Victorian Tattooed Ladies: Circus freaks or pioneering feminists? by Katherine Clements

The history of tattooing goes back to prehistory but the English word, in this context, is first attested in the writings of Captain Cook. An entry in Cook’s ship’s log of 1769 refers to male and female ‘tattooed savages’ in Polynesia, proudly displaying their tribal marks: 

"Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow, as it is called in their Language. This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible."

Many of Cook’s men returned to England with tattoos they’d received on their voyages and the practice quickly became a tradition, hence the enduring association with sailors and men of the sea. It might have been common to see crudely inked bodies in the eighteenth century docks and taverns of London and Liverpool, but otherwise tattoos were stigmatised, associated with criminals and prostitution. No respectable woman would have displayed one.

This began to change in the latter half of the nineteenth century when tattoos became fashionable among the upper classes. Notable society figures, including European royals, acquired tattoos, creating something of a fad that wasn’t confined to men.

One magazine of 1898 estimated that a fifth of British landed gentry had tattoos, while the New York Times claimed that many society women had designs in ‘inaccessible places’. Famous beauty, Lady Randolph Churchill (Winston’s mother) was said to sport a serpent wrist tattoo that she covered with bracelets, and some have even suggested that Queen Victoria herself succumbed to the craze.

This cover of the Police Gazette from 1870 shows a well-heeled woman receiving a tattoo in her boudoir – more than a hint of titillation about it. A tattoo might have been a provocative fashion statement for some women, but mostly they were not to be shown in public; they were private and rarely visible.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, a few women found fame and fortune exhibiting their ink in the circuses and freak shows of America.

Tattooed native women had been displayed as circus freaks in America for years, but the earliest known tattooed white woman was Olive Oatman. Her story is a sad one. In the 1850s, during an ill-fated journey to California, Yavapai Indians attacked her family. Only Olive and her sister survived. The girls were rescued and adopted by Mohave Indians, who gave Olive a traditional facial tattoo. Her sister died but Olive lived with the Mohave until she was ransomed some years later. 

Olive Oatman

She soon became a celebrity, touring the country giving lectures about her experiences. People flocked to see the facial markings that, according to Olive, were inflicted without her consent. More recent research suggests her stories may not have been entirely truthful and the tattoo was a sign of willing acceptance among her new Native American family. Later she married, turning her back on her extraordinary past, abandoning the lecture circuit and using veils and make-up to cover the evidence of her time with the Mohave.

Others played on Oatman’s story, and many of the ‘tattooed ladies’ who began performing as circus attractions in the latter half of the nineteenth century claimed to have been captured and forcibly tattooed by native tribes.

One of the best known is Nora Hildebrandt, America’s first professional tattooed lady, who toured with Barnum and Bailey’s circus throughout the 1890’s. Nora claimed to have been held captive for a full year, tortured daily with hours under the needle. She even suggested that the famous chief, Sitting Bull, had been involved. 

Nora Hildebrandt

It soon became evident that this fabricated history, while entertaining, was hardly true: Nora is commonly said to have been the daughter, or wife, of Martin Hildebrandt, an artist who opened the first tattoo parlour in New York City (possibly as early as the 1850s) and was heavily in demand among American Civil War soldiers. But this too is doubtful. Nora was actually born in England and there’s no proof she was either married to or related to Martin. (He’s recorded as married to a woman called Mary, with one son – Frank). Perhaps she took his name in acknowledgement of the art with which he covered her body, but the reasons are lost in almost as much myth and hearsay as Nora’s own stories. 

Nora’s debut was quickly followed by that of Irene Woodward – or La Belle Irene – who billed herself at ‘The Original Tattooed Lady’. She and others often used salacious stories like Hildebrandt’s, to attract and entertain audiences. These women were mostly viewed as risqué circus attractions, little better than those working in peepshows or burlesque follies. Margot Mifflin, author of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo says:

“The women afforded a peepshow, along with a freak show, because at that time women just didn’t show that much skin publicly, The tattoos gave them a reason to strip down and show their bodies. Certainly a number of people who came to see them were interested in the flesh as much as the art.”

