Kathleen Marple Kalb's Blog, page 23

JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM

There’s no crying in baseball, and no romance in mystery. At least if you ask Sherlock Holmes and some of his crustier (spiritual) descendants, who are positively infuriated by the idea of the dreadful distraction of relationship drama.
Which is entirely their business. But they might be interested to know a little more about the whole “no romance in mystery” tradition, which basically starts with Mr. Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Most popular 19th century novels included a big, messy, often doomed, romance plot of some kind. Think Sydney Carton in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Cathy and Heathcliff in WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Even in JANE EYRE, where Jane actually gets the guy, everyone pays a horrific price for that happy ending.
No wonder the fellas at Baker Street weren’t interested in all of that boy-girl nonsense. (Of course, it would take more than another century for society to acknowledge any other kind of romance.) With the steady diet of melodrama and misery on offer in books, plays and even just popular art, a story without doomed lovers was exactly the break everyone needed.
Except, of course, that it didn’t really work out that way. Watson was married – twice – and Holmes had that eternal crush on “The Woman,” which has launched thousands of pages of re-imaginings. Not to mention any number of romantic subplots among the people whose mysteries our heroes solve.
But Agatha Christie, you say! Miss Marple wasn’t chasing hot old dudes around the villages! Absolutely true. But there often were major plotlines that stemmed from other people's romantic complications.
And really, why not? Love, sex, and jealousy – the stuff of romance plots – are also great motivations for murder.
Ask me? The issue isn’t the romance. Not even its place in the plot.
The issue is the way the romance is handled.
Say, Volume Eleven: THEY’RE IN LOVE AND THEY’RE DOOOOMED!!!
That was probably a huge turn-off for most readers, even in the 1890s – they’d seen it done before, and done better, so why bother?
Romantic conventions were also pretty fossilized at that point. The woman was the damsel in distress, the angel for whom Sydney climbs on that guillotine…or maybe a one-dimensional scheming poisoner if she were really energetic. Can you imagine Dame Agatha buying into that nonsense for one hot second? Never mind Dorothy Sayers!
But what if the romance helps drive the plot? It could be part of the motivation for the crime, put one of the characters in a place where they will be in danger or distracted at a critical time, or lead them to think about something they would not normally consider…which leads to the solution.
And modern writers aren’t bound to the old conventions. Ella Shane, for example, is her own hero, and the Duke is the one who would be getting a “catch,” thank you very much, not vice versa!
Plus, for a sneaky writer like me, romance is a good distraction. You’re enjoying the romantic banter between Ella and the Duke, and you don’t notice that I’ve just dropped a HUGE clue. It happens several times in the books, so you can’t say you haven’t been warned!
And, just for the record, there’s always been a place for crying in baseball: look at the field after any pennant game.

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A LOVELY -- AND SLIGHTLY NAUGHTY -- TEA-GOWN

Why does Ella always seem to end up in a tea-gown?
It’s a reasonable question, considering that in the big wrap-up scenes of both A FATAL FINALE and A FATAL FIRST NIGHT, she’s wearing a pretty one. (Lacy and lilac in the first, violet crepe de chine with ribbon trim in the second, if you’re keeping score!) In FIRST NIGHT, her singing partner Marie is going with the program, too, in her favorite color, sky blue.
Reporter Hetty is in a suit, and Ella feels sorry for her.
So what’s so great about a tea-gown?
It’s simple: a tea-gown enabled a woman to be decently dressed without wearing a corset. Even our very modern ladies, and singers like Ella and Marie, would never dream of leaving the house without wearing stays.
Corsets have been compared to armor, and with good reason. I wore one for a musical production once, and I had a hard time getting my breath to walk across the stage, never mind sing, not that I’m much of a singer, anyhow. When you’re wearing one, even if it’s not laced especially tightly, there is no moment, or way you can move, that you aren’t aware of it.
More, they’re especially uncomfortable when you sit down. The late-19th century models weren’t as long-lined as the ones that came a bit later, so they probably were a little less horrible to sit in, but not by much.
So it makes sense that women wanted a reasonably respectable garment to wear around the house that didn’t require the uncomfortable underpinnings. Enter the tea-gown. Always loose in the waist, often not fitted anywhere but the shoulders and possibly sleeves, it could be anything from simple to fanciful, but it always gave women much-needed room to breathe in private.
Tea-gowns, it’s important to note here, were for women of at least some means. They were most popular among the upper crust, where a lady would change out of her day dress into a tea-gown for a relaxing afternoon on her chaise longue before donning a glittering evening creation for whatever the night might bring. But they were also popular house wear among “respectable” women, who immediately saw the appeal of a comfortable, yet attractive, house outfit.
Our respectable ladies would not be interested in this, but some of those society matrons discovered other uses for the tea-gown and the afternoon break. By their heyday in the Edwardian Era, tea-gowns were associated with illicit assignations. The idea, we’re told, is that the tea-gown made such activities far more pleasant than a conventional corseted costume.
So the tea-gown also has a little flair of the naughty about it. Ella and Marie are not unaware of this, but they’re also not about to pass up a chance to relax in a pretty dress. Marie, in case you’re wondering, wears a tea-gown at that final coffee because it’s late at night at a friend’s house. It’s not really proper, but since it’s “in the family,” it’s not really improper, either.
Tea-gowns, by the way, were still with us well into the 1970s, under a less elevated name, and in far less elegant form. Those little cotton housedresses that Edith Bunker and other sitcom housewives wore were nothing but a scruffy descendant of the tea-gown.
I’ll take the crepe de chine any day.

