by Gail Collins
“A VERY EXTRAORDINARY FEMALE SLAVE”
Phillis Wheatley was born in Senegal and arrived in America on a slave ship around 1761, when she was seven or eight years old, and was purchased in Boston by John Wheatley, who wanted a personal servant for his wife, Susanna. When the Wheatleys’ daughter saw Phillis trying to make letters with chalk on the wall, she taught her to read. Within a year and a half, Phillis was fluent in English and had also begun to study Latin. By the time she was thirteen she was writing poetry. Her work began appearing in New England newspapers, and she became a regional celebrity. Like Anne Bradstreet, she had found a way out of the normal restrictions of her assigned role in life through verse.
Treated more as a daughter than a servant by the Wheatley family, Phillis became known for her poise and conversation as well as her writing. In Britain, the Countess of Huntingdon admired one of her poems, and arranged the publication of a book by “a very Extraordinary female Slave.” The high point of Phillis Wheatley’s life came in 1773, when she traveled to England, where she was taken up by the literary celebrities of the day and invited to be presented at court. But the illness of Susanna Wheatley cut short her visit, and Phillis returned to Boston, where her mistress died and John Wheatley officially freed her.
Her renown far outstripped Anne Bradstreet’s, and she was the first American writer to achieve international fame. Benjamin Franklin read her work, which sometimes compared the experience of a slave to that of an American colonist under the yoke of British tyranny. George Washington invited her to visit him at his camp during the Revolutionary War. Some admirers credit her with Washington’s decision to allow black men to serve in the Continental Army. “I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate,” she wrote, “Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat…Such, such my case. And can I then but pray /Others may never feel tyrannic sway?”
Phillis Wheatley found no happiness in her own liberty. She continued living with her old master until his death, but the intelligentsia of Boston had much less interest in her as a free black woman than they did when she was the beloved slave of a prominent white family. She married John Peters, a free black man who turned out to be a poor provider and who eventually abandoned her. None of her three children lived past infancy, and she was working as a servant in a cheap tavern when she died at the age of thirty-one.
“WHAT HAVE I TO DO WITH POLITICKS?”
The struggle for independence was going to be one of the many, many moments in American history when the country found it necessary to do a sudden about-face on the conventional wisdom of what women were really like. The late-eighteenth-century feminine ideal was fragile, fair, not particularly bright, and certainly not interested in public affairs. But if the colonies were going to succeed in their fight for self-determination, women needed to become political, very fast. In the years leading up to the Declaration of Independence, resistance to the British was expressed mainly in boycotts of imported products. For the boycotts to work, women would have to step into the breach and provide the cloth and foodstuffs that could no longer be brought in from overseas. The housewives were also the family shoppers, and they were asked to shun all the “taxables”—items that the British imposed levies on without the colonials’ consent. Getting the cooperation of the women was the critical challenge “without which ’tis impossible to succeed,” said the South Carolina patriot Christopher Gadsden in 1769. Tea was, of course, a very important battleground. It was an extremely popular drink in colonial America—half of all homes had tea sets. Women patriots joined enthusiastically in the boycott, and those who found some particularly splashy way to express their determination became national heroines. Nine-year-old Susan Boudinot was invited to a tea party hosted by the governor of New Jersey, a Tory. She took her cup of tea, raised it to her lips, then threw it out the window. Only moments earlier, in the historical sense of time, Americans had been subscribing to the theory that women were supposed to be demure and deferential. Now they celebrated the defiance of a little girl who insulted a governor in a manner that would normally have earned her a spanking.
