America's Women

by Gail Collins

  For a while, women wore stiff petticoats made from horsehair to give their skirts volume, but eventually those gave way to “cages” made of hoops of increasing diameter. Over the cages, skirts swung gracefully as their wearers walked, sometimes revealing ankles that had not been displayed for decades and, inadvertently, some fancy underdrawers. Their lightness must have been a relief after the petticoats, but they were unwieldy. They got stuck in carriages, caught on fire, and even, it was alleged, blew their owners off cliffs.

  Worst of all was the corset, which was worn everywhere from the breakfast table to the ballroom in the perpetual and generally hopeless pursuit of the ideal 20-inch waist. Preadolescent girls wore corsets and old women wore corsets, and mothers-to-be wore corsets even in the advanced stages of pregnancy. Women’s tiny waists defined them as members of the leisure class—wives and daughters so well taken care of that they were never required to take a deep breath. But the industrial revolution made corsets affordable for almost everyone, and factory girls and servants also began wearing undergarments that were as tight as their occupations allowed. Young women of courting age were laced to rib-cracking tightness. One commentator claimed that it was not unusual to see “a mother lay her daughter down upon the carpet, and placing her foot on her back, break half a dozen laces in tightening her stays.” Comparisons to Chinese footbinding were rife, and stories were passed around about deformed babies born with corset lines imprinted in their flesh. Virtually every clergyman, doctor, and magazine editor decried the custom of tight corsetry. In an age when medical experts found everything from education to meat-eating dangerous to the delicate female sensibility, the corset was blamed both for problems it really did cause, like shortness of breath or miscarriages, and those that it didn’t, like curvature of the spine and cancer.

  While virtually everything women read told them that corsets were bad, everything they saw stressed how essential they were. Magazines pictured women with tiny waists and dresses that sported long, tight sleeves; heavy fabrics; and huge skirts. Fathers sometimes urged their daughters to consider their health before appearance, but mothers often sided with the forces of fashion. A southern woman wrote to her daughter in 1818, noting with alarm that she had heard rumors the girl had made her undergarments large enough to slip on and off without the trouble of lacing. “If you love me, alter these corsets before I see you,” she urged.

  This was one of many eras in American history when young women were at war with their bodies. “We in America have got so far out of the way of a womanhood that has any vigor of outline or opulence of physical proportion that, when we see a woman made as a woman ought to be, she strikes us as a monster,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe. “Our willowy girls are afraid of nothing so much as growing stout….” Girls starved themselves to win the ultimate compliment of “fairylike.” Warm clothing was not fairylike, and fashionable women wore only shawls for protection in the winter. Although shoemakers were finally learning how to differentiate between left and right feet, women of fashion didn’t seem to make fit a priority. “They never wear muffs or boots, and appear extremely shocked at the sight of comfortable walking shoes and cotton stockings,” wrote Frances Trollope. Tanned skin was also unacceptable, particularly in the South. “Remember…not to go out without your bonnet because it will make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, demonstrating once again that he could always find just the wrong thing to say to a devoted daughter.

  Everybody talked about fashion reform, but anyone who actually tried it ran the risk of universal ridicule. Elizabeth Cady Stanton fell in love with what would come to be known as the bloomer dress—a short skirt over full Turkish-style trousers. But she found, as did many of her friends, that no amount of comfort was worth constantly being jeered at by little boys on the street, snubbed by old acquaintances, and hollered at by male authority figures. No matter how you got around it, the things on bloomer-wearers’ legs were a form of pants, and critics, citing Deuteronomy’s prohibition of cross-dressing, claimed that the Bible was antibloomer. The dress reformers fought on for some time, but even the health journals had correspondents who wrote in arguing that when ridicule became overwhelming, it was time to abandon dress reform. Perhaps the bloomers would have done better if they had been more flattering. Cady Stanton, whose figure was by no means fairylike, admitted the outfit really required “a perfection of form, limb and feet such as few possessed.”

  “ONE OF THE BEST OBSTETRICIANS

  OF HIS TIME WAS BLIND”

  One of the early casualties of the nineteenth century was the tradition of female neighbors assisting in the delivery of babies. Poor and rural families continued to use midwives, but in the cities, middle-class women began calling in male doctors, who quickly cleared the room of female friends and relatives. Childbirth occurred in privacy, with only the mother and the physician present for the great drama.

  The best-trained doctors had some potentially lifesaving skills. Forceps, which had been popularized in England, allowed them to dislodge babies who were stuck in the birth canal. If midwives were unable to turn the infant with their hands, they were forced to dismember it to save the mother. But the real cause of the change was the growing population of doctors and their desire to acquire the midwives’ clientele. The doctors won rather quickly. In Philadelphia, twenty-one women listed their professions as midwife in the 1815 city directory; by 1824, there were only six.

  For the mothers-to-be, the change was not necessarily an improvement. The vast majority of births were not problematic, and a skilled midwife believed in letting nature take its course. That was better by far for both mother and child, since the medical profession had yet to embrace the concept of sterility. Anytime a hand or instrument was inserted into a woman’s body, she was in danger of becoming infected, with fatal results. Childbed, or puerperal, fever became epidemic at times in the nineteenth century, particularly in hospitals, where a single doctor could carry infection from one patient to the next. Hospitals were the delivery rooms for the urban poor, and in 1840 at Bellevue in New York, almost half the women giving birth during the first six months of the year contracted the fever. Eighty percent of them died.

