The American Toilet (1837)

This blog post is the third in a series that is part of a project funded by The Robert David Lion Gardiner foundation to assess and improve access to archival collections in our holdings that relate to Long Island. It was written by Cecilia Wright, an assessment archivist working on the project.

In a manila folder stored with other manila folders concerning the Petit and Schenk families of Long Island, is a small 4.25” by 5” bound book. The inside page of this book reveals that its title is: The American Toilet. The date on this page, 1837, also explains the choice of “toilet,” which would have had a connotation of a space intended for personal grooming and hygiene, not yet a euphemism for, well, the toilet.  

The following pages of this book are filled with detailed pencil drawings of items one would expect to find on a vanity (rouge, eye drops, necklaces) and accompanying rhyming verses.

However, there is more yet to this volume. Cleverly hidden paper foldouts reveal discretion, under the images of head ornaments, industry and perseverance, beneath the links of bracelets, and cheerfulness, secreted below the lid of lip salve.  

These fold-outs reveal the meaning which the creator of this volume intended for the viewer to draw from the page. It is not a tinted lip salve which one should “use daily for your lips this precious dye / they redden & breathe sweeter melody,” but, instead, cheerfulness. These pages, somewhat troublingly, or at least simplistically, from a modern perspective, draw a direct opposition between objects meant to “enhance” a woman’s beauty and positive moral attributes. It is only through the removal of these ointments and jewelry, physically enacted by the person interacting with the volume, that characteristics like discretion, cheerfulness, industry, and perseverance are revealed.

It is not clear who, exactly, painstakingly penciled and carved these moral advisements. A diary in this collection is bound in the same manner as The American Toilet, and covers the dates 1816-1850, so, is possibly from the same hand. This diary reads as though it was written in the midst of an apocalypse — “the 16 of November and a heavy rain the 18 the exit of Brockhaven the 2 of December come a shore [sic] with a freight of wood from Morichis [sic]"— a litany of unusual weather events and oceanic disasters which, outside of geographic clues, reveal little about their scribe.  

Other clues present within the Schenck and Pettit collection hint at the possible identity of the person who created The American Toilet. However, no singular clue, or combination of them, leads to a definitive identity of the creator of The American Toilet. Our encounter with this object, then, is one with a person who is virtually anonymous. While we may not know, with certainty this person’s name, the dates of their birth and death, or the particularities of the days between, the effects of their hand and mind have been preserved. With a visit to the archive of the Center for Brooklyn History, one can interact with an almost century old understanding about a woman’s relationship to the beauty industry and the complex web of what that relationship means about a woman’s values and how she is perceived (can she not persevere and be industrious with two bracelets on?)  

The archives of the Center for Brooklyn History, much like the foldouts of an ante-bellum pop-up book, contain endless opportunities for surprise and chance encounters. Browse our collection, see what you can find!

This blog post and research was made possible thanks to the generosity of The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.