City of Angels: Reflections on ASECS 2015

A week ago I had just gotten back from LA and the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). Last year’s meeting was in Williamsburg, Virginia, so it’s a bit hard to beat, from a historical perspective, though Los Angeles has its own charms, including delicious ethnic food, glittering sky scrapers, funky bookstores, and lots of big city glamour.

The famous/infamous Westin Bonaventure hotel.

Of course, I don’t really go to ASECS meetings for the glamour—unless you count the fashion styles of some of our most prominent scholars as “glamour,” which I do. President Kathleen Wilson gave her presidential address wearing a canary-yellow confection that would not have been out of place in Megan Draper’s closet on Mad Men, while John Richetti and Srinivas Aravamudan duked it out sartorially for the title of best-dressed dandy. I’m still deciding whether pink socks (John) trumps polka dot scarf and pork pie hat (Srinivas).

Scholarly fashion aside, this year’s conference was another personal success—and not just because I both presented a paper and chaired a roundtable, thought that was part of it. It was my fifth time at the annual meeting, which meant that there were ever more familiar names and faces to reconnect with, many wonderful folks from Twitter to finally meet in person, and an even greater sense of scholarly community to experience. Being the lone eighteenth-centuryist in my department in Texas, I enjoyed being surrounded by eighteenth-centuryists, even if I don’t always see eye-to-eye with them all.

My first ASECS was the meeting in Vancouver, and I still remember how wonderful it felt to share the first forays into my dissertation project with other people and get positive feedback. Last week, it still felt good to get positive feedback on the paper I gave and later on the roundtable I had assembled and chaired. Validation is an important part of the conference experience: our task is often a lonely one, and we need conversation and external validation in order to keep us going.

At the same time, conferencing also opens our eyes or, less dramatically, simply reminds us that there are people working in the same time period and perhaps even on related projects whose approach is diametrically opposed to our own. If you are like me, and you try to go to a couple of panels every day, then you are likely to hear papers that seem boring, irrelevant, or even wrong to your personal point of view and methodology. Those moments are difficult because they remind us that our own methods and objects of study are not the only ones out there; we are part of a larger constellation of projects and questions and areas of study that thrives on difference, not sameness.

Aside from the more esoteric side of conferencing, there is also a very pragmatic side. We come to conferences to meet people, not just ideas. I was fortunate enough to take advantage of the “Speed Mentoring” offered at this year’s conference, and there I met Kirsten Saxton, who, in about half an hour, listened to my questions, gave me great advice, and made me feel more confident about the next step in my career. I thus began my conferencing at ASECS with the sense of the humanness of conferences. I also ended it that way when I attended the Women’s Caucus annual luncheon on Saturday.

At the luncheon, in addition to getting to reconnect with my outside reader and wonderful mentor Kristina Straub, I simply basked in the sense of being surrounded by intelligent, capable, friendly, scholarly women, whose presence reminded me of how central women’s and gender studies is to my work and my sense of myself as a literary scholar.

My web of connections had some extra sparkle this year because of the presence of several people from my doctoral institution, Stony Brook University, including President Kathleen Wilson. Kathleen has always been a wonderful scholar, but many people might not also know that she is an incredibly generous friend, mentor, and colleague.

Before I get too gushy though, I will finish up my reflections on some of the panels I attended—and I tried to attend as many as my travel-addled brain could handle. Thursday I presented on the “Queer Richardson” panel, and it was an excellent set of papers, if I do say so myself. I spent the afternoon volunteering at the Women’s Caucus book sale table, which meant getting to chat with various attendees to who stopped by to take a look at the books for sale, including other SBU Alums, Devoney Looser and Jenny Frangos.

On Friday, I attended a panel on the role of missionaries in cultural and political developments, mostly because a colleague from my home department was presenting. I ended up learning a lot on a topic that I didn’t know much about, something I always appreciate. Kathleen’s presidential address on producing Sheridan’s plays in colonial milieus was fascinating, and I followed it up with the transgender studies in the eighteenth-century panel. Chris Roulston’s paper on Anne Lister was tender, reflective, and inspiring.

Saturday I took the morning off to catch up with some friends; after the Women’s Caucus luncheon I attended one more session: a workshop run through the “Re-Enlightenment Labs” project (Cliff Siskin and William Warner) which was interesting in part because it was a workshop, not a panel or roundtable. Between this “lab” and earlier discussions at our table at the luncheon, I’ve started thinking about how we might shake up the “usual” modes of conferencing. Even if the topic of the “lab” was not something I would have chosen myself, I found the idea of having a discussion (rather than just listening to others read papers) fascinating and refreshing.