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WHAT DO I CALL YOU?

A woman’s name, even now, isn’t just about her. In the 19th century, when women were legally their men’s property, it was more an announcement of who she belonged to, than who she was.
Not Ella Shane, though.
The name she was given – and the one she chose – are very much about her, her time…and how I built her character. She was born Ellen O’Shaughnessy, to Frank and Malka Steinmetz O’Shaughnessy on the Lower East Side on July 23rd, 1865, and took the stage name Ella Shane in her late teens when she made her debut as a mezzo-soprano specializing in trouser roles. That’s the easy part.
What’s behind those names is a bit more complicated.
From the time my swashbuckling opera singer main character came to me, I thought of her as Ella, which was weird. While it’s a classic Gilded Age woman’s name, it’s not one of my favorites. And it just didn’t feel like a real name.
But Ellen, that’s somebody you might know. It was my grandfather’s mother’s name (and my own original middle name), so I knew it was just fine for an Irish woman in the late 19th century. People were also much more likely to choose family names for children back then, so it made sense for Ella to be named for her father’s favorite sister, the aunt who later takes in the orphaned girl.
It also set up a perfect nickname from her beloved cousin Tommy: “Heller”
What about a last name, though?
I actually got the Shane before the O’Shaughnessy. I liked the idea that eventually the Duke would call her by her last name, as if she were a male friend. A great way to show that he thinks of her as an equal…and that she’s special to him.
All that was left was finding a very Irish name that could be shortened to Shane. Not much more obviously Irish than O’Shaughnessy! While the worst of the anti-Irish prejudice had eased by the time Ella started her career, it was still a bad idea for a performer to carry an identifiably ethnic name, especially in an elevated field like opera. In the late 1800s, we’re still most of a century before people start taking pride and joy in their diversity, and Ella would not have seen changing her name as turning her back on her family. It was just part of the job.
It was also a family tradition. We’ll learn more of the details in Ella’s second adventure, A FATAL FIRST NIGHT. Her mother, Malka Steinmetz, left Immigration with a new name for her new life: Molly. And she was far from the first.
Officials often had a hard time pronouncing or spelling any names that sounded “foreign” to them, and didn’t much care about respecting the people they were processing. There are plenty of families who will tell you that first, and often last names were one thing before Ellis Island, and something else entirely after.
So Ella carries a lot of history with her, whatever she’s calling herself at a given moment. In the climactic duel on the catwalk in A FATAL FINALE (it’s not a spoiler to say she’s squaring off against the killer), there’s a “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” moment: she meets her opponent’s gaze, draws herself up, and says “I’m Malka O’Shaughnessy’s daughter, and proud of it.”
Better fighting words never spoken by Miss Ella Shane.

