America's Women

by Gail Collins

  It would be hard to find a more perfect example of the contradictions of nineteenth-century womanhood than the workaholic editor continually reminding her readers how lucky they were to be presiding over the hearth rather than engaging in “the silly struggle for honor and preferment” in the outside world. The period before the Civil War was, for women, both a time of liberation and new restrictions. Teaching became a respectable career, giving middle-class girls an option in life beyond marriage or dependent spinsterhood. Working-class girls entered the factories. (When Mrs. Hale noticed that Godey’s fashion plates were being tinted by an army of female workers, she announced that any job done indoors qualified as a domestic occupation.) A few female pioneers fought their way into the professions and became doctors or ministers or journalists; others entered the public world as reformers or lecturers. But at the same time, Americans of both sexes were setting the most rigid rules for proper womanly behavior in the country’s history. Writers loved to list the qualities of the True Woman, and they were always the opposite of the virtues of the true man. “Man is strong—woman is beautiful. Man is daring and confident—woman is diffident and unassuming. Man is great in action—woman in suffering,” explained Ladies Museum magazine. Men were lustful, so it stood to reason that women—contrary to the theories of the colonial era—were chaste and possibly passionless. “The majority of women (happily for them) are not much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind,” wrote the popular lecturer and reformer William Acton.

  This vision of virtuous, sexless womanhood was actually a sign of higher status—before, women were viewed as the morally unreliable descendants of the sinful Eve. But it was still as restrictive as the corsets that immobilized them from girlhood. “True feminine genius,” wrote the popular novelist Grace Greenwood, “is ever timid, doubtful and clingingly dependent, a perpetual childhood.” From a very early age, girls were taught to restrain themselves physically and emotionally. A story in Godey’s Lady’s Book told about a tomboy named Ellen, who insisted on playing rough sports outdoors. When Ellen refused to heed her aunts’ warnings about appropriate womanly behavior, she was thrown from her horse and crippled for life. It was a familiar plot theme, including the paralysis, and the happy ending always came when the immobilized heroine realized this was God’s way of teaching her how to act like a lady. The term “tomboy,” one nineteenth-century author recalled, looking back at the pre–Civil War era, “was applied to all little girls who showed the least tendency toward thinking and acting for themselves.”

  The colonial housewife had contributed to the family with her chickens and butter money, but the True Woman that Sarah Hale helped popularize relied totally on her husband for emotional and financial support. Her only resources were spiritual. If her husband stopped loving her, she had to suffer in silence and, as Ladies’ Magazine recommended, try to win him back “by increased anxiety to please.”

  The law of the True Woman was attractive to many Americans in the pre–Civil War era because it emphasized safety and control. The new industrial economy was creating unheard-of opportunities for making money, but it was unstable, with booms and panics and get-rich-quick schemes and bankruptcies. In the bust of 1818, land values fell as much as 75 percent almost overnight, and when the panic of 1837 hit New York, more than a third of the city’s workers lost their jobs. Nervous businessmen embraced the idea of the family as a little nest detached from the outside world. The whole country was like the nation’s transportation system, which had improved so fast that it was possible for people to travel to places they would not have dreamed of a few decades earlier—but at a price. The railroads kept having wrecks and the steamships blew up—there were at least 150 major explosions between 1825 and 1850. It was a giddy, frightening time, and many women liked the idea of being protected by strict boundaries.

