How Martha Washington Lived: 18th Century Customs

By Charles A. Mills

A brief, informal look at the life of elite southern women in eighteenth century America, including a look at: (1) courtship and marriage, (2) slavery, (3) fashion, (4) food, (5) travel, and (6) amusements.

Have you ever fallen madly in love with a pair of shoes? Luxury footwear, combining the art form of a sculpture with the beauty of a piece of sparkling jewelry, has obsessed women for centuries. Certainly this was true in the case with Martha Washington. We don't generally think of Martha Washington as a vivacious fashionista. She has come down to us after two hundred plus years as a frumpy, dumpy, plump, double-chinned Old Mother Hubbard type. Both George and Martha Washington were transformed by generations of historians into marble figures of rectitude whose dignity and decorum fostered a sense of legitimacy for the new country.

But neither Martha Washington nor the women of the South's leading families were marble statues, they had the same strengths and weaknesses, passions and problems, joys and sorrows, as the women of any age. So just how did they live?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles A. Mills
• Release date: Sep 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781386144595

Charles A. Mills

Chuck Mills has a passion for history. He is the author of Hidden History of Northern Virginia, Echoes of Manassas, Historic Cemeteries of Northern Virginia and Treasure Legends of the Civil War and has written numerous newspaper and magazine articles on historical subjects. Chuck is the producer and cohost of Virginia Time Travel, a history television show that airs to some 2 million viewers in Northern Virginia. He lives on the banks of the Potomac River on land once owned by George Washington.

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INTRODUCTION

Have you ever fallen madly in love with a pair of shoes?  Luxury footwear, combining the art form of a sculpture with the beauty of a piece of sparkling jewelry, has obsessed women for centuries.  Certainly this was true in the case with Martha Washington.  Tucked away in the recesses of Mount Vernon’s archival vaults is a pair of avant-garde deep purple silk high heels studded with silver sequins that Martha wore on the day of her wedding to George Washington.  Emily Shapiro, curator at Mount Vernon, describes the shoes as a little sassy and definitely over the top for the time, They were the Manolo Blahniks of her time.

At the time of her marriage to George Washington in 1759, Martha was 27 and George was twenty six.  Martha was one of the wealthiest women in Virginia, having inherited five plantations when her first husband died.  She was a bit of a clothes horse.  Then, as now, if you had wealth you flaunted it, making sure you had the best clothes ordered from London in the deepest, richest colors.  Such colors set the upper classes apart from poorer classes who wore drab homespun clothes in browns, beiges and tans.

We don’t generally think of Martha Washington as a vivacious fashionista.  She has come down to us after two hundred plus years as a frumpy, dumpy, plump, double-chinned Old Mother Hubbard type.  There may be more design than accident in this portrayal of Martha Washington and the women of the Revolutionary War generation (‘The Founding Mothers").  The new Republic needed to make a clean break with the aristocratic ways of Europe and completely embrace simple republican virtues.  Both George and Martha Washington were transformed by generations of historians into marble figures of rectitude whose dignity and decorum fostered a sense of legitimacy for the new country.

But neither Martha Washington nor the women of the South’s leading families were marble statues, they had the same strengths and weaknesses, passions and problems, joys and sorrows, as the women of any age.  So just how did they live?

COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE

Outsiders observing the eighteenth-century southern elite commented on the sharp contrast between male and female standards of behavior. Timothy Ford, a New Jersey lawyer who moved to Charleston in 1785, wrote that the ladies there were circumscribed within such narrow bounds of acceptable behavior that they carry formality and scrupulosity to an extreme. Young gentlemen, in contrast, were expected to be abandoned and debauched.

Women within the southern elite were by no means privileged to do anything. They were expected to embody decorum and self-restraint.  In June 1734, the South Carolina Gazette printed a prayer for young ladies that called on