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I THINK WE'RE ALONE NOW

In a world where women and men work together every day, (hopefully soon in real offices again!) it’s rare to even think twice about being alone with a colleague of another gender. Usually, we only notice it if there’s a reason, whether innocent or – occasionally – inappropriate.
But in the 19th century, men and women who were not either married or related to each other would not have been alone together in a room without considerable risk to their reputations. BOTH their reputations, by the way.
While chaperonage wasn’t as strict as it might have been in earlier centuries, women, whether married or unmarried, were still expected to be extremely cautious about their behavior, and anyone in charge of them was expected to keep a good eye on the proprieties. By the late 19th century, that extended to the work environment, as women moved into offices and factories.
Early factories, like the New England mills, made a careful point of assuring parents that their daughters would be well supervised. That faded as time went on, but it was still very clear that a “respectable” employer would never allow a male boss to be alone with a young female worker.
The same applied to the young lady clerks and typists who were starting to take jobs in offices. Their bosses would have been carefully formal, and careful to avoid being alone with them. Part of that was also the simple fact that men weren’t entirely sure how to deal with female co-workers. They hadn’t had them before, after all!
All of this, we should note, is not simply out of a desire to protect the ladies’ reputations. Victorians were exceedingly concerned with virtue and respectability for men, too. A “bad reputation” would not be the same kind of social death for a man as a woman, but a man who could not be trusted with women could not be trusted in other areas, either.
These mores are very much in play for Ella Shane. She’s a woman who has made a successful life for herself in a respectable opera career, to be sure, but one who plays men on stage and hasn’t troubled to marry. So, it’s not just for love and companionship that she lives with her cousin Tommy Hurley – or he with her.
He provides her with the appropriate male protector that a woman is expected to have. She provides him with a reason for not being married, so people don’t, as Ella puts it “ask questions they don’t really want answered.” Modern readers figure out pretty quickly that Tommy is gay, and that it’s simply not discussed in his world. (Tommy’s orientation and his life are a whole different #ThrowbackThursday post!)
But everywhere Ella goes, she’s with either Tommy, or her dresser Anna.
In A FATAL FINALE, the Duke visits Ella in her dressing room, and they have a very personal conversation about the murder – and other things. During the editing process, someone asked me if Anna should be in the room during that talk. I assured them that not only should Anna be there, she had to be. Neither Ella, nor the Duke, would ever risk being alone together, especially not in such an obvious place as her dressing room.
Though for them, it’s not just the forms. In the case of Ella and the Duke, those suspicious Victorians are entirely right to worry about what might happen if they’re ever really alone!

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IN YOUR EASTER BONNET

Whatever spring holiday you’re observing (if any!), they mean different things to different people. But there’s one thing New Yorkers can agree on: Easter also means the Parade on Fifth Avenue.
No one seems to have an exact date for the first time some fashionable lady New Yorkers put on pretty hats and went for a promenade outside their church, but it apparently grew out of an earlier tradition. Many of the biggest and most socially prominent churches in town would put up extravagant floral decorations for Easter, and eventually, folks would walk from their own building to the next, to see what the other faithful had done.
It’s only a short step (sorry!) from there to an official promenade.
By the 1890s, it wasn’t just for fun or showing off. It was a big economic engine for the City’s fashion industry too. Even as the ladies strolled through the finer areas of town, department stores, milliners and more would show off their nicest spring wares.
If you’re getting a Fashion Week vibe, I won’t argue!
In the early 19th century, Easter was primarily a religious holiday, marked with joyful – but relatively quiet – family and church celebrations. But with the help of the New York Easter Parade and similar events, it became a key date on the shopping calendar, as the point where everyone wanted to show off their spring fashions. Shopkeepers and the new, growing department stores were more than happy to oblige.
While we associate the Irving Berlin song with the event, it was very much a late add: the song was part of a 1933 Broadway revue, and was later used in the famous scene in the movie Meet Me in Saint Louis featuring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. If you’ve seen the film, it’s no accident that they’re wearing 1890s clothes; yes, the film is set in that time period, but that never stopped a Hollywood costumer who wanted to make a point. The Easter Parade outfits are a deliberate celebration of the event’s heyday.
Even today, the parade is very similar to the earlier versions. It’s not an organized march like many other New York celebrations, but rather just a chance for people to put on their goofy hats and wander around on Fifth Avenue, which is closed near St. Patrick’s Cathedral. For a lot of New Yorkers, it’s just fun to come out and watch the scene.
Of course, last year, no one was coming out for any scene. The Easter Parade, like so many other big New York traditions, moved online, and the virtual festivities kept the party going.
As for Ella Shane, even though she’s a proud New Yorker, and generally throws herself into every City celebration with glee, she’s probably not going to be found wandering down Fifth Avenue in a fancy bonnet. She and her cousin Tommy might well go out to have a look – and Ella would definitely enjoy seeing all the new fashions for spring. But Ella gets quite enough attention onstage, and has no need to seek out any more.
Besides, her reporter friend Hetty MacNaughten would never forgive her for celebrating hats!

