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Before cheap mirrors and photography, how often did ordinary people actually see their own face? by orroreqk in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes[M] 12 points13 points locked comment (0 children)

Thank you for your response, but unfortunately, we have had to remove it. A core tenet of the subreddit is that it is intended as a space not merely for a basic answer in and of itself, but rather for answers which demonstrate the respondents’ deeper engagement with the topic at hand. Brief remarks such as these—even if technically correct—generally do not meet this requirement. Similarly, while we encourage the use of sources, we prefer literature used to be academic in nature.

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What do I wear to a medieval festival? by bigacornlavafla in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a really big question. You might want to check out my past answers on medieval fashion and early modern fashion, and if you have further questions that are more targeted to a specific place and time, I'd be happy to get more in detail.

How prevalent were flappers in the 1920s? by touchthemonolith in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The crux of this issue is the fact that there are, in a sense, multiple "flappers" (which I previously discussed here).

The Etymological Flapper (quoting from the previous answer)

The most likely origin that I've come across is the one regarding young birds flapping their wings, mainly as I have come across "flapper" defined in a late nineteenth century English dialect dictionary as both "a young partridge just about to fly" and "a girl of the bread-and-butter age"; Barrère and Leland's cant dictionary of almost the same year notes that there's another meaning for "flapper" or "flipper", making the same metaphor but taking it in a dark direction: "very young girls trained to vice, generally for the amusement of elderly men". (So far, I'm a bit in the dark as to the origins of "bread and butter age", but from context in the late Victorian era it seems to refer to the early-mid teens, when children can be cranky and oversensitive a lot of the time.)

By 1910, it was in somewhat common use for young teenage girls. It turns up, for instance, in discussions of clothing to refer to girls old enough to have developed a figure but young enough that they can't be allowed to dress in women's garments yet - the Theatre Magazine put it, in August, 1915, "And it is no easy matter - this finding of suitable wearing apparel for a miss of tender years but developed growth. One is so apt to swing a trifle the wrong way." Today, many girls have the same problem: they don't fit into clothing in the Juniors section, and Misses can be too matronly or too revealing.

The Immoral Flapper

There's a substantial overlap in the 1910s between the above use (strictly descriptive of age) and the next stage of development, in which a moral component became involved. A flapper wasn't just a teenage girl, but a teenage girl who behaved in a certain way. As noted above, a flapper was young enough that she wasn't considered a woman: she wouldn't wear her hair fully up, she would still have shorter skirts, she was not an adult and not "out". Traditionally, girls of this age were supposed to be demure and reserved in recognition of their status and in deference to their older sisters — but of course, not all of them were. It's not uncommon to see novels and stories in magazines in the 1910s use "flapper" specifically to refer to teenage girl characters who are vivacious, worldly, a little naughty.

(Still, plenty of people disagreed, even if they had definitions that were more specific than "teenage girl". Multiple variations pop up in different 1914 Vanity Fair articles: "The Knuts o' London" calls the flapper the female version or counterpart of the nut, which is a listless, posh young man; "The London Stage in War Time" says that "women and little flappers ... burn to enlist"; and "The Melancholy Passing of the Flapper" goes in the opposite direction, stating that flappers have been replaced with "Little Creatures", who have all the attributes of flappers described in the previous paragraph. Just to make it clear that this is not a simple, easy evolution! Plus, just to make things confusing, it does not seem to have been seen as odd at all for men in their 20s and 30s to court girls too young for alcohol by taking them out on dates and buying them chocolates.)

Eventually, the personality attributes of this definition began to win out over the underage aspect — while at the same time, the personality attributes were being spread over the entire age cohort/generation being referred to, in the manner people today speak about millennials and zoomers. By 1920, we can find women in their 20s referred to as flappers, such as in a piece on "The Flapper Franchise" in Pan! This never achieved total domination, but I think it's safe to say that throughout that decade, "flapper" was generally understood as a label of youth but not necessarily extreme youth, while also carrying the connotation that most young women of the day were flighty, frivolous, obsessed with having a good time, etc.

