After reading The New York Magazine’s list of the Top 20 Chef Empires, and perusing a few culinary books I’d borrowed from the library, I was struck, dumbstruck actually, that all save one of those twenty names are those of men. Many would argue that the age of modern cookery was of the turn of the century. Not only were chefs lifting food to its highest degree, but more and more people were able to partake of the sumptuous, delicate tastes a cook could create due to the falling food prices and rising incomes, if not the lucrative opportunities skilled French cooks could find in the kitchens of America and Europe’s new and fabulously rich. Right around the Edwardian era we saw an explosion of foodie treats, and most notably, women were involved–the “Queen of Cooks,” Rosa Lewis; Fannie Farmer, who raised the Boston Cooking School to prominence; and Marthe Distel, who founded culinary magazine La Cuisinière Cordon Bleu and offered subscribers cooking classes with professional chefs, which in turn led to the formation of Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.

Oddly enough, these women have been consigned to the footnotes of history. Granted, Farmer’s Boston Cooking School cookbook remains in print, but as I’ve quickly noticed, Victorian/Edwardian cookbooks written by women are shunted into the domestic sphere, while those authored by men become authoritative This strange dichotomy of the kitchen is fascinating. Cooking, in its basic format, is seen largely as a feminine position, yet once a man steps into the kitchen it becomes one of power. The male chef is master, he is king of the domain–in etiquette manuals, one never reads of tyrannical female cooks who must be handled with kid gloves. The careers of Rosa Lewis and Auguste Escoffier run parallel, yet Lewis is mentioned frequently in tandem with sex (rumored to be mistress of Edward VII and her hotel was allegedly a place where English aristocrats met with their mistresses), and Escoffier is lauded as the creator of modern French cookery, despite the fact that his career is also due to the opening of a famous hotel.

Even today, while watching Top Chef or Hell’s Kitchen, a female cook is rarely seen to raise her voice, shout and/or curse for her sous chefs and other underlings to get a move on. In vintage ads, a woman (frequently a mother) is posed in the kitchen with an apron, slaving lovingly over an apple pie or basting a turkey. For her, the kitchen is non-threatening, it is a place of peace and devotion; she is preparing a meal to nourish her family. The male in the kitchen is attired in chef’s clothing–tall white hat, white coat, dark pants. Frequently, his arms are crossed and he stares belligerently at the camera. Other times he is posed in the act of cutting, dicing, and mashing, and surrounded by a huge cavernous kitchen whose walls and ceilings are covered with big, heavy cast iron cookware.

Interestingly enough, when the White House hired a new cook in 1910, Miss Flora Hamilton was replacing a woman who left the employ of the Presidential mansion to marry. It seems the White House long employed female cooks to prepare and direct the luxurious suppers over which the President and the First Lady hosted (which also brings the issue of race into play, as most White House staffers were African-American, and the image of “Mammy” lovingly preparing food for her employers in the kitchen remained in popular food culture for almost a century after the Civil War).

Further Reading:
The World of Escoffier by Timothy Shaw
The Art of Dining: A History of Cooking and Eating by Sara Paston-Williams
The Duchess of Jermyn Street: The life and good times of Rosa Lewis of the Cavendish Hotel by Daphne Vivian Fielding
The Queen of Cooks – and Some Kings: The Story of Rosa Lewis by Mary Lawton
Coming Out of the Kitchen: Women Beyond the Home by Una A. Robertson
Women As Culinary Professionals

Hairstyles of this period shifted with the shifting silhouette in dress and also reflected, as the era progressed, the growing freedom and emphasis on ease in hairdressing that marked a more mobile society. The agricultural depression of the 1880s which dampened spirits, expressed itself in the somber, less frivolous clothing of the decade. This was the height of the bustle era, but somehow they didn’t seem as jaunty or frivolous as they appeared in the 1870s. This bustle was formidable and wowing in its height and width, as though ladies were adamant against being blindsided from behind. Accordingly, men’s clothing became unerringly correct and, despite the aberration that was the Aesthetic movement, dark colors, close-tailored and stout fabrics were the norm. To accompany this fashionable armor, ladies’ hair was worn close to the head and rolled tightly at the crown, with small curls at the nape of the neck and light bangs (or “fringes” as they were called in England). Hardly any man of this period were clean-shaven and their hair was clipped short and shaggy.

