America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Most women actually performed as much labor as they had a generation earlier. Although they may have done less spinning, higher standards of cleanliness dictated that they do much more washing and sweeping and polishing. But their husbands hardly noticed their efforts and found it hard to connect them with the support of the family. On the farm, instead of planting flax that their wives turned into linen, men planted cash crops that they sold, and bought cloth with the profit. The women seemed to be out of the loop entirely. The era of barter economy, in which they had played such an important part, was closing. And in some places, their exclusion from the world of commerce was much starker. In New Amsterdam, the Dutch had followed the traditions of their mother country and encouraged female entrepreneurs, training both their young men and women to enter business careers. Dutch women could maintain a separate civil identity after marriage, buy and sell goods and property, contract debt, and determine who would inherit their property. But when the English took over in 1664, turning New Amsterdam into New York, the women’s rights began to erode. Dutch farmers in New York stopped leaving their estates equally to all their children and started giving their land to their sons while daughters got a cash bequest. By 1700 there was not a single woman trader left in Albany, and the number in New York City dropped from 134 in 1653 to 43 in 1774.

  Just as women were losing their status as household producers, they were gaining respect as mothers. This was a new idea—to the degree that seventeenth-century opinion makers ever thought of child rearing at all, it was in terms of the father’s role. Women, who were supposed to be less intelligent, less self-controlled, and even a little silly, were hard for their sons to take seriously. (A well-known Puritan writer in England, who was also read in America, counseled boys that their duty to honor their mother was “the truest triall” of childhood.) But as fathers absented themselves from the home, mothers became the main nurturers of the next generation. Women were also beginning to get a much larger role in religion, particularly in New England. Church membership, which had been so central to the life of every community in the seventeenth century, began to decline, and women began to outnumber men in most congregations. The conflict between religious values and sharp business practices that had tormented the early Puritans was resolved tidily by putting the men in charge of business and the women, under the minister’s leadership, in charge of church.

  “LEFT TO PONDER ON A STRIP OF CARPET”

  Women’s economic power was narrowing even faster in the pre-Revolutionary South, but the region still continued to produce some remarkable women, worthy successors to the pioneers who dared malaria and shipwreck to seek their fortunes. Eliza Lucas was fifteen years old when her father moved the family to South Carolina in 1738, settling on a plantation seventeen miles from Charleston. George Lucas was called back to military duty the next year, and he left Eliza in charge of the plantation, as well as her invalid mother and younger sister. He knew what he was doing—Eliza not only kept her father’s properties running in his absence, she began experimenting with ways to diversify the area’s rice-based farm economy. She focused on indigo, a plant that was valued for the blue dye it produced, even though it was difficult to cultivate. By 1744—despite attempts at sabotage by the indigo expert her father had dispatched to help her—Eliza had successfully raised a crop of good commercial-grade dye and given away parcels of the seed to her neighbors. That was imaginative generosity, for it created enough supply to make it worthwhile for merchants to include South Carolina in their indigo trade. When she wasn’t busy revolutionizing the colony’s agriculture, Eliza found time to instruct her younger sister in French, set up a plantation school for the slave children, see to her father’s other business affairs, carry on an extensive correspondence, practice handicrafts, and teach herself shorthand. She eventually married the attorney Charles Pinckney, a widower much her senior. After his sudden death, she ran several plantations he had left in her care and reared her three formidable children. Her daughter managed her own husband’s plantations and both of her sons served as governor.

  But most southern women weren’t given that kind of independence. Slavery was gradually dominating the culture of the South and there was little about the role of southern women that was not defined by the “peculiar institution.” By the time of the Revolutionary War, prosperous white women shunned almost every kind of physical labor, and they were dependent on slaves to do their housework—nearly a fifth of the workforce on some Virginia plantations was involved in household duties, and even a middle-class farmer might have two or three female slaves dedicated to chores like clothmaking or cooking. The self-sufficient Eliza Pinckney, living alone in old age in Charleston, still required six servants to run her household.

  Wealthy southern families were beginning their experiment with the sort of cultivated lifestyle that we associate with the Gone with the Wind era. But the real life on the plantations, at least during the colonial era, was a peculiar combination of gentility and disorder. Just as the theoretically tidy Yankee farm families lived in yards full of garbage, the plantation hospitality had a wild edge that unnerved outsiders. The slaves were often the children of African parents, given neither the training nor the incentive to turn themselves into efficient butlers or maids. So meals were served several hours after the appointed time and the process of carrying the dishes from the cookhouse—always located away from the mansion—left much of the food overcooked and underheated. The plantations didn’t invest much in clothing for the slaves, either. “I have frequently seen in Virginia, on visits to gentlemen’s houses…young negroes from sixteen to twenty years old, with not an article of clothing, but a loose shirt, descending half way down their thighs, waiting at table where were ladies,” wrote one Revolutionary-era visitor.

