Needlework

[mrissa]

Oh, people. People, people, people, I am so tired of dislike of needlework being used as a stand-in for making a young female character actually interesting. I see this mostly in middle-grade fantasies, mostly. Not so much in YA, although I don’t know if that’s because I’m not seeing as much secondary world YA as I’d like. It sometimes goes

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[rikibeth]

And cross-stitch wasn't an exercise in decorative futility the way it is now (I love the interesting stitches in crewel-work, but counted-cross drives me bonkers); it was the standard stitch used for putting initials and numbers onto shirts and so on for laundry-marking, to make sure those were worn in rotation so they'd wear evenly, and to tell family members' things apart when the sizes didn't make it instantly apparent.

I can see how the religious or exhortative texts sometimes used on samplers might have driven a more restless girl mad, though. I can't remember which character I read who was set to stitching one that said "When I was young and in my prime / Here you may see how I spent my time" and, when she finished it, she burnt it, because she couldn't think of a more stifling sentiment, and she went off and had adventures or something. It might even have been Susan in Emma Bull and Steven Brust's "Freedom and Necessity", which would put it firmly Victorian and in the hands of a young girl who'd always have servants to do the required making and mending.

[cissa]

Also- urban families often did not do laundr5y in-house but sent it out. Then the monograms were important to make sure that the sheets, underwear, etc. came back to the families that they came from.

I find it fascinating that a lot of chores we currently have privatized used to- in Victorian urban households, anyway- be farmed out. Laundry, cooking, etc.

[rikibeth]

When I was quite young - this would be before 1975, at the very latest - my parents did not yet own a washing machine large enough to handle king-size sheets, so their bedsheets went out to an actual Chinese laundry, the same one they'd used for more than that when they lived in an apartment and had even less in the way of laundry facilities.

Their laundry number was 59. I still have a few flat sheets of theirs with that marking in them. Yes, I'm going to mend a tear in one, because the old, untreated percale is SO SOFT, unlike anything I can get now.

[cissa]

Ooo! That's fascinating! I grew up in the suburbs, with no handy laundries like that around, but we had a washer and dryer in the basement. And I got stuck with most of the ironing. :P I have pretty much never ironed since.

I have had reasonable luck with high-thread-count all-cotton sheets, esp. in the 400-600 range. They've broken in nicely. The 1000 count, though is really stiff; I don't know what it would take, and I'm not sure I care to bother to find out! -Although I may dye them.

[rikibeth]

This was in the suburbs! The Chinese laundry was in Waltham, MA, in a little cluster of stores that couldn't even really be called a strip mall -- just a few adjacent shops that shared a few off-street parking spaces in front of them.

And we had a washer and dryer - it's just that for the first few years we lived in that house, the washer had a fairly small capacity, and king-size sheets wouldn't fit. So the laundry it was.

[mrissa]

Oh golly yes. Baking bread is one of the things that's stereotyped as "women's work," but there's a reason that Baker and Baxter are profession-names: urban people quite often did not bake their own bread. (And things like French toast/poor knights, bread pudding, etc. came about because even the people who did bake their own bread didn't always have a fresh loaf every day.) It is not even remotely a coincidence that my late grandmother who spent the entirety of her childhood on a farm is the one whose bread recipe I have, while my grandmother whose family moved to town and my great-grandmother who was an urban businesswoman never, to the best of my knowledge, regularly baked bread from scratch.