America's Women

by Gail Collins

  “OH LIZZIE! THOU WILL MAKE US RIDICULOUS!”

  In 1840 in London, the World Anti-Slavery Convention refused to let the women delegates speak, and an outraged Lucretia Mott was relegated to the gallery—much as Harriet Beecher Stowe was voluntarily stashed away during her Uncle Tom tour. Steaming, she began talking with young Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another American, who was there with her new husband, Henry. We’d have long since forgotten the convention otherwise. “As Mrs. Mott and I walked home, arm in arm, commenting on the incidents of the day, we resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and form a society to advocate the rights of women,” Stanton recalled.

  It was eight years coming. Stanton had spent her early married life happily in Boston, in a charming house surrounded by sympathetic friends and assisted by two hardworking servants. She couldn’t understand why every woman didn’t love housework. “There is such a struggle among women to become artists that I really wish some of their gifts could be illustrated in clean, orderly, beautiful homes,” she sniffed. She gave the man who delivered her firewood a tip to pile the logs with the smooth ends outward.

  Then Henry Stanton moved the family to Seneca Falls in upstate New York, a distinctly unromantic mill town where the house was isolated, the servants untrained, and the neighbors not particularly sympathetic. While her husband traveled, Elizabeth was left alone with three small sons who were extremely active whenever they weren’t extremely sick. She discovered that “the novelty of housekeeping had passed away.” Lucretia Mott popped up visiting relatives at nearby Waterloo, and Stanton went to see her, pouring out her complaints “with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare anything.”

  They wrote up a newspaper announcement calling for a women’s rights convention five days later, drafted a “Womanifesto” modeled after the Declaration of Independence, and found a Methodist church where the sessions could be held. On the appointed day, to everyone’s surprise, the roads to the church were crowded with wagons and carriages. When forty men turned up, the organizers decided to drop their plan to exclude males. In fact, out of deference to the sensibilities of the time, they asked Mott’s husband, James, to preside.

  Stanton spoke for the first time in public—too quietly, people complained, to make herself heard. But she defied even Lucretia Mott with her call for the right for women to vote. “Oh Lizzie!” the Quaker cried. “If thou demands that, thou will make us ridiculous! We must go slowly.” Henry Stanton left town when he discovered his wife planned to demand the “elective franchise.” Her father—who had rushed over to check for signs of insanity in his daughter—found her mentally sound and threatened to disinherit her. The convention got national newspaper coverage, most of it scornful, and the popular reaction was so negative that most of the women who had signed the Declaration of Rights withdrew their names.

  But two weeks later, a different cadre of Quakers, freethinkers, and restless housewives held a second convention in Rochester. Stanton managed to attend, even though she had trouble getting a baby-sitter, and embarrassed herself by fearfully refusing to support a motion that a woman actually chair the women’s rights convention. “My only excuse is that woman has been so little accustomed to act in a public capacity that she does not always know what is due,” she wrote a friend later.

  Like everybody else, she would be learning as she went along.

  6

  Life Before the Civil War:

  Cleanliness and Corsetry

  “A TERRIBLE DECAY OF FEMALE HEALTH

  ALL OVER THE LAND”

  There was a virtual consensus in the first half of the nineteenth century that American women—at least the ones society worried about—were very sickly. By some estimates, a quarter of the female members of the middle and upper classes were laid up. They kept to their rooms, or lay on the couch weakly receiving visitors, or traveled from one health spa to another, seeking treatment. Catharine Beecher was convinced there was “a terrible decay of female health all over the land.” She conducted an unscientific but much-quoted survey of women in 200 towns and found only two communities in which a majority felt well.

