Museum curator delves into rich history of handheld fans

For more than 200 years, handheld fans haven’t only generated necessary cool breezes but also have provided nonverbal ways of “shooting the breeze”—even in clandestine fashion, if necessary.

How hand fans of the stick and folding varieties became an effective and stealthy way to communicate provided the focal point for a two-hour Texarkana Museums System lecture Saturday at the P.J. Ahern Home. TMS Curator Jamie Simmons used mostly locally collected vintage folding hand fans to walk her audience through the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and demonstrate how the artifacts offered a form of surreptitious language. Such fans were invented as far back as 3000 B.C. in ancient Egypt and Asia.

By the 18th century, the fans, some of which were made from chicken skin, were widely used in Europe and early America, as they became an integral part of etiquette and art.

“Using fans to talk in code just evolved from normal movement in body language, because back in the 18th century, people (mostly women) didn’t openly express their feelings, so they learned how to use fans to develop a code which became an official part of their social training,” Simmons said. “It wasn’t unusual to see men with fans, but they were primarily used by women.”

By the 19th century, Simmons explained, the Victorian Age forced such normal human activities as flirting to be conducted in a secret, less verbal approach through the use of fan positioning.

“By the 19th century, people learned this social training more unofficially as family members and siblings began to pass it down to one another and young people started to learn these coded fan movements quicker so they could skirt the Victorian moral code of the time,” Simmons said.

In the 18th century, holding the fan with the right hand in front of the face meant “Follow me”; holding it to the left ear meant “I want you leave me alone”; and throwing a fan down meant “I hate you.”

In the 19th century, resting the fan on the heart meant “My love for you is breaking my heart,” letting the fan rest on the left cheek meant “no,” resting it on the right cheek meant “yes” and putting the fan up to the lips meant “kiss me.”

Fan usage for coded language peaked in the 19th century, but it was used in the 20th century to a lesser degree starting in the 1920s—mainly because the Victorian Age had ended and people were more verbal with their flirting.

By the 1930s, the use of such fans dropped substantially in the U.S. with the onset of the Great Depression, essentially putting an end to the handheld luxury.

By World War II, with men called off to combat and women called into work, the handheld fan was no longer practical to carry around.

However, funeral homes use them to this day.