WHAT'S IN A NAME? by Penny Dolan.

Last Sunday people stopped, stood silently for two minutes in honour of those who died in World War I and in more recent conflicts. People remembered the names of those who had died: the names carved on War Memorials or told in family stories whether in Britain or elsewhere.

This History Girls post is a personal story about name and identity and the aftermath of war: the subject is my mother’s oldest brother, named Herbert, who was born in India in 1910.

His father was true army, both as an orphaned boy-soldier and as a man. His mother was the sixth of seven children of another Indian Army officer and, in that time and climate, both would have been familiar with death. They brought the boys to England sometime around 1914. Herbert and his two brothers would have been far too young to serve but perhaps they travelled on the troopships bringing the Indian soldiers to Suez and on to France.

Herbert was the oldest son: however he did not want to be a soldier. Studious and sensitive, he took a clerical post and became interested in the church and books and amateur dramatics.

Then, aged around twenty, along with a close friend, he converted from Anglicanism to the Catholic Church and took a new name: Michael.

Saint Michael the Archangel, venerated in Christian and other faiths, is depicted with the sword he used to defeat Satan. In another role, as the Angel of Death, he offers redemption to dying souls and is therefore a rather useful devotion for anyone involved in battle.

A good soldierly name, but his father did not welcome the religious conversion. Herbert’s mother wanted to follow but that caused so marital trouble that she took it no further.

Not long after, Michael chose to pursue his vocation. He went to Begbroke Priory in Oxford, the Novitiate House of the Servants of Mary. I do wonder what had happened in his life that had made him so devoted to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows? 

Had he seen disabled soldiers on the London streets? Or lost friends in the Flu Pandemic? Had his mother's and little sister's illnesses driven him to a deeper faith? Was any unknown sibling lost on the way? Something made Herbert Michael take a different direction but I do not know what.

On his ordination to the priesthood, he chose another military name: Martin.  

Saint Martin was a soldier in the Roman army. As he approached the gates of the city of Amiens, he met a half-naked beggar. Martin tried to give him his thick army cloak, but the beggar refused, saying that would leave Martin without one. Martin declared he could not leave the beggar to face another cold night. Impulsively, Martin slashed his cloak in two, gave one half to the beggar and went on his way. That night Martin saw a vision of Jesus, wearing the half-cloak he had given away. Martin became a revered priest, bishop and saint and his half-cloak was kept as a precious relic in Tours cathedral.

His order sent Father Martin to Salford during the war years, working in the Manchester slums. He was rarely able to visit home. On his annual visit to the Servite Mother House in Fulham, London, Father Martin could visit his mother for an afternoon. Sometimes he brought a troop of Scouts south to a Jamboree in Gilwell Park, near Epping so we could visit him there. But mostly he stayed away.

He led what seemed to me to be an odd but culturally rich life. We had some of his now unwanted books around: books of poems and plays and Lake District walks and watercolours. He sent me letters with amusing drawings and introduced me to the Victoria and Albert and the British Museum. I adored him from an awkward distance, for he could have a terrifying temper.

A sense of separation was inevitable, I suppose. Despite various vicar-detective tv fantasies, strict religious observances kept faiths apart during those decades.

Catholicism was seen as a faith of foreigners, with sins told in secret. The Church liturgy was not straightforward but recited in Latin with bells and even the daily practice was full of precise rituals and prayers. Communicants fasted from the evening before Mass, both the rich and those who had little food in their bellies in those hungry times and there was all that fuss about fish on Fridays. Divorce was impossible and Catholics could not attend any service – even a marriage or a funeral – in the church of another faith without permission, and those who entered the religious orders were encouraged to view the order as their family, rather than real relatives.

Maybe more than all that, as I grew older, I picked up another problem. His younger brother fought in the Second World War and came back from Dunkirk with his hair turned white. My father, who flew in bombers, returned with headaches and violent mood swings. 

Whenever they got together, and Uncle Michael was mentioned, there was a slight, silent accusation in the air that, for all his soldierly names and his good work in the slum parishes, the beloved man was a soldier’s son who never served in the war.  It was one of those unspoken silences that echo on and on in the wake of war.

Penny Dolan

A History of Periods, Politics and Emoji Pants by Fay Bound Alberti

On a bitter cold day in January 2018, a woman died in Nepal after she was forced to live in a menstruating hut. She had been banished to the unheated hut for the duration of her period, a still-common practice in Nepal, despite the fact that the weather often falls below zero degrees celsius in the winter. The woman died from smoke inhalation after she lit a fire to try to get warm. 

