‘The Woman’s Question . . . began in the pocket’
Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900
Yale University Press, 264pp, 35.00, ISBN 9780300239072
reviewed by Anna Parker
Writing to Horace Walpole in 1737, the general and politician Henry Seymour Conway described a cross-country carriage journey that he had shared with ‘an immense, fat, brandy-faced female’. His discomfort grew when the woman started to eat, pulling her tie-on pocket out from under the folds of her dress and emptying its contents. It turned out that ‘what I took for a simple pocket [was] a cornucopia, for it disembogued itself successfully of 20 different stores of raisins, almonds, apples, oranges, etc. etc.’ Misogynist caricature aside, a 21st-century reader might well feel jealous of this ‘brandy-faced female’. The clothes of the modern woman have very few pockets, certainly none that could hold apples, oranges and more besides. Designers generally prefer their clothes to create a slinky feminine silhouette, rather than to be functional with a bulging pocket. This is a problem so widespread that it has become a meme, celebrating the rare smugness of being able to respond ‘Thanks, it’s got pockets!’ (and putting hands in the pockets) when receiving a complement on a dress.
Being pocket-less generates particular ways of being. It shapes women’s behaviours, our relationships with others, and our interactions with the things – smartphone, bankcard, tampon, lighter – that satellite around us. At a bar or a party, I often ask my male friends to store my things in their deep pockets, which means that all evening I am on alert that they do not go home with my possessions tucked safely away. This lack of pockets is a perfect example of the way in which the design of material things often does not take into account the needs of women. During the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote of her frustration that the average smartphone is now too big for most women’s hands. This made it impossible for her to hold her phone one-handed in order to document the use of tear gas on protestors. Not to mention, larger phones do not fit in women’s pockets, should they be lucky enough to have them. It is little surprise that opposition to male-orientated design was a rallying point for early feminists. In 1907, the illustrated newspaper The Graphic wrote ‘The Woman’s Question . . . began in the pocket’.
Far from being something small and on the side, pockets (or indeed, the lack of them) speak to multiple facets of women’s experiences. This is the argument made by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux in The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900. By asking their own questions of the pocket, the authors compellingly tell the cultural and social history of women in 18th- and 19th-century Britain.
In this period, the tie-on pocket was the main form of personal, mobile storage for women, gradually falling out of favour at the beginning of the 20th century. Worn around the waist, the tie-on pocket was a pouch with a slit in the front, enabling the owner to easily reach in and take things out. A tie-on pocket might hold coins, keys, pocketbooks, pins, jewellery, talismans and sentimental keepsakes. In the 18th century, the wife of Oliver Goldsmith transported a ‘plumb cake’ (tragically squashed into ‘crumbs’) in hers. White linen was the most favoured material, but tie-on pockets were often decorated with flashes of colourful fabric or painstakingly embroidered by their owners. These pockets could be worn over clothes, or concealed underneath them. Once taken off, they would be carefully placed within the home, perhaps under the woman’s pillow or bed for security. Given its intimate connection with women’s bodies, the tie-on pocket often appeared as a device in contemporary culture. For example, in Thomas Bridges’s novel Adventures of a Bank-Note (1770), the male note goes on a metaphorical sexual escapade, spending some time in ‘the fusty warmth of a [woman’s] greasy pocket’.
To use a single object to tell a complex and ‘long’ history is a departure in approach. Object-centred histories are not unusual: Neil MacGregor’s 2010 radio programme A History of the World in 100 Objects raised the public profile of material culture studies and spawned many similar projects. Yet, there are very few books that maintain a focus on one object and theme across the centuries. Burman and Fennetaux masterfully balance geographies and timescales, weaving a highly readable and engaging narrative. Much of the book’s hypothesis is taken from surviving pockets themselves. Burman and Fennetaux’s attention to the stitched and stamped names or initials with which women proudly marked their pockets gives voice to individuals that are otherwise silent in the historical record. These surviving examples are well contextualised with texts, images and criminal court records. The result is a book that vividly and evocatively brings to life the everyday histories of women. The reader is led through the streets, the factory and the home, and is invited to look closely at the small boxes or wound-up handkerchiefs where women kept their most treasured possessions.
While the gaze is drawn to the small, private and intimate details of women’s lives, this is no small-scale history. As Burman and Fennetaux argue, ‘what is small can recalibrate our vision of the large’, and they track deftly between the micro and macro throughout. The tie-on pocket is closely connected to the developments in the history of Britain. For example, Burman and Fennetaux explore the growth of pocket-sized nature books in the 18th century, intended to equip middle-class women as they explored the new ‘public’ spaces of gardens, parks and nature reserves. At the end of the 19th century, sturdy tie-on pockets were produced for the wives of colonialists, with this item favoured for the secure storage that they provided as they travelled across Britain’s expanding empire.