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THE GHOSTS OF WASHINGTON SQUARE

A walk in Washington Square Park is a treat for Ella Shane and her friends, and for many New Yorkers today. But they may not know what – or who – is under those lovely stone paths.
Yes, who.
Like many very old cities, New York started as a tiny settlement on the water and grew from there. It wasn’t unusual for communities to bury the dead on the edge of town, especially in the case of an epidemic. But for New York, of course, the edge of town kept moving up. And up.
So, the place that was a useful Potter’s Field for the thousands of people who died from yellow fever around 1800 became a prime site for a park half a century later.
At the time, in the late 1820s, the idea of just building the park over thousands of dead New Yorkers was actually sold as a public good: turning it into a beauty spot instead of a “hot bed of miasma.” The idea of moving the bodies wasn’t a possibility – those folks had expired from a nasty disease within living memory, and nobody wanted to risk that again.
If that feels a little disrespectful, it’s worth remembering some things: first, people were a bit harder-headed about such matters before the late-Victorian cult of death. Just as important, most of the dead didn’t belong to anyone who would, or could, fight for them. The city fathers’ grandparents were buried in nice churchyards somewhere else, thank you very much.
Still, people didn’t immediately forget that their tony park had once been a graveyard. There are stories from later in the 19th century of a blue mist hovering over the ground at night. The scientifically-minded said it was some kind of miasma from all the remains beneath. Other folks might suggest it was something else…and I’m not going to argue with them.
Even now, the place has a special energy.
And even now, work crews find the occasional New Yorker.
Now, though, they do get treated with a good bit more respect. Just recently, in early March, remains that had been found between 2008 and 2017 were re-interred in the park. A Brooklyn cemetery prepared the remains and the coffin, and the city held a brief ceremony, complete with officials paying respects and local media covering the event.
More, the City placed a stone near the Sullivan Street and Washington Square Park South entrance, explaining the history of the site, and the fact that thousands of early New Yorkers have found their (hopefully) final rest there.
That newfound respect for the early dead is well over a hundred years in the future when Ella and the cast take their strolls. In fairness to our friends, they would not have been born when the park was built, and likely would simply accept it as given.
Though it’s entirely possible that the blue mist will appear in a future Ella Shane adventure. Nor would I be surprised if her Aunt Ellen, who claims the Second Sight, picked up a feeling from the park.
I certainly do, though I have no psychic gift. It’s not easy to put into words, but there’s just a vibe. You know that the past is very present, and you’re not alone.
Not your usual walk in the park.

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ON SAINT PATRICK'S HOLY DAY

Kiss me, I’m Irish today! Green donuts. Green beer. Green bagels. (Oy vey!)
Maybe a chorus of “Danny Boy.”
For a lot of Americans, that’s a typical Saint Patrick’s Day.
Whether you’re Irish – for the day – or not, it’s mostly a celebration of how we think of the Irish: a poetic and musical people who like the color green and know how to party.
Which…yeah.
But Americans have been observing Saint Patrick’s Day since before they were Americans. There are rumblings in Irish-American historical circles about a Royal Governor of New York in the 1600s who was Irish and Catholic and must have done something to mark the day.
If he did, he was smart enough to keep it quiet. Even before the Great Hunger, the Irish were second-class citizens at best, and Irish ancestry – and especially Catholic faith – were not things to celebrate.
Still, the Irish are not known for keeping their lights under a bushel, and in the early 1700s, there were modest and dignified celebrations in Boston that spread to other cities. By the 1800s, there were plenty of parades, usually fairly quiet and restrained events, again with the emphasis on pride and dignity, in no small part because of growing nativist prejudice.
It’s hard to imagine in our current multicultural world, but at one point, the Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocracy in Britain and the U.S. didn’t even consider the Irish human, never mind white people like them. You don’t let people starve in the road if you think they’re anything like you.
But the Irish are a resilient bunch. They’ve had to be.
By the late 19th century, they’d beaten back a lot of the prejudice just by showing up and working hard, and celebrations of Irish heritage continued and grew. Not without incident – a melee after dueling New York parades in 1867 led to a renewed emphasis on decorum. It apparently worked – the City’s famous parade moved to almost its current spot on Fifth Avenue in 1891, and became a key place for the Irish political machine to show its power…and for New York’s Irish community to show its pride.
Ella Shane and her cousin Tommy Hurley would be two of those proud Irish folks; Ella honors both her Irish father and Jewish mother whenever she can. As tenement kids made good as a singer and boxing champ, our heroes would be careful to celebrate in a restrained and proper fashion. But celebrate they would!
If they’re in town and not on tour, Ella and Tommy would start the day like all good Irish Catholics, with Mass, though Tommy’s best friend Father Michael Riley leads a more festive service than usual at Holy Innocents. Then off to Fifth Avenue to watch the parade…and home for dinner. Probably not corned beef and cabbage, though – for them, it’s probably still poverty food.
Not for me, though!
My grandfather was proudly Scotch-Irish (we were never entirely sure he didn’t add the “Scotch” part to please Grandma’s Scottish immigrant father!) but he sure liked to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day like a regular Irishman. Which meant a big pot of corned beef and cabbage. My very Scots grandmother made it for him each year, grumbling all the way.
Dessert? Grandpa’s favorite lemon meringue pie. Maybe key lime if she wanted to go with the green theme. Irish coffee for the grownups, too.
You’ll note there was no green beer…and definitely no green bagels.
I’m not judg-y, but green bagels are just wrong. Sorry.

