Carry A. Nation, Part 2

After her initial "smashings," Carry A. Nation became a full-time activist, traveling from town to town to destroy saloons and preach temperance. She turned her fame into a good income, and used much of that money to set up women’s shelters.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, listeners, just a quick heads up, we are going
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(00:23):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

(00:47):
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and this
is the second of our two parter about Carrie A. Nation.
And in our first episode, we talked about Carrie Nation's
early life and some of the events that influenced her
behavior for the rest of her life. And today we're
going to jump right into her ongoing work in what
she called smash Ings and the many places that her

(01:08):
temperance activism took her. On December nineteen hundred more than
six months after her smashings in Kiowa and two weeks
after her slander trial concluded. It was we're all in
part one if you're confused. Carrie Nation famously attacked the
bar at the Carry Hotel in Witchtock, Kansas. She had

(01:29):
learned from her previous smashings that quote, I could use
a rock, but once so I took the cane with me.
She also brought a steel rod which she had bound
to the cane to give it extra strength. And before
settling on the Carrie Hotel is her target, she had
actually cased fourteen different places and she was enraged to
see police drinking in some of them. But what led

(01:52):
her to select the Carry and that has spelled c
A R E Y. I know there's a lot of
the word carry, but there's a Carry Hotel as well
as Carrie Nation. What led her to select the Carry
was a painting of a naked woman that was kept there.
She also describes this as an oil painting, but then
says it was underglass, which is not normally how oils
are displayed. So it's unclear to me if she got

(02:13):
the details wrong or if the saloon didn't know what
to do with an oil painting. In any case, though,
this painting encapsulated to her just how much could be
taken from women by men who drank. Quote, it is
very significant that the pictures of naked women are in saloons.
Women are stripped of everything by them. Her husband is

(02:33):
torn from her, she is robbed of her son's, her home,
her food, and her virtue. And then they strip her
clothes off and hang her up there in these dens
of robbery and murder. Truly does a saloon make a
woman bare of all things? Yeah, she felt ways about things.
She felt really, really strongly about how drink really was

(02:54):
something that that ruined the lives of women at the
hands of men. A Nation also thought that the ball
are at the Carrey Hotel was a really important target
for another reason. It had a more upscale clientele than
other drinking establishments, so she saw it as a true
tragedy to serve people who were seen as respectable alcohol
because she believed in her heart that it would lead

(03:16):
to their ultimate ruin. She described her pre bashing preparations
for the Carry Hotel in her book quote, I went
back to the hotel and bound the rod and cane together.
Then wrapped paper around the top of it. I slept
but little that night, spending most of the night in prayer.
I wore a large cape. I took the cane and
walked down the backstairs the next morning and out into

(03:37):
the alley. I picked up as many rocks as I
could carry under my cape. I walked into the carry
bar room and threw two rocks at the picture, then
turned and smashed the mirror that covered almost the entire
side of the large room. Some men drinking at the
bar ran out. The bartender was wiping a glass, and
he seemed transfixed to the spot and never moved. I

(03:58):
took the cane and broke the sideboard, which had on
it all kinds of intoxicating drinks. There's actually a funny
UM article from a year later where it actually made
news when they managed to raise enough money to replace
the mirror in the bar, because it was apparently very
expensive to do so. Uh and the property damage that
she managed tallied up to several thousand dollars and Nation

(04:21):
was arrested. So keep in mind that it wasn't illegal
for a saloon to exist as a physical structure. It
was just the alcohol sales that were illegal, so that
is why she was arrested there, she was found guilty
of malicious mischief, and while she was in jail, she
believed that they her jailers, tried to drive her insane
by placing smokers in nearby cells she could have buide

(04:43):
neither pipe nor cigarette smoke, and in many subsequent arrests
she would similarly accuse the local police of trying to
drive her mad so that she could be declared insane
and institutionalized. She also claimed that a jail trustee named
John warned her that men in the County Attorney's office
meant to do her harm. So a trustee is an

(05:04):
imprisoned person who has exhibit good behavior and has been
given privileges or responsibilities in return. Carrie had been told
that the county Attorney, sam Aiden, was going to take
her out of the jail via the back entry, and
she agreed to that plan initially, but once she received
this warning from the trustee that the attorney's office might

(05:25):
have ill intent, she decided she was not going to
go with them, and so she wired the door of
her cell shut with some wire that she got from John,
who was the trustee, and she waited in her cell
all night, armed with the leg of a cot in
case anyone tried to steal her away. She was ready
to beat their hands if they tried to even touch
the bars. And while there's no indication that anyone did

(05:45):
try to kidnap or harm her in this way, she
commented on the night by writing quote, I know what
it is to expect murder in my cell. She also
came to view the Wichita Eagle as something of an
enemy during this time, calling it the rum Bot sheet
that has made Wichita one of the most lawless places
in Kansas. While she was jailed, she was brought copies

(06:07):
of the paper to read, and the coverage of her
smashing was decidedly unfriendly to her cause articles about Carrie
Nation routinely characterized her as just deranged. Yeah, we mentioned
too that the Kiowa paper had done a similar thing.
She was in the press pretty much written up as
like a kukie old lady who just was a nut

(06:29):
and not to be taken seriously except for the fact
that she was very damaging to property. But her ordeal
in the Wichita jail did not deter her at all
from what she saw as her calling she began receiving letters,
both hate mail and letters of encouragement, and some people
even sent her money. Nation quickly gained a following, and
before long, when she showed up to smash a saloon,

(06:51):
she was not alone. Sometimes the group with her would sing,
prey or recite Bible verses while destroying the bars that
they rated, although she was pretty much the leader in
all of the physical destruction, and her accompanied smashings began
immediately after her jail time over the Kerry Hotel incident ended.
When she left the jail in Wichita, she set out

(07:12):
for Enterprise, Kansas in Dickinson County because she had been
sent a letter while she was in jail, and the
sender had asked her to travel to Enterprise and to
smash up the saloons there, as she had done in
Kiowa and Wichita. As she headed to the train station,
a massive crowd had formed, but she made her way
through the throng of people and boarded. In her account,

(07:34):
she stated that a man she did not know assisted
her and kept the crowd away, telling her that he
believed she was a good woman. When she opened the
train window to see the crowd, a barrage of eggs
was let loose at her, but the windows slid closed
before any could hit her. A rock also flew through
the window next, but she claimed to be completely unfazed
by it, as she believed in her heart that God

(07:54):
was protecting her. After staying with a sympathizer on her
first night and enterprise, she mediately went to a dive
to smash it. It was closed because of a baseball
game in town, so she broke in by smashing the
front window and climbing through, and as she destroyed the
alcohol within, several women waited outside. Eventually a marshal arrived

(08:15):
and removed her from the premises. Although she was not arrested,
the lawman did prevent her from smashing up another establishment
across the street from that first one, though I really
wish we had an account from the perspective of the
lawman having to deal with all of this, like there's
a woman destroying the bar, you gotta go get her.

(08:36):
She was attacked later that day, though, by the wife
of the man who owned the saloon that she had destroyed,
and Carrie Nation ended up with a black eye. After that,
she continued that same day to organize a temperance group
to break up the bars of Enterprise, and as they
went out together the following morning to do so, they
were attacked once again by a group of four women
paid by Shilling that was the bar owner, and things

(08:58):
became really quite. Nation was beaten pretty brutally and some
of her hair was torn out. She feared for her life,
but when she implored the women around her for help,
they defended her and it finally ended the skirmish. Next up,
we will talk about how Carrie Nations started her own paper,
but first we're going to pause for a word from
a sponsor. After one of her later arrests and Topeka,

(09:28):
Carrie was bailed out of jail by a black man
named Nick Chiles. Chiles was a printer and a successful newspaperman.
He had been running his own paper called The Plain
Dealer for two years, and that paper actually went on
to become the longest running black newspaper in the US
until it shut down in Thanks to her acquaintance with Childs,
in March nineteen o one, Nation launched her own paper

(09:51):
from jail. It was called The Smasher's Mail, and she
started The Spencer in partnership with Chiles, who i mean,
this was kind of controversial, but his Child's rumored to
also own a saloon himself, and in her opening remarks
in the first issue, she wrote, quote, I have no
apologies to make in having Nick Childs, for the publisher
of the Smashers Mail, our Savior ate with publicans and

(10:14):
sinners to do them good. The servant is not above
his lord. This paper shall be as his name, the
Smashers Mail. I shall put into the columns the letters
I get from all over, even those I get from
across the water. Those wishing to say anything through the
columns of the Smashers Mail must put it in the
form of a letter and use brevity the soul of wit.

(10:35):
For I reserve the exclusive right as editor. But despite
this positive and resolved tone of that first statement, the
business relationship between Nation and Childs soured almost immediately. She
claimed that he had cheated her out of money and papers,
and that after three weeks it was over. Yeah. So
she said that not only had he taken her writing

(10:59):
and basically you know, run off with it, but basically
he then published the paper and and made money off
of it, and she never got any of it. The
Smashers Mail, though was not Carrie Nations only paper. She
would later go on to publish one called The Hatchet
in nineteen o five and another titled The Home Defender.
And in these periodical she not only warned of the
dangers of drink and the importance of fighting for temperance,

(11:21):
she took up other causes and used her publications to
speak on those topics as well. She believed in women's suffrage,
saying that quote the loving moral influence of mothers must
be put in the ballot box. And she was vocally
against a variety of vices and sins, including tobacco. We
mentioned earlier that she hated it. She also spoke against
foreign food and scurts who were worn too short. She

(11:45):
was firmly against the corsets, believing that they were bad
for women's health, so she refused to wear one, and
she wrote about their perils in the paper, and her
writing also included advice about child rearing and homemaking. I
scarious devotion to the cause. It really consumed her life,
and with all of her times spent smashing saloons and
giving lectures, she became completely disconnected from her family. In

(12:09):
nine one David Nation filed for divorce, claiming cruelty and
desertion on the wife's part. He had warned her that
if she didn't come home, he would be filing papers,
and she had responded with quote, Mr, Nation, God has
given me a mission. I dare not turn back, shall I?
Hearkened unto God or unto man. But she really was
quite devastated when David followed through on his threat. She

(12:31):
felt that even though they as a couple rarely agreed
and they really didn't seem to have a particularly delightful marriage,
that they had been together for twenty four years and
she thought that they were never going to separate. And
she also knew that a divorce would undoubtedly make news
and as she put it, quote, would hinder my work.
And while the divorce trial did cause something of a
scandal in Medicine Lodge, it really didn't seem to slow

(12:53):
down Carrie's activism. And when writing her life story, she
used this moment in her life as a sort of
springboard of then go on for quite a while uh
and discuss all of the ways that men betray women.
In her second raid on Wichita, she adopted a hatchet
as her favorite means of destruction for her saloon rates,
and this became an iconic part of her story. When

(13:15):
a bartender approached her, she exclaimed, quote, don't come near
my hatchet. It might fall on you, and I will
not be responsible for the results. She was often photographed
while holding both her bible and her hatchet. She was
arrested once again in Wichita, but this time several of
her friends from the Temperance movement were arrested with her,
because again she at this point was not by herself

(13:37):
on most of these raids, and she actually described their
time in a holding cell there as very happy, saying quote,
this was one of the glorious, heavenly and refreshing times.
We're saying hymns repeated scripture. Would often laugh and cry
by turns for Joy to think we were worthy to
suffer for his sake. Throughout her career of smashings, which

(13:57):
she sometimes called hatgitations, she continued to tour around to towns,
usually after receiving a letter from someone requesting her help
to eliminate the saloons in a given location, and she
was arrested many many times. Was often found guilty of
some destruction of property or mischief charge. To pay for

(14:17):
her many fines, Nation turns to the lecture circuit and
to merchandise sales, and initially she actually turned down a
number of offers to appear in public, which were usually
proffered in exchange for assistance in getting her out of jail.
She believed that a lot of the people contacting her
just saw her as a mere curiosity or a freak
to exhibit, I think she said, like I would be

(14:37):
a white elephant to them. But eventually she was struggling
so completely for money that she did consider it, and
she prayed on it, and eventually she did indeed begin lecturing.
She never planned in advance what she was going to
say to a crowd, but she just relied on her
own experience and passion for the cause, and her faith
in God to carry her through. She brought in a

(14:58):
good income giving talks of temperance and eventually selling many
hatchets made of pewter. After she initially began selling the
souvenir hatchets, she came to believe them to be a
vitally important part of her cause, writing quote, the little
hatchets have been my faithful little defenders. They have paid
railroad fairs, hotel bills, they aided me and paying for
the home for drunkards wives. Besides, they are my little messengers.

(15:21):
They cause people to talk, to think, to act. Never
was there a greater advertisement of a great cause. God
has blessed the mission of the hatchet. I tell mothers
to get these little hatchets, put them on their boys
and girls clothes. With these hatchets goes the facts of
my life, which will be an inspiration to the heart
of the young. And she also sold souvenir photos of

(15:45):
herself always posed with her hatchet in her Bible. And
she reportedly brought in as much as three hundred dollars
per week from all these ventures, and in addition to
paying her finds and bail, she would use the money
to print her periodicals, though almost each time she started
when she would end up him to close up shop
because she simply could not manage her life on the
road and all of these smashings and the job of

(16:06):
editing a magazine. At the same time of her various
financial efforts, she wrote quote, I have made a lot
of money, tried to use it to further the cause
of the people. But I have made some sad failures
to get the results I paid for. Carrie Nation changed
the spelling of her first name from the I e
ending to the Y ending officially in nineteen o three,

(16:27):
and this was to create a play on words with
her middle initial and last name. So she became carry
a nation, as in carry a nation for prohibition U.
And that was according to her own logic. Yeah. She
would also use use her name in phrasing of like
carry a nation out of darkness, carry a nation, you know,
from slovenly drunkenness. She she used it in a lot

(16:50):
of different slogans. In nineteen o three. The eighteen fifty
four Temperance novel titled Ten Nights in a Bar Room
and What I Saw There was adapted as a vaudeville play,
and this time it incorporated Carrie Nation into it and
allowed her to tell her story. She started in the show,
and she took the part to spread the message of
prohibition more widely. As she once told a journalist quote,

(17:12):
people go to the theaters more than they do the churches.
And I want to go where there are plenty of
people to hear me and where they need me. Next up,
we will talk about Carrie A. Nations travels to Scotland
and England to share her feelings on temperance there. But first,
people take one more quick sponsor break. Carrie Nation made

(17:35):
waves across the Pond as well as in the United States,
touring Great Britain as a lecturer, and she met the
organizing secretary of Dundee, Scotland's Prohibition Party at a prohibition
convention in Ohio in and that was when he invited
her to come and speak in his home country. And
so they worked out all the particulars of financing, and
she started her tour in Dundee, but eventually she went

(17:58):
to several cities in Scotland before second leg of the
tour in England. Nation's writings as she experienced this other
culture are fairly amusing. She was horrified by the pubs
of Great Britain and she found the women there, in
her words, nervous. She wrote, I never saw such nervous
women in my life as they're in Britain. Their conversation

(18:20):
seems affected. Their voices are high and they use the
rising inflection. I believe the reason of this is the
tea drinking. Nearly every man, woman and child is a
tea fiend. In Britain. It is nothing for them to
drink three and four cups of tea at a meal.
They always use black tea. I don't know why. That
just cracked me up when I read it. Uh. Clearly

(18:44):
she saw it as almost as bad as alcohol. Uh
in some ways. Anyway, Nation wrote her autobiography, which we've
quoted a lot here, which is titled The Use and
Need of the Life of Carrie A. Nation in Night.
In this book actually made enough money that she was
able to use the proceeds to purchase a home in
Kansas City, Kansas, and that residence was a women's shelter.

(19:06):
It was a haven for those who had fled from
men with drinking problems. And for this and her other
work in the temperance movement, she was eventually given a
medal by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which celebrated her
as quote the bravest woman in Kansas. In nineteen ten,
she purchased another house to become a home for drunkards,
wives and children, this time in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. She

(19:28):
moved in there as well, and her grueling schedule of
the previous decade at this point had taken a really
serious toll on her health. In January nineteen eleven, Carrie
Nation was at a speaking engagement in Eureka Springs when
she collapsed. She never fully recovered, and five months later
she died on June nine. She was sixty four at
the time and had not lived long enough to see

(19:49):
the eighteenth Amendment, which outlawed alcohol nationally, or the nineteenth Amendment,
which granted women the right to vote, passed. She was
buried next to her parents in Belton, Missouri. Of course,
prohibition failed, and it was ended in nineteen thirty three.
Had carry A Nation been alive to see this repeal,
she probably would have been livid and her eyes drinking

(20:11):
was a sin, and that condemned it thoroughly. She read
in her autobiography quote, there is not a lawful saloon
in the world. Law is as eternal and unchangeable as
God himself. Anything that is sinful cannot be lawful, and
anything that is lawful cannot be sinful. The saloon is
not lawful because it is sinful. Yet she had very

(20:33):
clear and unwavering opinions. So clearly, Carrie A. Nation was
a really complex woman. And while her motivations in many
cases may have been noble. We have to also address
some really problematic aspects of her story, notably her interactions
with black people. So as she became well known in

(20:54):
the temperance movement, she did become quite popular with black
temperance advocates, and many of them sent her small amounts
of money to help her cause or wrote testimony letters
of how their lives or the lives of loved ones
had been damaged by drink. In many ways, Carrie Nation
was very vocal about accepting and loving all people. I
mean she really did say all the time, like if
she believed everyone to be equal. But she also wrote

(21:17):
some really troubling things about black people and slavery. She
was raised largely by both black servants and enslaved people
that her parents owned, and she called them her aunties
and uncles and was quite attached to several of them,
so her writing about slavery consequently is really problematic. She
acknowledged that it was a bad thing, but then she

(21:38):
downplayed it all by writing quote, I would rather have
my son sold to a slave driver than to be
a victim of a saloon. And she wrote more on
race it is equally troubling. She saw, of course, that
this was a serious issue, and she understood that the
problem was that white people were afraid of black people
seeking equality. But then she cautions that black people shouldn't

(22:00):
want that anyway, as quote, it would be of no
real value to them. She advises that black people quote
should never depart from your race lines and bearings, keep
true to your nature, your simplicity and happy disposition, and
above all, come back to the old time religion. You
will never strand on that rock. Obviously, her stamps on
the matter was informed by the time she was living

(22:21):
in but the links that she goes to and justifying
her family's ownership of enslaved people and assuring the reader
that her father was one of the quote good slave owners,
indicate that she clearly understood that it was wrong. Yeah,
there's some really Her autobiography is available online in a
number of places. You can get it, you know, in

(22:42):
all kinds of formats. There's even a free Kindle version
of it. And there's actually like a whole really upsetting
portion where she claimed that some of the enslaved people
that they had actually asked her father to beat their
children for them and like she says really upsetting things. Um,
and it's clear she doesn't to disparage her father, but

(23:02):
the things she's talking about are just horrifying. In seventy three, though,
as she had gained stable footing financially, Nation actually did
attempt to seek out one of the women who had
helped raise her, who was named Aunt Judy, and her
intent was to take care of her in her old age.
But when she traveled south to Texas at the time
where Judy had moved, Carrie discovered that the woman had

(23:24):
died six months earlier, and Judy's children actually told Carrie
Nation that Judy had hoped one day to live with
her again. So today Carrie Nations name Grace's a restaurant
slash bar. But I think they're I think they're online
thing calls themselves like a modern speakeasy. Sure, uh, it's

(23:45):
called Carrie Nations spelled with an I E. I've only
been there once. It is I would call it gleeful
in the fact that it is literally a bar named
after Carrie Nation, who would have smashed it up with
her hatchet. Yeah, I have to go next time I'm
in Boston, We're going there. Well, and I was glad

(24:06):
that you picked this episode because I I a friend
of mine had been going to take us there one
time and it turned out we just happened to be
there on it like they were closed. We were like, well,
we'll go somewhere else. Um. And then I was in
the same neighborhood a different time. We were looking for
something to eat one hole. Let's try this. Yeah. And
actually thank my friend Justin for that because he suggested

(24:29):
it because I was I had been looking at another
topic entirely and I was just running out of steam
and not finding things, and I was like, do you
have anything on your wish list? Has stuff? And he
mentioned it and then I started looking at her and
I was like, oh, we have to do her. Yeah,
she had gone on my list at that point after
having you know, sat there at the bar named after her.

(24:49):
So I was very glad when you picked her up. Yeah.
And the one thing throughout Carrie Nation's life that seemed
to be the constant through her failed marriages, her work
in the hotel business for smash sing, you know, her
failed attempts at teaching school and teaching in churches, and
her jail time was her religious faith and her belief
that she was above all an instrument of God. And

(25:12):
she actually made a note in her autobiography to call
out this fact, writing quote, note this reader that I
did not think of smashing God told me to do it. Yeah,
she's she is really fascinating, and I loved reading about
her in many ways, But there was part of me
that was, like, I'm so glad I never met this one. Yeah,

(25:34):
the whole time you were working on this, you would
you would uh, you would direct message me periodically with
like the latest troubling Yeah, yes, so cantankerous. But then
there's this part of me that feels I feel very
bad for her because I really think, like, because that

(25:54):
first marriage was so torn apart by alcohol, like it
kind of led her down this path where she was
never going to find true happiness, you know, Like her
life was always a struggle after that, And I think
part of it was that she was always struggling with
with what had happened. I mean, that's just me being
armchair psychiatrists, but well, yeah, and I feel bad that

(26:16):
she clearly had her very sort of cantankerous demeanor was
clearly like her wrestling with the world. Well and I
think sometimes the temperance movement is painted as a bunch
of busybody women who needed to mind their own business, um,
when in reality, there were a lot of women in
the temperance movement who were involved with it because they

(26:38):
were being abused by their husbands, um and like the
husbands would come home drunk and abuse them, or their
husbands had lost all of the family savings because they
were untreated alcoholics. Like that's like there were so many
women who for them, it was this this desperately personal thing,
needing to try to save their family basically. So it's

(27:00):
not really accurate to just be like these women couldn't
keep their nose out of other people in social habits.
Like that wasn't right. Yeah, yeah, it's ah, Like I said,
it's tricky. She's she's seen in very different lights by
different people with different perspectives. So that's care nation. She's
she's one of those food for thought people Like I
know I will be thinking about her for a long time.

(27:22):
But you know what I'm thinking about now? Is it
listener mail? It is uh This listener mail comes from
us from our listener, Shelly. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly,
she says, Happy summer, ladies. I discovered your podcast about
two years ago as I was getting ready to sell
our old house. During the long, horrible process of painting
and staging the house just to turn around and sell
it to someone else, I kept myself engaged with your podcast,

(27:45):
and I have been a fan ever since. I tend
to listen to your episodes in batches as I travel
for work, and I must admit that I'm a bit behind,
but I've had a couple of trips recently, so I'm
almost caught up. You continue to simultaneously entertain and educate,
a difficult balance, but you nail it. As an aside
by me, no one should feel like they have to
keep up. I don't keep up with all my podcasts.
If there when you're ready, she says. Next, my husband

(28:09):
and I are taking a trip to Europe in August
to celebrate our tenure anniversary. Happy anniversary. Let me say
that my husband has never been outside the country before,
so I'm excited to introduce him to so many awesome
things that the world has to offer for his first trip.
I picked pretty reliable cities from a tourist perspective. Cities
to have a little something for everyone. We're headed to
Nuremberg because beer, and then we have a stop or

(28:30):
two in northern France, ending in Paris. And Paris, as
you know, is filled with such interesting history and architecture,
and I feel like you really can't go wrong there
with the first time international traveler. I would concur uh,
she says, I know from previous visits that Paris museums
are often closed one or more days during the week,
so I was doing a little planning ahead to find
out when a few places would be open, including the

(28:50):
Palace at Versailles. While I was on the website, I
noticed that they have an online exhibit called Fashion at Versailles.
I know how much Holly likes historical fashion, so I
thought I would let you know. It's they or I
have no idea how long it's been up, and you
may likely know about it already, but I wanted to
let you know in the off chance that you did not.
And she gives the link. We will share that on
our show. Notes I did not know about this. It

(29:10):
is amazing. I'll talk about it some more in a second.
She says, Well, I don't harbor an intense love for
fashion the online exhibit is stunning. They provide commentary around
fashion shown in many paintings, and you can click each
painting and zoom in to see the detail. For a
novice who knows nothing about fashion in history, it's very
interesting and the fashion is stunning. Although I have to
say the first picture in the her section, so this

(29:32):
site is laid out with a hymn and her so
that you see both like sort of the traditional male
and traditional female modes of dress. She says, the first
picture in the her section of the exhibit made me chuckle.
It starts out by talking about the simplicity of the
clothing for everyday life, and then the picture that illustrates
this concept shows Marie Antoinna in a silk robe with
a really full skirt and lace tram which, through the

(29:53):
modern lens, or at least my lens, is extremely ordinate
and definitely not simple. I literally laughed out loud when
I saw that. It was great. Just goes to show
that perspective is everything. Uh. And then she mentions that
she is also sharing the podcast with her daughter, who
is about to turn eight, so happy birthday to her,
and that she screens them first, since you know, those
are our younger ears, since some of our material maybe

(30:14):
a little too much. But uh, she is already noticing
that her daughter has a very strong interest in history
and that the podcast is something that they can do together.
So that is awesome, Kelly. I had no idea about
that website and now I'm in love with it. So
it's really really beautiful. Also, it circles back to another
podcast topic that we have done because it uses some
of the vision La portraits of Marianntoinette to illustrate the clothing,

(30:37):
and it really does break down like the elements of
the clothing what it means, Uh, you know why different
things were favored at different times. It is a really
amazing resource. So, like I said, we will have that
link in the show notes and it is gorgeous and
I can get lost in that site for a long time. Uh.
If you would like to write to us and send
us things that will send us down rabbit holes of

(30:57):
delight for a long time, you can do so at
History pie Cast at how stuff works dot com. You
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(31:17):
to type in some element of interest into the search bar.
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at missed in History dot com and how stuff works

(31:38):
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