  Once southern agriculture had become dependent on slave labor, it became necessary to raise upper-class southern men to dominate, to control large numbers of potentially rebellious slaves, and impose their will upon them. The wives inevitably got the spillover. Southern white womanhood was supposed to be submissive, as well as frail and chaste, the better to contrast with black women who were thought of as sturdy and sexually promiscuous. Caroline Gilman, a lively southern matron who wrote a memoir of her life in South Carolina, described her internal battle to mold herself into a proper wife: “To repress a harsh answer, to confess a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defense, in gentle submission, sometimes requires a struggle like life and death; but these three efforts are the golden threads with which domestic happiness is woven.” She praised her husband as one of the rare men in South Carolina who included women in his conversation. None of the other men in the neighborhood, however, were interested in hearing anything she had to say and when male guests came to call, “after the ordinary questions were answered, I was usually left to ponder on the strip of carpet before the hearth, and wonder why it did not come up to the chairs” while the men talked over her, as if she was not in the room.

  “THEY LACED HER UP, THEY STARVED HER DOWN”

  In both the North and South, the daughters of the wealthy urban gentry were becoming the nation’s first leisure class. The girls learned fancy stitching, dancing, and music and spent a great deal of time worrying about their figures, which were supposed to be very slender and straight-backed. Elegant bearing was regarded as a critical accomplishment, and many young women spent their adolescence wearing harnesses or strapped to backboards in order to improve their posture. One Revolutionary physician recalled in verse:

  They braced my aunt against a board,

  To make her straight and tall

  They laced her up, they starved her down

  To make her light and small.

  The “pretty gentlewoman” replaced the fecund workhorse as the colonial female ideal. When upper-class family matrons began sitting for their portraits, historian Laurel Ulrich has noted, the artists were encouraged to depict them not as the middle-aged mothers they were in real li
fe but as “tiny-waisted, full-bosomed, raven-haired creatures.” Nicholas Culpepper, that best-selling author of medical advice books, offered a remedy to make matronly figures look more youthful: “Take hemlocks, shred them and boyl them in white-wine, then make plaster of them and apply them to the breasts.”

  Visiting was the main occupation of many young women, and sometimes even their mothers. They traveled from one friend’s home to another, for stays of a few days or a few months, amusing themselves and exposing marriageable daughters to the widest possible array of suitors. Lucinda Lee, a wealthy Virginian, kept a diary of her two-month round of visits in the Revolutionary War era, and it depicts a life that would be regarded today as either extremely carefree or extremely useless. Lucinda and her friends read novels, entertained young men, played cards, fixed each other’s hair, went dancing and riding, and drove around in a carriage. She did note that she spent one morning “putting my clothes to rights—a dreadful task.”

  As so often happened in American history, society was sending young women two completely opposite signals. They were expected to become wives who could perform an enormous number of tasks so skillfully that their husbands never noticed that they were busy. But they prepared for married life by spending their youth in leisure that was supposed to be so refined as to leave them almost immobile. (Dr. William Buchan, a popular writer on medical issues, advised that the only proper activities for young women were “playing on some musical instrument, singing and reading aloud delightful pieces of poetry or eloquence.”) Well-bred American girls were also getting a raft of advice about how to conceal their intelligence. A young woman’s literary magazine featured in its first issue the sad tale of one Amelia, a clergyman’s daughter who was taught Latin and Greek, and as a result became “negligent in her dress” and filled with “pride and pedantry.” In his popular A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, John Gregory urgently advised young women to refrain from displaying their good sense in public: “If you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts, and a cultivated understanding.” Dr. Gregory, who had a habit of giving with one hand and then taking away with another, admitted that “a man of real genius and candor” would rise above such meanness. But he added that it was unlikely such a paragon would appear.

  Fashion began to get very complicated in the eighteenth century. Most women continued to wear the loose skirts and smocks that farm wives had worn for generations. But upper-class wives and daughters tried to outdo one another in the most uncomfortable getups imaginable. Skirts acquired hoop petticoats so huge that ladies had trouble getting into carriages or walking two abreast on the streets. At one point the hoops were six feet in diameter, and wags reported that ministers of well-to-do congregations despaired of finding adequate seats for all those billowing churchgoers. Women also wore extremely tight corsets that covered much of the body, and shoes with very high heels, usually made of wood. When they were outdoors, they balanced their shoes on pattens—leather or iron or wooden clogs mounted on rings of iron. The pattens kept the thin-soled shoes out of the mud, but they made a stroll down the street as challenging as stilt-walking. When women went outside in daylight, they also wore masks to protect their complexion, as well as gloves to keep their hands smooth. (It’s hard to imagine how someone encumbered with a body-length corset and huge hoop skirt would be able to get involved in any activity conducive to nail breakage, let alone chapping.) Well-born little girls wore the same clothes as their mothers. Their stiffness in colonial portraits may reflect the fact that they had already been bound up in corsets.

