By: Elizabeth King
Spring is in the air, and with it comes excitement, creation and of course, Spring Fever. Spring Fever is really just defined as “a feeling of restlessness and excitement felt at the beginning of spring” but it is likely that if you ask anyone you know, they’ll tell you that in the first few months of the season of rebirth, love is definitely in the air. If you look to nature; plants and trees come to life, animals are breeding, there is a charge in the air…and we all feel it. What better time to talk about historical courtship and one of it’s more surprising practices…”Hello April, where have you been all my life?”
I’ve been just BURSTING to talk about BUNDLING since I first read about it. Looks like I’m getting my 15 minutes/sentences…has someone gone crazy? Let’s talk…no blushing…!
Everyone likes to paint our predecessors as prudish, unfeeling, cold fish. This is not necessarily an accurate picture of what was really going on. The prevalent image of the 19th century sanitized romance is really just that…an image, an illusion. Just like today, nothing is what it seems on the surface. (While you might not announce to the world you are actually covered in scales, you really ARE covered in scales, you just don’t talk about it, and you cover that stuff up. See what I am getting at here?) When I read about bundling I had one of those “Aha! Got you!” moments. I knew from reading Susanna Moodie (who you can be darn sure was smitten with her husband) that it wasn't all “Oh my!” and “Gosh, no.”
There seems to be a tendency to shy away from the topic of what kept early settlers warm at night. I can understand how this could be a challenge at a living history site, where all ages and levels are visiting, but you always get those keeners, those really interested folks who want to talk about the awkward stuff - the toilet paper, sanitary napkins and birth control crowd. The tradition of bundling is a fun nugget to pull out for these visitors.
What is Bundling? An accepted traditional courtship ritual in which a man and a woman were allowed to spend time together in bed, fully clothed (sometimes wrapped or sewn in sheets, known as “bundling bags.”) You may have seen something similar in movies. This usually took the form of the man spending the night at the women’s house, and her parents tucking them in. The extremely cautious might also include the use of a bundling board, a panel of wood placed between the couple. The purpose was, quite simply, to “learn the virtues (or lack thereof) of their prospective mate.”
What I love about bundling is that while it does seem kind of shocking based on the popular notion of attitudes at the time, in theory it seems pretty chaste. In fact, according to what I’ve read, in some cases where people tried to say it wasn’t, they were harassed publicly for contradicting the practise.
I think most people were okay with it because bundling was only done with serious courtships, so statistically it had a high success rate. In fact, even when seven month babies were born, there often wasn’t any tittering, because the couple were married by that point. Something tells me it was likely also used as a tool to force some marriages, where that was convenient.
I first came across the term bundling in a legal textbook about the history of women in Canadian law. It came up again, more recently in a book about seduction in Canadian law. Bundling seems to have led to it’s fair share of legal shenanigans. If you want to dive more into the legalities and where things went wrong, check out this book: Courted and Abandoned: Seduction in Canadian Law by Patrick Brode. But let’s just say it seems to have gone out of practise because of the few sensationalized cases that did not have a very happy ending, errrr…more accurately…those who did not buy the goods after sampling the wares.
By the time the 20th century rolled around, bundling went out of practise. But really…the flappers, the dolls, the hippies? I’m not really sure it went out of practise…
There’s those scales peeking out…
Elizabeth King is currently filling the role of Interim Assistant Manager at Lang Pioneer Village Museum. She has been working at the Village since May of 2009. Elizabeth is passionate about history, costuming, reading, vegan culinary crusades and environmental pursuits. When she isn’t in the middle of a project at Lang, she is often found with her head in the clouds.