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A ROTTEN DEAL FOR A WOMAN

“Marriage is a rotten deal for a woman.”
When Ella Shane says it to the Duke in a key scene in A FATAL FINALE, she’s not flirting or exaggerating; she’s just stating a simple fact of 19th century life, at least from her point of view.
Even in the late 19th century, when a woman married, she essentially ceased to exist as an independent person. The legal doctrine was called “femme couvert,” literally translated as “covered woman,” meaning the woman’s rights were covered by her husband’s power. You can see how that could lead to all sorts of trouble.
All of a woman’s money and property, not to mention her person – and her children – were (at least legally) under her husband’s control. She could earn money, but he decided how it was spent. She would bear the children and raise them, but they, too, were his property.
By the late 1800s and early 1900s, divorce was just barely possible in particularly egregious cases of abuse or financial neglect – and men could ditch an unfaithful wife. But a woman could not expect to take her children with her if she left a bad marriage, even a horrifically abusive one.
In less extreme cases, women just had to put up with the daily knowledge that they weren’t real people in the eyes of the law, with little or none of the power that a man had. A woman could do almost nothing without her husband’s consent – and that didn’t change for decades. There are plenty of women today old enough to remember having to ask their husbands to co-sign on their credit cards.
Women like Ella, single and making a living on her own, were rare at the time, but not unknown. Often, they lived with parents or family, as Ella does with her cousin Tommy, and often (based on advice writing and fiction of the time) the families vexed about having an independent woman around, and what to do with her.
Until then, a woman alone with money was usually a widow, and people knew how to handle that. She was taking care of her late husband’s estate for the benefit of her children, and needed some legal and social room for the purpose. A single woman? Who knows what she might do?
The one thing she certainly could do, though, is run her own affairs without anything more than advice from a man. Ella is well aware of that, and while she’s glad to have Tommy as friend, protector and manager, she also prizes her independence.
Independence that she would have to unconditionally surrender in a match with any man, never mind a worthy one who is her equal. If a clerk expects his wife to stop working and tend to his home, how much more would a powerful and well-off man expect? The answer, of course, is everything. Women with careers, whether on the stage or elsewhere, generally gave them up when they married.
Ella has no interest in that.
It’s all in the room when the Duke makes his reply to Ella’s comment: “Depends on who’s setting the terms.”
And at least at that moment, there is no way she can trust him – or any other man – to set fair terms. Looks like the Duke has a lot of work to do.

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WITCHES, B*TCHES, AND BRITCHES, OH MY!

