When my French grandmother died a few years ago, I holed myself up in her bathroom. I took one of her many lipsticks from the makeup cabinet, studied its half-used red nub, and found myself instantly transported back in time. Back to all the mornings on which I stood next to her, wide-eyed and wondering, as she applied the colour to her narrow lips. I thought of her, but also of her friends, her neighbours, the French women of her generation. Of a particular idea of womanhood. At that time, few women left the house without lipstick; for them, it was a question of attitude and respect. A way of inserting themselves into the ranks of “decent women”, who considered it one of their primary tasks to look beautiful and neat. Those little tubes of metal, black plastic and mother-of-pearl didn’t just say something about one woman – my grandmother – but testified immediately, wordlessly, to what it meant to be a middle-class woman in France in the latter half of the 20th century.
History can be narrated in so many ways. We can write of battles, wars and conquests, of treaties that drew new borders and economic developments that changed the balance of the world. We can describe history as a succession of unique, extraordinary events involving unique, extraordinary people and, in so doing, narrate it almost exclusively through the powerful, the victors and – let’s be honest – the men. With some exceptions, this is mainly what we do. We learn names and facts by heart, make pilgrimages to monuments, convey our past in a way that makes it seem just as stiff and cold – just as dead, almost – as the materials chosen to embody it. We keep the past and the people who lived in it, who dreamed, laughed, suffered, hoped and loved at a strangely abstract remove.
Objects, by contrast, build an almost sensory bridge between us and our ancestors. They are, if you like, the very opposite of monuments. They aren’t large and conspicuous, rarely occupy much space in public, don’t scream “big history” in our faces. They are part of everyday life, not unique but usually reproducible and, by their very nature, often so trivial that we find it hard to imagine their having anything “important” to relate. We fail to hear the messages they send us from the past, because we haven’t learned to decode them. This is a shame. Because if we make just a bit of effort, look a little closer, prick up our ears and – as Neil MacGregor says in the introduction to his seminal A History of the World in 100 Objects – employ “sufficient imagination”, they can give us unexpected insights into past times and bring distant epochs to life.
This is especially true of the history of women. Perhaps because women are so often conflated with objects, considered equally insignificant. Or perhaps because both have long been downplayed as being on the margins of history – and thus gone overlooked and unheard. The fact is that the objects standing around in antiques shops and flea markets, warehouses and museums, offer incredible access to the world of women’s experience.
Take, for example, the hatpin. Around 1900, when women began frequenting big city boulevards and inhabiting the public sphere to the same degree as men, society discovered a hitherto unknown (or, at least, undiscussed) issue: public harassment. Unused to the presence of women in “their” space, men apparently felt licensed to grope them. But women weren’t willing to be forced back into their parlours and found an unexpected weapon in one of the fashions of the day: the hatpin. Newspapers from the period are filled with women seeing off their attackers with the help of an accessory wielded like a sword. They were admired for their courage, considered heroic. That was, until the suffragettes took up the cause. When they seized on the issue as just one of many examples of inequality, the mood shifted. From then on, the concern was no longer women’s safety, but men’s – and wearing particularly long hatpins was forbidden in many cities.
Another, extremely moving example, is a small cloth bag from the 1850s, known as “Ashley’s sack”. Found a few years ago at a flea market in the US, at first glance it yields very little. Small – 83 by 40 centimetres – and made of slightly yellowed cotton, it could hardly appear more banal. Yet, woven into it is one of the greatest tragedies of history: the slave trade and its fracturing of families. It’s there in the words sewn on to the bag: “My great-grandmother Rose / mother of Ashley gave her this sack when / she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina … ” Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered them in 1920, 70 years after the fact, going on to describe how Rose filled the sack with nuts, a braid of hair and her love, and gave it to her child when they were parted.
In a manner we all can see and feel, this object bears witness to the fate of enslaved people and their children, to the way in which families were ripped apart and sold in different corners of the country. In its very inconspicuousness, it speaks of the destiny of thousands of mothers, fathers and their children. Rose and Ashley, the sack tells us, never saw each other again.
The examples are endless. Objects give us countless insights into the lived worlds of the past; they delineate different eras and their changing moods like geological strata. If my grandmother, for example, had been born a couple of decades earlier, her many lipsticks would have said something completely different about her. For women of the 1910s, red lips weren’t a sign of assimilation, as in the 1950s, but instead the preserve of suffragettes, the colourful accentuation of a body part that men increasingly feared as, for the first time, it issued demands loud and clear.
• Annabelle Hirsch is the author of A History of Women in 101 Objects (Canongate).
Further reading
A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor (Penguin, £16.99)
Normal Women by Philippa Gregory (William Collins, £15)
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (Profile, £25)
