Spinster Spills

Spinster Spills 📖 History's tea, freshly spilled.

College girls in Texas, 1944 🤠📸While the Second World War was changing life far beyond these walls, five young women at ...
14/09/2026

College girls in Texas, 1944 🤠📸

While the Second World War was changing life far beyond these walls, five young women at the University of Texas at Austin were doing what students have always done: laughing, posing, borrowing clothes, having a drink and making memories with friends. ❤️

These members of Delta Delta Delta, better known as Tri Delta, were photographed inside their sorority house during the 1944 to 1945 academic year.

Ci******es, cowboy hats, stuffed animals, a bottle being passed around and one wonderfully oversized Sigma Nu shirt. 😄 It feels far less like a formal 1940s portrait and much more like someone simply picked up a camera in the middle of a very good evening.

More than 80 years later, the hairstyles and clothes belong to another era, but the friendship in this photograph still feels wonderfully familiar. ✨

📍 Austin, Texas
📅 1944 to 1945

📷 Photo credit: Traces of Texas. The original photograph was reportedly shared with the project by the daughter of one of the women pictured.

If anyone recognises these women or knows more about the story behind the photograph, we would love to hear it. ❤️

Literary history has a few awkward footnotes.Some of them have someone else’s name on the cover. 👀📚Colette’s Claudine no...
12/09/2026

Literary history has a few awkward footnotes.
Some of them have someone else’s name on the cover. 👀📚

Colette’s Claudine novels were first published under her husband Willy’s name. Zelda Fitzgerald’s diaries, letters, and language were folded into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work. And Agnes Kinloch Kingston translated Jules Verne while the translations appeared under her husband W. H. G. Kingston’s name.

For a long time, some women did remarkable literary work from the shadows of the men beside them. ✍️🕯️📖

Painting attributed to the Master of the Female Half-Lengths, Woman Writing a Letter, c. 1530–1540

Things you didn’t know about Marie Antoinette 👑✨Born in Austria in 1755, Marie Antoinette was just 14 years old when she...
10/09/2026

Things you didn’t know about Marie Antoinette 👑✨

Born in Austria in 1755, Marie Antoinette was just 14 years old when she married the future King Louis XVI of France. 🇦🇹🇫🇷

And despite what history has made famous, she almost certainly never said, “Let them eat cake.” 🍰 In fact, many of the most outrageous stories about her were fuelled by gossip, political propaganda and scandal. 👀

She became one of the biggest fashion icons of her time, known for extravagant gowns, towering hairstyles and her close relationship with dressmaker Rose Bertin, who was even nicknamed the “Minister of Fashion.” 👗🎀✨

Her simpler choices could cause just as much controversy. A portrait of her wearing a loose white muslin dress was considered so informal and shocking for a queen that it had to be replaced. 🎨🤍

She was also wrongly caught up in the infamous Diamond Necklace Affair. 💎 Although she had nothing to do with the fraud, the scandal seriously damaged her reputation.

And that famous little “peasant village” at Versailles? 🌿🏡 She wasn’t dressing up as a shepherdess and pretending to farm. The Queen’s Hamlet was designed as a private retreat and included a working farm.

Marie Antoinette had four children, but only one of them survived the French Revolution into adulthood. 👑

After the fall of the French monarchy, she was imprisoned, put on trial and executed by guillotine in Paris in 1793. She was only 37 years old. 🕯️

More than 230 years later, Marie Antoinette remains one of history’s most recognisable queens, but the woman behind the legend was far more complicated than the famous image of cake, diamonds and excess. 👑🍰💎

Victorian women were supposed to be delicate. These women lifted men, broke chains, bent iron and turned strength into a...
10/09/2026

Victorian women were supposed to be delicate. These women lifted men, broke chains, bent iron and turned strength into a spectacle. 💪✨

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, performers like Charmion, Katie Sandwina, Vulcana, Miss Athléta and Minerva turned female strength into public spectacle.