While The Pocket is skilfully tied to the history of women, this book is at its most exciting when it uses the tie-on pocket as a way in to the more prosaic aspects of ordinary women’s lives. For example, Burman and Fennetaux examine women’s work from multiple angles. The washing, bleaching, mending and storing of household linen was an enormous part of women’s housework, and yet was little recorded. Burman and Fennetaux reveal women to be extremely adept managers of this process, and of the household’s resources more generally. The inventory of Mary Young in the 1830s included a note stating that ‘Every P[ai]r of Sheets and Pillow Cases is marked with a letter to denote the bed they belong to and particulars of the date when they were purchased kept in a small red book – in the linen press’. Lower down the social scale, the tie-on pockets of poor women were invaluable as they moved across the country, through different types of work, and in and out of crime. In London in 1846 Mary Green, who worked for a horse-hair manufacturer, was charged with theft after her employer saw her surreptitiously take some stock, ‘lift up her clothes and put it into a large pocket which she had tied around her’. Burman and Fennetaux movingly present the vulnerabilities, and yet the resilience, of plebeian women as they eked out a living.
As well as enriching our understanding of the lives of women, The Pocket reframes our understanding of ‘fashion’. ‘Fashion’ is normally written about as a one-way march towards novelty, one trend overtaking the other. This season, clashing prints are out, Molly Goddard-style ruffles are in. The Pocket takes a long view, traversing between the ‘early modern’ and ‘modern’, time periods that are normally separated by historians. By crossing this boundary, Burman and Fennetaux find that the story of the tie-on pocket is one of considerable consistency over the generations. This is shown in how the tie-on pocket was made, and what it was made of. Cotton, ‘the first global fibre’, imported from India in the 18th century, did not replace other materials, but instead small scraps of printed cotton were used to add a flash of colour to the ever-popular linen. The domestic sewing machine, introduced in the 1860s, did not transform how the pocket was made. Surviving examples show that women generally continued to stitch these personal, intimate items by hand, and that they were carefully mended or recycled when they wore out. Even when the tie-on pocket decreased in popularity, it was not fully out. In 1916, the tailor’s magazine The Draper’s Record wrote that replacing a ‘really useful pocket’ with a handbag was a ‘crass absurdity’.
In recent years, the modern ‘fast fashion’ cycle has received growing critical attention. The environmental campaign group Extinction Rebellion protested at this year’s London Fashion Week, raising awareness of the enormous ecological and social impact of the cyclical and throw-away nature of the industry. Without romanticising the past, The Pocket highlights the ‘culture of preservation [that] formed a powerful undertow to the consumption of novelty and fashion’. In the late 1700s, one woman made a pocket from 22 pieces of cloth that she had hoarded over 30 years, patchworking the printed, woven and embroidered scraps together. This attention to the ‘culture of preservation’ can be read as a much-needed corrective to how we live now: the stories of women who lovingly patched, darned and reused their tie-on pockets shows that a different relationship to clothing is possible.
The Pocket is a deft and adroit history of women’s lives as told through their clothing. It illuminates women’s lives in their richness and complexity, taking the reader as close to historical ‘experience’ as it is possible to be. Burman and Fennetaux show how ordinary women negotiated the structures of patriarchy, creating space for themselves, even if it was just in their tie-on pockets. This enriches our understanding of women’s history and challenges our perceptions. Most of all, it is an argument for the profound meaning that can be found in minute, everyday detail.
Being pocket-less generates particular ways of being. It shapes women’s behaviours, our relationships with others, and our interactions with the things – smartphone, bankcard, tampon, lighter – that satellite around us. At a bar or a party, I often ask my male friends to store my things in their deep pockets, which means that all evening I am on alert that they do not go home with my possessions tucked safely away. This lack of pockets is a perfect example of the way in which the design of material things often does not take into account the needs of women. During the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote of her frustration that the average smartphone is now too big for most women’s hands. This made it impossible for her to hold her phone one-handed in order to document the use of tear gas on protestors. Not to mention, larger phones do not fit in women’s pockets, should they be lucky enough to have them. It is little surprise that opposition to male-orientated design was a rallying point for early feminists. In 1907, the illustrated newspaper The Graphic wrote ‘The Woman’s Question . . . began in the pocket’.
Far from being something small and on the side, pockets (or indeed, the lack of them) speak to multiple facets of women’s experiences. This is the argument made by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux in The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900. By asking their own questions of the pocket, the authors compellingly tell the cultural and social history of women in 18th- and 19th-century Britain.
In this period, the tie-on pocket was the main form of personal, mobile storage for women, gradually falling out of favour at the beginning of the 20th century. Worn around the waist, the tie-on pocket was a pouch with a slit in the front, enabling the owner to easily reach in and take things out. A tie-on pocket might hold coins, keys, pocketbooks, pins, jewellery, talismans and sentimental keepsakes. In the 18th century, the wife of Oliver Goldsmith transported a ‘plumb cake’ (tragically squashed into ‘crumbs’) in hers. White linen was the most favoured material, but tie-on pockets were often decorated with flashes of colourful fabric or painstakingly embroidered by their owners. These pockets could be worn over clothes, or concealed underneath them. Once taken off, they would be carefully placed within the home, perhaps under the woman’s pillow or bed for security. Given its intimate connection with women’s bodies, the tie-on pocket often appeared as a device in contemporary culture. For example, in Thomas Bridges’s novel Adventures of a Bank-Note (1770), the male note goes on a metaphorical sexual escapade, spending some time in ‘the fusty warmth of a [woman’s] greasy pocket’.
