Architecturally Isolating “Feminine” Emotional Displays

I recently moved to upstate New York.  So, there’s a lot more Victorian-style architecture in my neighborhood.  I’ve posted on the interesting ways that Victorian architecture gender segregates activity within the domestic space before (here and here).  One room I’ve been interested in lately is a room with a few different names and a history that’s not entirely known.  It’s sometimes referred to as a “roofwalk.”  But, it’s more commonly called either a “widow’s walk,” “widow’s perch,” or a “widow’s watch.”  When I first learned about it, it was written about as a widow’s watch.  And there’s a bit of cultural mythology that surrounds these rooms in homes.  Here are two houses in my neighborhood with the room (right and left).

The story that I’ve always heard about this room is that it was designed for the wives of sailors to watch and wait for their husbands to return.  Women whose husbands died at sea–so I was told–would sit in these rooms, pining for their long-lost lovers.  As it happens, there’s not a great deal of evidence that this was, in fact, the original purpose of the room, nor that this is how these rooms were actually used.  They did initially appear during the period when the sailing industry produced international trade on a level previously unimaginable and during which naval warfare dominated (~1500’s through the mid 1800s).  But the rooms could have equally been intended for (and used by) mariners themselves (rather than their wives) to look out for ships due back in port.  Indeed, in some communities, these rooms are referred to as “captain’s walks.”

And it’s also true that a great deal of these rooms were initially built around the chimneys of homes to provide quick and easy access to the chimney both in case it needed repair, and for a quick way to put out chimney fires–a constant dilemma in early American architecture.  This was the reason people had their chimneys “swept” every so often.  The accumulated ash and soot, if not regularly removed, could ignite.  Sweeping chimneys was serious–and extremely dangerous–business.  Children were often used because of their size, but it was a job often given to orphaned children.  It’s also a powerful illustration of historical understandings of children and childhood.  Despite being illegal, it would be unthinkable to ask a child to do something this dangerous today.  Chimney fires were serious business.  So, having quick access to pour sand down might have saved your home.

Yet many of these rooms today are not around chimneys, and if they were intended for either men or women, they were a room gendered by design.  And if intended for women, then they continued a tradition within Victorian architecture of designing rooms specifically intended to segregate (and/or isolate) certain emotional displays of women, keeping them out of sight.

Goodnight Moon – The Story of a Lost Room

I’ve read Goodnight Moon to my son over 300 times now. So, I feel I can speak with renewed confidence when telling students about the benefits, joys, and new frustrations than come from re-reading a text.

Goodnight Moon is a simple enough story. My son isn’t yet old enough to begin to play the game that parents have recognized at least since Margaret Wise Brown wrote this book. The game is “delaying bedtime,” and it’s a classic! If the clocks depicted in the images are correct, the bunny in the story is able to successfully delay bedtime from 7:00 to about 8:10 (though the moon’s descent into the night sky provides a shorter time table). That’s not bad, particularly considering he’s being “hushed” by an “old lady” the whole time.

There are a number of oddities throughout the book that the repeat reader will find difficult to ignore. More thorough analyses of the text have explored these in greater detail. Beyond the depiction of a different colored set of curtains on the cover (red and green) than appear throughout the book (yellow and green), however, the room itself is a bit strange by modern standards. For starters, the room is enormous! If you consider the number of objects it holds, combined with the amount of space between them, the room must be gigantic. This is part of what makes this story magical.