  “IN DANGER OF BECOMING

  PERFECT RECLUSES”

  Men’s and women’s lives operated on separate tracks, even in society. At many dinner parties, the sexes were actually seated at opposite ends of the table. After they had finished eating, the men always left the ladies and retired to smoke and drink brandy. In the business districts, men lived in a growing alternate universe of restaurants and clubs and theaters, while women kept to their parlors and sewing rooms. Frances Trollope reported from Cincinnati that husbands even did the marketing. If it weren’t for church services, she said, “all the ladies…would be in danger of becoming perfect recluses.” Women were so cut out of the public life that even the holidays went on without them. The Fourth of July, with its military maneuvers and all-male parades, was the biggest occasion of the year. “Staid in all day and saw the procession and all there was to be seen from my window,” wrote a San Francisco housewife. As the nation got closer to midcentury, women gradually became the audience, clustering in yards and balconies to wave handkerchiefs, or perhaps sitting on special stands along the parade route. (Young ladies were promoted even further, to decorations on the floats.) Women’s main response to being excluded was not to demand a chance to march, but to create entirely new holidays, which people celebrated by staying home. Sarah Hale led the effort to get Abraham Lincoln to proclaim Thanksgiving a national holiday. The novelist Catherine Maria Sedgwick popularized the Christmas tree in one of her stories.

  The male view of why women had to be kept out of the public world was basically that they just weren’t up to it. “She has a head almost too small for intellect and just big enough for love,” said Dr. Charles Meigs of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, in a famous speech on the “Distinctive Characteristics of the Female,” which he delivered to a class of male gynecology students in 1847. “The great administrative faculties are not hers. She plans no sublime campaign, leads no great armies to battle nor fleets to victory…. Do you think that Woman…could have developed, in the tender soil of her intellect, the strong idea of a Hamlet, or a Macbeth? Such is not woman’s province, nature, power or mission. She reigns in the heart…the household altar is her place of worship and service.”

  Even if women had a higher opinion of their own capabilities, they were not all that attracted to the outside world. The streets were full of mud and garbage, and many cities had yet to evict the local livestock. (Complaining about the constant presence of pigs in Cincinnati, Frances Trollope claimed that when she walked across Main Street “the chances were five hundred to one against my reaching the shady side without brushing by a snout.”) After dark, the streets in most cities were lit only by the moon, and a woman walking unescorted risked robbery, assault, or at the least, getting lost in black twisting alleys. “This darkness, this stillness is so great that I almost felt it awful,” said Mrs. Trollope, after coming out of a Philadelphia theater.

  Last but most definitely not least, men chewed and spit tobacco everywhere. “I hardly know any annoyance so deeply repugnant to English feelings as the incessant, remorseless, spitting of Americans,” said Mrs. Trollope, who found that words failed her when she attempted to describe the condition of the carpet in the gentleman’s lounge of a steamship. Women who ventured out of their homes in their long skirts were continually at risk. A Mrs. Hall, reporting on a dance in Washington, said she was walking upstairs to waltz when she heard her partner clearing his throat in an ominous manner. “I said to myself ‘surely he will turn his head to the other side,’” she wrote a friend. “The gentleman, however, had no such thought but deliberately shot across me.” If fancy-dress balls were not expectorant-free zones, theaters were worse. Men not only felt free to spit, they drank, threw food at the stage, and generally behaved as if they were relaxing in a tavern. Mrs. Trollope attended a performance in Washington where one patron began vomiting, to the general amusement of his fellow playgoers. And the upper tiers were packed with prostitutes, who got free tickets from the management eager to attract male clientele and who occasionally serviced their customers in the hallways. In women’s magazines like Godey’s the outside world was depicted as a dangerous
and mysterious place, where men pursued incomprehensible occupations. The magazines never attempted to educate their readers about “business,” although they occasionally tried to make it relevant by blaming all financial failures on thoughtless wives who insisted on spending the family fortune on social climbing and fancy dresses.

  “INITIATED INTO THE ARTS AND

  MYSTERIES OF THE WASH TUB”

  Lydia Maria Child had a particular depth of experience in the economic uncertainties of the pre–Civil War era. Her husband, David, was a political reformer of great energy but negative moneymaking capacity. (“Oh, if we only could have ever so small a house where you could be contented, and have no dreams of Congress,” she mourned.) Both Lydia and her friends had expected her to have a career as a serious writer. But in 1829 she was thinking only about paying the rent when she threw together a collection of household hints and recipes, which were published as The American Frugal Housewife. “Dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy,” Child’s book was nothing if not down-to-earth, full of tips on how to remove inkspots, stew prunes, and, of course, save money. (“Keep a bag for odd pieces of tape and strings; they will come in use.”) She put in a good word for pig’s head (“It is despised because it is cheap; but when well cooked it is delicious”) and gave advice on how to salvage practically anything, from a moldy feather bed to “injured” meat. Critics pointed out that Child’s wedding cake recipe called for 4 pounds of flour, 3 pounds of butter, 3 pounds of sugar, 4 pounds of currants, 2 pounds of raisins, 24 eggs, and a pint of brandy. But it was, after all, for a special occasion.

  The book became one of the publishing phenomena of the first half of the nineteenth century, even though an unenthusiastic Sarah Hale regarded Frugal Housewife as rather ungenteel. (Child’s emphasis on frugality, Hale felt, was so excessive as to encroach into the masculine world of finance.) Some of Child’s former friends, including an ex-suitor, Nathaniel Willis, snorted that the book was “written for the lower classes.” But Lydia Maria Child became the first in a line of domestic gurus of the pre–Civil War era, when women book-buyers turned the art of housekeeping into a national obsession.

  In 1841, Child’s book was displaced by Catharine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy, which combined a celebration of woman’s role as goddess of the hearth (“extending over the world those blessed influences…to renovate degraded man”) with practical tips on how to destroy bedbugs or build a privy. Beecher was part of a remarkable family—the great American women of the early nineteenth century seem to have been born in clumps, two or three to a household. One of Beecher’s sisters, Harriet, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin; another, Isabella, became a prominent suffragist. Their brothers were almost all well-known ministers and one, Henry Ward Beecher, became the most celebrated preacher of his era and the star of one of the century’s biggest sex trials. (How-to manuals for women were so much in demand that even Henry Ward’s famously miserable wife, Eunice, wrote one called All Around the House; or How to Make the Home Happy.)

  Catharine never married—she was officially in mourning for a fiancé drowned at sea—and she seldom kept house after she left her father’s residence to make a living as an educator. Her nesting instinct was so lightly developed that Harriet referred to her as “wandering like a trunk without a label.” Yet she fought all her life to elevate women’s position by raising the stature of housework. She argued that the wives who were charged with educating the nation’s children and elevating degraded men had to be prepared for the job—preferably in an excellent boarding school that taught philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, botany, geology, mineralogy, and moral philosophy in the afternoon and washing, sewing, and cooking in the morning. (When a girl was taught to launder her clothes, Beecher referred to it as being “initiated into the arts and mysteries of the wash tub.”) When these well-educated young ladies married, they would not become mere housewives, but some combination of domestic scientist and goddess of the hearth. Like Sarah Hale, Beecher believed that women could develop a parlor-based culture that would spread their influence over the entire nation. Any woman who strove to establish a niche in the public male-dominated world was a traitor who endangered this division of power.

  All this discussion about women’s role was directed at a minority of the American households—most wives and daughters were still on the farm, doing the same rough chores their grandmothers had performed. As late as 1840, only one in nine Americans lived in a town with 2,500 or more people, and many urban women were too poor to contemplate their appropriate role in society. Still, thanks to the publishing industry, housewives in raw settlements and isolated farms devoured magazines that lectured to them about their rights and duties as True Women, along with hints on how to decorate an elegant parlor and raise a decorous child.

  “HOW COULD I TELL

  SHE WAS GOING TO BE SO FAMOUS!”

  During the first part of the nineteenth century, America became crammed with what Nathaniel Hawthorne bitterly called “a d—d mob of scribbling women” who supported themselves with their pens. Although most made little or no money, some of the women novelists, essayists, poets, and short-story writers did actually become rich—Harriet Beecher Stowe, who hoped Uncle Tom’s Cabin would make enough for her to buy a new dress, wound up with a mansion and a Florida orange plantation. Hawthorne’s irritation had a great deal to do with the fact that The Lamplighter, the novel by twenty-seven-year-old Maria Cummins that inspired his outburst, sold four times as many copies in the first month as The Scarlet Letter sold in Hawthorne’s lifetime.

