by Gail Collins
AMERICA’S WOMEN
FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF DOLLS, DRUDGES,
HELPMATES, AND HEROINES
Gail Collins
To my mother
When I was young if a girl married poor,
she became a housekeeper and a drudge.
If she married wealthy, she became a pet and a doll.
—Susan B. Anthony
A smart woman can do very well in this country.
—A young woman in nineteenth-century California
CONTENTS
Epigraph
Introduction
1. The First Colonists: Voluntary and Otherwise
2. The Women of New England: Goodwives, Heretics, Indian Captives, and Witches
3. Daily Life in the Colonies: Housekeeping, Children, and Sex
4. Toward the Revolutionary War
5. 1800–1860: True Women, Separate Spheres, and Many Emergencies
6. Life Before the Civil War: Cleanliness and Corsetry
7. African American Women: Life in Bondage
8. Women and Abolition: White and Black, North and South
9. The Civil War: Nurses, Wives, Spies, and Secret Soldiers
10. Women Go West: Pioneers, Homesteaders, and the Fair but Frail
11. The Gilded Age: Stunts, Shorthand, and Study Clubs
12. Immigrants: Discovering the “Woman’s Country”
13. Turn of the Century: The Arrival of the New Woman
14. Reforming the World: Suffrage, Temperance, and Other Causes
15. The Twenties: All the Liberty You Can Use in the Backseat of a Packard
16. The Depression: Ma Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt
17. World War II: “She’s Making History, Working for Victory”
18. The Fifties: Life at the Far End of the Pendulum
19. The Sixties: The Pendulum Swings Back with a Vengeance
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Gail Collins
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
When I look back through all of American history, the one moment that stays with me is the image of women standing on the deck of the Mayflower, staring out at a whole continent of dense forest. On the trip over, they must have been fixated on simply getting to land. They could never have imagined how wild it would seem, how big and empty of everything they knew. Plenty of male Europeans had made the same voyage before them, but they were explorers or traders or fishermen, out to get what they needed and return home. For the women, this was going to be the only home they would ever know again. The real job of settling was theirs. Most of them would die before they could put down real roots, but those who survived generally went on to have big families, whose descendants took special pride in knowing they shared the DNA of those simple, scared, determined women.
The history of American women is all about leaving home—crossing oceans and continents, or getting jobs and living on their own. Some of our national heroines were defined by the fact that they never nested—they were peripatetic crusaders like Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth, Dorothea Dix. The center of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it.
I started thinking about American women when I was doing my last book, Scorpion Tongues, and stumbled across Louisa Adams, the wife of the sixth president of the United States and daughter-in-law of the formidable Abigail. As First Lady, Louisa was so miserable she spent much of her time eating chocolate and writing memoirs she called Adventures of a Nobody. But she had been a diplomat’s wife who traveled in midwinter from Russia, crossing the icy and corpse-laden fields of Europe in the middle of the Napoleonic War, alone in a carriage with her small son. She was a hostess so skilled that her party-giving helped propel her distinctly unlovable husband into the presidency. You’ve got to take note of that kind of duality; it crops up all along our history. This was a country, after all, where some nineteenth-century females became famous for writing books about why women had to stay out of the public eye, while others traveled all around the country lecturing on how women should never leave home. In World War II, women pilots risked their lives pulling targets so that inexperienced gunners could practice firing at them. And women pilots were arrested if they left the air base wearing slacks after dark.
The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it’s less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women’s role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders. Southern matriarchs aspired to be the image of the helpless female, then ran the plantations while their husbands went to Congress—or luxuriated at a spa. Pioneer women rode sidesaddle and wore gloves to protect their soft hands, then crawled up the side of mountains with a newborn baby in one arm. Everyone believed that married women were obliged to stay home with their children, while everyone bought factory goods produced by poor working mothers, made from cotton picked by female slaves. When slavery ended, nothing irritated white Southerners—or visiting Northerners—more than the idea that ex-slave women wanted to stop working and become homemakers.
Writing America’s Women gave me the opportunity to read hundreds of books about the women of this country, which was a joy. We live in a great age for women’s history, one that makes it easy to forget that only a few decades ago college professors were discouraged from teaching the subject because people believed that there wasn’t enough material to fill up an entire semester. I hope reading this book leads others back through the tracks of the writers I’ve followed. From everything I’ve learned, I’ve tried to spin a story that’s about both what women did and what it felt like for them to do it. Everything they achieved through the Victorian age was accomplished in very long dresses and, generally, tight corsets. This is the story of the woman who saved Washington’s army by setting fire to New York, and the mystery of what pioneers on the wagon trains did about menstruation and wet diapers. I tried to see the nineteenth century as an era when women first demanded the right to vote, but also as the time when they were medicating themselves into mercury poisoning and making their first cautious commitment to regular bathing. That period ended with the Gilded Age, when the suffrage movement went into a funk, when women first began earning a living behind a typewriter, and when the most glamorous chorus girls were the ones with huge thighs.
