My Dowry
I mentioned elsewhere that I had kind of a "dowry" and I search and I get a lot of hits talking about a dowry being a sum of money given to the groom or groom's family. I don't know when I left planet earth and landed in this deluded, fabricated "Matrix" of a fictional world that I seem to live in now, but, NO, that's not remotely what I mean.
Most of the below article goes off on a wild hair about the totemic significance of hand-made goods and their decorations. THIS part is not completely warped nonsense of a past viewed through the lens of modern experience and imagined to be something wholly unlike actual reality for the people who lived it (and I apologize to the author who AT LEAST knew it was HANDMADE GOODS and not MONEY for the most part):
But MONEY per se was not widely in use as a default means to acquire goods and services until something like 300 or 350-ish years ago. Before that, most goods were handmade by the people who used them or by a relative of theirs or bartered for. And you began making a girl's dowry when she was an infant because these were subsistence cultures struggling to just get enough to EAT much of the time.
If it didn't directly put FOOD on the table, it was an activity MOSTLY pursued during "the off season" -- typically winter. Educating children, making clothes and so forth mostly occurred when you didn't need all hands over the age of four for purposes of planting, tending and harvesting crops.
This fact is preserved in most modern American school calenders. Spring break and summer break exist because when public schools were created, children ONLY went to school when their labor was not NEEDED to bring in enough food for the family to not STARVE to death.
Spring break was REQUIRED so children could participate in PLANTING the crops and then they could go back to school for a few weeks before their labor would again be needed for harvesting the crops and tending the fields on an ongoing basis during the summer months.
A DOWRY was clothes and household items intended to give a young couple a good start in life so they had the essentials and was provided as a means to help ensure their survival because in a subsistence culture, many household items are critical to survival. For example, blankets keep you from freezing to death in winter.
Women cooked every single day because there were no fast food places, refrigerators, snacks in plastic packaging, etc. AND you raised most of your own food, stored it in the cellar for winter and processed it from a raw state to whatever it took to put a meal on the table.
Which means you needed a LOT of tools for taking food from the kitchen garden (where women grew vegetables and herbs) or fields (where men grew staple foods) and turning it into a meal. There were no canned goods, microwave meals or Door Dash services.
Also, please keep in mind that girls were routinely married off between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, NOT twenty and thirty five. So you could COUNT ON twelve seasons or so to make enough household goods BY HAND to furnish her first home ON TOP OF having to make YOUR OWN stuff and ongoing bigger sizes of clothes for growing kids and etc.
The tradition of barn raisings served a similar purpose of making it POSSIBLE for a young couple to survive. This is an event where the COMMUNITY comes together to put up a barn in one day for a newly married young couple so they have essential infrastructure critical to making life work on a family farm that ONE MAN or ONE MAN and HIS WIFE are NOT going to be able to put up AT ALL, much less quickly.
Things were handcrafted not by choice nor to make them all SPECIAL but because it was BEFORE the industrial revolution. There were no machines to make it, no big factories, no automated production lines run by robots.
PEOPLE made things BY HAND. That's how life worked.
Yes, people decorated stuff but the real point was it could take many YEARS for a family to MAKE all the clothes, bedding, and other essential household goods NEEDED to set up a home for a newly married young couple. For MOST things, you made it yourself or someone who cared about you made it for you as a gift or you didn't have it.
So when I speak of having kind of made myself a "dowry" I mean it in the more traditional sense of what subsistence cultures typically meant: ENOUGH HOUSEHOLD GOODS for a young woman to set up a home separate from her parental home.
My recollection is that my "dowry" began when I was about maybe ten or twelve years old and began ordering silverware off the back of cereal boxes. You sent in so many box tops and got it for some ridiculously low price, or something like that. And I set aside one drawer in my chest of drawers for storing stuff like that.
During my teens, for a time my mother cleaned apartments and mostly worked at a complex that had a LOT of short-term leases of three-to-six months for people attending training at the big military base nearby. These were often unmarried, childless officers -- people who made good money and had few obligations -- and they would buy a bunch of cheap stuff for the kitchen and bathroom when they showed up and leave it behind when they left again.
My mom would bring this stuff home and I got first pick and kept the stuff I liked and she gave away anything I didn't want. Over time, I would upgrade and keep NICER things and let my mom give away the other stuff that I no longer had room for.
The top of my closet got filled with boxes of stuff so full that it was like a puzzle to fit it all in and it was a real production to try to get one of them out again and go through it. I had multiple shower curtains, towels, dish drain racks, etc. all for free.
Over time, I began requesting living room style furniture piece for my bedroom to replace my dresser and chest of drawers. By the time I moved out, I had a queen sized bed, three wall units, a desk, desk chair, buffet and book case all stuffed into a single bedroom and fitted in very carefully. Every inch of available wallspace was covered.
One Christmas, I was gifted some shelving for above my desk that had to be screwed into the wall. When I moved out, my parents asked me to leave that behind and gave me a few bucks for it because it was mine, not theirs.
They didn't want big holes left in the wall and told me "You can't put it up in a rental ANYWAY." I felt they were being reasonable and fair, took the money and didn't put up a fuss.
If you decide to accumulat a "dowry" -- enough household goods to more or less readily set up a separate household when you move out -- maybe let folks know you want to take this with you when you move out in a few years as a young adult, thus stuff that needs to be attached to the wall isn't really something you want.