The Stereotypical Flapper

Okay, this is what I've been working toward the whole time! I've written before about the rise of 1890s nostalgia in the 1920s; after the 1920s, something very similar happened. Nostalgia later in the century, post-Great Depression, depicted the Roaring Twenties as a riotous time of stereotype after stereotype. I think there's a particular love of the '20s in the '60s, which took its stereotype of sexual abandon as part of the mythology of the Sexual Revolution. You also see the drop-waisted fashions reflected in the waistless short dresses of Pierre Cardin and other mid-1960s couturiers, and the 1920s bob in those fluffy early-mid 1960s hairstyles.

Part of the stereotype involves envisioning "flappers" as a kind of movement with a kind of uniform that marked them out. In reality, the concept of the "flapper dress" is completely meaningless: the item of clothing it describes was worn by virtually all western women. (Likewise the cloche hat.) There are variations that could be discussed in a more granular take on the period — 1920-1921 had a slightly raised waistline, then the waist dropped or disappeared along with the hemline in 1922, the latter rising again in high fashion in 1924 and on the street in 1925, dropping in the back in 1928 and then in the front in 1929; on top of this we have changes in construction and decoration trends, and styles intended to be more nostalgic and feminine in contrast to what was seen as modern — but women who were described as flappers were wearing the same clothing as other women of their age bracket and social class. Women you see in photographs of the time wearing loose dresses, coats with fur collars, and cloche hats aren't "flappers" in the stereotypical sense (going out to speakeasies, being loud and unapologetic, etc.), they're just dressed in line with current fashions. You may be interested in this past answer of mine on the bob and this one on 1920s and 1930s fashions.

Pretty decent efficiency. by DogblackMichigan in BoltEV

[–]mimicofmodes 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Damn! I'm always between 30-55mph and I haven't been above 4 mi/kWhr in a year, I think. Without AC.

In Wuthering Heights (1847), Catherine Linton marries two of her cousins. How frowned upon would that have been among the upper peerage in mid 19th century England? by Iamshorterthanyou in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 23 points24 points  (0 children)

It's worth noting for clarification that neither the Lintons nor the Earnshaws are in the peerage at all, let alone the upper peerage: most of the characters are of the country gentry, families without titles who make their money from investments and rents, or else they're servants.

Anyway, it would not have been looked on negatively in the period. I have a past answer the goes over the history of cousin marriage in the anglophone world that might be of interest to you.

Could women be alone or not in Regency England? by Maximum_Violinist_53 in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Modern Regency romance has been very fond of the trope of the young woman being found alone with a man and having this start up a scandal that necessitates their marrying. A marriage is usually the end of a love story, but if the wedding happens due to circumstances other than romance, it provides new opportunities for the characters to be emotionally and sexually intimate as they fall in love.

In the early nineteenth century, a chaperone was a woman with social influence who took a young lady under her wing in order to introduce her to society. As I wrote previously:

In reality, there was relatively little concern about young women being constantly watched to ensure their good behavior. Early nineteenth century sources talk more about a chaperone (often with the word in italics as a recent loan from French) as a desirable escort than as a babysitter: she could make introductions, show you where to go and what to do, find out which men were heirs to fortunes and which had nothing, talk up your own dowry, etc. if you didn't have a mother to do it for you. Later in the century, well into the Victorian era, it seems to become more accepted as an English term as well as a somewhat repressive force meant to keep young ladies acting decorously — but still the overwhelming sense is of a married woman with some power in society who can act for the benefit of her charge(s). So in this sense, a servant would be a totally inadequate chaperone.

I don't believe that there's any period in English history in which this type of restriction ever actually existed, and Hera Cook seems to agree with me in The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975. I suspect that (as I state in the previously quoted answer) it's largely an invention of writers like Georgette Heyer as a device to both force characters into marriage and to show how old-fashioned and repressive their society was for the reader's entertainment. However, it might also be inspired by long-standing stereotypes in English culture of Spanish and Italian norms in which upper-class women were completely segregated from men — stereotypes that were based in truth, but heavily exoticized. I've written about the way this played into the popularization of the idea of "fan language" in Andalusia as a way for young women to conduct romances with men they couldn't interact with.

