New Exhibit at the Betsy Ross House
It was not an easy thing to be a woman during the time of the American Revolution. I know that I personally hate doing laundry, but imagine a time when “doing the laundry” meant three days of hard manual labor! In the days before washing machines, getting clothes clean meant hauling multiple buckets of water to the fireplace to boil it for doing the washing! Not only was it a heavy job, but it was a hot one as well… and let’s not forget the cumbersome stays and dresses that women wore back in those days!
Come discover what women’s work consisted of at an exhibit going on now at the Betsy Ross House!
You can get a whole new appreciation for women’s work at the Betsy Ross House right now. There is an exhibit going on, entitled, “Women, Work, and the Revolution.” It’s interactive, which means that visitors will have the opportunity to carry a wash bucket weighted to the weight of a filled two-gallon bucket and get the sensation of what it was like to carry that back and forth as many as eight times! Exhibit director Lisa Acker Moulder says that there will also be a kitchen display in which children (and even adults) can discover the smells of a kitchen during the American Revolution. There is a step stool and a little box that asks what the smell is. Some are good smells, and some are… not. Children can guess the answer and then open a small panel to find out what the answer is.
The Betsy Ross House is considered the birthplace of the American flag. Visitors can go and watch Betsy herself (well… a very educated and informative actress depicting her) hard at work plying her trade of sewing, and ask questions about the time when she sewed the first American flag. You can tour the house through either a self-guided- or an audio tour, and find out lots of fascinating details about Ross and the time period in which she lived. The House is located in Philadelphia’s Historic District, close to plenty of other entertaining attractions pertaining to the City of Brotherly Love and its place in American history.
