A People

by Howard Zinn

  When feminist impulses are recorded, they are, almost always, the writings of privileged women who had some status from which to speak freely, more opportunity to write and have their writings recorded. Abigail Adams, even before the Declaration of Independence, in March of 1776, wrote to her husband:

  … in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound to obey the laws in which we have no voice of representation.

  Nevertheless, Jefferson underscored his phrase "all men are created equal" by his statement that American women would be "too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics." And after the Revolution, none of the new state constitutions granted women the right to vote, except for New Jersey, and that state rescinded the right in 1807. New York 's constitution specifically disfranchised women by using the word "male."

  While perhaps 90 percent of the white male population were literate around 1750, only 40 percent of the women were. Working-class women had little means of communicating, and no means of recording whatever sentiments of rebelliousness they may have felt at their subordination. Not only were they bearing children in great numbers, under great hardships, but they were working in the home. Around the time of the Declaration of Independence, four thousand women and children in Philadelphia were spinning at home for local plants under the "putting out" system. Women also were shopkeepers and innkeepers and engaged in many trades. They were bakers, tinworkers, brewers, tanners, ropemakers, lumberjacks, printers, morticians, woodworkers, stay-makers, and more.

  Ideas of female equality were in the air during and after the Revolution, Tom Paine spoke out for the equal rights of women. And the pioneering book of Mary Wollstonecraft in England, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was reprinted in the United States shortly after the Revolutionary War. Wollstonecraft was responding to the English conservative and opponent of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, who had written in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that "a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order." She wrote:

  I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who arc only the objects of pity and that kind of love… will soon become objects of contempt…

  I wish to show that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.

  Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, so many elements of American society were changing-the growth of population, the movement westward, the development of the factory system, expansion of political rights for white men, educational growth to match the new economic needs-that changes were bound to take place in the situation of women. In preindustrial America, the practical need for women in a frontier society had produced some measure of equality; women worked at important jobs-publishing newspapers, managing tanneries, keeping taverns, engaging in skilled work. In certain professions, like midwifery, they had a monopoly. Nancy Cott tells of a grandmother, Martha Moore Ballard, on a farm in Maine in 1795, who "baked and brewed, pickled and preserved, spun and sewed, made soap and dipped candles" and who, in twenty-five years as a midwife, delivered more than a thousand babies. Since education took place inside the family, women had a special role there.

  There was complex movement in different directions. Now, women were being pulled out of the house and into industrial life, while at the same time there was pressure for women to stay home where they were more easily controlled. The outside world, breaking into the solid cubicle of the home, created fears and tensions in the dominant male world, and brought forth ideological controls to replace the loosening family controls: the idea of "the woman's place," promulgated by men, was accepted by many women.

  As the economy developed, men dominated as mechanics and tradesmen, and aggressiveness became more and more defined as a male trait. Women, perhaps precisely because more of them were moving into the dangerous world outside, were told to be passive. Clothing styles developed- for the rich and middle class of course, but, as always, there was the intimidation of style even for the poor-in which the weight of women's clothes, corsets and petticoats, emphasized female separation from the world of activity.

  It became important to develop a set of ideas, taught in church, in school, and in the family, to keep women in their place even as that place became more and more unsettled. Barbara Welter (Dimity Convictions) has shown how powerful was the "cult of true womanhood" in the years after 1820. The woman was expected to be pious. A man writing in The Ladies' Repository: "Religion is exactly what a woman needs, for it gives her that dignity that bests suits her dependence." Mrs. John Sandford, in her book Woman, in Her Social and Domestic Character, said: "Religion is just what woman needs. Without it she is ever restless or unhappy."

  Sexual purity was to be the special virtue of a woman. It was assumed that men, as a matter of biological nature, would sin, but woman must not surrender. As one male author said: "If you do, you will be left in silent sadness to bewail your credulity, imbecility, duplicity, and premature prostitution." A woman wrote that females would get into trouble if they were "high spirited not prudent."

  The role began early, with adolescence. Obedience prepared the girl for submission to the first proper mate. Barbara Welter describes this:

  The assumption is twofold: the American female was supposed to be so infinitely lovable and provocative that a healthy male could barely control himself when in the same room with her, and the same girl, as she "conies out" of the cocoon of her family's protectiveness, is so palpitating with undirected affection, so filled to the brim with tender feelings, that she fixes her love on the first person she sees. She awakes from the midsummer night's dream of adolescence, and it is the responsibility of her family and society to see that her eyes fall on a suitable match and not some clown with the head of an ass. They do their part by such restrictive measures as segregated (by sex and/or class) schools, dancing classes, travel, and other external controls. She is required to exert the inner control of obedience. The combination forms a kind of societal chastity belt which is not unlocked until the marriage partner has arrived, and adolescence is formally over.

  When Amelia Bloomer in 1851 suggested in her feminist publication that women wear a kind of short skirt and pants, to free themselves from the encumbrances of traditional dress, this was attacked in the popular women's literature. One story has a girl admiring the «bloomer» costume, but her professor admonishes her that they are "only one of the many manifestations of that wild spirit of socialism and agrarian radicalism which is at present so rife in our land."

  In The Young Lady's Book of 1830: ",… in whatever situation of life a woman is placed from her cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind, are required from her." And one woman wrote, in 1850, in the book Greenwood Leaves: "True feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood." Another book, Recollections of a Southern Matron: "If any habit of his annoyed me, I spoke of it once or twice, calmly, then bore it quietly." Giving women "Rules for Conjugal and Domestic Happiness," one book ended with: "Do not expect too much."

  The woman's job was to keep the home cheerful, maintain religion, he nurse, cook, cleaner, seamstress, flower arranger. A woman shouldn't read too much, and certain books should be avoided. When Harriet Martineau, a reformer of the 1830s, wrote Society in America, one reviewer suggested it he kept away from women: "Such reading will unsettle them for their true station and pursuits, and they will throw the
world back again into confusion."

  A sermon preached in 1808 in New York:

  How interesting and important are the duties devolved on females as wives… the counsellor and friend of the husband; who makes it her daily study to lighten his cares, to soothe his sorrows, and to augment his joys; who, like a guardian angel, watches over his interests, warns him against dangers, comforts him under trials; and by her pious, assiduous, and attractive deportment, constantly endeavors to render him more virtuous, more useful, more honourable, and more happy.

  Women were also urged, especially since they had the job of educating children, to he patriotic. One women's magazine offered a prize to the woman who wrote the best essay on "I low May an American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism."

  It was in the 1820s and 1830s, Nancy Cott tells us (The Bonds of Womanhood), that there was an outpouring of novels, poems, essays, sermons, and manuals on the family, children, and women's role. The world outside was becoming harder, more commercial, more demanding. In a sense, the home carried a longing for some Utopian past, some refuge from immediacy.

  Perhaps it made acceptance of the new economy easier to be able to see it as only part of life, with the home a haven. In 1819, one pious wife wrote: "… the air of the world is poisonous. You must carry an antidote with you, or the infection will prove fetal." All this was not, as Cott points out, to challenge the world of commerce, industry, competition, capitalism, hut to make it more palatable.

  The cult of domesticity for the woman was a way of pacifying her with a doctrine of "separate but equal"-giving her work equally as important as the man's, hut separate and different. Inside that «equality» there was the fact that the woman did not choose her mate, and once her marriage took place, her life was determined. One girl wrote in 1791: "The die is about to be cast which will probably determine the future happiness or misery of my life… I have always anticipated the event with a degree of solemnity almost equal to that which will terminate my present existence."

  Marriage enchained, and children doubled the chains. One woman, writing in 1813: "The idea of soon giving birth to my third child and the consequent duties I shall he called to discharge distresses me so I feel as if I should sink." This despondency was lightened by the thought that something important was given the woman to do: to impart to her children the moral values of self- restraint and advancement through individual excellence rather than common action.

  The new ideology worked; it helped to produce the stability needed by a growing economy. But its very existence showed that other currents were at work, not easily contained. And giving the woman her sphere created the possibility that she might use that space, that time, to prepare for another kind of life.

  The "cult of true womanhood" could not completely erase what was visible as evidence of woman's subordinate status: she could not vote, could not own property; when she did work, her wages were one-fourth to one-half what men earned in the same job. Women were excluded from the professions of law and medicine, from colleges, from the ministry.

  Putting all women into the same category-giving them all the same domestic sphere to cultivate- created a classification (by sex) which blurred the lines of class, as Nancy Cott points out. However, forces were at work to keep raising the issue of class. Samuel Slater had introduced industrial spinning machinery in New England in 1789, and now there was a demand for young girls-literally, "spinsters"-to work the spinning machinery in factories. In 1814, the power loom was introduced in Waltham, Massachusetts, and now all the operations needed to turn cotton fiber into cloth were under one roof. The new textile factories swiftly multiplied, with women 80 to 90 percent of their operatives-most of these women between fifteen and thirty.

  Some of the earliest industrial strikes took place in these textile mills in the 1830s. Eleanor Flexner (A Century of Struggle) gives figures that suggest why: women's daily average earnings in 1836 were less than 371/2 cents, and thousands earned 25 cents a day, working twelve to sixteen hours a day. In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, came the first known strike of women factory workers; 202 women joined men in protesting a wage cut and longer hours, but they met separately. Four years later, women in Dover, New Hampshire, struck alone. And in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, when a young woman was fired from her job, other girls left their looms, one of them then climbing the town pump and making, according to a newspaper report, "a flaming Mary Wollstonecraft speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the 'moneyed aristocracy' which produced a powerful effect on her auditors and they determined to have their own way, if they died for it."