To use a single object to tell a complex and ‘long’ history is a departure in approach. Object-centred histories are not unusual: Neil MacGregor’s 2010 radio programme A History of the World in 100 Objects raised the public profile of material culture studies and spawned many similar projects. Yet, there are very few books that maintain a focus on one object and theme across the centuries. Burman and Fennetaux masterfully balance geographies and timescales, weaving a highly readable and engaging narrative. Much of the book’s hypothesis is taken from surviving pockets themselves. Burman and Fennetaux’s attention to the stitched and stamped names or initials with which women proudly marked their pockets gives voice to individuals that are otherwise silent in the historical record. These surviving examples are well contextualised with texts, images and criminal court records. The result is a book that vividly and evocatively brings to life the everyday histories of women. The reader is led through the streets, the factory and the home, and is invited to look closely at the small boxes or wound-up handkerchiefs where women kept their most treasured possessions.
While the gaze is drawn to the small, private and intimate details of women’s lives, this is no small-scale history. As Burman and Fennetaux argue, ‘what is small can recalibrate our vision of the large’, and they track deftly between the micro and macro throughout. The tie-on pocket is closely connected to the developments in the history of Britain. For example, Burman and Fennetaux explore the growth of pocket-sized nature books in the 18th century, intended to equip middle-class women as they explored the new ‘public’ spaces of gardens, parks and nature reserves. At the end of the 19th century, sturdy tie-on pockets were produced for the wives of colonialists, with this item favoured for the secure storage that they provided as they travelled across Britain’s expanding empire.
While The Pocket is skilfully tied to the history of women, this book is at its most exciting when it uses the tie-on pocket as a way in to the more prosaic aspects of ordinary women’s lives. For example, Burman and Fennetaux examine women’s work from multiple angles. The washing, bleaching, mending and storing of household linen was an enormous part of women’s housework, and yet was little recorded. Burman and Fennetaux reveal women to be extremely adept managers of this process, and of the household’s resources more generally. The inventory of Mary Young in the 1830s included a note stating that ‘Every P[ai]r of Sheets and Pillow Cases is marked with a letter to denote the bed they belong to and particulars of the date when they were purchased kept in a small red book – in the linen press’. Lower down the social scale, the tie-on pockets of poor women were invaluable as they moved across the country, through different types of work, and in and out of crime. In London in 1846 Mary Green, who worked for a horse-hair manufacturer, was charged with theft after her employer saw her surreptitiously take some stock, ‘lift up her clothes and put it into a large pocket which she had tied around her’. Burman and Fennetaux movingly present the vulnerabilities, and yet the resilience, of plebeian women as they eked out a living.
As well as enriching our understanding of the lives of women, The Pocket reframes our understanding of ‘fashion’. ‘Fashion’ is normally written about as a one-way march towards novelty, one trend overtaking the other. This season, clashing prints are out, Molly Goddard-style ruffles are in. The Pocket takes a long view, traversing between the ‘early modern’ and ‘modern’, time periods that are normally separated by historians. By crossing this boundary, Burman and Fennetaux find that the story of the tie-on pocket is one of considerable consistency over the generations. This is shown in how the tie-on pocket was made, and what it was made of. Cotton, ‘the first global fibre’, imported from India in the 18th century, did not replace other materials, but instead small scraps of printed cotton were used to add a flash of colour to the ever-popular linen. The domestic sewing machine, introduced in the 1860s, did not transform how the pocket was made. Surviving examples show that women generally continued to stitch these personal, intimate items by hand, and that they were carefully mended or recycled when they wore out. Even when the tie-on pocket decreased in popularity, it was not fully out. In 1916, the tailor’s magazine The Draper’s Record wrote that replacing a ‘really useful pocket’ with a handbag was a ‘crass absurdity’.
In recent years, the modern ‘fast fashion’ cycle has received growing critical attention. The environmental campaign group Extinction Rebellion protested at this year’s London Fashion Week, raising awareness of the enormous ecological and social impact of the cyclical and throw-away nature of the industry. Without romanticising the past, The Pocket highlights the ‘culture of preservation [that] formed a powerful undertow to the consumption of novelty and fashion’. In the late 1700s, one woman made a pocket from 22 pieces of cloth that she had hoarded over 30 years, patchworking the printed, woven and embroidered scraps together. This attention to the ‘culture of preservation’ can be read as a much-needed corrective to how we live now: the stories of women who lovingly patched, darned and reused their tie-on pockets shows that a different relationship to clothing is possible.
The Pocket is a deft and adroit history of women’s lives as told through their clothing. It illuminates women’s lives in their richness and complexity, taking the reader as close to historical ‘experience’ as it is possible to be. Burman and Fennetaux show how ordinary women negotiated the structures of patriarchy, creating space for themselves, even if it was just in their tie-on pockets. This enriches our understanding of women’s history and challenges our perceptions. Most of all, it is an argument for the profound meaning that can be found in minute, everyday detail.