The middle of America’s Women is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency. The chaos of the battlefield turned out to be the ideal ground for female initiative—disorganized and desperately in need of people who would work for nothing and do any task required. That pattern repeats itself throughout this story. It took our entire history to actually change the rules of proper female behavior. But those rules were temporarily abandoned whenever the country needed women to do something they weren’t supposed to do. And even in circumstances less critical, women were almost always welcomed in new enterprises that hadn’t yet become either prestigious or profitable—whether it was early radio or early cattle drives.
The Great Depression unleashed a national war against working women, followed by World War II, when there was a national crusade to get women to take jobs. Our own era began with the late 1960s and early 1970s, when everything changed so fast the country was banning job discrimination against women while they still couldn’t serve on juries in some states, and nonvirgins weren’t allowed to bring rape charges in others.
; Everyone can choose their own heroines in this story; I have a particularly soft spot for the eccentric, heroic Grimke sisters, who braved violent mobs to speak out against slavery, and demonstrated, to the utter delight of the other female reformers, that it was possible to believe in women’s rights and still find a husband. One of the tricks to being a great historical figure is to leave behind as much information as possible. We talk a lot more about the Pilgrims than Eleanor Dare of Virginia; she came first but vanished before history got a chance to know her. New England spinsters get way more than their share of attention because of their winning habit of keeping diaries. Native American women who had no written language left behind almost nothing of their voices. It’s absolutely impossible to write this kind of book without wanting to apologize for the failure to give them their due.
The first women in America whose names we know actually came half a millennium before Eleanor Dare. Gudrid and Freydis were Vikings, relatives of Leif Eriksson, and they sailed with their men on missions of trade and exploration. Gudrid gave birth to the first European child in the New World, in what is now Canada, and was known for her ability to get along with the strange people the Vikings encountered in their travels. Freydis organized a massacre of her business partners, finishing off the wives and female servants herself.
That, at least, was the tale the Vikings told, and there’s a good-or-bad plot that fits the image of women throughout our history—virtuous wives on one hand, and on the other, the women who stepped outside their appointed roles, causing disaster. Gudrid actually did some amazing things, making her a pretty good prototype for the traditional American woman. She is said to have traveled on the Hudson River and visited Greenland, Norway, and Italy, outliving several husbands before ending her life as a nun in Iceland. Freydis, for her part, turned out to be a handy person to have around in a pinch. When the Viking camp was attacked by Indians, causing the male defenders to flee, a pregnant Freydis grabbed a handy weapon, took out her swollen breasts, “and whetted the sword upon them” according to a Viking chronicler. The sight of her so unnerved the war party they “became afraid and ran away.”
That’s pretty much our story: Melanie and Scarlett, Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, the soccer moms and the vampire slayers. All of them are more complicated than they let on. The Gudrids embraced their humble identity and hid their moments of endurance or courage or innovation under the all-purpose excuse of emergency. The Freydises were sometimes less rebels than victims of their own naïveté about the way the world worked. But as you read through history you always wait for them to appear—standing in a clearing, beating a sword against a naked breast.
1
The First Colonists:
Voluntary and Otherwise
THE EXTREMELY BRIEF STORY OF VIRGINIA DARE
Eleanor Dare must have been either extraordinarily adventurous or easily led. In 1587, when she was pregnant with her first child, she set sail across the Atlantic, headed for a continent where no woman of her kind had ever lived, let alone given birth. The only English-speaking residents of the New World at the time were a handful of men who had been left behind during an earlier, unsuccessful attempt at settlement on Roanoke Island, in what is now Virginia. Eleanor’s father, John White, was to become governor of the new colony. Her husband, Ananias, a bricklayer, was one of his assistants.
Under the best of circumstances, a boat took about two months to get from England to the New World, and there were plenty of reasons to avoid the trip. Passengers generally slept on the floor, on damp straw, living off salted pork and beef, dried peas and beans. They suffered from seasickness, dysentery, typhoid, and cholera. Their ship could sink, or be taken by privateers, or run aground at the wrong place. Even if it stayed afloat, it might be buffeted around for so long that the provisions would run out before the travelers reached land. Later would-be colonists sometimes starved to death en route. (The inaptly named Love took a year to make the trip, and at the end of the voyage rats and mice were being sold as food.) Some women considered the odds and decided to stay on dry land. The wife of John Dunton, a colonial minister, wrote to him that she would rather be “a living wife in England than a dead one at sea.”
But if Eleanor Dare had any objections, they were never recorded. She and sixteen other women settlers, along with ninety-one men and nine children, encountered no serious problems until they stopped to pick up the men who had been left at Roanoke. When they went ashore to look for them, all they found were the bones of a single Englishman. The uncooperative ship’s captain refused to take them farther, and they were forced to settle on the same unlucky site.