A menstruating hut in Nepal

This sad story was announced soon after the publication of an article on the politics of periods that I wrote for a new online literary magazine called  Boundless. Dedicated to long-form writing and edited by the incomparable Arifa Akbar, former Independent literary editor, it's a fantastic resource, and one that I urge readers to check out. 

My article considered why periods are so shameful when they are such a natural part of human existence. Most major belief systems, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, place restrictions on menstruating women. Leviticus 15:19 and 24 states: ‘if a woman has an emission, and her emission in her flesh is blood, she shall be seven days in her [menstrual] separation, and anyone who touches her shall be tamei…[ritually unclean] until evening.’ Followers of the Qur'an regard menstruation as ‘an impurity’, often banning menstruating women from religious and social practices. In the Christian tradition, menstruation and pain in childbirth was God’s punishment when Eve tempted Adam. This is the origin of the 'curse', a term still used for menstruation.

The creation of Eve (Wellcome Images)

Menstruation has not been considered 'proper history' in the past. That is, before the 1970s and women's history, family history and medical history found new ways of redressing the gender and class imbalance of traditional history and exploring new sources. There remains a limit to what we know about menstruation in the ancient world, however, since records of the time were taken by men. They therefore didn't record women's cycles, or consider what 'normal' might have been. Ancient Egyptian women are said to have used cloths on sticks to stem the flow, or wedges of papyrus, a plant-based material also used to make paper. Classical books talked about 'wombfuls' of blood, but were not specific about how much blood a woman might have lost. 

In keeping with religious concerns about menstruation,we do know that classical writers worried about women's association with witchcraft, the natural world and spiritualism. Pliny the Elder, a Roman author and philosopher, believed that menstruating women could prevent hailstorms and protect crops. Period blood was not always depicted as revolting; ancient Egyptians may have included menstrual blood in medical recipes. 

Pliny the Elder, killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, AD 79

What did women do without Tampax? The same as they do in most of the world today. Ragged cloths that were washed seems the likely option, especially in medieval times, and this explains the modern term 'on the rag' to describe a menstruating woman. It is likely that poor women with little access to hot water had little option but to use and reuse the same rag, or to bleed on their clothes. By the nineteenth century there was more concern about hygiene, and more 'scientific' language by which the female body and menstruation was understood. 

Sanitary belts were created by the end of the nineteenth century, and washable pads could be attached to the belt. By the 1980s, adhesive strips on sanitary towels and tampons were more popular. But this did not mean that the shame around women's bodies and menstruation was reduced. In the modern West, menstruation remains shrouded in disgust and shame, even where scientific explanations show it to be a natural biomedical process rather than related to magic or divinity.

Early 20th-century newspaper advert for a sanitary belt

Consider European popular culture, which has many slang words for periods, few of them positive. English examples are Aunt Flo, Bloody Mary, Code Red, The Blob and Shark Week; while the French included La semaine Ketchup (ketchup week), VHS (vaginalement hors service), Les chutes du Niagra (Niagra Falls). And in German:  Die rote pest (the red pest) and Besuchvon Tante Rosa (a visit from Aunt Rose). 

It's not just periods, but women who are on their periods that are the subject of disempowering language. Menstruating women are ‘PMS-ing’, ‘On the Blob’ or ‘Out of Service’. Jokes about menstruation depict periods as a disruptive force that lessens women’s intellectual capacities, and reduces them to their biological function. 

In schools, children are taught a basic biomedical model: each month the uterine lining thickens and becomes vascularized in case an egg is fertilised. If it is not, the unused blood is released as a period. Boys and girls (and boys are usually excluded from the classroom) are not taught the psychological, social or cultural contexts of menstruation, of the constituents of period blood, of the different cycles girls might experience, or how cycles can differ between girls. Menstruation simply marks girls and women apart as different and, in some contexts inferior, like the poor girl who died in Nepal, or the thousands of women from developing countries who cannot attend school because they do not have sanitary supplies. 'Period poverty' is also a problem in the UK. 