  The most spectacular eighteenth-century fashion was the tower hairdo, in which the hair was piled on top of the head in stiff poufs and topped by a wire frame covered with ribbons, beads, jewels, and feathers. The women must have looked like floats in a parade, but the towers went in and out of style several times over the 1700s. “Some of the ladies appear sensible and dress neat,” wrote John May after a visit to Philadelphia in 1788, “and some appear by their garb to be fools. I have seen a headdress in this city at least three feet across.” In 1782, a minister described Mrs. Henry Knox, the wife of the secretary of war, as “very gross…her hair in front is craped at least a foot high much in the form of a churn bottom upward and topped off with a wire skeleton in the same form covered with black gauze which hangs in streamers down her back. Her hair behind is in a large braid, turned up and confined with a monstrous crooked comb.”

  Very few women in the colonies had either the money to buy these getups or the leisure to be immobilized by them. Nevertheless, the obsession with shopping and display must have seemed like the end of the world to ministers who believed that the colonies were supposed to represent the kingdom of God on Earth. They were shocked by women’s revealing fashions—a Boston journal in 1755 suggested that if current trends continued, women would soon be completely nude. And the ministers were horrified when people started dancing with the opposite sex. Previously, those who dared to dance at all generally performed the contradance, in which men and women faced each other from opposing lines. The new style, in which couples danced in pairs, was called “gynecandrical” or “promiscuous” by the scandalized arbiters of morality. Cotton Mather, naturally, had something to say about it:

  Because the daughters of Zion are haughty,

  and walk with outstretched necks.

  Glancing wantonly with their eyes,

  Mincing along as they go,

  tinkling with their feet;

  The Lord will smite with a scab

  the heads of the daughters of Zion

  and the Lord will lay bare their private parts.

  Prenuptial pregnancy went through the roof during the eighteenth century, and the authorities gave up trying to mete out punishments, concentrating instead on identifying the fathers of illegitimate children and forcing them to support their offspring. But while young women seemed to become more sexually active, particularly with men they expected to marry, American society was developing ideals of courtship in which the woman was supposed to play a passive, virtually hostile role. A truly ladylike female rejected a suitor on first proposal, even if she intended to accept him eventually. And she never felt the surges of something as tawdry as sexual attraction, or even romantic love. “A man of taste and delicacy marries a woman because he loves her more than any other,” wrote Dr. Gregory. “A woman of equal taste and delicacy marries him because she esteems him and because he gives her that preference.”

  “MISERABLE OLD AGE AND HELPLESS INFANCY”

  The number of really poor people grew in eighteenth-century America, and as now, the most distressed segment of the population was single women with children. In the colonists’ case, they were mainly widows, whose numbers had exploded as a result of the British wars against the French in North America. In 1742 there were 1,200 widows in Boston alone—nearly a third of all the women in the town who had ever been married. Those with young children tried to stay afloat by taking in piecework, wet-nursing other women’s babies, or doing laundry in their homes. Those with older children often bound them out, or placed their daughters in domestic service.

  Widows who inherited establishments from their husbands sometimes did very well. They ran taverns and stores and printing shops, a business that for some reason seemed particularly well suited to colonial women’s talents. But any female who worked for wages was poor. The maximum weekly rate paid for women in domestic service in New England around the time of the Revolution was the same as the maximum daily rate for male farm laborers. Even women who worked as tailors, one of the few crafts open to them, made only about a third of what men made.

  Some colonies had a rough welfare system, but it was very unpleasant. In parts of Pennsylvania, a woman on the dole had to wear a red P, for pauper, on her upper sleeve, along with the first letter of the county providing the support. Massachusetts established almshouses for th
e indigent, but only the most pathetic and infirm were willing to be institutionalized in return for bread-and-water diets and employment at the looms. Judith Stevens, who visited an almshouse in 1775, was shocked by what she saw. The inmates, she said, were “occupied by unsuccessful industry, destitute vice, miserable Old Age and helpless infancy…. I passed through many divisions of this abode of wretchedness.” If an impoverished mother died, many communities accepted responsibility for her children. But they showed little appetite for the job and bound their young wards out as indentured servants as soon as possible. There are records of girls being bound out as early as two years of age.

  In 1748, Boston came up with a new plan—a factory, sponsored by public subscription, which employed widows and orphaned children in the manufacture of linen cloth. But despite the urgings of the minister of the Brattle Street Church that factory employment would add to “the innocent Gaiety and Sprightliness of Childhood,” mothers were reluctant to enlist their offspring in an army of infant textile workers. Nor were the women themselves much more eager for work that took them out of their homes and separated them from their children. The factory closed without ever making a profit, and meanwhile the French and Indian War was creating yet a new generation of widows and fatherless children.