The early 1890s saw a slight loosening of the hair, and as this decade progressed, ladies’ hair softened and ballooned nearly as drastically as their sleeves! Fringes remained, though with the slight pompadour effect, the height required need as much hair as a woman had on her head–and then some. Ever since the simple coiffures of the first two decades of the 19th century disappeared, ads filled newspapers selling all manners of fake hair. Ladies brushed their hair daily not only for cleanliness but to collect enough hair in the bristles to make their own “rats” and “pads” to bulk up their thin locks. The sale of hair became big business (hence the scene in Little Women) and to save even more time, hair companies created styled hairpieces–braided coils, ponytails, even whole wigs! No longer was it shameful for a woman to lack her own head of plentiful, glossy hair: she could buy it.

The 1900s were apogee of false hair. The full-blown pompadour look was in fashion, mostly inspired by Charles Dana Gibson’s iconic Gibson Girl. The sketches showed a beautiful woman with high and full up-do, and women rushed to emulate this with any manner of rats, pads and hair pieces. The Gibson Man–square-jawed, broad-shouldered, athletic, and more important, clean-shaven–inspired a new generation of young men as well. Beards had fallen out of favor and though mustaches retained their supremacy (particularly in the military, where officers were required to sport one), a lack of facial hair signified youthfulness and vigor, which matched the cavalier and derring-do spirit of the age. The latter part of the first century saw a widening of hats and a widening of hair to carry the wide-brimmed “Merry Widow”. However, the hair lost a bit of its height and was generally parted on the side or in the middle, and was fluffed low and wide towards the ears and nape.

The 1910s saw a near abandonment of facial hair for young men. Their hair was now loose and tousled, no longer trapped by the macassar oil and brilliantine pomade of former years. For ladies, the slimming silhouettes needed slimmer hair, but rather than a retread of the 1880s, their hair was dressed so that it appeared ear-length and curled–almost bob-like beneath their close-fitting hats. In fact, some women even went so far as to bob their hair, mostly inspired by Irene Castle who chopped her locks in 1914 before a scheduled surgery (she didn’t want to deal with caring for long hair during her convalescence). This inspired a craze for the “Castle Bob” and when Irene added a necklace around her head, the “Castle band” took off as well. The craze for bobs during the war years actually preceded the Golden or Roaring Twenties, and ironically (or not), ladies’ hair of the immediate post-war years made an attempt to recapture the twilight of the Edwardian era with a short-lived favoring of a slight pompadour. But the tide of fashion is unstoppable in progress, and the new generation threw themselves headlong into embracing hairstyles the older considered horrid and masculine, altogether forgetting the horror that met their generation’s shift in coiffure.

Further Reading:
Encyclopedia of Hair by Victoria Sherrow
One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair‎ by Allan Peterkin
The History of Hair: Fashion and Fantasy Down the Ages‎ by Robin Bryer
1911 Hairstyles from the Girls’ Own Paper and Woman’s Magazine

The House of Lords measured 100 feet by 50 feet, and was decorated in solemn hues of gold and crimson, with lofty stained-glass windows depicting the past kings and queens of England. At the end of the Chamber was a canopied throne of gold where the reigning monarch sat when opening Parliament. On the steps to the throne the eldest sons of peers and privy councilors were privileged to stand during the sittings of the House of Lords. Immediately before this was the Woolsack, a red ottoman upon which the Lord High Chancellor presided over the House. Unlike the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Lord High Chancellor could take part in debate. At his right sat the Lords Spiritual–the Archbishops and Bishops. To their right were the peers supporting the current Government with the Ministers seated in front of them. Opposite them sat the Opposition peers. In front of the Lord Chancellor was a table, upon which lay volumes of Parliamentary procedure and writing materials, where three clerks in wigs and gowns sat. Facing this was a desk for the reporters of Parliamentary debates, who relieved one another every fifteen minutes.

Near the strangers’ gallery were three or four benches in the center of the floor, facing the Lord Chancellor, known as “the cross benches,” upon which sat those Princes of the Blood Royal who had been created peers of the realm and who, though they were allowed to vote, belonged to no political party. A few peers also chose to be seated thus. Behind these benches was the place known as “the Bar,” where the Speaker and the members of the House of Commons stood when summoned by the Black Rod to the House of Lords to hear the Royal assent signified to the Bills agreed upon by both Houses. The divisions in the House of Lords mirrored that of the Commons, except the peers declared themselves in the Old Norman French “Content” or “Non Content” rather than “Aye” or “No,” and the tellers counted these votes with a white wand.