  Doctors charged much more than midwives, and they wanted to look as if they were making an effort. They sometimes used forceps to speed deliveries, risking both tearing the mother and hurting the baby. A physician might also make use of one of the “heroic” remedies of the day, like bloodletting. William Dewees, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote proudly that in one protracted labor he took “upwards of two quarts” of blood from a woman while she was standing up. The woman, unsurprisingly, fainted, and after that, the doctor said, “everything appeared better.” Bleeding women until they swooned stopped them from crying out, which must have been a relief for the doctor and the family members waiting nearby.

  In 1833 in Boston, a woman who was eight months pregnant went into convulsions. The doctors took 8 ounces of blood and gave her a purgative to empty her bowels. The next day, when she had more convulsions, they took 40 ounces of blood and gave her emetics to induce vomiting and put ice on her head and burning mustard plasters on her feet. A few hours later, when she had more convulsions, they took another 12 ounces of blood, and then 6 ounces more. The woman, who had now lost two-fifths of her blood over two days, lapsed into a coma as she began to deliver. The doctors gave her ergot, a dangerous fungus found on rye grain that was believed to hurry contractions. When the woman went into convulsions again, they gave her another emetic and calomel to again purge her system. The child was stillborn but the woman eventually recovered, and the doctors regarded their treatment as relatively conservative, because they hadn’t used forceps or otherwise intruded on the uterus.

  To protect their patients’ delicate sensibilities, most male physicians delivered babies without ever looking between the mother’s legs. Doctors were constrained both by women’s sense of modesty and the strong publ
ic suspicion that seeing a half-naked woman in labor would provoke sexual excitement in any man. (A Virginia doctor, Thomas Ewell, claimed that he knew for a fact that doctors who assisted in childbirth became “inflamed with the thoughts of well-shaped bodies of the women they have delivered” and were driven to “adultery and madness.”) Male doctors worked by sense of touch on women who were fully clothed, or covered by a sheet. A famous illustration from the period shows a doctor kneeling next to a standing patient, his face averted and his hand up her skirt. (Dr. Thomas Denman told his readers in 1848 that “Degorges, one of the best obstetricians of his time, was blind.”) Medical students were not permitted to watch actual deliveries and learned what they could from manikins and textbooks. When the choice was between modesty and safety, decorum trumped good medicine every time. “I confess I am proud to say that, in this country…there are women who prefer to suffer the extremity of danger and pain rather than waive those scruples of delicacy which prevent their maladies from being fully exposed,” said Dr. Meigs, who had made the famous speech about the nature of women to his gynecology students. But even he admitted that a little more candor might be helpful.

  The concern for modesty caused some cultural conservatives, including Sarah Hale, to champion female doctors. But male physicians resisted this, occasionally arguing that menstruation made women too mentally unstable for such responsibilities. Although the Blackwell sisters and others broke the barrier, the medical profession never willingly opened its doors to women in the nineteenth century. When Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes got the Harvard medical school to admit a female student, the move was revoked after protests from undergraduates who wrote, to national acclaim, “we are not opposed to allowing woman her rights, but we do protest against her appearing in places where her presence is calculated to destroy our respect for the modesty and delicacy of her sex.”

  “MARRIED PERSONS WILL READILY UNDERSTAND

  THE NATURE OF THE TOPICS”

  During the colonial period, the average woman gave birth to seven children, and visitors wrote home in amazement about the size of the families. But beginning around 1800, American households began shrinking steadily—by the end of the nineteenth century, the birth rate had been cut in half and was lower than any European nation except France. Obviously, people were practicing birth control. Women relied mainly on their mothers’ methods, the most venerable of which was nursing one baby to stave off the chances of getting pregnant with another. In 1840, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, a young matron, wrote to her sister pointing out the dangers that even the Queen of England might face if she decided to forgo the tradition. “I suppose you have heard that Victoria is expecting again. Poor thing! So much for not nursing.” Breastfeeding reduces the chance of conception, but it certainly doesn’t eliminate it. Abstinence does, and given women’s new status as the moral center of the home, along with the health reform movement’s enthusiasm for celibacy, many American couples were probably convinced to forgo intercourse altogether.

  Beginning around 1830, a great deal of literature about birth control began floating around the country. Robert Dale Owen’s well-read Moral Physiology recommended coitus interruptus, or withdrawal. The Fruits of Philosophy, by Dr. Charles Knowlton, urged women to douche—to wash their private parts right after intercourse with water and a spermicide like alcohol or vinegar. Dr. Knowlton seemed to feel he had invented the technique and attempted to sue another birth control advocate for copyright infringement. But early American recipe books already contained directions for making “preventative lotion.” (A mixture of bichloride of mercury, milk of almonds, and rosewater was deemed “infallible if used in proper time.”) Douching was far from foolproof, but like breastfeeding, it cut down on the chances of conception and may have been effective enough for couples who were simply hoping to keep the number of pregnancies down to a manageable level.