  A journal kept by an unsympathetic resident of Chicopee, Massachusetts, recorded an event of May 2, 1843:

  Great turnout among the girls… after breakfast this morning a procession preceded by a painted window curtain for a banner went round the square, the number sixteen. They soon came past again… then numbered forty-four. They marched around a while and then dispersed. After dinner they sallied forth to the number of forty-two and marched around to Cabot… They marched around the streets doing themselves no credit…

  There were strikes in various cities in the 1840s, more militant than those early New England "turnouts," but mostly unsuccessful. A succession of strikes in the Allegheny mills near Pittsburgh demanded a shorter workday. Several rimes in those strikes, women armed with sticks and stones broke through the wooden gates of a textile mill and stopped the looms.

  Catharine Beecher, a woman reformer of the time, wrote about the factory system:

  Let me now present the facts I learned by observation or inquiry on the spot. I was there in mid- winter, and every morning I was awakened at five, by the bells calling to labor. The time allowed for dressing and breakfast was so short, as many told me, that both were performed hurriedly, and then the work at the mill was begun by lamplight, and prosecuted without remission till twelve, arid chiefly in a standing position. Then half an hour only allowed for dinner, from which the time for going and returning was deducted. Then back to the mills, to work till seven o'clock… it must be remembered that all the hours of labor are spent in rooms where oil lamps, togedier with from 40 to 80 persons, are exhausting the healthful principle of the air… and where the air is loaded with particles of cotton thrown from thousands of cards, spindles, and looms.

  And the life of upper-class women? Frances Trollope, an Englishwoman, in her book Domestic Manners of the Americans, wrote;

  Let me be permitted to describe the day of a Philadelphia lady of the first class…

  This lady shall be the wife of a senator and a lawyer in the highest repute and practice… She rises, and her first hour is spent in the scrupulously nice arrangement of her dress; she descends to her parlor, neat, stiff, and silent; her breakfast is brought in by her free black footman; she eats her fried ham and her salt fish, and drinks her coffee in silence, while her husband reads one newspaper, and puts another under his elbow; and then perhaps, she washes the cups and saucers. Her carriage is ordered at eleven; till that hour she is employed in the pastry room, her snow-white apron protecting her mouse-colored silk. Twenty minutes before her carriage should appear, she retires to her chamber, as she calls it; shakes and folds up her still snowwhite apron, smooths her rich dress, and… sets on her elegant bonnet… then walks downstairs, just at the moment that her free black coachman announces to her free black footman that the carriage waits. She steps into it, and gives the word: "Drive to the Dorcas Society."

  At Lowell, a Female Labor Reform Association put out a series of "Factory Tracts." The first was entitled "Factory Life as It Is By an Operative" and spoke of the textile mill women as "nothing more nor less than slaves in every sense of the word! Slaves, to a system of labor which requires them to toil from five until seven o'clock, with one hour only to attend to the wants of nature-slaves to the will and requirements of the 'powers that be. …"

  In 1845, the New York Sun carried this item:

  "Mass Meeting of Young Women"-We are reque
sted to call the attention of the young women of the city engaged in industrious pursuits to the call for a mass meeting in the Park this afternoon at 4 o'clock.

  We are also requested to appeal to the gallantry of the men of this city… and respectfully ask them not to be present at this meeting as those for whose benefit it is called prefer to deliberate by themselves.

  Around that time, the New York Herald carried a story about "700 females, generally of the most interesting state and appearance," meeting "in their endeavor to remedy the wrongs and oppressions under which they labor." The Herald editorialized about such meetings: "… we very much doubt whether it will terminate in much good to female labor of any description… All combinations end in nothing."

  The tide of Nancy Cott's book The Bonds of Womanhood reflects her double view of what was happening to women in the early nineteenth century. They were trapped in the bonds of the new ideology of "women's sphere" in the home, and, when forced out to work in factories, or even in middle-class professions, found another kind of bondage. On the other hand, these conditions created a common consciousness of their situation and forged bonds of solidarity among them.

  Middle-class women, barred from higher education, began to monopolize the profession of primary-school teaching. As teachers, they read more, communicated more, and education itself became subversive of old ways of thinking. They began to write for magazines and newspapers, and started some ladies' publications. Literacy among women doubled between 1780 and 1840. Women became health reformers. They formed movements against double standards in sexual behavior and the victimization of prostitutes. They joined in religious organizations. Some of the most powerful of them joined the antislavery movement. So, by the time a clear feminist movement emerged in the 1840s, women had become practiced organizers, agitators, speakers.

  When Emma Willard addressed the New York legislature in 1819 on the subject of education for women, she was contradicting the statement made just the year before by Thomas Jefferson (in a letter) in which he suggested women should not read novels "as a mass of trash" with few exceptions. "For a like reason, too, much poetry should not be indulged." Female education should concentrate, he said, on "ornaments too, and the amusements of life… These, for a female, are dancing, drawing, and music."