In 1774, fifty-one women in Edenton, North Carolina, issued a public statement endorsing the boycott, much to the amusement of British journalists and cartoonists, who depicted them as bad mothers, harlots, and heavy drinkers. But they were praised as patriots back home. Southern ladies wore dresses made of homespun cloth to their fancy balls, and they joined their husbands and fathers in making political toasts and singing patriotic songs. The northern women organized spinning bees and were honored for their production of homemade material, which they proudly presented to local officials. A much-quoted poem addressed to the “Daughters of Liberty” in 1768 derided men for allowing themselves to be stripped of their rights and urged:
Let the Daughters of Liberty, nobly arise,
And tho’ we’ve no Voice, but a negative here,
The use of the Taxables, let us forbear,
Stand firmly resolved and bid Grenville to see
That rather than Freedom, we’ll part with our Tea.
As much as the male rebels wanted to encourage their wives and daughters in defiance, they still liked to picture patriotic women engaged in safe, feminine forms of protest. The Virginia Gazette announced approvingly that the young women of Amelia County had “entered into a resolution not to permit the addresses of any person…unless he has served in the American armies to prove, by his valour, that he is deserving of their love.” But the women were actually required to do far more than boycott tea and vet their boyfriends for political correctness. If men were going to have to fight, women were going to have to take over their farms and businesses, and in some parts of the country, endure life under an army of occupation. Eliza Pinckney, who was not generally given to complaint, described her situation in South Carolina to a friend: “my property pulled to pieces, burnt and destroyed; my money of no value, my Children sick and prisoners.” Some women were raped by Tory soldiers, but many victims kept it secret rather than bear the stigma. “Against both Justice and Reason we Despise these Poor Innocent Sufferers,” admitted a New Jersey man. A North Carolina man recalled his widowed mother being “tied up and whipped by the Tories, her house burned and property all destroyed” while he was away with the militia.
“We are in no ways dispiritted here,” wrote Abigail Adams, who was holding down the fort at the family farm in Massachusetts. “We possess a Spirit that will not be conquerd. If our Men are all drawn off and we should be attacked, you would find a Race of Amazons in America.” Abigail spent much of her married life as a veritable widow to the Revolution—her husband John was always off serving his country as a statesman or diplomat. Now, she was sheltering soldiers and refugees from the conflict, and as the war approached Boston, she made contingency plans for grabbing her children and fleeing into the woods. When dysentery struck the area, her home became a hospital. “And such is the distress of the neighbourhood that I can scarcely find a well person to assist me in looking after the sick,” she wrote. She raised their five children, managed their finances, ran their farm, and kept the house throughout the war. The Revolution not only deprived her of her helpmate, but of a companion she dearly loved. Still, in her letters, she urged him on. In November 1775, she reported to John that when their minister had prayed for a reconciliation between the colonies and the mother country, “I could not join.” England, she wrote, was “no longer parent State but tyrant State…. Let us separate…. Let us renounce them.”
In the summer of 1777, more than 100 Boston housewives gathered in front of the store of one Thomas Boylston. They were, one observer reported, “reputable Clean drest Women Some of them with Silk gownes on,” and they were angry about Boylston’s extortionate wartime prices. They were prepared to boycott tea, but not to let a merchant gouge them for coffee. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband that the women “assembled with a cart and trucks, marched down to the Ware House and demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver, upon whi
ch one of them seazd him by his Neck and tossd him into the cart.” Boylston gave up his keys, and the women opened the warehouse, took out the coffee they required, and drove away. “A large concourse of Men stood amazd silent Spectators of the whole transaction,” Abigail reported gleefully.
The women sometimes took a more aggressive part in the war—one South Carolina man claimed the women in his state “talk as familiarly of shedding blood and destroying the Tories as the men do.” In Massachusetts, a group of women disguised in their husbands’ clothes intercepted a Tory captain en route to Boston, took the important papers he was carrying, and escorted him to the Groton jail. In 1776, when the British troops took control of New York, the city was suddenly engulfed in fire, which protected the retreating Americans. Edmund Burke told the British House of Commons that the blaze had been started by “one miserable woman, who…arrested your progress in the moment of your success.” The female rebel, he said, had been found in a cellar “with her visage besmeared and smutted over, with every mark of rage, despair, resolution and the most exalted heroism, buried in the ashes—she was brought forth, and knowing that she would be condemned to die, upon being asked her purpose said ‘to fire the city!’ and was determined to omit no opportunity for doing what her country called for.”