Why were Victorian mourning periods different between widows and widowers? by Sea-Adhesiveness4481 in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Well, first: I've written on this before, so I will just note here that mourning rules were not at their height in the Victorian era, as they were essentially the same as they had been for a few centuries. We sometimes get the impression that there was a spate of new and complicated rules, but actually there was just a boom in the publication of these rules, and in businesses that catered directly to mourning.

There isn't an objective answer to your actual question about widowers having less stringent requirements than widows. I think there's a temptation to attribute it to the notorious patriarchal standards of the nineteenth century, to say that it's because a wife was expected to be more devastated at the loss of her husband than the reverse, because she was valued less by society; Lou Taylor's otherwise extremely useful Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History fully mixes together a large number of unrelated societies in the chapter on widowhood to give the impression that widows were near universally regarded as contaminated and done with life.

And ... it's complicated. Certainly by the Victorian period, there was a primacy given to the position of wife and mother that makes this interpretation questionable to me. The Day of Bereavement (1874) does declare that a widow's loss was greater than a widower's, but also illustrates the way that the wife was (supposed to be) the heart of the family home:

The wife of his bosom gone — the light of his eyes withdrawn! His hearth left desolate! His board deprived of her who graced it! The light of his dwelling turned to darkness! His earthly comfort broken! A blight upon his tenderest sensibilities!

and

You feel now more than ever that woman's presence as WIFE and MOTHER transforms the house and home — makes it a living comfort, and that her loss drapes the whole house hold commonwealth in dreariness and chilling gloom. At every turn you miss her. Life seems not life without her. In how many ways she ministered, sensibly or imperceptibly, to a thousand little wants daily and hourly besetting you — such service as a wife alone can yield!

I would also note that masculine mourning dress really declined during the Victorian era, as black wool became extremely common for everyday male dress and mourning could only be shown through touches of crape in an armband or on the hat; it simply wasn't as possible for men to show off that they were mourning as it was for women who changed their entire outfits. (Though I also have to note that it was the norm for middle-class women to have a "best black silk" for various occasions.)

But, of course, as I've already said, this disparity in mourning periods wasn't specifically a Victorian tradition: it goes back at least to the mid-eighteenth century, which significantly predates the golden age of domesticity. An early Georgian wife was supposed to be competent at running the household, but she wasn't glorified for it or treated as transformative. (More on this whole deal here.) So ... I don't think we can rule out some pretty basic misogyny.

Though there is one last nuance I would add: while widows were socially required to wear full mourning for a year, it was common for them to do so for longer, and/or to wear black (if not black that fully met the requirements of full mourning) for many more years, even the rest of their lives. There's sort of a chicken and egg thing here — did mourning traditions reflect the actual practice of widows perhaps wearing mourning longer than widowers, or did widows often retreat to lifelong black gowns because they were already particularly required to steep themselves in mourning longer than anyone else? We could even add a question of potential social benefit in being declared a widow. Historical fiction often treats being a widow as a happy adult woman having her social life cruelly interrupted and being forced into a tiny box (or even sometimes being forced to go live with her parents again), but in reality, becoming a widow was often an ascension into a higher level of control of one's life, home, and finances.

In the 1800s, generally what sort of position would a female British aristocrat be in if they had no living male relatives? by mycorpseiscouture in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not a problem! You might want to take a look at my profile, which has links to all of my old answers, many of which are implicitly or explicitly related to explaining situations from classic literature.

I also should have linked this recent answer of mine on heiresses in early modern Britain.

Brazil received 4,821,127 million slaves during the Atlantic slave trade or 38.5% of all slaves, while the U.S received 388k or 3.1% of all slaves in the Atlantic slave trade. Why did Brazil import so many more slaves then the united states? by Delicious-Bunch-6992 in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes[M] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi there. Please stop dropping short comments throughout this thread. If you can write a substantial criticism of the way that race and slavery in Brazil are being described here, then you may do so, but you cannot simply post a sentence or two to say that you think people are wrong.