Most of the below article goes off on a wild hair about the totemic significance of hand-made goods and their decorations. THIS part is not completely warped nonsense of a past viewed through the lens of modern experience and imagined to be something wholly unlike actual reality for the people who lived it (and I apologize to the author who AT LEAST knew it was HANDMADE GOODS and not MONEY for the most part):
Clothing, bedding, rugs and wall decorations were also important items for a newlywed couple to furnish their home with.Yes, SOME wealthy families have given MONEY as part of the dowry. And the practices of wealthy families are often recorded in history more than that of commoners.
The custom of crafting and giving dowries has held strong throughout the centuries. Crafting a dowry was often an activity that all women in a family group partook in, starting from when a girl was born in anticipation of her wedding.
But MONEY per se was not widely in use as a default means to acquire goods and services until something like 300 or 350-ish years ago. Before that, most goods were handmade by the people who used them or by a relative of theirs or bartered for. And you began making a girl's dowry when she was an infant because these were subsistence cultures struggling to just get enough to EAT much of the time.
If it didn't directly put FOOD on the table, it was an activity MOSTLY pursued during "the off season" -- typically winter. Educating children, making clothes and so forth mostly occurred when you didn't need all hands over the age of four for purposes of planting, tending and harvesting crops.
This fact is preserved in most modern American school calenders. Spring break and summer break exist because when public schools were created, children ONLY went to school when their labor was not NEEDED to bring in enough food for the family to not STARVE to death.
Spring break was REQUIRED so children could participate in PLANTING the crops and then they could go back to school for a few weeks before their labor would again be needed for harvesting the crops and tending the fields on an ongoing basis during the summer months.
A DOWRY was clothes and household items intended to give a young couple a good start in life so they had the essentials and was provided as a means to help ensure their survival because in a subsistence culture, many household items are critical to survival. For example, blankets keep you from freezing to death in winter.
Women cooked every single day because there were no fast food places, refrigerators, snacks in plastic packaging, etc. AND you raised most of your own food, stored it in the cellar for winter and processed it from a raw state to whatever it took to put a meal on the table.
Which means you needed a LOT of tools for taking food from the kitchen garden (where women grew vegetables and herbs) or fields (where men grew staple foods) and turning it into a meal. There were no canned goods, microwave meals or Door Dash services.
Also, please keep in mind that girls were routinely married off between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, NOT twenty and thirty five. So you could COUNT ON twelve seasons or so to make enough household goods BY HAND to furnish her first home ON TOP OF having to make YOUR OWN stuff and ongoing bigger sizes of clothes for growing kids and etc.
The tradition of barn raisings served a similar purpose of making it POSSIBLE for a young couple to survive. This is an event where the COMMUNITY comes together to put up a barn in one day for a newly married young couple so they have essential infrastructure critical to making life work on a family farm that ONE MAN or ONE MAN and HIS WIFE are NOT going to be able to put up AT ALL, much less quickly.
Probably surprisingly close to reality in spite of being a Hollywood film.
Things were handcrafted not by choice nor to make them all SPECIAL but because it was BEFORE the industrial revolution. There were no machines to make it, no big factories, no automated production lines run by robots.
PEOPLE made things BY HAND. That's how life worked.
Yes, people decorated stuff but the real point was it could take many YEARS for a family to MAKE all the clothes, bedding, and other essential household goods NEEDED to set up a home for a newly married young couple. For MOST things, you made it yourself or someone who cared about you made it for you as a gift or you didn't have it.
So when I speak of having kind of made myself a "dowry" I mean it in the more traditional sense of what subsistence cultures typically meant: ENOUGH HOUSEHOLD GOODS for a young woman to set up a home separate from her parental home.
My recollection is that my "dowry" began when I was about maybe ten or twelve years old and began ordering silverware off the back of cereal boxes. You sent in so many box tops and got it for some ridiculously low price, or something like that. And I set aside one drawer in my chest of drawers for storing stuff like that.
During my teens, for a time my mother cleaned apartments and mostly worked at a complex that had a LOT of short-term leases of three-to-six months for people attending training at the big military base nearby. These were often unmarried, childless officers -- people who made good money and had few obligations -- and they would buy a bunch of cheap stuff for the kitchen and bathroom when they showed up and leave it behind when they left again.
My mom would bring this stuff home and I got first pick and kept the stuff I liked and she gave away anything I didn't want. Over time, I would upgrade and keep NICER things and let my mom give away the other stuff that I no longer had room for.
The top of my closet got filled with boxes of stuff so full that it was like a puzzle to fit it all in and it was a real production to try to get one of them out again and go through it. I had multiple shower curtains, towels, dish drain racks, etc. all for free.
Over time, I began requesting living room style furniture piece for my bedroom to replace my dresser and chest of drawers. By the time I moved out, I had a queen sized bed, three wall units, a desk, desk chair, buffet and book case all stuffed into a single bedroom and fitted in very carefully. Every inch of available wallspace was covered.
One Christmas, I was gifted some shelving for above my desk that had to be screwed into the wall. When I moved out, my parents asked me to leave that behind and gave me a few bucks for it because it was mine, not theirs.
They didn't want big holes left in the wall and told me "You can't put it up in a rental ANYWAY." I felt they were being reasonable and fair, took the money and didn't put up a fuss.
If you decide to accumulat a "dowry" -- enough household goods to more or less readily set up a separate household when you move out -- maybe let folks know you want to take this with you when you move out in a few years as a young adult, thus stuff that needs to be attached to the wall isn't really something you want.