It's striking how little we have progressed from nineteenth-century ideas about menstruation, which is where much of our language of the body comes from. Victorian medics were convinced that menstruation weakened women, providing evidence of their biological and spiritual inferiority. Women were already regarded as hysterical because of their ‘wandering wombs’ that caused havoc with women’s mental and physical health. Walter Heape, the anti-suffragist and Cambridge zoologist, drew attention to the terrifying spectacle of menstruation, that left behind ‘a ragged wreck of tissue, torn glands, ruptured vessels, jagged edges of stroma, and masses of blood corpuscles.’ Menstruating women couldn’t possibly tackle work, education or intellectual concerns, argued prominent Victorian writers, which women like Mary Wollstonecraft did much to tackle.

Discussions of periods used economic languages of production in the industrial age, with women’s bodies as baby-making factories: profitable or unprofitable, depending on their ability to produce. If conception was the proper result of the menstrual cycle, menstruation was failed production. The tissue lost during menstruation was ‘debris’ and waste. Early pregnancy failure was a ‘blighted ovum’, a womb that opened up too soon, an 'incompetent cervix'. 

Scientific medicine still talks about menstruation in these terms. The social meaning of menstruation also takes on different emphases throughout a woman’s life, highlighting the demand for youth in the modern West – at least for women. For an individual, menopause, or the literal stopping of the menses, might bring all kinds of exciting new opportunities into a woman's life. Yet in narrowly biomedical terms, it signals her lack of reproductive competence, and her social and sexual irrelevance. Menopausal women have a tendency to become invisible. 

In all kinds of areas, 21^st century women campaign for more social visibility, and equity with regard to their bodies, including around menstruation. In the digital age, new opportunities arise for us to talk about periods and how they are framed in society. For example, isn’t it extraordinary, given the fact that the average woman menstruates for 3,000 days, that there is no symbol for menstruation? There are, after all, emojis for everything from crystal balls to sushi, from faeces to tears. This is why the charity Plan International UK has been campaigning for a period emoji to allow people to communicate more openly. Nearly 55,000 people voted. The winner? A pair of white pants, decorated with two drops of blood.

The world's first period emoji, courtesy of Plan International 

Finding spaces to talk about menstruation in its own right and not as linked to fertility is important – and not only to avoid biological reductionism. The presumption that menstruation equals fertility and womanhood excludes women born without wombs as well transgender woman. It excludes women who choose not to have children, or are unable to have children. 

Reframing how we talk about the body, and rejecting historical ideas that are outmoded or reductive, is not new. Since the 1970s, the shaming and silencing of menstruation has been subverted. Feminist artists initially made periods visible. Judy Chicago’s ‘Menstruation Bathroom’ (1972), showcased a bin filled with used sanitary towels. In the 1990s, Tracy Emin casually disposed of used tampons in ‘My Bed’ (1998), described as ‘a violent mess of sex and death’. In 2015 Kiran Ghandi ran the London marathon while menstruating, and without using tampons or pads, to highlight menstrual stigma. And in 2017 the #BloodNormal campaign won the right to use red rather than blue fluid in menstrual product advertising. This important step demystifies the idea and image of period blood, and marks a shift towards normalizing menstruation. 

Periods are political, as their history shows. Which is why we need more education about what is 'normal' or abnormal, more discussion about the differences between women, and better metaphors for women's bodies that aren't based on outdated ideas of the factory. When it comes to the history and experience of menstruation we need less shaming, and more talking. Period.

 

Joel Filipe, on Unsplash.com

My website: www.fayboundalberti.com
Twitter: @fboundalberti 

Trade in the 17th Century - The Tallow Chandler

by Deborah Swift

Matthias Storm c.1640 Old Woman with a Candle

I was at a great loss for candles; so that as soon as ever it was dark, which was generally by seven o'clock, I was obliged to go to bed ……… The only remedy I had was, that when I had killed a goat, I saved the tallow, and with a little dish of clay, which I baked in the sun, to which I added a wick of some oakum, I made me a lamp; and this gave me light, though not a clear steady light like a candle."

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719

Light has always been a symbol for move out of ignorance and into the light of knowledge. As long as we can manufacture and control light, then we are no longer bound by the seasons, or forced to work from sunrise to sunset. Light gives us extra time for work and play, and the time to create during the hours free from chores or work.

The candle was one of the earliest forms of artificial light, and in the period in which I write, most candles were tallow. I need to continually think of this whenever I write a night-time scene, or a winter scene. We take the availability of good light so much for granted.

The Stink of Tallow 
Tallow was cheap animal fat, usually the waste material from meat - hence often sheep or bullock fat.

