Sumer is icumen in, but am I ready for it?

By Susan Vincent

 

You know how the (very) old song goes:

Sumer is icumen in (Summer is a coming in)

Lhude sing cuccu (loud sing cuckoo)

Groweþ sed (groweth seed)

And bloweþ med (bloometh mead)
And once again I start to shave my underarms and legs.

 

 

So, I’m kidding about the last line, but the return of warmer weather and the corresponding casting of clouts, does mean for me a return to depilation. Now well into middle age, I am much less commited to the whole enterprise though. Something that was once a year-round practice has shrunk to the few months that require summer clothing, and even then only when I can be bothered.

Like my own personal practice, the history of women’s hair removal has been closely tied to what she wore – or, put more accurately, what she didn’t wear. The ‘problem’ areas were limited to those body parts on show.

 

Back when garments covered mostly everything from neck to feet, shoulder to wrist, then faces were the sole target. Recipes and advice manuals from these centuries suggest ways of tending to eyebrows, upper lip, and those pesky foreheads, at the time admired with a high hairline.

 

 

 

Then, as now, women might pluck with tweezers, 'wax' with a mastic, or use chemical depilatories. The last of these, by necessity home-made, featured a range of ingredients on a continuum from anodyne to excoriating and ordinary to outré. So we have things like vinegar, nettle heads, cats' dung or horse leeches (both dried and powdered), arsenic compounds, and quicklime. In the words of the author of one early printed recipe,

Some that have the hair of their forehead growing too low, others the hair of their eyebrows growing too thick; and some women that have haire growing on their lips, (an unseemly sight to see) would give any thing for this Secret. (La Fountaine, A brief collection of many rare secrets (1650), sig. Br.)

 

As sleeves got shorter from the later seventeenth century, a new potential area was disclosed: forearms. 

A handwritten recipe in one manuscript collection advises that you can dispose of long arm hair by singeing it off with a candle at the wane of the moon (London, Wellcome Library, English Recipe Book, 17th-18th century, c.1675-c.1800, MS. 7721, 'To hinder haire from growing'). I'm assuming this would be effective but for the life of me can't see how you'd escape painful burns – losing hair and skin, both. (One history lesson when I was fifteen was made memorable by the loud discussion between three of the girls about shaving forearms, with one demonstrating the results of her attempt. By contrast, I can remember nothing about that year’s actual curriculum.)

 

The Victorians, as we well know, were mad about head hair. For women it was an abundant crowning glory, brushed one hundred times (anecdotally anyway) and let down to her waist. Men had side whiskers, beards and a moustache; a manly beauty. But the Victorians were also vocal about the removal of hair from the wrong place. In the new world of print saturation, mass production and rampant advertising, the dread words ‘superfluous hair’ were presented as a suffering that could be relieved by the right product. Tweezers, mastics, creams, and now the newly invented electrolysis charged to the rescue, at a price.

 

This, except for the electrolysis, was little different from earlier ages. When sleeveless evening wear made an appearance though, the world definitely tilted, shifting closer to the precipice down which it would soon hurtle. 

And the destination at the bottom? The hairless woman. 

 

The next key moment came in the 1920s, and what a moment it was. Hemlines rose and for the first time, well, pretty much ever, adult women routinely showed that above the ankles, they had legs. And guess what, those legs needed to be hairless. 

 

And this was where the new invention of the safety razor was truly revolutionary. Breaking a centuries-old tradition linking masculinity and the open blade, the safety razor found a market with female users. Manufacturers were quick to spot the opening, developing dainty ‘women’s’ styles with attractive names and pretty cases. More helpfully, some even had design adapatations like a curved edge, easier for underarms. 

 

But the history of women’s hair removal is like a corporeal whack-a-mole, with new areas popping up that now suddenly need attention too. The old zones are not forgotten, more are just added. 

And so after a brief flurry of hair in the 1960s, the 1980s brought highcut swim and gym wear and a new worry about the bikini line. Over the ensuing decades the permutations of pubic hair removal have been many, with different mini-fashions of sculpting all nibbling away at the hairy growth between our legs. Total pubic depiliation is common. (Who knows, it might be the norm – obviously, it’s a bit hard to gain a sense of this through mass observation . . .)

 

 

For women, superfluous hair is a social solecism. A failure of femininity. And here’s the irony, it’s an invented problem. Growing alongside her sartorial emancipation, this is a new, and voluntary, servitude.

