Dark humor lightens tales of Colonial horrors

NORTH CANAAN — There was plenty of buzz over the weekend discussing the premiere of “The Handmaid’s Tale” — Hulu’s miniseries adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s grim and poignant novel of a future where a totalitarian America has cloistered women into the narrowest confines of servitude, childbirth and stolen identities.

Meanwhile, women at the Douglas Library in North Canaan were discussing those very themes — and they were laughing their heads off. It might sound a bit odd, and in the best way, it was.

Author Velya Janez-Urban arrived at the library on Friday night, April 28, to present her talk “The Not-So-Good Life of the Colonial Goodwife.” 

A natural-born storyteller in the style of a vivacious aunt at Thanksgiving dinner, Janez-Urban seems to be both the friend who knows all the juicy gossip and the person you’d want to call in a crisis, because she could make you see the ridiculous side of whatever ordeal you’re enduring. 

It was that levity and distance that made her “Goodwife” presentation so riveting and enjoyable. In the hands of another, the struggles she described might have been horrifying. 

Janez-Urban’s journey began when her family moved into a 1770 Colonial home in Woodbury, Conn. In digging up information about the house’s history at the local library, Janez-Urban was struck by a mystery staring back at her from the pages of the town’s death records: lists and lists of nameless women. Colonial women who died before marriage were listed as the child of their father, married women under their husband’s name, and widowed women as the same, sometimes buried with a tombstone reading, “The relict of.” 

The remains of a marriage.

Janez-Urban was particularly struck by the record of one older widow: “She lived to be 75 and we’ll never know her name.” To become 75, it turned out, was quite the accomplishment.

The life of a Connecticut goodwife was a strange, bloody obstacle course of survival aided by the latest inventions and concoctions — which usually did more harm than good. Colonial women typically began menstruating at age 17, were married around 22, and could expect their first pregnancy around 16 months later. 

Just what is a goodwife? The Colonial term for a married woman, or “Mrs.” (often shortened to “Goody”, as remembered in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”). A goodwife could expect to give birth eight times over her life (so yes, at age 40, she and her daughter could be pregnant at the same time). 

Living through those pregnancies was an ordeal in itself, a fateful roll of the dice. Women already had a high chance of death when a midwife helped in delivering the baby — but the percentage grew even higher with the growing involvement of doctors, who used a speculum resembling a large, rusty, sharply pointed garden tool — which they did not sterilize between patients. Women planned their own just-in-case burial before going into labor, setting aside linens and a casket.

When they weren’t pregnant, the goodwives were airing their birthing regions, for there were no undergarments (and even later, doctor’s posited that without air their genitals might “decay,” so cold-weather underwear for women was still crotchless), and finding very creative birth control methods in nature. Lemons could apparently be fashioned into diaphragms; turtle shells were another makeshift device, and condoms were crafted from animal intestines. 

Even more bizarre and unpleasant were the devices invented to be used during the women’s “courses” or menstrual cycles.

While there were many, many more oddities (with illustrated slides) that Janez-Urban shared, her recurring message was that everything happens in steps. 

There was a wide age range of women in the audience; some from the older generation could see how Colonial methods and products were linked to ones they had used or seen in their own early 20th-century childhoods. 

Janez-Urban noted that an octogenarian grandmother from another lecture had used the lemon technique herself. What today’s generation accepts as normal will be ridiculous in 250 years; perhaps there will be a future Velya Janez-Urban having a good-natured laugh at it all.