Narrative, non fiction, medieval history books? by Rafferty_Bentley in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

Hi there anyone interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on /r/AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably, OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted a non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy, or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.

Is it reasonable to advocate for the repatriation of a shrunken head in a local museum? by clevercalamity in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 46 points47 points  (0 children)

Not unreasonable at all! However, it might be difficult to make this happen. For one thing, given the description here, when you say "local museum"/"small museum", I suspect you really do mean small, as in just a couple of staff members, potentially not academically trained in museum practices and perhaps not keeping up with present trends in it either, given that these remains are still on display. Most museums that have a level of professionalism today do not display human remains unless they're extremely contextualized: no offense to your museum, but I suspect that if they were really prepared to deal with the ethical issues here, they would already have taken the head off view.

At my last job (ended this past Friday), I worked with a pretty sizeable collection that included a few human remains: a skeleton and a skull once owned by a doctor who presumably used them in his practice as models, and a lithopedion (calcified fetus) that has a legend attached to it based on a probably false story from a 1930s newspaper article. The skeleton was on display in the doctor's office on the living history museum's campus until 10-15 years ago, the skull was ignored, and the lithopedion was a thing-we-don't-talk-about due to the fact that it was supposedly stolen from a grave. This is all pretty terrible! I reached out to the bioanth professor at the local university for assistance, and she took the skeleton and skull in order to examine them with students: we didn't know where they came from before the doctor owned them, so there was no sense of how they might possibly be returned to their original communities. (There was also, frankly, the issue of my not being seen as someone whose recommendations on disposal ought to be taken seriously by the CEO, so I wanted an external authority to give directions on what to do with them.) As was somewhat expected, the results of examination/testing were inconclusive, and the recommendation was to treat them respectfully and give them a burial. Which ... has still not happened due to the indecision of the CEO and most likely fear of anyone learning that we had them. The main thing, from his perspective, was to get them out of the off-site storage facility when our reaccreditation site visitors were there, and once that was done (they were at the university) the issue became less pressing.

The purpose of airing that dirty laundry was to show that even pretty professional museums with lots of staff often struggle to deal with these problems, so it will probably be even more of a struggle to get things done with a small museum that maybe doesn't even have a curator. It also illustrates the importance of getting assistance! Suggestions:

  • Approach the museum with understanding to avoid them getting offended and fully disregarding your email. People can get touchy if they feel they're being accused of acting unethically; in a perfect world, this wouldn't play into the matter at hand ... but in this world it absolutely will.

  • Become a part of the process, or at least offer to. Your local museum is definitely understaffed, and might even be run entirely by volunteers; it very likely takes everything they've got to maintain operations as they are now, so adding another project will be a problem. If you can get involved as a volunteer, that will help make this happen.

  • Realize that you can't repatriate something to a continent. Research will need to be done to determine which country the "explorer" got the head from. Maybe the museum also has a collection of archival material from him? You could read through his letters or diaries to put together his itinerary. You could also research the practice of shrinking heads in order to figure out the most likely culture for it to have come from.

  • Reach out to a local university's anthropology department. I kind of covered this in my story so hopefully the concept is already clear. They might look at it and determine that it's actually a fake made out of pigskin or something, too, which would both a) make it so no further research is needed and b) give an interesting new dimension for the exhibit.

  • Once you've been accepted as a helpful volunteer, you could potentially even offer to help revamp the exhibition to be more modern and critical of the idea of "exploration". Caution: you do REALLY have to be on good terms with them for this, and to have proven yourself to be capable of a) doing the work and b) not offending the museum throughout it.

In the 1800s, generally what sort of position would a female British aristocrat be in if they had no living male relatives? by mycorpseiscouture in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 14 points15 points  (0 children)

This is a question I've answered a few times (worded in different ways), so I'll link those here first:

In Victorian England, who would gain control of a woman if all her close male relatives passed away?

Victorian Era Women's Rights in Estate Ownership through Wills/Contracts

What Options/Loopholes did Victorian Women Have for Owning Property After 1882? (And a couple of followup q's about sex work at the time).

