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Note from Andrea: Today we have our second of two special guest posts, and this week’s author should be familiar: Sarah Van Vugt! You may remember her from her interview in a previous edition of Historians’ Histories. Enjoy!
On Rosies, Past and Present
Image from author.
When it comes to North American symbols of feminism, few outrank Rosie the Riveter in ubiquity and popularity. Although Rosie imagery dates from the Second World War, it’s still extremely potent and recognizable. Today, when you mention Rosie, most people think of artist J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It!” poster, designed to hang briefly in Westinghouse factories, and featuring a beautiful woman in a uniform, sleeves rolled up, arm raised, fist clenched. There’s ample evidence that this particular Rosie image is both familiar and constantly being reinvented. For example, on any given day, check out #wecandoit on Instagram, and you’re guaranteed to see many examples of people posing as Rosie, dressed up as Rosie, taking her iconic stance or wearing something that evokes Rosie, like her signature red and white polka dot bandana. There are also many consumer products featuring the image, like this lip balm I recently received as a gift.
It’s 2017 and we’re back! I’ve got tons of exciting blog posts and projects planned for this year, and I can’t wait to show them to you! But right now, we’re going to start off with a brand new post in our series, Historians’ Histories, the series where we do the historiography of historians! (You can see the previous post in this series by clicking here.) I’m excited to announce that the latest post comes from another dear friend of mine and my supervisor-sibling, Sarah Van Vugt!
Without any further ado, here’s her bio:
An Ajax, Ontario native and happy west coast transplant, Sarah Van Vugt has degrees from York University and recently completed her doctorate at the University of Victoria. In her academic life, she’s a historian who studies Canadian, gender, and beauty/body history (including war worker beauty pageants!) Sarah is also a Learning Strategist at UVic, where she is lucky enough to work with and around students in all disciplines. For fun, Sarah knits, bakes, reads, avidly participates in her local food swap, hangs out with her husband and her cat, and produces rather a lot of jam.
If you’ve spent any time on Youtube lately, then you’re probably aware of the massive community of online beauty gurus. One of the more popular types of videos that these gurus regularly post are “What’s in My Bag” videos.
Often sold as “girly” guilty pleasures, these videos are shockingly formulaic. They all start with a demonstration of the designer purse and the accompanying wallet. Next, they take apart the cosmetics bag, describing each item in detail. While doing so, the guru will crack jokes about how she is so girly and probably doesn’t need to be carrying around all of this makeup. There will often be a furtive and almost guilty joke about tampons or pads, sometimes including allusions to deodorizers. And the videos will conclude with a display of the guru’s smart phone, completed with adorable cover, earbuds, designer sunglasses, and her keys.
As a historian, I find myself fascinated by the performances of white feminine gender norms that are inherent to these videos. What do I mean by performance? Performance theory argues that ideas like gender and race are abstract concepts that serve as “scripts,” each particular to a time and place. In order to be recognized as belonging to a particular gender, race, class, etc, individuals try to follow these scripts as closely as possible. For example, think about how some girls are really smart but pretend not to be in order to be more socially acceptable or attractive to boys.
Expert Tip: Judith Butler is most famously associated with performance theory in history.
While watching these videos, I kept finding myself thinking about historical handbags, and what they would say about the lives of people who carried them. When most people think about historical sources, their minds go immediately to written documents. Material objects are another kind of source that historians can use. In many ways, these objects are the ultimate embodiment of Unwritten Histories, since not only do historians not often consider them but they also tell important stories about people who might not have left written documents. What’s more is that many of these material objects were personal items, things that were used on a daily basis, and so much a part of the landscape that they were seldom described in historical sources.
So in this new series on material history, “What’s in My ____?,” I will select a bag, container, or room, and use the material objects that would have appeared in these receptacles to provide an intimate look into the hidden lives of people in the past.