When people talk about getting married and setting up home and they talk about the bottom drawer, it isn’t literally the bottom drawer in a chest of drawers, but it could be.
It’s more of an idea than a literal place.
The bottom drawer is traditionally the place that a young unmarried woman would put things to use when she was married. They would be mostly household things like towels and tablecloths. And because she was putting things away until the right time, the bottom drawer in a chest of drawers made sense.
And it was probably in her bedroom.
The bottom drawer is what people in the UK call it. In the US, they might know it as a hope chest or a glory box. In Australia they are familiar with both ways of describing it.
However it was described, it was important to a woman who dreamed of being married. It was a practical way of laying the foundations for her marriage. When she eventually married she would have things the home needed.
The fact that a woman had a bottom drawer meant she had her head screwed on, was a thinker, a planner, someone who prepared well and could keep things together.
There was another dimension, too. The act of making practical preparation for marriage gave extra meaning to marriage itself. After all, words, why make preparations unless the thing you were preparing for is important?
What Goes Into The Bottom Drawer
The things that went into a bottom drawer also gave a glue to the woman herself. If she put away practical things like bedsheets, towels, and tablecloths, then she was ready for marriage.
She might put a little picture frame in there, but most things would be practical.
If she filled the bottom drawer with ornaments then she was immature and not really ready for marriage.
But then who besides the young woman would see what was in the bottom drawer? Perhaps her mother, or close friends.
The main thing was to show maturity and practicality. But there had to be a little bit of room for sentiment or else there would be no romance.
The World Has Changed
In the United Kingdom, marriage rates have dropped more than 50% since the early seventies. I am sure sociologists can come up with all kinds of reasons, from the decline in religious attendance, to the rise of economic independence, to the longer commitment because people live longer.
Those are all possible reasons, but here’s one that strikes a chord. It is simply the rise of individualism. People just aren’t as affiliated to myths and ideas as they once were. And it is not only what a person feels inside them. The environment tells them the same message. There simply isn’t the cultural pressure to marry because ‘it is the ‘thing to do’ and more.
Then add gender fluidity to that mix and suddenly the ‘obvious’ certainty of how a person identifies themselves, disappears.
So if a person nowadays takes marriage seriously, they don’t have society behind them as they once did. In some ways they are fighting a tide of opinion in the other direction. The idea of committing to one person for a lifetime might seem almost quaint. Friends might laugh rather than support. Parents might suggest that a person takes their time, and doesn’t hurry into things.
And what is a lifetime? There was a time when a lifetime was shorter, and the thought of spending it with one person didn’t mean all the years it means nowadays.
A Bottom Drawer For Men?
In today’s world, is the bottom drawer exclusively for women?
In these metrosexual days, why shouldn’t a man want to keep house and plan for married life with his chosen partner?
Might a man fill his own bottom drawer? What would go in it? Power tools? Screwdrivers?
Why could a woman not also put those in her bottom drawer? The 21st century doesn’t get any easier to understand for human beings carving their chosen path in life. And that even assumes that what they are interested in is their own chosen path and not something picked up second hand from whatever environment a person happens to be in.
Not everyone breaks the ties of where they happen to grow up, and finds the environment that suits them, with people they aspire to be like.
A Chest Of Drawers
A chest of drawers is such an ‘obvious’ piece of furniture. It is effectively a stack of boxes with lids made from the box above. And then you just need runners to slide the drawers in and out and a lid for the top – and voila you have a chest of drawers.
And what went into that first chest of drawers? Was it used by the maker or was it made for someone else on commission? Was it used for storing clothes or something else?
And when did it get its name as a chest of drawers? Put a set of shelves above it and move it into the kitchen, and it is Welsh Dresser. In American English a chest of drawers is called a dresser.
Before chests of drawers there was the coffer, meaning a box with a lid. And the word coffer dates from the mid-13th century when it meant a box or a chest for keeping valuable items.
The word comes from the Old French word cofre, meaning a chest. That in turn came from the Latin word cophinus, meaning a basket. And that is related to the word that came through to English as coffin.
Whatever the kind of container, they all share the idea that valuable and meaningful things are put in containers.
Do you know Mark Anthony’s speech over the dead body of Julius Caesar when he talks about Caesar and says ‘He hath brought many captives home to Rome, whose ransom did the general coffer fill…’
A Heart In A Frame
The picture frame on the chest of drawers in our card is a link to romance and love. That frame may have been in the bottom drawer before the marriage.
To make the design, we drew directly by hand in Photoshop. We drew the top, sides, and drawers on different layers. Then we added a wood grain effect and pasted the design it into our greeting card template.
Click the illustration and it will take you right to the card. Or click this Drawers Anniversary Card link.