Even so, some of these women became stars. Artoria Gibbons was the highest paid tattooed lady of the 1920s, with a legion of fans, and others, such as Betty Broadbent, went on working as pin-ups and performers right up until the 1960s. It certainly offered a level of fame and financial independence, more so once women became more than just a canvass.

Artoria Gibbons

One of the most enduring, evocative images of early tattooed women is that of Maud Wagner (née Stevens); widely regarded as the first American female tattoo artist.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Maud was a circus performer, making a living as an acrobat and contortionist – hardly a conventional career choice to begin with. While entertaining visitors at the St Louis World Fair she met Gus Wagner, a renowned tattoo artist (and the last to work with old-fashioned needle and ink, rather than a machine). Legend has it that Maud agreed to go on a date with Gus only if he gave her lessons. She learned the art from him, going on to become a circus attraction and respected tattoo artist in her own right. They ran a successful business together and their daughter, Lovetta, continued the tradition, becoming a well-known artist, working up until the 1980s, despite apparently never getting inked herself. I’d love to know how many of Maud’s clients were women.

Maud Wagner in 1911

Margot Mifflin’s book, mentioned above, is one of several that chart the history of tattooing in relation to the female body, the changes in gender prejudices and stigma over the years and the reasons for them. It’s a complicated history that’s synonymous with women’s rights, feminism and the changing representation of women’s bodies. 

Mifflin writes in her introduction to the most recent edition: “Tattoos appeal to contemporary women both as emblems of empowerment in an era of feminist gains and as badges of self-determination at a time when controversies about abortion rights, date rape, and sexual harassment have made them think hard about who controls their bodies—and why.”

I wonder what these tattooed ladies of a century ago would have made of the proliferation of body art that adorns all kinds of women – and men – today. Would they see themselves as pioneers? Even if some of them were motivated by money, renown or simply a passion for the art, they certainly broke the rules, and in doing so, made a statement which was far more subversive – and gutsy – than it is today.

www.katherineclements.co.uk

www.facebook.com/KatherineClementsBooks

@KL_Clements

The beauty of Bunyan, by Vanora Bennett

I used to think it must be a twee little book, the Pilgrim’s Progress, because the four sisters in Little Women read the famous Christian allegory so assiduously on Sundays and it seemed to be full of the kind of religious goodness that I figured any red-blooded child must (at least secretly) find boring.

It was written by John Bunyan and published in 1676. It made him famous. It was pretty much the only book apart from the Bible that children in Victorian days were allowed to read on a Sunday.

We don’t know it half so well these days, but since Bunyan is remembered in the Church with a minor feast day in August, and since I have been thinking since That Referendum about cussed free-thinkers through history who have come out and surprised the powers that be with their ideas, sometimes changing the course of history, I have dipped into my granny’s copy, which may have been her granny’s too, since it was published in 1861, in Bunyan’s honour.

Bunyan, it turned out, had a colourful life. He was a tinker and a soldier, born in Bedford, whose wife introduced him to freethinking religious ideas and an austere sect in which he could do penance for his past sins – dancing, and helping as a ringer in the parish church belfry, and playing tipcat on Sunday. He started preaching, but came a cropper after the Reformation, when tolerance for freethinking went down to near zero, and he was packed into jail for more than 12 years for his nonconformist ideas. He wrote the Pilgrim’s Progress – “from this world to that which is to come” while in jail though it was only published after his release, as religious dissent became more tolerated. He spent his last years continuing to preach and was known affectionately as Bishop Bunyan.

Here is what the newspaper cutting my grandmother left in her handsome leather-bound Rutledge copy of the book in 1938 says about it.

“It is probable that the average modern reader does not know ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ as did his forefathers, who made acquaintance with it almost before they had left the nursery. In the Victorian era it was among the most popular of ‘juvenile gift-books.’ Benevolent uncles and aunts played for safety when they chose this as their present; the most censorious parents could not object to it; it was indeed among the very few story books which might be opened on Sundays. The children loved it for its thrills and for the vigorous illustrations which usually adorned it. Bunyan’s theology did not interest them. But Christian seemed a delightful kind of sabbatical Jack-the-giant-killer, and the Pictor of Apollyon as he ‘straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way’ was one to haunt the memory.  Then in later years, when they could better appreciate its greatness, they returned to Bunyan’s masterpiece as to an old friend. It appeals still to every one who prizes our English speech, and it has brought solace and delight to millions of simple readers.

“What is the secret of its power? This English classic is the work of an uneducated man, the ‘little schooling’ he received being, as he confesses, ‘almost totally forgotten’ soon afterwards. His handwriting is an illiterate scrawl and his manuscripts had to be drastically edited before a printer could deal with them. Again, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ did not gain its success by any striking novelty of theme. The idea of human life as a pilgrimage, suggested in the New Testament, had been developed by many allegorists; one such book had appeared not long before Bunyan’s. 

Yet there was a clear point of difference. In all the other allegories of pilgrimage the characters were merely conventional puppets of virtue or vice; in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ they were most real men and women. Bunyan had seen and known them all, and draws their portraits with astonishing deftness, with the most engaging blend of kindliness and satire. They have their counterparts in every age. We still meet Mr Byends, disdaining those who ‘are for holding their notions though all other men are against them; but I am for Religion in what, and so far as, the times and my safety will bear it’; and Mr Facing-both-ways, and the young woman whose name is Dull, and the heroic Mr Greatheart, whom we could ill spare today. Beyond question, it is this company of living people met by Christian and Christiana on their journeys that give Bunyan’s work its vitality and perennial charm, together with the magic of his style, felt by all those who value English prose.”

This certainly makes me want to know more. The pictures in the edition on my lap are robust, lively etchings of solid, rambunctious English people, too – real-looking people you can imagine with forthright opinions and a bit of a sense of humour. It seems perfect reading for understanding a bit more about how the underbelly of history worked, where ideas come from, and how they survive, grow and finally die, maybe only centuries later. Who knows, there may even be a clue for me about the strong currents and cross-currents of thought in our country today. What's certain, though, is that even if twee goodness might be boring to the red-blooded reader, goodness born of sin, stubbornness, dancing, bell-ringing, tinkering and soldiering sounds altogether more fun. No wonder the Little Women enjoyed it so. It’s going to be top of my reading list for this summer too.

Vanora’s website

LUCY FITCH PERKINS AND HER "TWINS" by Penny Dolan

The second half of twentieth century brought a wealth of books into libraries, schools and into homes, led by technological developments, especially in colour printing. As a teacher, my class book-box was a bright treasury of inventiveness and pleasure.

However, the titles lodged in my childhood heart have dull covers. They were well-worn copies from the old-style public library shelves, read and re-read them randomly. The books were part of a series – not that I had heard that word then – known as The Twins books. I borrowed The Cave Twins and The Spartan Twins as often as I could, as well as any other Twins I found. The Dutch Twinsdidn’t quite fit the history category but they did live in a country nearby, a country in Europe. Ah, Europe, that currently painful word. 

The Dutch Twins were why, in a moment of EU-nostalgia and curiosity, I found and downloaded The Twins e-book bundle. There, thanks to the unexpected Preface, I discovered the author, Lucy Fitch Perkins, who was an American and her specific reason for writing these books.

Lucy's father and mother had been teachers. Her father was involved in the Civil War, which ended in 1865, the year Lucy was born. However, by 1873, increasing business problems made him send Lucy, her four younger sisters and their mother to the Fitch family home in Kalamazoo, Massachusetts, where she grew up.

Lucy always loved drawing and, at sixteen, had cartoons published in the Kalamazoo Gazette. Family contributions allowed Lucy to attend the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. Lucy, with her Congregational upbringing. did not favour dancing, drinking or card-playing, but she was nevertheless a popular and lively-spirited girl.

After graduating in 1886, Lucy worked as an illustrator for the Prang Educational Company until Walter Scott Perry, who was then setting up a Fine Arts Department within the new Pratt Institute for Manual Arts and Engineering, asked her to be his Assistant. (What a widely encompassing title for a college and what a glimpse into the practical American vision of the time!) Lucy’s life seems, to me, to be a useful mix of art, pragmatism, determination and social awareness.

Four years later, in 1891, she left to marry Dwight Perkins, a young architect she'd met while still a student although his Unitarian religion had originally been a barrier to their union. Perkins encouraged his wife by designing her a studio in their new home in Chicago. Unfortunately, as a result of the economic collapse of 1893, Perkins became seriously ill, which led to Lucy resuming her public career. For the next ten years, she worked for the educational publisher as well as teaching, illustrating and painting mural decorations for schoolrooms. 

Lucy wrote, but neither her book of children’s verses nor her fairy stories were a great success. However, when Edwin O. Grover, a publisher friend, saw her sketches of children, he persuaded her to write a series of “geography” reading books, using a boy and a girl as main characters. Her first title, in 1911, The Dutch Twins, was very popular and by the time her last book -  The Dutch Twins and Little Brother - was published (a year posthumously in 1938), Lucy Fitch Perkins had written over twenty-six “Twins” titles, many of which had been translated and sold across the world. For a time, Lucy Fitch Perkins was the publisher Houghton Mifflin’s most profitable author.  

Yet, although her biographical details are interesting, they are not the reason I chose her for this History Girls post. I chose Lucy Fitch Perkins because she wrote with a clear and valuable intention. Early in that new century, the term “melting pot” - the title of a 1908 play – was current, although the idea was not new. Immigration was a continual topic of discussion and Lucy wanted her Twins books to teach respect and understanding for the many peoples then gathering within the United States. 

Her research led her beyond literary sources and out to Ellis Island, where she was deeply affected by the plight of the depressed and oppressed people of all nations herded together. She also visited a Chicago school where children from twenty-seven different nationalities were gathered together in a room and taught by a few determined teachers, which somehow sounds quite a familiar description.

Additionally Lucy believed that only a story based on a real, individual experience would lead her young readers to understand all she was trying to tell them, so she “sought out and became intimately friendly with someone who had been a child in the place she wanted to write about,”according to one account. Children would never be moved to sympathy or empathy by the pedantic generalities of a text book.

Furthermore – and surely as result of all her work for an educational press – Lucy Fitch Perkins wrote her books to appeal to children. She wanted her stories to be both readable and enjoyable so she tried out her stories on a small group of children to make sure the story worked and that text was as fresh and lively as possible. 
 
She called her young critics “the poison squad”, which feels quite accurate, considering the sharp comments that children can make about one’s precious writing. Lucy believed in getting close to her young audience, and drew kneeling on the floor so that she saw things from the viewpoint of a young child. 

Once, when asked how to write for children, Lucy answered “Learn to draw!” I take this to mean not only the art of drawing but also the art of imagining the story in vivid scenes, not in a flurry of wonderful, adult words. The popularity of her books seems to suggest she got that right, and the author Beverly Cleary was a great fan. Lucy was not afraid of strong content either, and included the absentee landlords in Ireland, the Scottish estate clearances and the land ownership system in Mexico within her tales.

The full list of her books is not quite as historical as I remembered: only The Cave Twins, The Spartan Twins, the Puritan Twins, as well as some more specifically American pairs, such as the Twins of the Revolution, which may never have reached English libraries. The Geography series included Dutch, Japanese, Irish, Eskimo, Mexican, Belgian, French, Scotch, Italian and Swiss children, and more. Many of these Twins would have seemed quite “historic” by the time I read them which may be why the series seemed such an enigma - and that silent children’s library didn’t encourage questions.

Right now, when identity and immigration are topics of sadness and tension, I found the story of Lucy Fitch Perkins and her Twins books a positive and welcome delight, even if I have yet to re-read my kindle bundle. I am hoping that - discounting the era of the writing - my memory has not been deceiving me.

To conclude, here’s Lucy Fitch Perkins explaining in her own words:

So I wrote books giving pictures of child life in other countries, and then, for the benefit of American and foreign born children alike, I wrote books which gave some idea of what had been done for this country by those who had founded and developed it.

And, again, emphasing:

. . . the necessity for mutual respect and understanding between people of different nationalities if we are ever to live in peace on this planet. In particular I felt the necessity for this in this country where all the nations of the earth are represented in the population.

Hooray for Lucy Fitch Perkins!

Penny Dolan

A moving and inspiring encounter with Dutch wartime history

On a recent visit to my father’s birthplace, Amsterdam, I went to the Verzetsmuseum - the Museum of the Dutch Resistance - which is to be found in the leafy Plantage district to the East of the city. Like the far better-known Anne Frank Huis, it illuminates a dark time in Holland’s past - May 1940 to May 1945 - when the country was under Nazi occupation, and 100,000 Jews were amongst those sent to their deaths in concentration camps. The museum documents what took place during those years, focusing on the growing resistance to the Nazi presence both by political activists and by those who - although not necessarily identifying themselves as such - nonetheless took part in acts of resistance. It is these stories of bravery and self-sacrifice that the museum commemorates, using artefacts - letters, newspaper reports, photographs, and personal possessions - to illustrate what day-to-day resistance meant.

Here, for example, are the cardboard prints used to create the metal ‘stereotypes’ needed for printing one of Holland’s 1,300 underground newspapers. These included Het Parool (The Password), Vrij Nederland (Free Netherlands), Waarheid (Truth) and Ons Volk (Our People). To be found in possession of these would have meant arrest and deportation to a concentration camp (a fate which overtook at least 20,000 Dutch citizens), and so it was essential to keep such material hidden - in a bag with a false lining, such as this one.

This suitcase was one of the many smuggled into Holland and used for transmitting coded messages back to England. Since the signals these devices emitted were easy to trace, it was essential that the person transmitting kept on the move, and that the equipment could be jettisoned quickly if necessary. Even so, many agents were caught - which meant certain death. Of the 20,000 members of the Dutch Resistance arrested and sent to concentration camps, around 2,000 were executed, although many others did not survive their imprisonment.

     

Here’s the typewriter on which political activist Coba Veltman typed pamphlets calling for a national strike, in February 1941. Shocked and angered by the rounding up and deportation of young Jewish men in Amsterdam, following an outbreak of civil unrest in which a Nazi sympathiser was killed, Dutch dockworkers organised a strike, which was supported by transport services and businesses across the city. The strike was put down with extreme severity, but it helped to galvanise public outrage against anti-Semitism across the country.

This letter, found on the back of a cardboard notice listing regulations at Scheveningen Prison, was written by Arie Addicks, sentenced to death for distributing the underground newspaper, Het Parool. ‘Having worked for freedom, I’m now having to pay a high price for it,’ he writes, adding wryly, ‘The stake was death. I lost this match.’

Another grim reminder of the ‘price’ some Resistance fighters had to pay is seen in the museum’s display about Hannie Schaft, a young Communist activist, who, together with her fellow student, Truus Oversteegen, took it upon herself to kill men who’d been identified as collaborators. To do this, she sometimes disguised herself as a man, wearing glasses she didn’t need, in order to fool the authorities. Eventually she, too, was caught and executed.

Thankfully, not all the stories related in this fascinating museum have an unhappy outcome - and there are many objects on display here which lift the spirits, if only because they show the ingenuity and humanity of those struggling against oppression. These include examples of forged identity papers, and the tools used to make them, which were turned out in their thousands, in order to enable Jews and other proscribed minorities to escape detection and deportation.

One of my favourite exhibits is the pair of hiking boots, worn by Eleanore Hertzberger during her escape to England with her husband Eddie in 1943. The boots look well-worn - as indeed they might, since the young couple travelled by a rather roundabout route, through occupied Belgium and France, and across the Pyrenees. Exhausted and soaked to the skin, they were forced to crawl on hands and knees for the last part of the journey. It’s a scene straight out of John Buchan, or Le Carre.

I’m happy to say they made it - unlike some of the brave people whose lives are showcased here. What’s heartening is to discover how many people preferred to resist rather than capitulate, even if it meant their own lives - and those of their loved ones - were put at risk. I’m grateful to the Museum for giving me such a moving insight into what life was like for many of my father’s countrymen, during the War years - and for giving me permission to use some of their wonderful archive of photographs.

Museum of the Dutch Resistance

Plantage Kerklaan 61 

(620 2535, www.verzetsmuseum.org)