But I get it. Who is brave enough to defy cultural norms? More importantly, who is able to recalibrate their own ideas of beauty and decency in defiance of received assumptions and the familiarity of habit? A few can, but sadly I’m not among them. 

 

On the other hand, I have – joy of joys – discovered the delight of swim shorts.

 

 

Picture credits

Imgae 1: ‘shaving my legs’ by Mario A. P. is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Images 2 and 3: Queen Elizabeth I (The Ermine Portrait) by William Segar (and detail), c. 1585, Hatfield House, photo Wikimedia Commons

Image 4: Self-Portrait with a Harp by Rose Adélaïde Ducreux, oil on canvas, 1791. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Susan Dwight Bliss, Accession No. 67.55.1

Image 5: ‘Women 1888–1889, Plate 019’, Gift of Woodman Thompson, Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Image 6: Evening dress (silk, cotton), 1898–1900, House of Worth. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Miss Eva Drexel Dahlgren. Accession No. 1976.258.4a, b

Image 7: ‘Two women in pleated skirts’ by simpleinsomnia is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Images 8 and 9: Razorette miniature safety razor for women, case measures 2.25 inches in length, razor measures 1-5/8 inches, made In USA, c. 1930s–1940s, both photos by France1978 licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Image 10: ‘Um Mergulho’ by Rodrigo Soldon Souza is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Image 11: My Home magazine, ad for Veet depilatory (1930s), photo by davydubbit (‘Superfluous Hair’) licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

 

Cherry Blossom Tales - by Lesley Downer

Cherry blossoms at Yoshino. Katsushika Hokusai 1833. 
Met Museum, Rogers Fund 1922. Public domain

うつせみの世にも似たるか花ざくらさくと見しまにかつちりにけり
Like the world
Hollow as a cicada’s empty shell -
Oh cherry blossoms -
The moment that we see you bloom
You have already fallen.
                                Anonymous. From the Kokinshu anthology of poetry (915-929 AD)

April is cherry blossom season in Japan, when people gather to eat, drink, sing, make music and sometimes dance under the spreading branches of the beautiful pink cherry trees. For well over a thousand years the cherry blossoms have inspired poetry, art and stories and have held a special place in the hearts of Japanese people. 

Cherry blossom viewing on the hill of Tenjin Shrine. Utagawa
Hiroshige 1833. From the series Famous Views of Osaka.
MFA Boston. Public domain.

The most famous place of all for cherry blossom, all the way back to the time of the artist Hokusai and long before, is Mount Yoshino in Central Japan. In fact Yoshino is emblematic of cherry blossom. In poetry the word ‘Yoshino’ evokes cherry blossom and the word ‘hana’ (flowers, cherry blossom) evokes Mount Yoshino. 

Most cherry trees bear their blossom on leafless branches. First come single pink blossoms, then white blossoms, then double blossoms. The blooms last only a few days before they fall.

The Pathos of Things
The cherry blossoms are said to be like clouds as they bloom all at once and hang above the trees as if shrouding them in mist. They last just a few days before withering and falling, raining white petals all across Japan. The falling petals are often compared to snow. Their transience is what is treasured, symbolising the poignant evanescence of existence - the impermanence of all things, mono no aware, ‘the pathos of things’, the poignancy at the root of all existence, the fragility of life, beauty and love.

Cherry blossoms symbolize birth and death, beauty and violence. They are part of Shinto, part of the Japanese worship of nature, but historically they also signified the short but dramatic life of the samurai. The youthful kamikaze pilots were celebrated as being like cherry blossom, with its vivid beauty and brief existence.

So on the one hand they’re heralds of spring, of nature’s revival after the cold winter. They represent the beauty of nature, renewal of life, first love. But on the other the brevity of their existence gives them has a melancholy quality, a painful beauty.

Portrait of the Emperor Saga, Imperial
Collection, Tokyo, Japan. Public domain.

Gods inside the Cherry Trees
According to the eight century chronicle Nihon Shoki, there were cherry blossom festivals as early as the third century AD. The blossoming of the cherry trees marked the beginning of the planting season. Through the timing of the blossoming seers could divine whether the harvest would be good that year or whether the gods within the cherry trees needed to be propitiated. Worshippers made offerings of food and drink, then ate the food and drank the sake and thus the custom of eating and drinking under the cherry trees began.

In the Heian period, around the ninth century, Emperor Saga was so moved by the beauty of a particular cherry tree at Jishu Shrine (now within the Kiyomizu Temple complex in Kyoto) that he decided to hold a cherry blossom viewing party. There was eating, drinking, dancing, singing and poetry writing. Thereafter he held regular parties with sake and feasting under the blossoming boughs of the cherry trees in the Imperial Palace. 

Ki no Tomonori, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 
1840, William Sturgis Bigelow 
Collection, MFA Boston. Public domain.

People would write poems celebrating the flowers, like life itself, luminous and beautiful but fleeting and ephemeral, such as this waka (31 syllable poem) by Ki no Tomonori (850-904 AD), in the Kokinshu and also in Hyakunin Isshu (A Hundred Poems by A Hundred Poets), Japan’s most all time popular collection of poetry:

久方の光のどけき春の日にしづ心なく花のちるらむ
In these spring days
When tranquil light encompasses
The four directions,
Why do the blossoms scatter
With such uneasy hearts?

Cherry blossom features large in the 11th century Tale of Genji. The eighth chapter, entitled Hana no En (The Cherry Blossom Party) begins with a cherry blossom celebration with poetry, singing, drinking, eating and dancing. The party goes on well into the night. Afterwards the beautiful Prince Genji hears a lady singing a snatch of a famous poem. He catches her by the sleeve in his casual way and draws her gently inside, ‘closing the door behind them.’ Fortunately for Genji #metoo was still far in the future. 

Genji, Hana no En. Utagawa Kunisada 1857. 
From Lady Murasaki's Genji cards. 
MFA Boston. Public Domain.

The Biggest Tea Party of All Time
Up till now it was the imperial court and the samurai who enjoyed cherry blossom viewing. But then came the great warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He brought about the unification of Japan, then ushered in a glorious golden age of the arts. He particularly loved the tea ceremony. He twice invited the entire population of Kyoto to a huge tea ceremony and cherry blossom viewing. The first was in 1594 when he invited 5000 people for a huge party at Mount Yoshino.

For the second he invited 1300 guests. First he had Daigo-ji Temple in Kyoto renovated and had 700 cherry trees of different varieties brought in and planted along the approach and grounds.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi's cherry blossom viewing parade,
Daigo-ji, Fushima-ku, Kyoto Pref., Japan. 12 April 2009.
By Motokoka. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The party began with a huge procession. Dancers led the way to the doors of the huge main gate. Then came Hideyoshi’s samurai followed by yamabushi mountain ascetics and feudal lords. Hideyoshi, beaming joyously, decked out in colourful robes emblazoned with gold, was carried aloft on the shoulders of white-clad bearers. His son Hideyori followed together with his wife Nene and his concubines, including the famous beauty Lady Yodo (also known as Lady Cha-cha), the mother of the heir.

The party kept stopping for entertainment and the ascent took hours. The women changed outfits multiple times and many teahouses had been set up to cater to the 1,300 guests. Finally the entourage reached the great hall of the temple and the festivities began.

How Many Many Things They Bring to Mind

Under the Tokugawa shoguns the cultural centre shifted to Edo (now Tokyo). Successive shoguns planted cherry trees around the city. 

The eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684-1781), was a particular enthusiast of the cherry blossom and wanted to make cherry blossom viewing accessible to ordinary folk as well as to courtiers and samurai. He had cherry trees planted along the banks of the River Sumida, across the hills of Goten'yama in Shinagawa and along the banks of the River Tama, to provide places where impoverished commoners could relax and enjoy themselves.

Blossoms on the Tama River Embankment.
Utagawa Hiroshige 1856. MFA Boston.
Gift of Anna Ferris. Public Domain.

Meanwhile the merchants grew wealthier and wealthier. The shogunate passed sumptuary laws to prevent them from spending their wealth on ostentatious luxury. So they spent it in red-light districts, on geisha, and on cherry blossom parties in public parks. They modelled their parties on the courtly cherry blossom parties of the Heian period when the Tale of Genji was written but of course there was considerably less courtly entertainment and considerably more drink and rowdiness.

The poet Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) wrote many haiku celebrating the cherry blossom and drawing on their symbolism. He wrote one melancholy nostalgic haiku when he had gone back to his old home in Iga Ueno. The cherry blossoms there reminded him of a dear friend who had died twenty years earlier, cut off in his youth:

さまざまの事おもひ出す櫻かな
How many many things
They bring to mind -
The cherry blossoms! 

All pictures in the public domain.

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and an inveterate traveller. She is the author of many books on Japan, including The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale of love and death, out now in paperback. She also appears on Netflix's Age of Samurai! For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

My blog is actually a book - making the most of your backlist blogs

by Deborah Swift

The Blogger

I've been blogging for more than twelve years now, both here, on my own blog and on other people's blogs. The purpose of the blogging was to make people aware of my books by choosing sites that focussed on historical fiction. So the question is, did it drive much traffic to my books, and why only now, after all this time, am I starting to ask these questions?

The Backstory 

Late last year I decided I wanted a new website. My old one was outdated and looked tired, and I wanted to integrate some new ideas like giving away something free to generate traffic. I went to what I thought was a reputable company that specialized in WordPress websites. This was a massive mistake which I only realized once I'd got involved in the re-design and paid a large chunk of deposit. There never seemed to be the same person answering my queries twice, and when one thing was fixed another broke. Eventually after months of wrangling, crashes and disasters I asked someone for a recommendation and a new designer took over - phew! But what neither of us realized was that all the photos and links to my hundreds of blog posts were now missing or dead and didn't transfer over.

They are now lost and can't be reinstated and to individually find the links or pictures for each post is a massive task. Only posts since August 2020 are visible as they should be. Fortunately I had backed up my posts on Authory, (thank God!) but it doesn't save the pictures, so it would still be hundreds of hours of work to reinstate all the pictures, and the posts still be dead links from other websites. So it led me to the question of was it worth doing and...

Who reads blogs?

I decided to look at how many hits I got on my blog posts and the results were depressingly low. Mostly in single figures. I host blog tours on my blog for other Historical Fiction writers, and these posts were also getting very few hits, despite my desperate tweeting. I began to wonder if I should blog at all, and what was the point of writing stuff no-one would read. Certainly each post took hours of my time to write or set up, for the benefit of a handful of people who my Amazon rankings showed, probably never went on to buy a book. Supposedly traffic 'raises awareness', but what use all this awareness was, and how to cost it into my precious time, was debatable.

The Eureka moment - it's all writing

Following the 'lost blog post' disaster, I copied all the posts from Authory into one document. It was then that I realised - hey, it's all writing! This might seem obvious, but its not until you have more than 100,000 words in front of you that you realise you have produced a substantial body of work. I decided to divide this output into themes, and found I had many posts on the craft of writing, and even more posts on themes around the 17th Century. I began to collate them into e-booklets which could be given away and the first one on writing historical fiction is now available for free to anyone who wants to download it on Bookfunnel. It is a rough and ready document, not to be published or sold, but is there for anyone who wants to read it. The joy of it is that I can just give away this material, and it can have a second life.

How to do this if you want to have a go

First of all, it costs nothing - all the programmes to do it are free. The first collection  - Historical Fiction: 30 Posts on the Craft of Writing was made up as a simple Word Document. (I used the standard Headings function to make sure it would have a Table of Contents when converted.) 

The booklet is an hour's worth of e-reading and just over 20,000 words long, so the posts are in bite-size chunks. I made it into epub and Mobi (for Kindle) files using Calibre, and then made the simplest possible ebook cover in Canva. The whole thing took me a day to do. Yesterday eight people downloaded it. Yes, I know that's not very many, but there are links in it to my books - and who knows, maybe I'll be lucky and sell some! And instead of the posts being lost or never looked at again, they are having new eyes on them. In the next few weeks I'll do the second hour's worth of posts in another booklet to give away. What's more, it feels good to produce something from all those hours of work.

The Pay Off

Because I can see that there is the potential for another booklet on writing, and at least three on historical snippets of the 17th Century, it has re-enthused me to blog. If no-one reads the posts, well it's still writing. I love to write about the craft of writing, and each post goes to make up a larger body of work, which at some time, might become another free booklet that I can give away. The fact the posts might become something bigger has made me keen to write more of them. Because these are not 'officially published' and free I feel no pressure to make sure they are perfect. It is more important to get the work out there to be read.

My next booklet will probably be one called something like 'The 17th Century Miscellany' and will include many posts from this blog, my own blog and other places where I've blogged on history. I look forward to giving it away! If you're reading this, perhaps you've a collection of posts that can be made into a booklet?

Happy blogging!

Deborah's all new website is at www.deborahswift.com

Find me on Twitter @swiftstory