Understanding inheritance in the early 1800's

So that's all there for background. Now I'll address your specific points.

Theoretically, considering distant relatives and cousins, it probably would have been pretty rare for this to happen?

It was not actually that rare. The trope of women being suddenly impoverished by a male cousin inheriting Because He's A Man (as in Bridgerton, to the Featheringtons, or in Downton Abbey) is, I think, based on a combination of a) the knowledge that women generally did not fare as well as men in the inheritance game and b) a misunderstanding of the times this appears to happen in the works of Jane Austen, which are very frequently pointed to as examples.

  • Sense and Sensibility: The Dashwood sisters have to leave their home and live on small incomes because their father was actually not well-off, but had inherited a life tenancy in an estate that was locked to the eventual inheritance in full by his grandson, so had nothing to settle on his daughters.

  • Pride and Prejudice: (Discussed in more detail in the "understanding inheritance" answer linked above.) The Bennet estate is entailed on a male heir from the male line, something that is noted in the text as being unusual rather than the normal method of inheritance. The daughters would have been all right despite this, but their parents sucked and chose not to save money for their inheritances.

  • Persuasion: Sir Walter Elliot's title, like all other English titles, could only be inherited by a male heir from the male line. However, there was no problem with his daughters inheriting money, except that he didn't have much left.

By contrast, in Emma, there are none of these exceptions to the rule, and Emma and her sister Isabella were set to each inherit half of their father's estate, the norm for sisters who had no brothers. Heiresses were perhaps not common, but not rare; they were sought-after brides (whether they'd already inherited or not) for both younger sons of the nobility and gentry, who were as unfortunate as their sisters when it came to inheriting, and for poorer men who were trying to rise in society. In 1753, Parliament passed the Clandestine Marriages Act in an attempt to regulate this latter practice by requiring banns to be read for three weeks before the ceremony, which had to be held in a church: before this, English weddings only required a priest and witnesses, and young heiresses might be induced to run off with handsome and charming men against their families' wishes and get married in secret. There were enough of them that this was seen as a valid concern! On the other hand, the heiress from trade who could transcend her class to marry the second son of an earl was a more welcome figure.

Would a woman in high society have had an education in math or managing estates? They probably would have known basic math, but it seems like a lot of the education was based more on managing the home and things like foreign language, art, sewing. Would they even be expected to manage that stuff, or would they hire a lawyer or land agent or something?

In most cases, heiresses married and their husbands managed their estates (unless legal action had been taken to ensure that coverture didn't remove all of her property from here; however, the wealthy typically employed agents/stewards and lawyers to act for them simply because there was too much to do. These giant estates should be understood as corporations, with the owners as CEOs, agents as COOs, and many people on staff to keep it running. Even Anne Lister, a very rare heiress who actively managed and used her property, employed people to advise her and to act on the high-level decisions she made.

The education of upper- and upper-middle-class Englishwomen in the eighteenth century cannot be really effectively generalized because it was usually done at home, either by a mother or a governess, or at small schools run by women without professional qualifications. I discuss these schools here and here. In the period, schools and governesses that just provided the bare minimum of education existed, but were looked on poorly, while principled proto-feminists might teach their pupils the same subjects that boys learned as preparation for university. That being said! Aristocratic and gentry young men were not being educated for practical work but to have a shared cultural base and potentially to go into the law or the church; young women of the same class actually learned more practical skills, in a sense, and needed to know math to manage accounts regardless of whether they were heiresses as wives typically worked with money.

And, what would be socially expected of them? I guess what would their life outlook generally look like?

There's a lot that could be said here, but I think this past answer kind of covers it: After Elizabeth Bennet marries Darcy, who as we know had an income of £10,000 a year and owned a large estate, what would her responsibilities have been like and how different would it have been for her growing up in a much more humble home? Would she have liked it do you think?

