Phantasmagoria

she/her, love women's history, fashion history, linguistics. i am studying history. most of my research is on 17th-19th century with a main focus on the late 18th century I work in a museum :)

[dwellordream]

- Emily West, Enslaved Women in America

[palatinewolfsblog]

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." Ray Bradbury.

[anarchopuppy]

its been p common knowledge for decades that light pollution can be massively reduced by just putting shades on streetlamps, and that doing that would save energy, help wildlife, and let us see the stars better, but are society says if u wanna change any minor little tiny thing u gotta dedicate ur whole life to campaigning for it and this is a good ways down the list of priorities for most ppl, so instead i gotta walk past newly-installed streetlamps that are just dumb glass globes that use half their electricity to blast half their light directly into the sky where it does only bad things for no reason and think "we should overthrow the government"

[phantasmagoriacouture]

My theory as to why I disliked history in school but now love it and made it into my career is that in school most of what we‘re taught about is war.

When did xyz war happen? Who fought? Where did they fight? etc…

What I love about history is learning how people used to live. How did they think? How did they live their day-to-day lives? Which of hour traditions were established when? What concepts and things are older or younger than we think they are?

[darkandstormydolls]

PSA to all historical fiction/fantasy writers:

A SEAMSTRESS, in a historical sense, is someone whose job is sewing. Just sewing. The main skill involved here is going to be putting the needle into an out of the fabric. They’re usually considered unskilled workers, because everyone can sew, right? (Note: yes, just about everyone could sew historically. And I mean everyone.) They’re usually going to be making either clothes that aren’t fitted (like shirts or shifts or petticoats) or things more along the lines of linens (bedsheets, handkerchiefs, napkins, ect.). Now, a decent number of people would make these things at home, especially in more rural areas, since they don’t take a ton of practice, but they’re also often available ready-made so it’s not an uncommon job. Nowadays it just means someone whose job is to sew things in general, but this was not the case historically. Calling a dressmaker a seamstress would be like asking a portrait painter to paint your house

A DRESSMAKER (or mantua maker before the early 1800s) makes clothing though the skill of draping (which is when you don’t use as many patterns and more drape the fabric over the person’s body to fit it and pin from there (although they did start using more patterns in the early 19th century). They’re usually going to work exclusively for women, since menswear is rarely made through this method (could be different in a fantasy world though). Sometimes you also see them called “gown makers”, especially if they were men (like tailors advertising that that could do both. Mantua-maker was a very feminized term, like seamstress. You wouldn’t really call a man that historically). This is a pretty new trade; it only really sprung up in the later 1600s, when the mantua dress came into fashion (hence the name).

TAILORS make clothing by using the method of patterning: they take measurements and use those measurements to draw out a 2D pattern that is then sewed up into the 3D item of clothing (unlike the dressmakers, who drape the item as a 3D piece of clothing originally). They usually did menswear, but also plenty of pieces of womenswear, especially things made similarly to menswear: riding habits, overcoats, the like. Before the dressmaking trade split off (for very interesting reason I suggest looking into. Basically new fashion required new methods that tailors thought were beneath them), tailors made everyone’s clothes. And also it was not uncommon for them to alter clothes (dressmakers did this too). Staymakers are a sort of subsect of tailors that made corsets or stays (which are made with tailoring methods but most of the time in urban areas a staymaker could find enough work so just do stays, although most tailors could and would make them).

Tailors and dressmakers are both skilled workers. Those aren’t skills that most people could do at home. Fitted things like dresses and jackets and things would probably be made professionally and for the wearer even by the working class (with some exceptions of course). Making all clothes at home didn’t really become a thing until the mid Victorian era.

And then of course there are other trades that involve the skill of sewing, such as millinery (not just hats, historically they did all kinds of women’s accessories), trimming for hatmaking (putting on the hat and and binding and things), glovemaking (self explanatory) and such.

TLDR: seamstress, dressmaker, and tailor are three very different jobs with different skills and levels of prestige. Don’t use them interchangeably and for the love of all that is holy please don’t call someone a seamstress when they’re a dressmaker

[phantasmagoriacouture]

I finally got the Leopoldine von Habsburg book for my birthday!!! Such a beautiful book and I love her so much! Get ready for me to post a bunch of facts about her!!

[ouppygirlcity]

“Florida banning all 14 year olds from social media rare Florida W???” I think it should be obvious this is an effort to control young people’s access to information that runs contrary to a conservative agenda, as well as online resources and networks that could be vital to abused children.

[ouppygirlcity]

Yeah that 14 year old has a bad take but kids are allowed to be stupid. I think it’s more important in an era of rapidly authoritarian control by fascist state governments over the lives of children, they have an alternate avenue of information and support.

[baebeylik]

13th century Arabic depiction of slaves

Between 869 and 883 CE an attempted insurrection of the Abbasid Caliphate was led by one Ali ibn Muhammad. He was a man of mysterious origin (possibly Persian?) who claimed to be descended from the Rashidun Caliphate. While his claims were not taken seriously by the Abbasids he did garner a following who journeyed with him to modern Iraq.

While in Iraq he made an unlikely alliance with the mistreated African slaves of the Iraqi marshes known collectively as the “Zanj”. These slaves were of mostly East African stock and were forced to work in harsh conditions in Abbasid plantations.