  The scribbling women performed a delicate balancing act, creating careers while disdaining ambition. Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose writings forthrightly exposed the sexual exploitation of female slaves and the grisly tortures undergone by African Americans in the South, tried hard to present herself as “a little bit of a woman” who never intended to achieve international fame. “I have been forced into it, contrary to my natural modesty,” she assured a fan. Sarah Hale always said the need to support her fatherless children forced her to become an extraordinarily successful editor and writer, despite her wishes to the contrary. Cynics might have noted that her family emergency lasted until she retired at age ninety, when her youngest child was fifty-five.

  The most popular novels often involved heroines who, like Hale, had emergencies. The stories pledged allegiance to the woman’s place being in the home, and the importance of showing deference to male authority figures. But fathers, brothers, and husbands always seemed to be conveniently absent when the curtain went up, and the heroines were forced to travel, pursue careers, and do any number of other exciting things that they would have been expected to avoid under normal circumstances.

  St. Elmo, by Augusta Evans, one of the best-selling novels of the century, told the story of Edna, an orphan adopted by a kindly widow. St. Elmo—men in that era were sometimes named after saints—was the widow’s embittered son, who was attracted to Edna despite his contempt for educated women. (“I should really enjoy seeing them tied down to their spinning wheels and gagged in their own books, magazines and lectures.”) Edna went off to become an internationally acclaimed philosopher, albeit one who believed woman suffrage was “the most loathsome of political leprosies.” Eventually, St. Elmo calmed down, became a minister, and married her. The Deserted Wife, by E.D.E.N. (Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte) Southworth, starred Hagar, an orphan who is abandoned by her husband and becomes an internationally famous singer to support her family. Ruth Hall’s title character was a widow—and an orphan—who is forced to become a wildly successful writer in order to support her children. Although Ruth never remarries, the reader does get to enjoy a happy ending in which her selfish relatives get their comeuppance. (“How could I tell she was going to be so famous!”)

  Although most of the successful women writers were rather obviously fibbing about hating the limelight, almost all of them really were desperate for money. Fanny Fern, the author of Ruth Hall, and E.D.E.N. Sout
hworth were single mothers. Augusta Jane Evans was saddled with a wastrel father. So was Susan Warner, whose book The Wide, Wide World may have been the nation’s first real best-seller. (An extremely long saga about an abandoned, and eventually orphaned, girl, it was estimated to have “245 tear flows” in 574 pages.) Their successes were also advertisements for the fact that in a society that celebrated sheltered, protected wives and daughters, many husbands and fathers were not holding up their end of the cultural bargain.

  Hawthorne was not the only man of letters who decried the feminization of American fiction. Nathaniel Willis, the influential editor of Home Journal, denounced the “universality of cheap and trashy novels” and the oversentimentality of women writers. Willis may be remembered as the ex-suitor of Lydia Child who made vicious fun of Frugal Housewife. He cruelly discouraged his own sister’s literary ambitions. (Under the pen name Fanny Fern, she got revenge by depicting Ruth Hall’s brother as a snobby editor who spends $100 on a vase while his sister is starving.) The men were right, however, that a lot of the women’s literature of the era was pretty dreadful. There were gift books full of short stories with names like Shy Peeps into the Heart Feminine and poetry by people like Lydia Sigourney, “the Sweet Singer of Hartford,” whose dying words were said to be “I love everybody.” Even the best of the novels tended to have villains so madly evil they made Cinderella’s stepsisters look like social workers. When the heroine of Ruth Hall was starving in a garret with her children, her wealthy aunt refused to offer assistance, protesting, “Are we not doing something for her? I allow Ruth to do her washing in our kitchen every week, providing she finds her own soap.”