Unmentionable

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The past is a different place and it is the mundane, sesquipedalian details that provide the clearest evidence that the world of my grandmother's parents was jarringly alien.

Things like underwear.

The good news is that they wore underwear. The weird news is that for women it was all crotchless, something today we might associate with some kind of weird fetish. Back then, though, it was a practical necessity, obvious when pointed out but something one might not normally think about.

This book is probably not for the serious student of history. The author, Therese O'Neill, presents it in the form of a monologue by a time-travel consultant to “you” - a young woman who plans to go back to the romance of the 19th century with their great clothes and great manners.

Also filth. Everywhere.

Another great point was the reason for women's shoes to be leather and calf-high, namely, the streets weren't paved and horses added to the mud to create deep mud banks, which in the summer would be replaced by dust. The dust and the fact that any source of heat or light was generated by burning something led to everything being covered with dirt and ash.

On that last point, I am put in mind about how when my grandfather came back from the war he falsely claimed to be able to handle a team of horses, which he lost control of on Wall Street, New York City. So, even as late as 1919, horses were still making delivery and deposits in the heart of New York. (My father remembered stables behind his family home in Brooklyn in the 1930s.) The banishment of livestock from the city, with the undoubted improvement of public sanitation and hygiene, has been a surprisingly recent innovation.

The writing is lively and funny. The asides, particularly the subtexts to various pictures, had me snorting in surprise and laughter at times.

The book is not without its flaws. It quickly degenerates into feminist tropes about the oppression of women. Obviously, the lot of women was far worse than it is for modern women - in fact, it sucked and modern women - and men - ought to find what are ancestors of 4 or 5 generations ago had to endure to be unimaginable to us. On the other hand, it was not much better for men, either. The author acknowledges all of this, by the way, in her epilogue, so score the feminists parts as a way of extracting humor from the grim realities of elimination, menstruation, traveling, cleaning, and the rest without modern labor-saving conveniences.

There are an awful lot of excerpts from various sources, usually male sources to make fun of. On the other hand, some of details filled in the blanks spaces within my personal memory. For example, when the author mentions that women in the 19th century would typically not cut their hair their entire life, I remembered my grandmother, born in 1899, mentioning how she had hair that went down her back until she was married, which would have been in the 1920s. So, her memory gibed with the author's details in an interesting way. Likewise, the general lack of knowledge by women (and presumably men) about sex and reproduction was corroborated by a story from my grandmother to the effect that she was unsure how the baby would get out when she was first pregnant in her 20s! Finally, I was as surprised to learn that bras weren't invented until the 1920s as I was to find that pantyhose was invented in the 1960s. It seems, after all, that these are obvious things and not rocket science. (Until bras, the business of holding firm the “wobbly bits” was done by corsets, and imagine how restrictive that would have been.)

Here's another one: 19th century sources were in favor of bathing, but they weren't sure how long or what temperature was safe. According to sources, too long, too hot or too cold, could lead to death or insanity. On the other hand, when it came time to wash hair, they thought nothing about recommending that the house wife take a block of solid ammonia, pour water over it, chop it up until a lather was formed, and then wash the hair with pure ammonia, all the while breathing in the toxic, abrasive fumes created by this process. It's a wonder that anyone survived at all, which of course they didn't over the long run.

I rather enjoyed this book.