[Sca-cooks] ELIZABETHAN KITCHEN

[Laura C. Minnick]

At 08:25 PM 4/24/03 -0500, you wrote:
>Ciorstan quoted from a book:
>> "Very few of the garments, ranging
>> in date from an early seventeenth-century gown at Hardwick Hall,
>> Derbyshire, to a beaded evening dress made in 1914, would fit a dummy
>> with the figure of an average Englishwoman of the 1990's.  At 5'4in,
>> 36B
>> -25.5-36 and 9st 9.4lb, today's woman has added two inches to her bust
>> in just twenty years and nearly half an inch to her height in a decade.
>Wow. What modern surgery and silicone can do! :-)
>Stefan
>Thanks for the information, Ciorstan.

Just as a rebuttal- at 16, I was 5'4", about 105lbs. Thin, not much bust.
My older daughter is built much the same way, but she's solid muscle. My
younger daughter is 5'6", pushing 5'7" at nearly 15 1/2- probably weighs
115, and has a killer figure (if her skin would clear up she could be
modelling). These are variations  from one generation to the next, and
within the same generation!
If I took a dress of Annie's, and a dress of Lydia's, and a dress of mine,
what sort of conclusions could I draw?

Another one to throw out there- somewhere in storage at my grandmother's
(Ha! Betcha though I was going to say 180 miles away!) is a pair of shoes
and kid gloves that my great-grandmother wore at her 'coming-out' party.
Mid 19'teens. The shoes are miniscule. The gloves I managed to worm on once
when I was about 14, and last time I saw them they were much too tiny.
However, I knew her when she was older (Oy. MEAN old bat. Nasty woman. How
she produced my grandfather I'll never know.). She was not a tiny woman as
an adult. When I knew her (in her 70's mostly) she was about 5'6", around
200lbs, ring size (guessing) 9, size 9 shoes.

I'm wondering if our info and concepts are skewed by _when_ the samples are
taken. Many of the girls at Annie's graduation were tiny- I'll bet they
aren't in ten years. If we are looking at formal gowns and wedding gowns
(mostly worn by the young) are we going to see a smaller frame than a few
yearas later? And which gowns do you pack away? I still have my first
formal in storage. Wedding dress was my aunts- but it was a size 3 and I
cannot even imagine trying to put it on now...

On the overall, I could buy the idea of a statistical model shifting by 2
or 3 or maybe even 6 inches, and say 20 pounds (excluding us American- we
really throw off the curve). But not 1 or 2 feet. And that was what I was
grousing about in the first place- was over-exaggeration. it leads to teh
sort of assumptions that sound suspiciously like seven blind men examining
an elephant...

'Lainie
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Sometimes Life makes drastic changes without our permission...