Exhibit explores lives of women around Frick

Frick Art and Historical Center

Now until June… Frick Art and Historical Center

Now until June 5

Tours led by docents, run throughout the day Tuesday-Sunday, reservations recommended

Students $10, free for Clayton members

Pittsburgh’s great industrialists and philanthropists have been the subject of museum exhibits, books and lectures — but there’s less focus on the women who supported them.

The Frick Art and Historical Center seeks to take a closer look with “Ladies of the House,” a guided tour of Carnegie Steel Company chairman Henry Clay Frick’s Clayton estate. The exhibit examines the lives of all of the women in the Frick household — including Henry Clay Frick’s wife Adelaide Howard Childs Frick and their daughter Helen Clay Frick — from the governesses to the maids.

“By talking about all of the women of Clayton, we have an opportunity to look at the rooms of Clayton in a different way as spaces where these women lived and worked and interacted with each other,” said Amanda Gillen, assistant curator of education and collections for Clayton.

Jo Ellen Aleshire, Clayton docent and adjunct history faculty at Carlow University and CCAC, said, “In looking at class and social structure of the Gilded Age, the women of Clayton fit into all the categories.”

Gillen said that the dates covered by the tour, roughly from the late 1890s to the early 1900s, were “a time of incredible industrialization and also immigration in the United States, and Pittsburgh was at the forefront of both.”

All of the artifacts on display in the exhibit were either owned by the Frick family or their employees or are from the same time period, giving visitors an idea of the material culture of the time. Also on display are bookkeeping records, handwritten correspondences from the various women and other items from the center’s archives.

“You can’t talk about women of the late 19th century without considering how dress affected their daily lives,” Gillen said. The higher a woman’s economic status, the more complicated a her dress became. As the upper-class wife of a prominent industrialist, Mrs. Frick possessed an elaborately complex wardrobe and would have had a maidservant dedicated to assisting with her dressing.

One of the artifacts on view is a dress similar to one Mrs. Frick would have worn, displayed with all of its myriad undergarments on a mannequin to give visitors a sense of the production of dressing in that era and social class. The layers upon layers of fabric — sometimes as much as 30 pounds of clothing — were often taken on and off several times a day, as family members would change for every meal.

Dr. Maurine Greenwald, associate professor of history at Pitt, helps train docents to lead tours at the center, lecturing on the history of labor — particularly women’s employment.

“[The tour] will encourage the Frick Art and Historical Center to do more research on the interior life of the household. There’s much, much more to be learned, and I think that what the exhibit does is to whet your appetite,” she said.

Greenwald said that as one of the last houses of what was once Millionaire Row and the only house in Pittsburgh that has been preserved as a museum, Clayton is a treasure in the history of the city. “I think it’s important for people to have a glimpse of that past which was in some ways a glimpse of the future [at that time],” she said. The Fricks were among the first in the city to own a telephone or to have electric lights installed. They only trusted technology to a certain extent — they were careful to have gas lights installed as well in case the electricity failed.

One of the messages docent Aleshire hopes visitors take away are the positions of women in this society and home.

“I also would like for people to take away the image of an upper class, modern, privileged household in comparison to the working class and middle class homes of the other ladies who spent their days at Clayton … the submersion of their family lives to assist that of the Frick family,” she said.

The exhibit is not without its lighter moments though, Aleshire said.

“We have a photo where James Elmore, the coachman, is driving Helen’s dolls in the carriage — no people — just the dolls, and I love to think of young Helen deciding that her dolls would enjoy an outing and making it happen. The extension of the women’s world to the dolls.”