A hope chest, also called dowry chest, cedar chest, trousseau chest or glory box is a piece of furniture traditionally used to collect items such as clothing and household linen, by unmarried young women in anticipation of married life. The term "hope chest" or "cedar chest" is used in the midwest or south of the United States; in the United Kingdom, the term is "bottom drawer"; while both terms, and "glory box" are used by women in Australia.
Social context
Using her own needlework skills to construct a trousseau and stock her glory-box "was for the working girl the equivalent of planning and saving for marriage on the part of the provident and ambitious young man." The collection of a trousseau was a common coming-of-age rite until approximately the 1950s; it was typically a step on the road to marriage between courting a man and engagement. It wasn't always collected in a special chest, hence the alternative UK term bottom drawer, which refers to putting aside one drawer in a chest of drawers for collecting the trousseau undisturbed, but such a chest was an acceptable gift for a girl approaching a marriageable age. Contents of a "hope chest" or "glory box" included typical dowry items such as clothing, table linens, towels, bed linens, quilts and occasionally dishware. As a bride would typically leave home on marriage, hope chests were sometimes made with an eye to portability, albeit infrequently. Examples of hand-made items made between 1916 and 1918 for a trousseau by a prospective bride are on display in the National Museum of Australia. In this case, the trousseau—never used because its creator's fiancé was killed in World War I before the marriage took place—was stored in calico bags rather than in a chest. The hope chest was often used for the firstborn girl of a family. Instead of just having sheets and household linen in the bottom drawer, this box would transport these goods and dowries and then later be used as a standard piece of furniture for the ladyof the house to use. This dowry chest was often richly decorated, however over time dowry chests gradually became smaller, with jewelry boxes emerging instead of large dowry boxes. By contrast, a "bridal chest" was given to a bride at her wedding, by her husband, and so is not a "hope chest" in this sense.
There have been several instances of child deaths due to suffocation inside hope chests, due to the piece's traditional design which can trap children under a heavy and sometimes self-locking lid. In 1996, following reports of at least six child suffocation deaths, the manufacturer Lane Furniture recalled 12 million hope chests, the lids of which latched shut automatically, and could not be opened from the inside. Specifically, the recall applied to the locks of all "Lane" and "Virginia Maid" cedar chests manufactured between 1912 and 1987. As part of the recall, they provide new lock latch configuration replacement parts. However, they estimated that 6 million chests still used the recalled lock latch. As of 2020, Lane Furniture still offered replacement locks through their website.
Styles
The typical hope chest is of lidded blanket chest form. In some traditions, there may also be one or two side-by-side drawers beneath. As with blanket chests, a small till may also be found inside for small items.
As the contents of such a chest would primarily be linens, construction in moth-repellent cedar, or at least a cedar lining, was popular. The Lane Company of Altavista, Virginia were a notable maker of cedar chests. After developing production-line techniques for making ammunition boxes during World War I, they turned these production techniques into vast numbers of chests. This was aided by strong advertising, using a teenaged Shirley Temple as a model, in a campaign targeted at GIs and absentee sweethearts of World War II. They were particularly well known for their practice of distributing miniature cedar chests to girls graduating from high-school as advertising gifts. The Eastern Redcedar is the "cedar" used in making moth-repelling cedar chests and drawers, as well as pencils.
Decoration
Decoration is not an intrinsic part of the hope chest, but often appears.
In the 1920s, 'hope chest' was slang for a pack of cigarettes. "Glory Box" is also the title of a song from the band Portishead. The song is about a woman who is giving up her time as a temptress to commit to a settled life with a man, asking him to take a look from her side every now and then. In the 1985 movieBack to the Future, the character Lorraine McFly refers to having placed Marty McFly's pants "over there...on my hope chest" after he had been knocked unconscious. The joke implies her romantic interest in Marty when, unbeknownst to Lorraine, Marty is her son from the future. In Glee, Kurt Hummel has claimed to own a hope chest. This is an ironic inversion of the hope chest's usual role for a prospective bride, as Kurt is a gay teenage boy. In the 2012 film , Bilbo Baggins asks Kili to "please not do that" on his mother's glory box, when the dwarf cleans his boots on the chest. This suggests that in Middle Earth women also used hope chests, at least in Hobbiton. In Me and You and Everyone We Know, Peter and Robbies' neighbor has a hope chest, which is a part of the climax of the film. In The New Yankee Workshop, Norm Abram demonstrates how to build and paint a Pennsylvania Dutch-style hope chest modeled on one on display at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware.