The slaves readily allied with Ali Ibn Muhammad. He also allied with many freed Zanj and Arab peasants who had their own quarrels with the Abbasid Dynasty. The rebellion lasted for years and caused the deaths of thousands of lives. While it ended with an Abbasid victory and the complete eradication of Ali and his allies it also escalated the already steady decline of the Caliphate.

[kammartinez]

The Power of the Veil for Spanish Women - JSTOR Daily

In sixteenth-century Spain, veiling allowed women to move freely through cities while keeping their identities private.

[enamouredpoet-deactivated202205]

morgan harper nichols

[phantasmagoriacouture]

To all my German-speaking friends I highly recommend this book:

„Die Erfindung der Hausfrau: Geschichte einer Entwertung“ by Evke Rulffes (engl. „The Invention of the Housewife: History of Devaluation“)

It is a book that explains the history of how the medieval „working couple“ where men and women where seen as contributing equally to the household and production, turned into the modern housewife that has to beg her husband for enough money since all assets are solely his. It analyses primary sources, especially books that gave advice and instructions to housewives and housefathers. (Hausmütter- und Hausväterliteratur)

Unfortunately there is no English translation but if anyone is interested in the topic, I recently wrote an essay on this that I can share 🤗 !

[scumahsoka]

“Prostitution is nothing but the microcosm of a society where exploitation is a general rule. It is a symbol of the contempt men have for women. And yet this woman is none other than the painful figure of the mothet; sister, or wife of other men, thus of every one of us. In the final analysis, it is the unconscious contempt we have for ourselves. There can be prostitutes only as long as there are pimps and those who seek prostitutes.” - Thomas Sankara, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle

[leftistfeminista]

Simone de Beauvoir Understood the Link Between Gender and Class Oppression

The Second Sex is rightly celebrated as a classic work of feminist theory. But it’s often forgotten that Simone de Beauvoir saw it as a soci

The formidable erudition of The Second Sex and the sheer length and breadth of resources with which it interacts also function to conceal or bury her engagement with Karl Marx’s works. Interestingly, Beauvoir only mentions Marx’s name and those of his works explicitly a few times. While one might assume that the obvious place to find him is in the chapter titled “The Point of View of Historical Materialism,” this chapter actually engages with the book of his collaborator Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which appeared the year after Marx’s death — although recent research suggests that Engels drew upon Marx’s unpublished notebooks in writing it.

Beauvoir’s engagement with Marx’s works in the history chapters of The Second Sex enables her to offer a nuanced account of the experience of being both working-class and a woman. In fact, she makes use of Marx to establish the specific ways in which women were “more shamefully exploited” than workers of the opposite sex, noting that employers preferred hiring women (and especially mothers) to men because women “did better work for less pay.”

Some key passages in these chapters show that Beauvoir did not exclusively imagine the working class as male (and nor did Marx for that matter). Drawing on Marx’s work, she demonstrates how women workers are uniquely oppressed on the basis of their gender — inexperienced in political organization, sexually harassed and abused. As girls, they are socialized into docility; later, as workers, they are reluctant to assert their rights. And as working mothers, canny employers ruthlessly find new ways to exploit them.

[spiderfreedom]

the international virgin-whore complex

In this manner, ūman ribu made connections between the status of Japanese wives and Japanese imperialism by recalling the sexual violation of the comfort women.

From "Scream from the shadows: the women's liberation movement in Japan."

[phantasmagoriacouture]

radical feminist being terfs is actually so insane like you have literally missed the point

[jewellery-box]

1960’s Beaded Flower Power Cocktail Dress

xtbayvintage

[femalethink]

As this brief history of women and primitive accumulation has shown, the construction of a new patriarchal order, making of women the servants of the male work-force, was a major aspect of capitalist development.

On its basis a new sexual division of labor could be enforced that differentiated not only the tasks that women and men should perform, but their experiences, their lives, their relation to capital and to other sectors of the working class. Thus, no less than the international division of labor, the sexual division of labor was above all a power-relation, a division within the work-force, while being an immense boost to capital accumulation.

This point must be emphasized, given the tendency to attribute the leap capitalism brought about in the productivity of labor only to the specialization of work-tasks. In reality, the advantages which the capitalist class derived from the differentiation between agricultural and industrial labor and within industrial labor itself — celebrated in Adam Smith's ode to pin-making — pale when compared to those it derived from the degradation of women's work and social position.

....The power-difference between women and men and the concealment of women's unpaid-labor under the cover of natural inferiority, have enabled capitalism to immensely expand the "unpaid part of the working day," and use the (male) wage to accumulate women's labor; in many cases, they have also served to deflect class antagonism into an antagonism between men and women. Thus, primitive accumulation has been above all an accumulation of differences, inequalities, hierarchies, divisions, which have alienated workers from each other and even from themselves.

....Male workers have often been complicitous with this process, as they have tried to maintain their power with respect to capital by devaluing and disciplining women, children, and the populations the capitalist class has colonized. But the power that men have imposed on women by virtue of their access to wage-labor and their recognized contribution to capitalist accumulation has been paid at the price of self-alienation, and the "primitive disaccumulation" of their own individual and collective powers.

—Silvia Federici, "Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation".