From the Archives: Word With a Past -Vaudeville
In 1648, revolution broke out in the streets of Paris. Known at the time as the Fronde ,* it was in many ways a rehearsal for the French Revolution(s) that would follow. Barricades went up in the streets. Aristocrats were pulled out of their carriages and shot at. Militias paraded in the public squares. There were threats of pulling down the Bastille.
More important for the purposes of this blog post, the Fronde was fought in the media as well as in the streets. Printed placards were put up in public places and distributed door-to-door. Small notices, called billets (tickets), were strewn around the city streets. Peddlers sold political pamphlets on street corners like newspapers.** And satirical political songs, known as vaudevilles, became popular.
A contraction of the the phrase voix de ville (the voice of the town), vaudevilles were well named. Writers took popular tunes and wrote new lyrics to them about current events. Singers were paid to roam the streets and sing the latest tunes. Rich and poor alike would hum them as they went about their day. The songs became so popular that collections of greatest hits were compiled.
In eighteenth century France, vaudevilles became a way to get around restrictions on the theater. Theaters presented vaudevilles in conjunction with pantomime and comic sketches. Tap shoes optional.
* Slingshot, a name with a David and Goliath feel appropriate for a revolution that was, at base, about privilege.
** Almost a historical reference in its own right.
The Weeping Widow
The world’s first female prime minister, Sirimavo Bandaranaike of what was then Ceylon, is the archetypical example of what political scientists sometimes refer to as the “widow’s walk to power,” in which a woman steps into a position of political power after the often-violent death of her husband.The assumption is such women will carry on the same policies and protect the same interests as the men whose size elevens they try to fill.
Her husband, S.W.D. Bandaranaike, was a national hero who democratized Ceylon’s government after it gained independence from Great Britain in 1956. A Buddhist monk assassinated him three years after he was elected; his death left a power vacuum not only in the Ceylonese government but in the political party that he founded. After several months of bitter infighting, several key party members asked Bandaranaike to run for office in his place, assuming she would be a political placeholder.
Bandaranaiake was the visual embodiment of what her society expected from a widow, from the dark shadows under her eyes to her white mourning sari. She played tapes of her husband’s speeches at every campaign stop. The press called her the “weeping widow.”
In fact, Bandaranaiake was not the political innocent expected by both her supporters and detractors. In addition to the political education she received as the daughter and wife of important politicians, she had years of experience as an leader in Ceylon’s largest Buddhist women’s organization. Prior to her first election, she worked to improve economic and social conditions in rural areas, focusing on rice yields, women’s education, and access to family planning—all political hot buttons at the time.
Her widow’s walk was the first step in a forty-year career in national politics. She served as prime minister three times for a total of eighteen years and became a dominant figure in Sri Lankan politics. A weeping widow, perhaps, but not a wimpy widow.
From the Archives: Did Civil War Nurses Wear Uniforms?
Dear Marginalia: I’m coming close to the deadline and close to the end of the book. I’m also in Kenosha, Wisconsin, speaking at a Civil War medicine weekend at the Civil War museum here. ( Saturday, 2/17, 1 PM–stop on by if you’re in the neighborhood!) It’s a lovely way to hit the road for 36 hours and fluff up my brain before settling down for the last mad dash.
Since I’m thinking about Civil War nurses again this weekend, I thought I’d share this post from the past. New blog posts coming soon, I guarantee it!
***
If you poke around the Internet looking for pictures of Civil War nurses for any length of time, you find pictures of youngish women in identical dresses with white caps and aprons identified as Civil War nurses. Every time I see them I want to pound my fist on my desk and say “No! No! No!”
The pictures are wrong in so many ways. For one thing, the dresses have the wrong silhouette for the period.* The dresses are frequently white. And in a few egregiously wrong cases, the women are wearing Red Cross armbands. (As a reminder, Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross in 1881–fifteen years after the end of the war.)
The fact of the matter is that, with the exception of the several hundred nuns who served, the women who volunteered as nurses did not wear uniforms. They definitely didn’t wear spiffy white dresses.
Instead they looked more like this:
Dorothea Dix had a strict dress code for her nurses. They were to wear brown, gray, or black dresses: practical choices given the inevitable exposure to blood, pus, vomit, and other filth in a hospital of that day and the heroic efforts required to do laundry in the nineteenth century.** Bows, curls, jewelry, and especially hoop skirts and crinolines were forbidden. Again, a practical requirement. Hospitals were crowded and the aisles were too narrow for women in fashionably wide skirts to walk through them. In at least one case, a wounded soldier is reported to have bled to death when the crinoline worn by a female visitor caught on his cot and tore open his wound. ***
Nurses who served on the United States Sanitary Commission’s hospital transit ships weren’t bound by Dix’s restrictions, but they soon recognized the practical value of her rules given the realities of life on the ships. Many of them arrived wearing the ribbons and ruffles typical of women of their class, but they soon abandoned frilly dresses in favor of a skirt and a man’s flannel shirt, worn with the collar open, the sleeves rolled up, and the shirttail out. They dubbed the shirts “Agnews,” after the doctor from whom they stole the first shirt.
Even the “Agnew “was a long way from the practicality of this:
Modern nursing field uniform, courtesy of US Army Medical Department, Office of Medical History
My guess is that Miss Dix would have approved.
*Leg o’mutton sleeves were popular in the 1830s and again in the 1890s, but not in the 1860s.
**Perhaps the subject of a future blog post. What say you, Margin-ites?
***This may be a nineteenth century urban legend: I’ve seen many accounts of this incident, all phrased in similarly cautious terms and none of them attributed to a specific contemporary source.