Casual Friday: The Tattooed Lady & Groucho

Groucho Marx

Loretta reports:

Well, there was the way he walked, that stalking, snakelike movement.  And the eyebrows.  And the mustache.  And the way he talked, usually around the big cigar.  I've had a big crush on Groucho Marx since childhood, and this is one of my favorite bits from the Marx Brothers movies.  As one who's a sucker for clever rhymes and lyrics, I find "Lydia, oh, Lydia, that encyclopedia," just irresistible. The song is "Lydia the Tattooed Lady," and the movie is At the Circus.

You may have your own favorite Marx Brothers routine or song.  Feel free to share.  Movie history nerdiness counts as history nerdiness, too.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

When Little Girls Wore Blue & Boys Wore Pink Dresses

Isabella reporting,

As Loretta discussed in a recent post highlighting 19th c. American portraits from the Heritage Museums & Gardens, it's not always easy for modern eyes to decipher a historical child's gender. For hundreds of years, young boys and girls were dressed in virtually the same clothes - a long gown that seems like a dress to us, but was in reality a simple garment for convenience in those pre-Pampers days. The question of color defining gender does appear in the late 18th c., but with pink preferred for boys as a stronger, more masculine color, and blue - a color long associated with innocence and virginity - as the primary choice for girls.

I thought of this again while visiting the Think Pink exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts (which I mentioned earlier this week here.) The charming small dress with the puffed sleeves, left, is made of bright pink printed cotton, with seams accentuated by white cotton embroidery; the narrow-legged trousers beneath are modern reproductions. The dress was worn by an American child around 1825, but whether it was made for a boy or a girl remains unclear.

Gender guessing games are difficult for curators and art historians. A similar dress in blue is worn in the painting, right, which is most likely a young girl. Another in white, lower left, is nearly identical in style, and because of the toy horse, is probably worn by a little boy.  But with the sitters' identities long forgotten, no one now knows for certain. Confusing matters further is that 19th c. parents weren't as concerned as their modern counterparts about choosing the "right" color, and might simply have dressed a child in blue to match her (or his) eyes.

Apparently the current generation of American parents is much more concerned  than ever before about reinforcing gender stereotypes through children's dress. According to this fascinating article from Smithsonian Magazine, new mothers who were dressed in genderless children's clothes in the 1970s-80s are now choosing the pinkest of ruffled dresses for their daughters and aggressively blue overalls with footballs for their sons - choices encouraged by savvy marketers of children's wear. Who knows which way the kiddie fashion pendulum will swing next?

Perhaps this little pink unisex dress is more ahead of its time after all....

Above left: Boy's or Girl's dress, United States, about 1825. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photograph copyright Susan Holloway Scott.
Right: Detail, Family Group, by Sturtevant J. Hamblin, 1830s.
Lower left: Detail, The Williamson Family, by Stanley Mix, 1840s.
Both images from the wonderful art history website by Barbara Wells Sarudy, It's About Time.

Seasonal Foods in November 1811

View online here

Loretta reports:

Because we live in the era of supermarkets and refrigeration, we need to stop and think—look it up, actually—when we’re giving dinner parties in our books—if, that is, we want to talk about the food  as well as what the hero and heroine say and do during the meal.

A recent trip to the local farmers’ market showed me what the non-supermarket food choices are in New England at this time of year.  And of course it awakened my Nerdy History Girl curiosity about what would be available to eat in England during an early 19th century November.

Read online here

—The Female Instructor; Or, Young Woman's Companion, 1811

Shocking Pink . . . in the 1830s?

Isabella reporting,

I'm afraid I'm as guilty as anyone of imagining the late Romantics and early Victorians as dressing in nothing but the most fragile and languid of non-colors. It doesn't matter how much proof I've seen to the contrary in the fashion plates that Loretta has posted. My imagination says otherwise, and insists on picturing subdued colors for this era, with nothing more vivid than, oh, a maiden's blush.

This weekend my imagination received a firm slap of reality with these two dresses, left, from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This pair were so bright that they nearly glowed in luscious, vibrant shades of pink.

The American dress with the short sleeves is the earlier of the two, dating from about 1830. It's made of silk satin patterned with weft floats, and dyed with either madder or cochineal (the king of red-dyes and Starbuck's strawberry frappuccinos – more about it here). The lady who entered a room in this gown would have had every eye on her, and with good reason, too. Simple in style, it's the color that makes it such a beautiful stand-out.

The dress with the longer sleeves dates from 1868-70, and was also sewn in America, but of fabric made of pineapple leaf fiber from the Philippines and combined with a silk underdress trimmed with silk net. According to the museum's label, the dress has an interesting history: "This bright pink dress was originally worn by Mary Francis Cook of Hyde Park, Massachusetts, and was made of piña cloth brought home by her sea-captain father. By the second half of the 19th century, the port of Manila had a vibrant trade in pineapple fiber cloth, which was lauded for being strong, light-weight, and breathable. This fabric was dyed with fuchsine, an aniline dye color introduced in 1858 that became ultra-fashionable in the 1860s."

In other words, the color of the earlier dress came from naturally derived plant or animal dyes that had been in use for hundreds of years, while the later dress represents the latest in 19th c. color innovations, straight from the chemist's lab. Yet side by side, the two complement one another beautifully, like a pair of prize azaleas.

Both dresses are part of Think Pink, a charming interdisciplinary exhibition now showing (through May 26, 2014) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It's small - only a single gallery - and tucked away in a distant corner, but it's a delightful, thoughtful look at the color pink in fashion from the 18th c. to the present day. Pink girls (you know who you are) will love it, and if you're visiting the MFA for the blockbuster exhibition of John Singer Sargent watercolors, it's well worth the trip upstairs, away from the crowds.

Day dress, United States, c. 1830, silk satin patterned with weft floats, dyed with madder or cochineal.
Day dress of piña cloth, United States (fabric from Philippines), 1868-70, pineapple leaf fiber (piña) plain weave dyed with fuchsine; silk pain weave underdress trimmed with silk net.
Both from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photographs by Susan Holloway Scott.

A Newpaper for the Doughboys: The Stars and Stripes 1918-1919

More info here

Loretta reports:

Today is Veterans Day in the U.S. (a video here) and Remembrance Day elsewhere.  As Downton Abbey aficionados and others will know, the signing of an armistice on 11 November 1918 marked the end of the Great War.  11 November became the commemoration day, known for many years as Armistice Day.

Looking for a social history angle (we Nerdy History Girls generally leave politics and war to others) I ended up at one of my favorite sites, the Library of Congress, where I came upon the newspaper created for the U.S. Army during WWI.  Intended to unify the U.S. forces, which were spread over Europe and mixed with troops of other countries, The Stars and Stripes ran from 8 February 1918 to 13 June 1919.

I discovered that soldiers created a significant amount of its material, and the original staff included enlisted men Alexander Woollcott (later of of The New Yorker and Algonquin Round Table fame) and Harold W. Ross, (a co-founder of The New Yorker).

If you’d like to see what the soldiers were reading, you can take a closer look at individual issues on this list.  Downloading the PDF-Entire Issue offers the easiest viewing of whole pages, but you will probably want to zoom in quite a bit.

More info here

Here’s what a U.S. soldier found in its first issue. It includes illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson, along with satire and satirical prints and a fascinating array of advertisements for U.S., British, and French companies and products.

Posters courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA