my eye saw a garish Indian print on the loose and unseasonable skirt of a white woman striding aggressively toward me, I withheld a sigh. Sadly true to my predictions, the hippie closed the gap between us and loudly berated me for oppressing the entirety of womankind.
I took a sip of my coffee.
Um, good morning to you as well? Why yes, it is fine weather we’re having.
Inwardly, I sighed again, although I did not allow myself to show sign of it. And I had so been enjoying my coffee. I casually sipped the creamy-brown drink, being very deliberate about consuming it neither more quickly nor more slowly than I would have had there not been a human patchouli-bomb shouting abuse at me from across my table. She spouted an entire laundry list of stereotypes and misinformation, which I rebutted with memorized citations and quantitative data whenever she paused for breath. Her invariable response to these was first to call me a liar, then either repeat the very same stereotype or move on to an equally false one.
Nineteenth-century illustration of coffee.
When I told Gabriel about the occurrence that evening, he paused for a moment, then laughed. “Who was oppressing who there? Really!”
I had noticed the irony myself. Sadly, the incident would become an oft-repeated one, in assorted places and with a different random stranger as antagonist, but with an otherwise unvarying itinerary. I eventually learned to expect it at least once every two or three weeks, although I sorely wish the expectation were realized less often than it is.
And yet despite the critics, I carried on; and the people who were receptive lent encouragement that helped me stay the course. It was rewarding to help individuals reexamine their opinions of Victorian culture, just as it had been satisfying to present an image of Americans that did not follow the stereotypes of my home country when I had lived abroad in Europe and Asia. Occasionally, opportunities now arise to invite study of both historical and geographical ideas of culture, and these are particularly edifying.
The Korean girls whom I tutored in English were especially fascinated by my hats. One day, after a lesson had run over its appointed time, the girl with whom I was working looked pointedly at the clock, then with a smile slid a sly look over toward my broad-brimmed, royal blue hat with its sparkling glass beads and bright parrot feathers. Since the lesson was over, I lifted the hat from the shelf to which I had removed it upon entering and asked if she wanted to try it on. She responded immediately with vigorous nodding and a broad grin.
The hat was, of course, far too big for the small girl’s nine-year-old head, but like any child trying on grown-up clothes, that mattered to her not at all. She gazed at her reflection in a little hand mirror as proudly as the preening parrot from which the feathers atop the hat had originated.
“You know,” she said as she handed the hat back to me, “before I met you, I had never seen a person who looked like you before.”
I wasn’t sure quite how to take that remark. “Do you think that’s a good thing, or a bad thing?” I asked.
“A good thing,” she smiled. “It’s different. I like it.”
Her mother might have overheard us from the hallway, or perhaps she had simply been recalling memories of a similar style. As I halted by the door to put my shoes back on (having removed them, of course, upon entering an Asian home), she fetched my jacket for me and, watching me, held it a moment.
“The first time I saw you, I thought, ‘Such a small waist—is it, possible?’”
I had never actually talked about my corset with her before, and I was a little nervous. The family was one of those interesting cases of professional parents who had moved their entire family to a foreign country for a year so that their children could learn its language (in this case, English) in context. The father was a medical doctor, and the mother, the woman currently asking about my waist, was a psychiatrist. I wondered what an Asian psychiatrist would think of a choice that many of my own compatriots considered crazy.
I smiled nervously, considering it highly unlikely she had encountered a corset before, and wondering how on earth I was going to explain it across the language barrier. “It’s because I wear a very traditional garment,” I started slowly, “called a corset.”
“I know,” she nodded quickly. “We call it, ‘ant-waist.’”
Relief broadened my smile and amusement brought a small giggle from me. “It has a similar name in English: ‘wasp-waist’!”
We both laughed, and she agreed that a wasp was a bit like an ant, at least in terms of their waistlines. As I put on my jacket and returned home, I felt a great relief that, as opposed to the American strangers who accosted me on the street to tell me they thought I was crazy, this Korean psychiatrist, whose opinion I respected, merely considered my lifestyle to be a cultural curiosity.
Historical ambassador wins small victory.
“The Latest Star Shaped Hats.“ Trimmed hat, 1897. Price: $3.25.
22
Veiled Glances
Fashionable veils, 1897.
