A Modern Chatelaine

For a long time, as far as I knew, Chatelaine was a magazine that the women in my family read. Growing up, there were stacks of it lying around, and people got subscriptions as gifts. It never occurred to me to look up the name or find out what it meant. It was just part of the vernacular or being a female of a certain age, from a certain generation.

But as it turns out, Chatelaine isn’t just a lovely, flowery random word for a publication full of life advice and recipes. It’s a thing. It’s actually a couple of things. “Chatelaine” used to refer to the woman in charge of the house, which makes sense for the magazine. It also used to be a descriptor for a small organizational device that women would clip to the belts of their dresses.

Chatelaines looked more like a piece of fine jewelry than anything else, with lovely filigree patterns in silver and pewter, and elegant, sparkling chains extending from it. At the end of each chain was some sort of tool or utensil, like a tiny pair of scissors, a pencil holder, a wee notebook, or a travel-sized canister for sewing needles. It was kind of like a Swiss army knife, a tool belt, holding together the things that a woman of a certain era would use on a daily basis, that she’d need handy at all times.

Chatelaines were aesthetically pleasing, functional, and of course, the kind of thing that would tell us a lot about the women who wore them -the times they lived in, their families and their roles, the things they loved, and the things they needed to do. Here I am, in a very changed world, pouring over pictures of these useful adornments, imagining the stories of the women who toted them. No big surprise that I’m also wondering, do women today carry their own version of a chatelaine? If someone two hundred years from now wanted to learn about us through the tools we carry, what would they look to? What do we keep close to us at all times to make sure we can do the things we need to do?

Ummm…I’m struggling with this one a little bit.

There are our devices, of course, the magic rectangles we spend too much time with, like our phones, our tablets, our laptops. I’ll admit that these things are a big part of my git-r-done, but it can’t be that simple, can it? Is that really all I have to show for myself as a woman in 2024? Is this how I want people to learn about who I was and what I did with my time?

Maybe our modern chatelaines are our bags. There are a many, many YouTube videos featuring celebrities emptying out the contents or their purses and fawning over how they can’t live without certain items. Our bag could be a purse, a laptop case, a backpack, even a fanny pack. But what if, like me, you don’t often these? I find purses fussy and cumbersome, and they pinch my neck. Even my wallet is tiny and minimalist. If doing without my keys were an option, I’d leave those at home too. If the fashion industry learns to put adequate pockets in our clothing (pretty please), our purses might go the way of the chatelaine. Generally speaking, I like to travel light, and I’m not fond of the idea that baggage might speak for us.

So, maybe we just don’t have a modern equivalent of a chatelaine, at least not in a tangible sense, and maybe that alone tells us something pretty interesting. There are a lot of things we don’t carry around anymore. In the 21st century, there’s an un-corsetted, un-hoop-skirted version of us that takes care of a whole lot more than a household.  Our hands juggle a lot more than sewing supplies and grocery lists. Maybe we just have too many things to carry with us to string them from a bejeweled clip. Maybe our tools of the trade aren’t so tangible or visible anymore.

Or maybe it’s bigger than that. Maybe we’ve just decided that they aren’t our tools to carry in the first place, that someone else can and should be in charge of the tasks that require scissors and needles and thread. “Woman In Charge of the Household” may not be enough for many of us (although transferring the duties involved in this is still a work in progress).

If Simone de Beauvoir is right (and I think she is), and a woman is made, and not born, we’re collectively and individually in the midst of deciding what we want to be. We’re hesitant to attach ourselves to any particular tools, just as we’re more hesitant to accept any particular role or definition of womanhood. If I’m not comfortable with roles, I’m sure as heck not going to wear something that ties me to them. There are choices I’ve made about what being a woman is. I’d never want to be reduced to the way I look, to the ways I present myself in public, the gadgets I have at my fingertips.

I do happen to think chatelaines are beautiful, as I do many treasures from days gone by. I’d never wear one (it would drive me nuts and would get caught on doorknobs, I’m sure), but I think I’d enjoy hanging one up on display, so that I could admire the care that went into putting it together. It would make me pause every so often to appreciate how far we’ve come, the steps backward that have happened, and what needs defending. Like a lot of women, I’ve worked pretty hard to dodge gender-based expectations of me. I don’t want them chained to me, and I don’t want them made to seem pretty and ornate.

Having a chatelaine on display would serve as a reminder that in many parts of the world, including my own, women of many definitions still tote their own versions of it. They still deal with the tangles and the weight of it, and are still judged by the standards it represents. It’s a privilege to be able to choose what I carry, what represents me, to mark the difference between ornamentation and identity.