Also present in the House of Lords were the peeresses, whose galleries lined both sides of the Upper Chamber, foreign Ambassadors, invited guests (“Strangers”), and reporters, who each also possessed galleries of their own. But unlike the House of Commons, where the sexes were separated into their own galleries, ladies and gentlemen could sit together.

Contrary to popular belief, most peers sat regularly in the House of Lords, and throughout the nineteenth century, attendance reached its peak in the 1830s, 1850s, 1870s and late 1880s–no doubt spurred on by such issues like the Irish Question or the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act. However, sittings were usually brief, a quarter of an hour not infrequently the length of a sitting. Sometimes a sitting might have extended to an hour, on still rarer occasions it prolonged until seven pm, and at times on two nights of a Session of seven or eight months’ duration, the sitting could last until midnight. But it was more likely that newspaper reports would announce the adjournment of the House fifteen minutes after it first sat. Far from being lazy, the reasons behind these short sessions was because the House of Lords was practically barred from initiating legislature of an important nature.

Sittings in the House of Lords began at four, though as a rule, no business was done until half-past four, and during this interlude, the Lord Chancellor would essentially twirl his thumbs. The number of peers of the realm fluctuated over the years, but generally hovered around five hundred and seventy. Where the House of Commons required forty members to “make a House,” three peers formed a quorum, but if it appeared on a division that thirty lords were not in attendance, the question was declared not decided.

When the Government changed, the parties crossed to floor, with the “ins” sitting on the benches to the right of the Lord Chancellor, and the “outs” occupying those on his left. The Lords Spiritual always occupied the same benches on the Government side of the House, near to the Throne, no matter which party was in office. Twenty-six in number–the Archbishops Canterbury and York, and twenty-four bishops–were distinguished from the Lords temporal by their full, flowing black gowns and their lawn sleeves. The peers in the House were much more soberly dressed except at the opening of Parliament by the Sovereign, whereupon they appeared in scarlet robes, slashed across the breast with stripes of ermine, few or numerous according to the low or high degree of the wearer in the peerage. Though the Lords temporal–royal peers, dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and barons–were allotted certain benches according to their rank, they only sat thus during the opening of Parliament.

Opinion of the day claimed that speeches made in the House of Lords were of an eloquent and more able quality than those made in the Commons, for members of the lower house spoke as often as possible to get their names in the papers. The demeanor was quite different in the Lords as well–none of the fury and raucous which characterized the doings in the Commons. But if order cannot be maintained, the procedure of the House provides for the quelling of the disturbance by the reading by the Clerk of two old Standing Orders in relation to asperity in speech and quarrels in the Chamber.

Though of lesser political power, the House of Lords was the Supreme Court of Appeal from the Courts of Justice of the United Kingdom. If a claimant felt an injustice was done him by the decision of any of the law courts, they could come to the House of Lords, whose judgment on the matter would be final and irrevocable. This court sat on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays throughout the legal year from 10:30 am to 4 pm, and gravity, dignity and decorum reigned supreme. No witnesses were examined, nor was there a jury, and sparring between opposing lawyers was unheard of. The lawyers would address the House at the Bar and lay down, in placid, conversational style, the facts of the case and the points of law on which he relied for judgment. After both sides presented their case, the House would adjourn and the parties involved would be informed of the day on which the House would deliver its decision.

As with such great power, there came resentment, and the growing dissent against the House of Lords affected the House of Commons, where the Conservative Party was defeated in 1906, and then invoked a Parliamentary crisis in 1910. Meanwhile, books and pamphlets filled bookstalls with such titles as Peers and bureaucrats: two problems of English Government and The Old Order Changeth, the Passing of Power from the House of Lords, one of which went so far as the proclaim that “our victory at Waterloo was a great misfortune to England….the feudal system, broken down and disorganized all over the Continent by Napoleon, preserved its old tradition in these islands…[and Britain] is now a hundred years behind the rest of Western Europe.”

The trouble began when in 1909 David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced into the House of Commons the “People’s Budget”, which proposed a land tax targeting wealthy landowners, among other benefits for the common people of England. This bill was immediately defeated by the House of Lords, and in response, the Liberal Party made the curtailing of the House of Lords’ powers their primary campaign issue for the General Election of January 1910.

The chaos produced by this was enormous, and King Edward let it be known his willingness to raise men to the peerage to force the bill to pass through the House of Lords. He died in May however, before he could implement this, and when the Conservative Party, with their Liberal Unionist allies, gained more seats than the Liberals, the fight intensified. After another general election in December, the Asquith Government secured the passage of a bill to curtail the powers of the House of Lords. In the end, The Parliament Act 1911 effectively abolished the power of the House of Lords to reject legislation, or to amend in a way unacceptable to the House of Commons; most bills could be delayed for no more than three parliamentary sessions or two calendar years.

Further Reading:
Edwardian England: 1901-1914, ed. Simon Nowell-Smith
The Book of Parliament by Michael MacDonagh
How We are Governed: Guide for the Stranger to the Houses of Parliament‎ by Howard Vincent
The House of Lords Question by Andrew Reid, Philip Stanhope, and Robert Collier Monkswell
The Rise of the Democracy by Joseph Clayton
House of Lords on Wapedia

“Booker T. Washington, the well known negro educator and President of the Tuskegee, Ala. institute , was a guest of President Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt at dinner at the white house tonight.”

It was a day like any other when the White House Social Calendar, a regular column in the newspapers of Washington D.C, inserted a tiny line stating that on October 16, 1901, Booker T. Washington had been a guest of President Roosevelt at dinner. overnight the dinner became a sensation. Southern newspapers who had previously held Washington as an example of a “good negro” after his infamous Atlanta Compromise address in 1895, now felt betrayed, and turned to attack both Washington and President Roosevelt with a rabid fervor. Men who had never supported Roosevelt swore to never vote for him again, and many whites revoked their trust in Washington.

In the ensuing silence from both the White House and Tuskegee, it fell to the nation’s newspapers to publicize the opinions of Americans. One southerner sent the President a possum with a card around its neck bearing the name “Booker Washington.” To one of his callers the next day, a friend of the President reported him as saying “I do not need to give you an explanation of the Booker Washington affair, do I?” President Roosevelt went on to say that he was amazed that he could be so misunderstood by those who had criticized him. Maryland Democrats seized upon this to ridicule the President and the Republican Party, and many claimed that the Booker Washington incident would usher in a Democratic victory.

What made this dinner so remarkable?

Firstly, because it was a private, family affair. Washington had previously dined with a president (McKinley), and President Cleveland had invited Frederick Douglass to the White House, but both were in official, public capacity. By inviting Booker T. Washington to dinner as though he were just another honored guest was shocking, repulsive, outrageous, offensive. Secondly, because it implied that President Roosevelt was opposed to racism and the ever-expanding Jim Crow laws. And lastly, because it implied, for W.E.B. DuBois-supporters, that Washington’s socio-political stance had been granted sanction by the highest in the land.

President Roosevelt’s invitation to Dr. Washington was provocative. Though Roosevelt, like most Anglo-Saxon Americans of that time period, still held to certain assumptions of and prejudices against blacks, the fact that he was willing to break bread with a black man–and that his family were present as well–was astounding in a time period where the advances and tentative healing made during Reconstruction were receding to the point of memory.

Further Reading:

“The First President to Entertain a Negro, Booker T Washington Dined”
Roosevelt, the Happy Warrior By Bradley Gilman
Booker T. Washington By Louis R. Harlan

From the end of Reconstruction until the Great War, Washington was the center of the black aristocracy. Nowhere else in the United States possessed such a concentration of “old families,” not merely from the District and nearby Maryland and Virginia, but from throughout the country, whose emphasis on family background, good breeding, occupation, respectability, and color bound them into an exclusive, elite group. Upper-class blacks from Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans and other places gravitated to Washington D.C. in sizable numbers due to its educational and cultural opportunities, the availability of jobs on par with their education, and the presence of a black social group that shared their values, tastes and self-perceptions.

The “black 400″ of Washington consisted of fewer than a hundred families out of a black population of 75,000 in 1900, and centered around the family of Blanche K. Bruce, an ex-slave and former Mississippi Senator who served in Congress from 1875 to 1881, who was also the first Black American to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate. Bruce was born in Virginia to a black woman and a white man, who may have been their master. Fortunately, his slave master took an interest in Bruce and he was permitted to share lessons with the master’s son. In later years, Bruce shared that his life as a slave in Virginia, and later in Mississippi and Missouri, was in fact no different from that of his white peers. In 1850, Bruce moved to Missouri after becoming a printer’s apprentice and from there he escaped to Kansas and declared his freedom. After the Union Army rejected his application to fight in the Civil War, Bruce taught school and attended Oberlin College in Ohio for two years and from there, he went to work as a steamboat porter on the Mississippi River. In 1864, he moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he established a school for blacks.

During Reconstruction, Bruce became a wealthy landowner in the Mississippi Delta. He was appointed to the positions of Tallahatchie County registrar of voters and tax assessor before winning an election for sheriff in Bolivar County. He later was elected to other county positions, including tax collector and supervisor of education, while he also edited a local newspaper. He rose rapidly in Republican Party ranks and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1874. Bruce’s arrival in Washington aroused much comment: he was relatively young, cultured and handsome. Even those who resented his presence in Congress could not find fault with his innate dignity, elegant manners and shrewd political judgment. When he married Josephine Beall Willson of Philadelphia in 1878, they set Washington society–both black and white–ablaze, most noticeably because Josephine Bruce was very light-skinned, wealthy, very highly educated and beautiful. During Bruce’s residence in the District, he and Josephine entertained lavishly, taking as full a part in official Washington society as possible. The Bruce’s, along with other prominent black Washingtonians such as Hiram Rhodes Revels, P.B.S. Pinchback, Josiah Settle, Robert Harlan, Norris Wright Cuney, etc, directly challenged notions about black Americans during that period.

In addition to the Bruce’s, the colored aristocracy of the nation’s capital included the Cooks, Wormleys, Syphaxes, Shadds, Franciss, Grays, Terrells, Grimkés, Pinchbacks, Purvises, Cardozos, Menards, McKinlays, Douglasses, Murrays, and especially families associated with Howard University. Each family possessed “a background of accomplishment” and positions of considerable influence within the District power structure. With the economic resources of physicians, public-school teachers and administrators, attorneys, government employees, popular caterers and certain businessmen, Howard University faculty and others within the colored aristocracy, many possessed wealth beyond comprehension for the majority of black Americans at that time. According to an observer in 1895, the wealthiest blacks were John F. Cook ($200,000), Blanche K. Bruce ($150,000), W.A.A. Wormley ($115,000), P.B.S. Pinchback ($90,000) [right], John R. Lynch ($80,000), Charles B. Purvis ($75,000), Daniel Murray ($60,000), J.H. Meriwether ($60,000), George F.T. Cook ($50,000), Furman J. Shadd ($40,000), and John R. Francis ($35,000).

A few not only owned comfortable residences in the city, but also “country places” in Maryland and Virginia. Those who did own such places escaped the summer heat by taking cottages either in the vicinity of Harper’s Ferry, or at well-known resorts such as those at Cape May and Saratoga, which had sizable “colored colonies.” In the late 1880s, Charles Douglass, son of famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, purchased a tract of land on Chesapeake Bay, about five miles from the Naval Academy at Arundel-on-the-Bay, where he developed a vacation site for Washington’s black elite, and christened the place “Highland Beach.”

Despite the hardening of racial practices and the erosion of civil rights for blacks in post-Reconstruction America, the black elite held steadfast hope that blacks would achieve equality. However, this black “400″ was insulated against the hardships of Jim Crow, and many were accepted by white Washington society–several black families were listed in the 1888 issue of Elite List, a forerunner of the Social Register, a few attended white churches, and even after certain public places closed their door to blacks, they sometimes made exceptions in the case of “refined and genteel Negroes.” Because of their successes, the notion that Washington was “the colored man’s paradise” gained wide acceptance among blacks and whites anxious about the turning tide against integration and rehabilitation of the nation as Reconstruction began to die. Though the “colored aristocracy” was hampered with issues of color, refinement and social status, they did nonetheless see themselves as a “buffer” between whites and lower-class blacks; a buffer that would prove the equality and ability of black Americans in a post-Civil War society.

Further Reading:

Aristocrats of Color: 1880-1920 by Willard B. Gatewood
The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty by Lawrence Otis Graham
Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen by Philip Dray