A few women donned male clothing and fought with the Revolutionary Army. Deborah Sampson Gannett fought for more than two years before being discovered, and her husband was later granted a pension as the widower of a Revolutionary soldier. Far more women traveled with their soldier husbands, cooking, washing, mending, and sometimes replacing them in the lines. The legendary “Molly Pitcher” who took her wounded husband’s place loading a cannon at a critical moment during the battle of Monmouth may have actually been a camp follower named Mary Ludwig Hays, but whoever she was, she was representative of dozens of women who shared their mates’ lives in the field and sometimes the dangers of battle as well. Margaret Corbin stepped in for her slain husband at the Battle of Fort Washington and was severely wounded, losing the use of one arm. The Continental Congress awarded her a pension and she was eventually buried at the West Point cemetery.
Some women appeared to get a new sense of purpose from their responsibilities as patriots and stand-ins for their husbands at home. Letters to husbands away at war gradually took on a more confident tone, and farms and crops that had been referred to as “your” when the war began, became “our” as time went on. Nevertheless, they were still tentative about expressing political opinions. Ann Gwinnett, widow of the president of Georgia, wrote to the Continental Congress to warn that the officer corps in her colony was full of Tory sympathizers. “These things (tho from a Woman, & it is not our sphere, yet I cannot help it) are all true,” she penned. Another wrote, “Tho a female, I was born a patriot and cant help it if I would.” The deeply political Sarah Jay stopped in a letter on the events of the day to protest wryly: “But whither, my pen, are you hurrying me? What have I to do with politicks? Am I not a woman, and writing to Ladies? Come then, the fashions to my assistance.” When the federal Constitution was being debated in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Angelica Church, who had apparently solicited his opinions about political developments, that “the tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion.” (Admirers of Jefferson might best be advised to skip everything he ever wrote about women and restrict their attention to the Declaration of Independence.)
No matter what the ladies’ contribution, the Revolution was not fought to prove that all women were created equal. One of the era’s most quoted letters was written by Abigail Adams to her husband when the Continental Congress was meeting to draw up the Declaration of Independence: “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 and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands…. That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity and impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.”
Adams’s response, which is less well known, wounded his wife deeply: “As to your extraordinary code of laws,” he wrote, “I cannot but laugh.”
“WE MAY SHORTLY EXPECT TO SEE THEM TAKE
THE HELM—OF GOVERNMENT”
The only colony that permitted women to vote after the Revolutionary War was New Jersey. Possibly due to pressure from Quakers who lived in the southern part of the state, it awarded the franchise to “all free inhabitants” who owned a certain amount of property. That seemed to apply to at least a limited number of widows and single women, as well as a few free black residents.
In 1797, during a hard-fought election for the state legislature in Essex County, about seventy-five women turned out to vote—most of them in favor of William Crane, the Federalist candidate who lost to John Condict of Newark. In 1800, a larger number of women showed up at the polls, including some who probably didn’t qualify under a strict interpretation of the property requirements. (Well into the twentieth century, New Jersey had a reputation both for vigorous political campaigns and a lack of regard for the finer points of election law.) People began to complain and predict dire consequences if the women weren’t curbed. Before you knew it, critics argued, “we may shortly expect to see them take the helm—of government.”
The fatal blow was struck in 1806, when the state decided to build a new courthouse in Essex County and left it up to the voters to decide whether to place it in Elizabeth or Newark. Local sentiment was so aroused that it became dangerous for residents of Elizabeth to be seen on the streets of Newark, and vice versa. On election day, men and boys skipped from one polling place to another, voting repeatedly. Outsiders were carted in to increase the local turnout. Women and girls, black and white, joined in the excitement, and when the balloting was over, nearly 14,000 votes had been cast in an area where the previous record turnout had been about 4,500. Unsurprisingly, the vote in Elizabeth was almost unanimously for building the courthouse in Elizabeth. But Newark was even more successful in marshalling people for the Newark site.