Mezzo-sopranos have a very wry way of describing most of the roles available to them in classic opera: “Witches, b*tches, and britches.”
It’s a darkly funny response to a not very funny reality. A mezzo-soprano, though her voice is every bit as much the product of gift and training as a woman with a higher range, can easily find herself shifted off to supporting roles.
When most of us think of opera, we think of the high notes of a coloratura soprano, and the iconic roles that go with it. Violetta in La Traviata, Lucia di Lammermoor, the Queen of the Night from Mozart’s Magic Flute. All showy parts for the highest voices. And not for a woman with a middle range and a darker vocal quality.
There are some lead roles written specifically for mezzos, like Carmen, but most of the big, popularly-performed pieces feature a soprano as the lead. Even if the role is written for a mezzo, like La Cenerentola, (Rossini’s Cinderella), it may be within a particular soprano’s range…so they can swoop in and take that, too.
Composers often use the darker, deeper quality of a mezzo voice for wise or evil characters – the witches and b*tches – as a contrast to the bright high notes of the pretty princess. Or they just give the soprano a mezzo best friend with one decent aria.
Which brings us to the britches.
A little background first. In the early days of opera, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were a fair number of castrati, men who had been, as Ella Shane puts it, “un-manned” to keep their voices high. Amazingly enough, that was not a popular career choice, and it died out with the eighteenth century. Before it did, though, some heroic male roles were written in that range.
Once there were no longer high-voiced men around to sing them, somebody figured out that mezzos could, and might look awfully good doing it, too. So women singers started taking those roles, and some became a sensation, both for their talent, and the simple fact that the opera house was truly the only respectable place in the 19th century that you might see a woman in trousers.
(It’s a whole different #ThrowbackThursday, but Victorian men got amazingly excited at the smallest sight of a female body, and a woman in pants would have been a major fantasy object for the fellas.)
And so, it’s really no wonder that someone like an Ella Shane, blessed with an amazing coloratura mezzo voice, genuine star quality, and a scrappy attitude, would gravitate to trouser roles. Neither she nor her mentor Madame Lentini would have been especially interested in training her for a career as the witch or the best friend; Ella didn’t claw her way out of the tenements for that.
Besides, Ella likes trouser roles. The fencing and swashbuckling and singing are all fun for her. In A FATAL FIRST NIGHT, she may have her best role yet, in a fictional opera about the Wars of the Roses, doubling as the murdered young King Edward V and triumphant Henry Tudor in “The Princes in the Tower.”
More on the Princes – real and operatic -- coming soon!

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OH, DARN IT!

Someday, my great-granddaughter is going to find a couple of packages of panty hose in my things and wonder what they are. Just like I found stockings in one of my grandmother’s drawers and wondered how they worked.
For centuries, women – and men – have worn some kind of fitted covering on their feet and legs. Very early tights, like the ones you see in those medieval illustrations, were actually made with cloth, carefully sewn to fit. Soon enough, folks realized that woven fabric wasn’t the best idea for a snug item worn on parts of the body that move a lot, and that knit was a much better idea.
Knit by hand, of course. Machine knit would not come in until the 19th century, but skilled craftspeople were able to create surprisingly fine stockings of silk and wool. Inventories of Renaissance queens’ wardrobes show they bought them by the dozen – and so did anyone else who could afford them.
Stockings didn’t change all that much through the centuries. They became finer as technology improved, and fancier if fashion allowed, but the basic idea of sticking your leg into a knit tube and fastening it with a garter was pretty much the state of the art until the invention of elastic in the 20th century.
By the late 19th century, women had plenty of choices in stockings, from the finest silk to thick wool or cotton. Outside the highest reaches of the upper class, most women wore the sturdier stuff most of the time, and saved the thin silk for special occasions. They had to.
Before synthetic fiber, and the ability to stop a run with clear nail polish, a Heloise hack that every girl learned at her mother’s nyloned knee, the only way to fix a hole was to darn it, which would be incredibly difficult on a filmy silk. Possibly even beyond the capability of a really good ladies’ maid…or at least the patience of the lady who might just prefer to toss it.
Everyday wool and cotton, though, was much easier to fix. Men’s socks, too, were made of thicker yarns, and could – and would – be repaired.
Darning socks and stockings, in fact, was one of those annoying chores that many women spent an awful lot of time doing. If you’ve never done it, it’s fiddly work; essentially, you’re re-knitting the ends of the hole back together. But in skilled hands, it’s amazing: the sock or stocking can be very close to good as new.
A particular bane of a mother’s existence was the long hose young boys wore with their short pants. Whoever came up with the fashion probably should have been the one who had to fix them. Sending an active little fellow out into the world with something knit on his knees is just asking for trouble…and the mending box was often full.
But that was just part of the deal at the time: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without” wasn’t just a statement on a sampler. It was the way life was.
The invention of synthetics led to practically disposable nylon stockings, and the end of darning socks as a daily experience. It’s still out there on the internet…maybe I should put the link in with that pair of panty hose I’m saving for my great-granddaughter!

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