Being a witchy woman in old-time Phoenix


I just finished watching "Room on the Broom", which is on Netflix, and I enjoyed the animation, and the wonderful little story. It also got me thinking about old-time Phoenix, and being a witchy woman. I think that I can answer most questions about why we have an image of a witch which looks that way, and for the stuff I can't do, I'm hoping that you, dear reader, can help me out here.

Let's time-travel to old-time Phoenix, a little over 100 years ago, and if you have no objection, you're going to be a witchy woman. I'm going to start with something that's very confusing nowadays, to both men and women of, uh, age, and that's thinness. A witchy woman was thin.

Nowadays, of course, "thin is in". All of my life women have wanted to be as thin as possible. When I was a kid, a popular model was so thin that she called herself "Twiggy". But before that, thin was kinda creepy, and being a bit plump was a sign of robust health. And a lot of women who had lived a long time were not in that kind of health. Like I say, this is hard to imagine for us now, but women didn't want to be "twiggy" back in the days old-time Phoenix that we're visiting.

So, to be a witchy woman in old-time Phoenix you would have to be rail thin. Your thinness might be also caused by something that younger people hadn't experienced as much of - losing teeth. There's a reason that the stereotypical witch has a jutting chin - that's what happens when you lose all (or almost all) of your teeth. And another thing that naturally happens with age is your nose continuing to grow. Speaking for myself, I've never had a small nose, and it seems to get more prominent every day, and since I figure that I have another 20-30 years of life, I'll be watching my nose grow. The witch in the illustration up there has something on her nose, it could be a mole, it could be a wart, it could be a pimple. These things happen.

Of course you're going to have a broom. Women tend to keep their houses clean, and brooms were once made like that. And even if there were a newer model designed, older people tend to stick with what they know, and what they like. The shawl would be to keep her shoulders warm, and her dress would be ragged because, well, she probably couldn't afford a new dress, or to have it repaired. Note the shoes, which were typical of the turn of the century and late 1800s. When this witchy woman was young, they were in style.

Of course, as a witchy woman you'll need a kettle, and your secret recipes would fire the imagination of the kids in the neighborhood. Probably magic potions! The cat is a nice touch.

Still, I have to admit that I'm stuck on the reason for the witch's hat. No Halloween costume of a witch is complete without it, and it could be a Wizard's hat, but I can't explain the brim. If you know, please tell me! Also the red hair puzzles me. My hair started going grey in my thirties and was completely grey by my late forties. Did women used to color their hair back then? I have no idea.

Thank you for being a witchy woman!

Raven hair and ruby lips,
Sparks fly from her fingertips.
Echoed voices in the night,
She's a restless spirit on an endless flight.
Woo hoo, witchy woman.
See how high she flies.
Woo hoo, witchy woman,
She got the moon in her eye.

-Don Henley
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more