  There was certainly a lot of illness going around—malaria in the South, consumption in the North, and typhoid and cholera epidemics in the cities, where rain mixed with garbage and animal droppings in the street, creating stagnant pools of fetid water. But Americans were not any more prone to disease than the rest of the world; in areas like the rural Northeast, people probably lived longer on average than anywhere else on the planet. And except for childbearing, women did not seem to be in greater peril than men—by 1840, their life expectancy was actually higher. It’s possible that they gave the impression of increased sickliness because they felt freer to complain about the disorders they had always endured. The nineteenth century was the first time in American history that ill health was not taken as a given. Until then people were routinely in constant pain. The number of doctors increased four times as fast as the population in the first half of the century, and it was in their economic interest to make people believe they were entitled to feel well, while finding as many illnesses as possible—particularly among women, who were their most faithful customers.

  Some of the newly discovered maladies seemed psychological. “Hysteria” was a nervous disorder with symptoms not unlike the ones the Salem witchcraft accusers displayed. “Let the reader imagine the patient writhing like a serpent upon the floor, rending her garments to tatters, plucking out handsful of hair and striking her person with violence—with contorted and swollen countenance and fixed eyes resisting every effort of bystanders to control her,” said a physician in 1840. Hysteria struck women in the prime of their lives and afflicted them with nervousness, depression, fatigue, and general weepiness. Most physicians found hysteria impossible to treat, because the symptoms were so obscure and variable. (Health reformers who advocated the “water cure” treated hysteria by pouring a jug of cold water over the victim’s head.) It was regarded as an upper-class disorder, but physicians who bothered to examine immigrant women in their tenement houses found cases there, too.

  Just being female made women candidates for perpetual medical care, because doctors began treating all the normal passages of their lives—puberty, menstruation, childbirth, and menopause—as illnesses. Menstruation in particular was seen as dangerous—“an internal wound, the real cause of all this tragedy,” said one physician. Many doctors believed that during their periods, women were deprived of blood to the brain, leaving them “idiotic” or temporarily insane. Early onset of menstruation was regarded as a sign a girl might be oversexed, and some doctors encouraged parents to keep prepubescent daughters on a vegetarian diet, since meat was seen as sexually “stimulating.” No matter what a woman’s complaint, doctors diagnosed a problem in the womb. Everything from a backache to hysteria was traced back to the childbearing organs. One professor of medicine thought that it was “as if the Almighty, in creating the female sex, had taken a uterus and built a woman around it.”

  But a great many of the female invalids of the early nineteenth century were suffering from tangible physical problems. Tuberculosis, or consumption, accounted for one out of every four American deaths in the 1830s, and young women were the prime victims. It was a lingering disease, and a woman could live with it, in varying degrees of distress, for decades. TB sufferers grew pale and delicate, their cheeks frequently flushed with fever. “Such complexions are generally esteemed handsome, but to the experienced eye, it is a beauty fraught with…mournful associations,” said the American doctor William Sweetser. It was, as diseases go, a romantic affliction, and many perfectly healthy women seemed eager to mimic the fragile, pink-and-ivory quality that consumption imparted. Tuberculosis was novelists’ favored method of sending the tender child-heroines of the era off into the happier world of heaven. The saintly little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin faded away from consumption, as did countless lesser-
known characters.

  The victims, of course, knew its other side. Unlike the serene Eva, many were tortured by night-sweats and diarrhea, stomach pain, and a “graveyard” cough. “How is your cough,” Deborah Fiske of Amherst wrote to her fellow consumptive, Harriet Fowler. “Mine sounds now very much like yours—deep and hoarse and I am obliged to keep an old cup and expectorate, no matter if [my husband] is disturbed by it.” The daughter of a consumptive, Fiske had lived with the classic medical regimen of leeches, blistering, and opium for so long that she learned to treat herself, and even raised her own leeches. (Handling leeches—bloodsucking worms that were attached to various parts of the body until they dropped off, gorged—was one of women’s domestic duties. In The Young Lady’s Friend, future wives were advised to regard them as rather adorable: “their ornamental stripes should recommend them even to the eye, and their valuable services to our feelings.”) Childbirth increased the danger of tuberculosis, but doctors didn’t counsel their patients to avoid pregnancy. Deborah Fiske never recovered from the birth of her fourth child.