  Thanks to an increasingly efficient mail system, Americans could send away for birth control pamphlets, medical devices like diaphragms and syringes, condoms, spermicides for douching, and pills that promised to induce abortions. Ads for condoms, cures for venereal disease, aphrodisiacs, and abortion services were an economic mainstay of the urban newspapers. Agents distributed ads for birth control devices on street corners and mailed them to newlyweds. “French” was a code word for a contraceptive, and “Portuguese” for something that induced abortion (“The Portuguese Female Pills always give Immediate Relief”). One New York firm advertised 201 styles of douching syringes; National Syringes unveiled a model with changeable nozzles that could be used for both birth control and watering houseplants. Diaphragms, called pessaries or “womb veils,” were also popular and easy to obtain. They were used to correct problems with the uterus as well as for birth control, and some women never took them out—there are records of people keeping them in for thirty or forty years.

  Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of itinerate lecturers specialized in sexual topics, giving anatomy lessons, recipes for marital happiness, and explaining about birth control. Frederick Hollick, one of the best known, exhibited life-size papier-mâché models of the human body. “The conviction that they are natural is at first so strong that many have even fainted away at first view, from the impression that they were viewing a live body,” he bragged. Hollick gave lectures on female anatomy and women’s diseases to women-only audiences, but he discussed reproductive control in front of mixed groups. His ad in Boston in 1849 announced a new series of lectures for “married persons [who] will readily understand the nature of the topics to be introduced and will see their importance especially to them. The want of such information, at a timely period, is the cause of incalculable suffering and unhappiness.”

  Availability of information was less of a problem than accuracy. Merchants frequently made up wild claims for pills and potions that were nothing more than alcohol and flavored water, and there was no way a befuddled young couple could tell which advertisements were reliable. Advocates of the rhythm method offered completely different estimates on what part of a woman’s cycle was the safest, with some recommending what was actually the period of maximum fertility. Lester and Lizzie Ward, who married right before the Civil War, wanted to continue their educations and remain childless. Over the early years of their marriage, Lester’s diary recounts one abortion, rejection of mail-order contraceptive pills, use of an “instrument” that failed, and then the purchase of “a fine syringe with India rubber tube.” The Wards seemed to have run the gamut of options, yet Lizzie became pregnant at least twice.

  Like Lizzie Ward, many women resorted to abortion when other methods failed. Even doctors who didn’t perform abortions reported that they were routinely asked to do so by their patients. Midwives hung flags in their window to signal that they provided abortion services. Although far from socially acceptable, abortions performed early in a pregnancy were generally regarded as a form of contraception. Most people held to the tradition that the fetus was not a human being until the “quickening,” when it began to move around in the womb. The churches, including the Catholic clergy, generally seem to have had the same attitude.

  Many of the abortions were performed by women—Elizabeth Blackwell had trouble renting office space in New York because landlords presumed that “female physician” meant abortionist. Madame Restell, who made a fortune in New York City in the pre–Civil War era, advertised herself as a former “Female Physician in the two principal female hospitals in Europe—those of Vienna and Paris—where, favored by her great experience and opportunities, she attained that celebrity in those great discoveries in medical science so specially adapted to the female frame.” In real life, Madame Restell was Ann Lohman, a seamstress married to a newspaper compositor with pretensions to medical expertise. Although she became infamous as an abortionist, she did most of her business selling contraceptive devices and running a confidential maternity hospital. If a pregnancy was past the quickening stage, she preferred to arrange for a clandestine adoption. She was a constan
t target of angry editorials in the city newspapers (which nevertheless took her advertising), and a public shunning so complete that the houses on either side of her Fifth Avenue brownstone were empty. After a young woman from upstate New York died from an abortion, Madame Restell was sentenced to a year in prison on Blackwell’s Island, where the warden was eventually fired for giving her special treatment. When her stepdaughter married, Madame presented the newlyweds with $50,000 and a European honeymoon.

  “TOO SPARING IN THEIR USE OF WATER”

  One of the things that separated nineteenth-century women from their colonial forebears was their belief that bathing is a good idea. Middle-class Americans became attached to the idea of personal hygiene even before they acquired running water or central heating. Lucy Larcom, the mill girl turned author, remembered watching her sister in 1835 taking a full bath before going to work, “even though the water was chiefly broken ice…. It required both nerve and will to dothis at five o’clock on a zero morning in a room without a fire.”

  Cleanliness, like most of the transformations of the pre–Civil War period, was mainly a phenomenon of the larger towns and cities. William Alcott, the health reformer, estimated in 1850 that a quarter of New England’s population bathed their whole bodies less than once a year, and the numbers of unwashed Americans in the South and western states must have been staggering. (The girls at the Euphradian Academy in Rockingham, North Carolina, had to get special permission from their parents to take a full bath.) But the people setting the pace—the prosperous urban families—had decided that cleanliness was, if not next to godliness, at least a sign of gentility. By midcentury, every middle-class bedroom had a water pitcher and washbasin.