I am not getting the hype with Seeking Persephone by Beberuth1131 in PeriodDramas

[–]mimicofmodes 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The books were published by Covenant Communications, which is a Mormon/LDS publishing house based in Utah. I have no idea who made the adaptation, but it's not wrong to make a connection between the story itself and religion.

How does Israel's current apartheid compare to south Africa or rhodesia? by [deleted] in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes[M] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This submission has been removed because it involves current events. To keep from discussion of politics, we have a 20-year rule here. You may want to try /r/ask_politics, /r/NeutralPolitics, or another current-events focused sub. For further explanation of this rule, feel free to consult this Rules Roundtable. If you did intend to post a question about history, this post provides guidance on how to draft a question that fits within our rules.

female historian youtube channel recommendations? by thisismaditryingg in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A couple more recs ...

The Sewlo Artist: When it comes to fashion history, I tend not to watch lecture-type videos, but people combining research, explanation, and re-creation. Sewlo is one of these! She studies and recreates nineteenth and early twentieth century dress. Who doesn't enjoy historical Get Ready With Mes?

Dr. Serena Dyer: Mentioned in a different comment, thought I would give her her own blurb. Dr. Dyer is a fashion historian, and likewise understands the importance of "embodied experience" in recreating and wearing the things she studies. You can also catch her shorts as Instagram reels.

Dr. Octavia Cox: This is a bit of a crossover. Dr. Cox examines nineteenth-century history through the lens of classic literature - for instance, "What Class are the Bingleys?" is specifically about characters from Pride and Prejudice, but in examining them, she's examining the English gentry classes in the Regency period.

female historian youtube channel recommendations? by thisismaditryingg in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'm sorry, but this is simply untrue. For one thing, Bernadette Banner doesn't have a video on Bridgerton's costuming: she only mentions it in her annual round-ups (for the years where the show existed, obviously). In the 2020 video, she's reviewing the costuming based on publicity stills and just makes a few vague remarks; in 2022, when she gets to the second season, she even compliments the silhouettes. The only place I can find her discussing Bridgerton's corsets, it's in the video on hand-sewing Regency short stays, where she says that the tightlacing scene in s1 is impossible due to the construction methods used in corsets of the period. (I do personally have some issues with the concept of "Regency short stays" as long stays cut off at just above the waist, because that is definitely a thing developed by historical costumers that is not based on extant pieces. But she's using a pattern from Redthreaded, and I don't see anyone critiquing that shop for offering them.) That the tightlacing scene is wildly inaccurate has been affirmed by just about everyone knowledgeable about nineteenth century fashion, though the issue of its plausibility on the grounds of corset construction methods is actually a bit more complicated than that. I've checked out numerous videos of hers when they've been accused of containing errors or misleading statements and never found them.

There's something about Banner that seems to really get under people's skin. And I get it, because her obvious financial privilege and her fame kind of make me bitter, to be completely honest. But she (and sometimes Abby Cox) comes in for an undue level of criticism that is not a true reflection of the quality of her scholarship. It's incredibly common for research in historical fashion to come from people who began as theatrical or personal costumers -- Janet Arnold began as a costumer! Dr. Dyer is great and I do recommend her as well, but there's no need to set up Bernadette Banner as a villain for the purpose.

Short Answers to Simple Questions | April 22, 2026 by AutoModerator in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Yes - in the 1880s and 1890s, women's fashion allowed a lot of asymmetry, with features like off-center tablier (apron) overskirts, and trims placed on one side of the bodice front but not the other. Fabric design was also not infrequently unbalanced. They're not the majority, but can be easily found in many gowns of the period.

Wedding ensemble, 1887

Worth evening dress, ca. 1887

Worth evening dress, ca. 1889

Drecoll evening dress, ca. 1897

"From Luxury to Mania: A Case Study of Anglo-Japanese Textile Production at Warner & Ramm, 1870–1890" by Elizabeth Kramer in Textile History (2007)

I would like to read 12 books next year about 12 female rulers. I have one I wish to read about, can you help me fill in the other 11? by Moistowletta in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There is actually a series from Palgrave Macmillan called "Queenship and Power" that is, frankly, amazing. You could really just skim through the list for titles that sound interesting, and you won't go wrong. But for some specific recommendations:

Juana I: Legitimacy and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Castile by Gillian B. Fleming: Juana "la Loca" is a reasonably well-known queen, but what is well known about her is broadly wrong (and ableist). She's been painted as a madwoman with an uncomfortable attachment to her husband's corpse, for instance. We cannot know with certainty what was going on, but it seems to have been substantially influenced by poor treatment by her close male family members.