I finished out Saturday in LA with a trip to The Last Bookstore and a delicious tapas dinner with some amazing people. I strolled over to the Walt Disney Concert hall, shopped for Andy Warhol postcards at the MOCA shop, and tried to ignore the urine stench in Pershing Square. It seems that the seedier side of downtown LA is still there, just a few blocks away from the sleek shine of the Westin Bonaventure and the stately hush of the LA public library.

Although conferencing is a heady mixture of inspiration, exhilaration, exhaustion and, at times, disappointment, it always leaves me reinvigorated in the end. I return to my own little patterns and habits, but my thoughts trace new paths and my research takes on new meaning.

Walt Disney Concert Hall.
I had to do a little sight-seeing at least!

Small Pockets, Big Problems

It is a fact universally acknowledged that contemporary women’s clothes do not have pockets. Or, if they do, they are non-functional. This has been an issue for me for a while, now, brought to light in those moments when I find a fancy dress that actually has functional pockets. Recently, women have become even more vocal than usual about this sartorial prejudice due to the change in size of the iPhone 6, of all things.

Jezebel.com writer Tracy Moore, in her piece “Pocket Equality,” sums up the problem succinctly: “No pockets = sexism.” She goes on to explain that lack of functioning pockets in women’s clothing is “a longstanding problem” for all women, a “silent epidemic that has infantilized us all.”

Atlantic Monthly contributor Tanya Basu agrees with these claims in her article “The Gender Politics of Pockets,” explaining,

“A man can simply swipe up his keys and iPhone on the way to a rendezvous with co-workers and slip them into his pocket. A woman on the way to that same meeting has to either carry those items in her hand, or bring a whole purse with her--a definitive, silent sign that she is a woman.”

This debate, and my own consternation at how small my pockets are and how big my purses are getting, has led me to wonder a bit as to how this all happened. Did women’s clothing have pockets in the past? When the pockets disappear? Was there always pocket disparity?

A little bit of online research and some Twitter querying resulted in some interesting information. In the eighteenth century, women almost always had a pair of pockets on their persons--but these were not sewn into the gown she wore. Since women’s clothes of the time period often consisted of petticoats (skirts) with an under-petticoat and a shift underneath, the solution, instead, was to have women tie their pockets around their waists between the under petticoat and the petticoat.

A pair of 18th-century tie-on pockets.

Some of these pockets could be quite beautiful, despite being wholly hidden under the main skirt of the gown. The pockets were then accessible through slits in the petticoat.

All of this was still practical and fashionable for women of the time because of the fashion for large, voluminous skirts. During the Regency period, when nightgown-like dresses were all the rage, pockets disappeared, only to reappear during the nineteenth century, which took hooped skirts to whole new levels. In the nineteenth century, some women’s pockets were sewn in, while others were still tied on.

The final demise of the women’s pocket, it would seem, happened during the 20th century, specifically in the 1920s, when the flat, boyish figure for women came into fashion. Any lumps, bumps or voluminous skirts were unfashionable, making pockets a fashion no-no.

Men’s pockets, according to the V&A website at least, were always sewn into the lining of their waistcoats, breeches and/or jackets. The sewing in of pockets into such garments might, in fact, have been a result of the tightness of breeches and waistcoats in the eighteenth-century--there would be nowhere to hide a tied-on pocket in such an ensemble. Additionally, the required male dress consisted always of a coat out-of-doors, and eighteenth-century jackets were long and large--almost like a skirt. Presumably a gentleman only had a few of these, so perhaps it was all right to have the pockets sewn in.

Whatever the reason for the difference in men’s and women’s pockets in the past, the similarity between those tie-on pockets and modern purses is striking. Likewise, the few times that I have located articles of clothing for myself that had nice, big pockets, they were usually dresses with big, full skirts, so that the pockets and their contents are hidden. When fashion dictated a less bulky silhouette, such as during the Regency period, pockets were out of fashion as well, and women began using small bags or “reticules” to carry their most essential objects around with them.

Since then, we have managed to get rid of many socially-dictated requirements for women’s clothing. We don’t have to wear dresses and skirts or corsets or girdles, though we are all probably aware of a thousand other ways that the consumer clothing industry is against us. As Tanya Basu points out, “mid-range fashion is a male dominated business, driven not by form and function, but by design and how fabric best drapes the body.” There might be hope on the horizon, as some companies work on new and innovative ways to make pockets both functional and stylish but for now, I suppose I’ll have to continue to rely on my reticule.