Hum. Servt Trailer

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant
Episode 0: Original Trailer
Published on June 16, 2020

Note: This transcript was generated by Otter.ai with light human correction

Kathryn Gehred 

"My dear Fanny, I'm sorry to hear by your litter of the 10th that your little girl has been so ill. I hope she has got quite well before this. I have not a doubt but worms as the principal cause of her complaints, children that eat everything as they like and feed as heartily as yours does must be full of worms."

Hello, my name is Kathryn Gehred and that was an excerpt from a letter written by Martha Washington. I am very excited to introduce my new project, Your Most Obedient and Humble Servant, a Women's History podcast where I feature the kinds of eighteenth and early nineteenth century women's letters that don't always make it into the history books.

You'll learn about things like being awkward at parties

"easiest intercourse among the company was while dancing, so I determined that if it was possible for me to get over my indolence and dislike to skipping about I should pass my time more agreeably, but a great difficulty now presented itself. I had forgotten the figures of the reels and quintillions as entirely as if I had never learned them."

Regency era women's fashion,

"and when we went to dress, there was such breaking of strings and snapping of laces, such pulling and pinching and pinning, and so many concealments to make and so much time consumed and his various operations that I almost cried with fixation. Virginia was the best of the two and her shoulders kept popping from under her corsets and petticoats so that by the end of the evening, she was almost undressed."

And of course, you'll hear some pretty scandalous gossip.

"We live in an age of discovery. One of our acquaintances discovered that a full grown child may be produced in less than five months, as well as a nine provided the mother should meet with a small fright a few hours before its birth."

In every episode, I discuss a different letter with a different public history professional. So you'll get a variety of perspectives and insights into a surprising number of topics

Kathryn Gehred

Like that she frames it as they just won't pay your debt.

Rachel Steinberg

Just won't do it, guys, they just, it's not that they don't have any money. Sorry, I get like really heated about this perspective on Shays' Rebellion."

Kathryn Gehred

I hope you enjoy listening to the podcast as much as I enjoyed making it. I hesitate to do too much reading into one letter like this. And yet I love to do and I am as ever with my sincerest regards, your most obedient and humble servant