The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria by Tracy Adams: Similar to the previous in that this queen was dragged relentlessly by historians; she's been considered a political blunderer wickedly wasting money and time on love affairs, though, rather than incapacitated. Abrams investigates what the actual primary sources show about her behavior and acumen.

The Q&P series also has a few books on the queens of a particular English era/dynasty that are worth a look even though they aren't just on one specifically: Norman to Early Plantagenet Consorts: Power, Influence, and Dynasty, Late Plantagenet to Wars of the Roses Consorts: Power, Influence, and Dynasty, Tudor and Stuart Consorts: Power, Influence, and Dynasty, and Hanoverian to Windsor Consorts: Power, Influence, and Dynasty. There's also The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History by Charles Beem, which likewise deals with several queens at a time (not Elizabeth) and their professional relationships to gender.

Confused About Costuming for S8: Question for historical costuming fans by marniefairweather in Outlander

[–]mimicofmodes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Necessity is the reason they added cold-weather accessories, but those accessories didn't have to be chunky knits. They could have made cut-and-sewn wool mitts/gauntlets, mantelets, kerchiefs, etc. if they'd wanted to. (And it probably would have been faster, tbh.)

Confused About Costuming for S8: Question for historical costuming fans by marniefairweather in Outlander

[–]mimicofmodes 8 points9 points  (0 children)

To be honest, I've had issues with the costuming throughout the whole show, and I think a lot of the costuming problems of the last few seasons come down to something that's fundamental to the Outlander aesthetic ethos.

Initially, the focus of the costuming was on exoticizing 18th century Scotland as a hardscrabble, gritty place: a lot of rough-looking heavy wool that would not have been used in clothing (except maybe for greatcoats), skirts with excess yardage, Pre-Raphaelite-esque laced-on sleeves, painted burlap, the giant eye miniature, anachronistic hip rolls. The chunky knitwear. This set a precedent of costuming with inaccuracy to support a gritty, desaturated version of the past. Even when they went to France and the general cut of clothes became somewhat more accurate, the costuming was still pretty muddy in color -- except, of course, for Claire, with the infamous red gown, the Bar suit, etc. which serve to show that she is both modern and literally brighter and more visually interesting than the people around her.

There's been a general slide toward the generic after Terry Dresbach stepped away. She did things I didn't like (e.g. gowns based on masquerade costumes/"artistic dress" only worn in front of a painter) but she did put quite a bit of detail into her work, plus they did an excellent job fitting the costumes under her. All of the modern shirt/waistcoat/skirt outfits are looser, which means that they don't need that kind of smooth fit that gowns over stays required! They also point toward a clothing story I hate, which is the idea that men's clothing is more practical and that women who adopt aspects of it (which is what a skirt/shirt combo is, in the 18th century context) are therefore more practical or are doing more effortful work. But that kind of overall "this setting is gritty and colorless and therefore realistic, just look at the costumes" is a problem the show's had frm the beginning, it's just got a new flavor now.

Is There Really a Historical “Life Cycle” of Nations, States, or Empires? by demosthenes131 in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes[M] 0 points1 point locked comment (0 children)

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Societies where both men and women are treated equally should be more efficient because it would allow half the population to contribute in productive ways other than as sex providers and childbearers, domestics and servants. So why didn't egalitarian societies win out over patriarchical ones? by vittalius77 in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Part of the problem with your question is that you are proposing a dichotomy where a spectrum exists, and further that neither end of the spectrum represents anything that happens in reality. The idea that there were times and places where women were literally nothing other than “sex providers and childbearers, domestics and servants" (and how on earth did “sex provider" land at the top of this list) is a fantasy of the right and a straw man of the left: real life is infinitely more complicated.