  Many of the mysterious invalids of the era had probably suffered damage during childbirth that the physicians weren’t skilled enough to repair. Sometimes the uterus descended from its normal position, creating an uncomfortable, dragging sensation that made moving around difficult, if not impossible. There are grisly reports of midwives who, in a misguided attempt to remove the afterbirth, tugged on the uterus until they dragged it out of the body. Prolapsed uterus was common enough that doctors and mail-order houses invented plugs and other devices that were supposed to hold the womb in place. Most of them must have been extremely uncomfortable—one was so large it had to be worn under a skirt with an enormous hoop.

  Other invalids suffered from an awful malady called vesicovaginal fistula. During childbirth, the wall between their vagina and the bladder or rectum ripped, leaving them unable to control the leakage of urine or feces through the vagina. The condition had been recognized for centuries, but some historians believe that it increased when doctors began delivering babies and inserting their instruments into the womb. The nineteenth-century German surgeon Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach called it “the greatest misfortune that can happen to a woman, and the more so because she is condemned to live with it without the hope [of dying] from it. The skin…becomes inflamed and covered by pustulous eruption. An unsupportable itching and burning sensation tortures the patient, so much so that she scratches the skin to bleeding…. The comfort of a clean bed, that grave for all sorrows and afflictions, is not their lot, for it will soon be drenched with urine. Many of the wealthier classes are, therefore, condemned forever to the straw. The air of the room of the unfortunate woman nauseates the visitor, and drives him off. The husband has an aversion from his own wife, a tender mother is exiled from the circle of her own children. She sits, solitary and alone in the cold, on a perforated chair. This is not fiction but naked truth, and the cure for such an evil is the prize for which we all labor.”

  J. Marion Sims, an Alabama physician, devised an operation that successfully closed the fistulas and let these tormented women resume their lives. But the discovery came at a horrifying cost. Sims was a surgeon in Montgomery in 1845 when he was called, within a few weeks’ time, to see three different slave women who had lost control of their bladders after childbirth. He experimented with surgical techniques while the women balanced on their knees and elbows, in order to give him a better view of what he was doing. “The first patient I operated on was Lucy,” Dr. Sims wrote later. “That was before the days of anaesthetics, and the poor girl, on her knees, bore the operation with great heroism and bravery.” There were many more procedures to come. Four years later, he finally succeeded in repairing the fistula of a slave named Anarcha, who had been with him since she was seventeen years old. It was Anarcha’s thirtieth operation, all of them performed without anesthetics.

  Sims claimed the women had begged him to keep trying his experiments and it’s possible that was true—returning home without a cure may have seemed like a worse fate than the continuing torment of the operations. They might also have become addicted to the opium he gave them for their pain. But they were still slaves, with no real option to say no, and Sims chose to work on them in part because he believed white women could not endure the kind of pain he was inflicting. There is a statue in honor of Dr. Sims in New York City, where he did most of his later work, and another in South Carolina, where he was born. But there are no monuments to Anarcha or the other slave women, who slipped out of history as soon as he had finished with them.

  Doctors in the first half of the nineteenth century had begun to come up with surgical techniques to cure some of the conditions that could ruin women’s lives, but they did not yet have the skill to make the procedures safe, or the anesthetic to make them bearable. In 1809, Jane Todd Crawford of Kentucky—whose cousin Mary would later marry Abraham Lincoln—discovered that what she thought was her fifth pregnancy was in fact a huge ovarian cyst. No American doctor had ever successfully removed such a tumor, and Mrs. Crawford appeared doomed to a life of hidden-away invalidism. A visiting surgeon, who had been trained at the University of Edinburgh, said he would try to operate if only someone could find a way to transport her to his office, which was sixty miles away over rough, roadless territory. A few days later, Mrs. Crawford arrived at his door, having ridden on horseback, supporting her swollen belly on the horn of her saddle. He gave her a mixture of opium and alcohol to ease the pain and removed the tumor. A month later she rode home, cured. Legend has it that an angry crowd surrounded the doctor’s home while he was treating Mrs. Crawford, threatening to kill him for his outrageous assault on a female body.