Try to imagine what Eleanor Dare must have thought when she walked, heavy with child, through the houses of the earlier settlers, now standing empty, “overgrown with Melons of divers sortes, and Deere within them, feeding,” as her father later recorded. Eleanor was a member of the English gentry, hardly bred for tilling fields and fighting Indians. Was she confident that her husband the bricklayer and her father the bureaucrat could keep her and her baby alive, or was she beginning to blame them for getting her into this extremely unpromising situation? All we know is that on August 18, the first English child was born in America and christened Virginia Dare—named, like the colony, in honor of the Virgin Queen who ruled back home. A few days later her grandfather boarded the boat with its cranky captain and sailed back to England for more supplies, leaving Eleanor and the other settlers to make homes out of the ghost village. It was nearly three years before White could get passage back to Roanoke, and when he arrived he discovered the village once again abandoned, with no trace of any human being, living or dead. No one knows what happened to Eleanor and the other lost colonists. They might have been killed by Indians or gone to live with the local Croatoan tribe when they ran out of food. They were swallowed up by the land, and by history.
The Dares and other English colonists who we call the first settlers were, of course, nothing of the sort. People had lived in North America for perhaps twenty millennia, and the early colonists who did survive lasted only because friendly natives were willing to give them enough food to prevent starvation. In most cases, that food was produced by native women. Among the eastern tribes, men were generally responsible for hunting and making war while the women did the farming. In some areas they had as many as 2,000 acres under cultivation. Former Indian captives reported that the women seemed to enjoy their work, tilling the fields in groups that set their own pace, looking after one another’s youngsters. Control of the food brought power, and the tribes whose women played a dominant role in growing and harvesting food were the ones in which women had the highest status and greatest authority. Perhaps that’s why the later colonists kept trying to foist spinning wheels off on the Indians, to encourage what they regarded as a more wholesome division of labor. At any rate, it’s nice to think that Eleanor Dare might have made a new life for herself with the Croatoans and spent the rest of her life working companionably with other women in the fields, keeping an eye out for her daughter and gossiping about the unreliable men.
“FEDD UPON HER TILL HE HAD
CLEAN DEVOURED ALL HER PARTES”
Jamestown was founded in 1607 by English investors hoping to make a profit on the fur and timber and precious ore they thought they were going to find. Its first residents were an ill-equipped crew of young men, many of them the youngest sons of good families, with no money but a vast sense of entitlement. The early colonists included a large number of gentlemen’s valets, but almost no farmers. They regarded food as something that arrived in the supply ship, and nobody seemed to have any interest in learning how to grow his own. (Sir Thomas Dale, who arrived in 1611 after two long winters of starvation, said he found the surviving colonists at “their daily and usuall workes, bowling in the streetes.”) The first women to arrive were the wife of one Thomas Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras. They came in 1608, the only women in a colony of around 200 misfits and mercenaries. The Jamestown that greete
d them was a fort, about an acre in size, with a shopping district composed of one storehouse and a church that looked “like a barne,” according to Captain John Smith. The homes were tumbledown shacks that one visitor said were inferior to the lowest cottage he had ever seen back in England.
There is no record of Mrs. Forrest’s first name, or what she thought when she discovered that she was marooned in what must have seemed like a long, rowdy fraternity party, minus food. All we hear is a report that she had a baby during the “Starving Time” of 1609–10, which killed all but about 60 of the settlers out of a population of 20 women and 470 men. People gnawed on “Dogges & horses…together with Rates, mice, snakes,” and one unnamed colonist killed his wife and turned her into dinner. He “fedd upon her till he had clean devoured all her partes,” wrote another colonist, who added that the man was “burned for his horrible villany.”
We don’t know if Mrs. Forrest and her baby survived the winter, but her former maid, Anne Burras, did. Anne, who was only fourteen when she arrived, soon married a twenty-eight-year-old laborer in Virginia’s first wedding ceremony and gave birth to a daughter—another Virginia—who also lived through the famine. So did Temperance Flowerdew, a young woman who had arrived in Virginia in 1609, after surviving a hurricane at sea. The storm hit a small fleet of boats destined for the colony. One, the Sea Venture, was destroyed, her passengers shipwrecked in an uninhabited part of Bermuda for nearly a year, while the crew turned the wreckage into two smaller boats. The marooned men and women weathered their ordeal on a warm island filled with food, while Temperance and the other émigrés who made it to Virginia were foraging for scraps and cooking rats. But after that unpromising beginning, a number of the women did very well. Temperance was the wife of two of the colony’s governors. The first, Captain George Yeardley, was knighted in 1618 and became one of the richest men in Virginia, with several plantations. He named one of them Flowerdew in honor of Lady Yeardley. After his death, Temperance, then about forty-two, married Captain Francis West, one of his successors. Joan Pierce and her young daughter, Jane, endured the long, hungry winter in Jamestown on their own while her husband, William, was stranded with the passengers on the Sea Venture. But after William finally made his way to the colony, he quickly became a wealthy planter. When Joan returned to England for a visit in 1629, she spent much of her time bragging about her garden in Jamestown and how she could “keep a better house in Virginia for 3 or 4 hundred pounds than in London.” Her daughter Jane grew up to marry John Rolfe after the death of his wife, Pocahontas.