In the old days, “fair” was synonymous with beautiful. There is a reason Snow White’s stepmother asks her mirror in the old story, “Who’s the fairest of them all?” A light complexion was the sign of a woman noble enough in birth not to have to work in the fields. Tanning for aesthetic purposes didn’t start until the twentieth century, when most jobs had moved indoors into pallor-inducing circumstances and the prerogative of the upper class had shifted from the privilege of staying out of the sun to the leisure time of going out and lounging in it.
I have the approximate complexion of boiled cod, and any sun exposure beyond that of the rainiest of Seattle days tends to burn me like cream on a griddle. (I went to Spain once and got sun poisoning. The girl with whom I was traveling spent our entire time at the beach frolicking in the Mediterranean Sea, while I passed the time huddled under a parasol on the sand, slathering SPF 45 sunblock thick as frosting on a cake over every reachable body surface and repeating the application every five minutes. By the end of the day, Jackie was fine, but my legs were covered with heat rash so severe it looked as though I’d been trekking through poison ivy.) Anything to mitigate my annual summer boiled-lobster impression seemed like a good idea.
Victorian ladies guarded their skin with long, light clothing, gloves, hats, parasols, and veils. In particularly bright circumstances, an oriental fan could be spread into service as an extra shade. I had long clothing, and hats were no longer a problem. A lot of vintage gloves bought online had yielded three pairs of well-fitting, easily washed 1950s-era summer gloves, which neatly guarded the skin below the cuffs of my long-sleeved blouses. I owned a beautiful, antique parasol from the 1880s, which Gabriel had bought me as a gift. I even had some silk fans that I brought back from Japan. The only thing lacking was a veil, so I looked into my options.
I had never seen a surviving Victorian hat with a functional veil. It is rare to find any Victorian silk garment at all in good condition (which was part of what made my peach petticoat such a rare find). Victorian technology treated silks with heavy chemicals to give them a more luxurious “hand” (texture) when examined in shops, and over time these chemicals rotted the fibers. (Actually, eighteenth-century silk garments tend to survive in much better condition than their later counterparts because they were treated with less aggressive solutions.) Victorian veils were more or less exclusively silk, and the typical problems of chemical damage were compounded by their inherent gossamer fragility. Very few withstood the passage of time. Even if I had come across an antique veil available for purchase, I would not have bought it: the stress of wearing something so delicate with intrinsic historical value would have rendered my nerves as fragile as the fabric.
The biggest hurdle to making my own veil was ascertaining suitable material. I had used tulle to stiffen the petticoat of my wedding dress, and I knew it would be far to
o stiff and scratchy for some-thing that would be hanging close to my face. Silk veils were a staple in Victorian romances, but these tales’ descriptions tend to focus more on the heroine’s dewy eyes than on technical millinery terms for the type of silk involved. I knew that charmeuse would have been too thick, and the thought of brocade for these purposes just made me laugh. I had no experience with crêpe, but a bit of research made me realize that it was equally out of the question. Organza seemed more suited to a Scheherazade impression than a Victorian lady, and chiffon . . . I hesitated over chiffon. It was the thinnest material with which I had experience, but something still seemed not quite right about it. I waited, hoping something better would present itself.
It was Gabriel who, researching as always, read of silk tulle’s difference from its synthetic counterpart. I had never even seen silk tulle, as it had been driven to virtual extinction by twentieth-century development of cheap nylon and rayon look-alikes. Whereas synthetic tulle was available at any fabric or craft store for the bargain price of $1.49 per yard, all of Gabriel’s research had yielded a single supplier of silk tulle: mail order only, $75 per yard. I shuddered over the price, which was equal, at that point in my life, to about two and a half weeks’ worth of grocery money, and hesitated.
Fashion plate showing a woman with a veil.
By all accounts, silk tulle was much softer than the synthetic stuff I had used in my wedding trousseau, and it had been the standard fabric for Victorian veils. I watched the weather grow progressively brighter and sunnier as April waned and the year waxed into May, and I finally decided to take the plunge. The fabric was expensive, but I did not believe it to be overpriced for what it was. Silk is a costly material, and naturally I understood that rarity value does add expense. If it helped keep me from yet another summer of solar-powered radiation burns, it would be well worth the price.
Victorian Secrets Page 19