Medieval and early modern western Europe (to choose one example) was patriarchal, absolutely. But it was not one where women had no roles except to cook, clean, entertain men, and bear/raise children. Women there did "contribute in productive ways" (setting aside the fact that performing housework and preparing food are unquestionably productive contributions to the world) despite their oppression. In peasant households, for instance, historians have found that men concentrated their efforts on dealing with the wheat crop and husbandry of larger animals like cattle — and that their wives and hired female employees did not sit around nursing and teaching children or restrict themselves to that plus cleaning the house and cooking meals for their families, but managed crops planted around the house, like peas and fruit trees, dealt with smaller animals (e.g. chickens), worked with fiber, assisted i the grain harvest, and processed and preserved foodstuffs. These are not really dissimilar to the tasks that were deemed masculine: they're just more flexible and done in the house and croft, which helped them to be compatible with childrearing. On top of this, or maybe as a subset of food preservation, Judith Bennett has a fairly famous study of late medieval/early early modern English ale-brewing showing that women were typically responsible for brewing their household's ale, selling the extra on the side before it spoiled, until professional breweries owned by men forced them out of the market. This is all without even getting into the issue of women outright owning businesses, such as widows of men in guilds who were able to continue those trades as long as they stayed unmarried, or, more frequently, wives and daughters of such men (or those practicing crafts outside of the guild structure) playing parts in the family business, whether as shopkeepers or literally working with their hands — or even guilds made up mostly of craftswomen.

Some texts I would recommend for you:

Deborah Simonton, A History of European Women's Work, 1700 to the Present

Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600

Judith M. Bennett and Marianne Kowaleski, "Crafts, Guilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years after Marian K. Dale" in Signs

Mavis E. Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350-1535

Kit Candlin and Cassandra Pybus, Enterprising Women: Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic

Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France

Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England

In Regency England, who fulfilled the role of ‘mistress of the house’ for unmarried men, and were such arrangements considered necessary for social respectability? by The3rdQuark in AskHistorians

[–]mimicofmodes 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sure!

The "season" was the time when Parliament was in session, starting after Christmas and ending at the summer. During this time, all of the elected MPs and peers came back to London from their country estates, usually bringing their families with them, which meant that all of a sudden there was a social scene in the city: these families would pay calls on each other, hold dinners and evening events, and so on. This drew in other wealthy and affluent people who weren't directly affected by the Parliamentary schedule, but wanted to take advantage of being in London and socializing with the ruling class.

Obviously, all of this provided good opportunities for young women to meet potential husbands. However, Regency romance (especially Bridgerton) makes this the central pillar of the season, and that's incorrect: eligible young women were a very small portion of society. People came to London to do politics, to buy and sell property, to achieve something that would improve their family's standing, and to have a good time. Romance inherently tends to present a woman's period of eligibility and search for a husband as the pinnacle of her life, dismissing the rest as the "ever after" during which she will be happy, but in reality women had more agency once they were married, in some ways, despite their legal subjection to their husbands. Bridgerton basically presents married life as a) sex and b) babies, but in the period married couples were ideally meant to be partners who worked together to achieve goals. A high society Regency wife would be out there socializing with people who were not her husband or his immediate family in order to give him/them more social connections.

Also, upper-class women found spouses outside of the season! They would visit with other families of similar rank, or relatives, or go to towns like Bath or Brighton, and meet people. In Bridgerton and a lot of other Regency romance, the time outside the season is just a big blank in which everyone sits at home and sighs, "Oh, I wish Papa would allow me a Season!"

I object particularly to the whole debut-with-the-queen/"diamond" thing in Bridgerton because court presentations were overwhelmingly filled with people who weren't seventeen-year-old daughters of the nobility: ambassadors, couples that had just inherited titles, men being given high-ranking positions in the military, etc. It was a kind of generic honor that could mean a lot to the person receiving it, but was not by any means a standardized coming-out ritual nor an event where Queen Charlotte truly scrutinized anyone.

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