The tallow was prepared by first chopping the fat into small pieces and then boiling it up in a large copper to detach the muscle or membrane from the fat. The resultant mush was pressed to extract the 'juice', or tallow, and the remains or 'greaves' fed to the dogs or pigs, and even to the geese that were being fattened up for market.To produce a pure light, the chandler must wrestle with dead animal carcasses, and the associated smell and mess. For this reason, chandlery was perceived as a very low class trade, and the chandlers premises were often located near the tanneries and slaughterhouses, and close to a river with access to water. The process reminds me that for every 'light' there is the often invisible 'dark'.

'A woman reading by Candle-light' by Frans van Mieris the elder,
c.1665; black chalk on vellum.

Fir candles, made of a long thin splinter of fir, were commonly used in Scotland, and a fir candle holder was known as a "puirman"(poorman). But tallow candles were the common household candle in early England, and by the 13th century, candle-making had become a guild craft in England and France, controlled by ancient City Livery Companies. The Tallow Chandlers Company, one of the London Guilds, sill exists. It was formed in about 1300 to regulate and manage candle-making. Over the next 150 years they expanded in membership and influence, until King Edward IV granted them a coat of arms in 1456.

In rural areas, where no Livery Company existed, chandlers would sometimes go from house to house with their moulds, making candles from the kitchen fats saved for that purpose, or in smaller towns they made and sold their own candles from a shop. Candle-making was usually done in winter by a householder, as livestock was generally slaughtered around Martinmas (November 11th) to save the expense of over-wintering them. Tallow candles could be made for you in your own home with your own saved drippings by an itinerant tallow chandler (tallow chandlers and wax chandlers had separate guilds, and jealously guarded their products).

Candles, especially tallow ones, were kept in a wooden or metal box hung on the wall in order to protect them from vermin, as being animal fat, mice regarded them as food. Being away from the fire also prevented the candles wilting and bending in heat.

A candle box of 1680

Holy Beeswax
Unlike animal-based tallow, beeswax burned pure and cleanly, without producing a smoky flame. It also had a pleasant sweet smell rather than the foul, acrid odor of tallow. However,  it took an entire honeycomb's worth of beeswax to make one 4" candle, so it was very expensive. Beeswax candles were widely used for church ceremonies. The beeswax itself had a religious significance in 17th Century England. One story is that bees were absent from the Garden of Eden and so escaped Eve's sin. Another is that medieval monks thought that bees reproduced by immaculate conception, like the Virgin Mary, and so the beeswax of a church candle came to signify purity.

The Revolutionary Art of Plaiting a Wick
The absorbency and efficiency of a wick depended on the number of individual strands. Adding or subtracting a few extra strands of animal hair or hemp fibre made the difference between a candle that burned well, or one that guttered or dripped. The wicks were made from twisted threads of flax, cotton, or hemp, and trimming the wick to get rid of candle "snuffs" was essential to keeping your candle burning well, or it would flare and smoke. I often imagine my characters having to trim the wick in the middle of conversations, or tackling writing a letter.

The best wicks were invented later in the 19th century, and revolutionised the candle. They were plaited so they curled as they burned to ensure that the tip burnt off during use so they didn't have to be continually trimmed, thus ensuring you could carry out your task uninterrupted. To achieve this curl, the plait or braid of a wick was woven asymmetrically, with a few extra strands in one of the threads. After being cut to length, the wicks were dipped in molten wax so that one end was stiff enough to poke through the hole at the bottom of the mould, and then the moulds were filled.

Wooden & Pewter Candle Mould

The Fall of Tallow

The tallow chandler's fortunes declined at the end of the 17th century. New materials, such as spermacetti (from whale blubber) and paraffin wax, replaced tallow. Then in the late 19th Century gas lighting arrived, twelve times as bright as a candle, only to be replaced by electricity twenty years later. These eras are comparatively short, when you think that we had many hundreds of years where most of our light was by the dim smoky haze of tallow candles.

More about lighting? Lucy Worsley has a post about domestic lighting here.

Thank you for reading. Find my latest book, Pleasing Mr Pepys, here.

Sources:

Images from Wikicommons

The Social History of Lighting - William O'Dea

Restoration London - Liza Pickard

At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime - Roger Ekirch

http://clanntartan.sitesneakpeek.com/manual/lighting.html
https://www.tallowchandlers.org

https://www.periodoakantiques.co.uk