Charmion became famous for combining muscular display with daring trapeze work. Sandwina lifted heavy weights, bent bars, broke chains and even lifted members of her audience. Vulcana, Athléta and Minerva belonged to the classic strongwoman tradition, performing feats that involved heavy lifting, iron bending, chain breaking and other displays of strength. 🎪🔥

They toured circuses, music halls and vaudeville stages, turning their bodies into both entertainment and rebellion.

More than a century before “strong is beautiful” became a slogan, female strength was already taking centre stage. 💪👑

Photo credits, in order:
Miss Athléta, Maria van Huffelen, photographer unknown, c. 1895
Charmion, photograph by Frederick W. Glasier, 1897, Wisconsin Historical Society / WCFTR
Katie Sandwina, General Photographic Agency
Minerva, Josephine Blatt, photographer unknown
Vulcana, Miriam Kate Williams, photographer unknown

This may be the oldest known photoshoot of a dog, taken around 150 years ago. 🐶🐾📸Not just one photograph, but at least T...
09/09/2026

This may be the oldest known photoshoot of a dog, taken around 150 years ago. 🐶🐾📸
Not just one photograph, but at least THREE portraits of the same little dog. ❤️

Taken around 1875 and preserved in Australia’s remarkable Holtermann Collection, the dog is known only as “Dog of Randall the jeweller.” At least three portraits were made using cumbersome wet plate glass photography, meaning this fluffy little subject had to sit remarkably still for every exposure. 📷

Its real name has been lost to history. But 150 years later, we’re still looking at a dog somebody cared enough about to preserve in time. ❤️🐾

👑 Queen Elizabeth II was the first female member of the British Royal Family to serve as a full-time active member of th...
08/09/2026

👑 Queen Elizabeth II was the first female member of the British Royal Family to serve as a full-time active member of the Armed Services. 🇬🇧

In 1945, while the Second World War was still being fought, 18-year-old Princess Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS).

She trained as both a driver and vehicle mechanic, learning to maintain and repair military vehicles. 🔧🚙 This was not simply a ceremonial role; she underwent practical training and qualified as a driver before later being promoted to Junior Commander.

These photographs show a very different side of the future Queen: years before the crown, the state occasions and a reign that would last seven decades, she was a young princess in overalls, learning her way around an engine and doing her part during wartime Britain. 👑✨

Black-and-white kneeling photo: Paul Popper / Popperfoto
Colour standing photo: Photographer unknown / Royal Collection Trust

They weren’t a couple. And they didn’t even pose together for the painting. 🎨❤️The two unforgettable faces in Grant Wood...
08/09/2026

They weren’t a couple. And they didn’t even pose together for the painting. 🎨❤️

The two unforgettable faces in Grant Wood’s American Gothic belonged to his younger sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby. Wood painted them separately in 1930, bringing their likenesses together only on the canvas. The figures were intended to represent a father and his grown daughter, although generations of viewers have assumed they were husband and wife.

Then, twelve years later, something rather wonderful happened. 📸

In September 1942, Nan and Dr. McKeeby stood together beside American Gothic at a memorial exhibition for Grant Wood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. For once, the two real people behind one of America’s most famous paintings were finally side by side.

There’s something so charming about seeing them next to their painted selves. Twelve years had passed, and yet those wonderfully serious expressions were still unmistakable. 😊

Nan Wood Graham and Dr. Byron McKeeby, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, September 1942.

📷 Photo credit: Cedar Rapids Gazette. Courtesy of the Figge Art Museum, City of Davenport Art Collection, Grant Wood Archive.

Grandma wasn’t built different. Grandma was chemically assisted. 💊✨In America, co***ne really did turn up in early Coca...
08/09/2026

Grandma wasn’t built different. Grandma was chemically assisted. 💊✨
In America, co***ne really did turn up in early Coca-Cola and patent medicines, and Britain had plenty of co***ne-laced tonics and remedies of its own. 🥤💉 Then came the age of “mother’s little helpers”: stimulants, sedatives, and tranquilizers keeping respectable households running. 💊🏠

The workload was familiar. The productivity stack was a lot more stimulating. 😅⚡💊

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