  But few doctors had the surgical skills necessary to perform that sort of operation. They were imperfectly trained, often in fly-by-night medical schools. Their arsenal of treatments included bleeding, blistering, and cleaning out the system by purging or inducing the patient to vomit. A favorite all-purpose remedy, calomel, was actually mercurous chloride, and many Americans’ ruined gums and teeth showed the effect of constant dosing. Both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Beecher suffered from mysterious complaints involving headaches and loss of control of the hands that were probably signs of mercury poisoning. One of Harriet’s biographers suggested that her notoriously disorganized household management might have been another symptom.

  To cure nervous complaints, doctors injected water, milk, and linseed into the uterus. For infections, they cauterized it with silver nitrate, or even a hot iron. They put leeches on the vagina, and even on the rectum. (A famous English gynecologist, whose work was studied by American doctors, advocated placing leeches right on the neck of the uterus, but he cautioned his readers not to let the leeches wander off into the organ itself. “I think I have scarcely ever seen more acute pain than that experienced by several of my patients under these circumstances,” he wrote.) Leeches were actually a moderate approach compared with doctors who tried to bring down a patient’s temperature by opening a vein and drawing blood. Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, watched doctors take 50 ounces of blood from his fever-stricken wife before she died.

  It’s no wonder that alternative treatment systems began to blossom in the nineteenth century, some of them bearing names we now associate with items in the kitchen cupboard—Sylvester Graham, John Harvey Kellogg. Hydropaths believed in the curative powers of water. Homeopaths stressed natural remedies, and the administration of very tiny bits of medicine, diluted in great amounts of water. The Botanical Movement, which taught that laypeople could treat themselves better than physicians, was founded by Samuel Thomson after six doctors called in to help his seriously ill wife prescribed six different treatments. All the movements celebrated healthy, robust womanhood and decried the “silly fashion of appearing frail even to the point of invalidism.” They stressed exercise, sunlight, temperance, and sensible dress. William Alcott, a well-known reformer who advocated a diet restric
ted to vegetables and water, urged women to found anticorset societies. The health reformers did share the traditional doctors’ belief that people had only a finite amount of “vital force” or energy, and most of them promoted celibacy, or at least a restricted sex life. (Sylvester Graham claimed that engaging in sexual intercourse more than once a month would endanger a man’s health.) These theories might have been eccentric, but they often helped women convince their husbands to limit the size of their families.

  Many prominent American women reported being relieved of chronic illness by taking “the cure” in the many retreats that the health reform movements set up around the country. Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe both favored the hydropaths, who had their visitors soaking in hot tubs, leaping into cold ones, and being massaged in a “wave-bath” that must have been something like a Jacuzzi. It may have been the healthful lifestyle of the resorts that rejuvenated the patients, or simply the chance to get away from home. Harriet Beecher Stowe spent ten months at a cure in 1847, while her husband Calvin tended their large brood of children. “I wish you could be with me in Brattleboro, and coast down hill on a sled, go sliding and snowballing by moonlight!” she wrote her husband, who undoubtedly wished the same thing. When she returned home, Calvin came down with ailments that required a fifteen-month stay at the spa.

  “AFRAID OF NOTHING SO MUCH

  AS GROWING STOUT”

  Everyone commented about American women’s failure to exercise. William Baxter, a visitor from England, noted that at vacation resorts and country inns, all the women did was sit in rocking chairs. “They would regard anyone who proposed vigorous physical exercise as a madman,” he said. There was actually an excellent reason why they didn’t move around more—they were immobilized by their clothes. Women were encased in rigid, ribbed underwear and restricted by dresses with arms that were either long and tight or huge and full of flounces. They were also half-blinded by extended bonnets and caps that eliminated all side vision and weighted down by floor-length skirts made of heavy fabrics, over multitudinous petticoats. Harriet Beecher Stowe theorized that women’s skirts were intended to trail along the ground as a way of demonstrating by their clean hems that the wearers never had to walk anywhere.