Porte Crayon

David Hunter Strother (1816-1888) or “Porte Crayon,” was one of the first successful magazine illustrators to work for Harper’s Magazine, which remains popular to this day.

On the surface, The Adventures of Port Crayon and His Cousins was a travelogue with a shoe-string plot that provided Strother with the opportunity to present his drawings of the natural wonders that awaited would-be travelers to the Shenandoah Valley. But even at first glance, readers will notice that Strother obsessed over the race and gender roles of his characters, more than he did upon the natural wonders he drew. As they always are, race and gender roles were actively being created and recreated in the pre-Civil War era.  No less than advice writers for women who engaged the process diliberately, artists like Strother, or even men like Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, were caught up in this cultural historial process whether they knew it or not.

Video: The Civil War as Crisis of Gender?

Now often seen as “traditional,” “Victorian” gender roles, were actually quite new.  Traditionally women had labored productively in making clothing, handling cows and chickens,  and producing household articles like butter and soap. They often spent a long day out of every week doing the laundry by hand.  They prepared the food from scratch for every meal and in the absence of older daughters, tended to small children. But early industrialism replaced or lightened many of the productive tasks that had traditionally been given over to women in the household economy.  Thus in the 19th Century, economic life shifted from a predominantly household to a more modern market-driven economy.  For middle and upper class women, the ideal suddenly became that women did not, or should not “work” at all! Instead, they were to specialize in the instruction, especially the moral instruction, of children. 

Ironically, this now “traditional” seeming gender settlement gave rise to feminism and antislavery in the North. Equally Victorian, in the South, feminism and antislavery both posed a threat to an economic and social order predicated on unchecked white male power. Could the violence of the Civil War have been related to a national crisis in gender roles?   

To navigate the site or to take a digital version of the ​exhibit home with you, click on the picture of the exhibit below (each of the pictures will be hotlinked).

David Strother, Virginia Illustrated: The Adventures of Porte Crayon and His Cousins (New York: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013).