“A more wicked and corrupt scene was never exhibited,” one Elizabethtown writer described it. The people of Newark were too busy celebrating to be shocked. But eventually, the whole episode was sent to the state legislature for consideration. The legislature decided to reform the election law, and the head of the committee charged with proposing changes was none other than John Condict. His suggested reforms included the end to female suffrage. When a motion was made to strike out that clause, Mr. Condict rose to his feet and eloquently defended the limitation of the franchise to “free, white, male citizens.”
The legislature voted to stop women from voting in the one state where their rights as citizens had been acknowledged. Mr. Condict had his revenge, and women lost their official voice in American politics for the next century.
5
1800–1860: True Women, Separate Spheres, and Many Emergencies
“MAN IS STRONG—WOMAN IS BEAUTIFUL”
In the first half of the nineteenth century, American women changed from colonial goodwives to people with more modern concerns. They went to school, and they knew a great deal more about what was going on in the world outside their own neighborhoods. They were still religious, but they wanted to be happy in this earthly life as well as in the next. They thought about marriage in terms of romance and companionship rather than a simple economic partnership. They believed their children were special individuals, in need of constant care and supervision, and they hoped to see them rise higher in the world than their parents did. They wanted their homes to be attractive, and comfort was becoming an important priority.
No one un
derstood all this better than Sarah Josepha Hale, the powerful editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. Hale was a mother of five who was widowed young—she wore black for fifty-four years in memory of her departed husband. Pregnant with her last child and nearly forty years old when he died, she first tried to feed her brood by selling hats, and then by writing, entering essay contests with ferocious energy. She churned out poems (including the one about Mary’s little lamb) and published a novel, which she assured her followers had been written “not to win fame, but support for my little children.” In 1827, a Boston minister offered her a job running Ladies’ Magazine, a new publication that became the first magazine edited by a woman, for women.
The development of the publishing industry offered women one of the first opportunities to exercise their clout as the nation’s premier consumers. In the years after the Revolutionary War, girls were taught to read and write almost as a matter of course, the better to prepare them for their role as mothers of the next generation of citizens. These literate women became the nation’s first mass book-buyers. (Light reading was presumed to be of little interest to the male half of the population since it was not a profit-making activity.) In the pre–Civil War era, Harper’s Magazine estimated that four-fifths of the reading public was female.
Until Hale came along, American magazines were generally collections of work bootlegged from English periodicals. But the frantically prolific Sarah (who later wrote a nine-hundred-page book called Sketches of All Distinguished Women from the Creation to 1851) made sure her copy was original, even if she had to write most of it herself, including the letters to the editor. In 1836, she was hired to take over Godey’s Lady’s Book, a popular periodical that was famous for its colored pictures of women’s fashions. By 1860, under her continued direction, the magazine had 160,000 subscribers—a huge number for that era. Its publisher boasted that “from Maine to the Rocky Mountains, there is scarcely a hamlet, however inconsiderable, where it is not received and read.” Mill girls passed it around the Massachusetts textile factories, and in New York Irish immigrant servants copied the dresses they saw in Godey’s in cheaper, brighter fabrics, much to the horror of their mistresses. Although the serious-minded Hale had always decried the rule of fashion, she kept the illustrations of elegant wardrobes and added sections on interior decoration, “How to Make Wax Flowers and Fruit,” recipes and patterns. But she also told her readers how to view their role in society. She lectured them about the importance of sticking to home and hearth, and she promised them that if they performed their role well, they would be able to influence, and ennoble, the entire world. “Our men are sufficiently moneymaking. Let us keep our women and children from contagion as long as possible,” she wrote.
