America's Women

by Gail Collins

  The food was as spare as the land. At a luncheon at Fort Lincoln in the 1870s, the menu was tea, toasted hardtack, tart jelly made from buffalo berries, chokeberry pie, and lemonade. Elizabeth Custer said their post went so long without eggs, butter, and cream “the cook books were maddening to us.” In California, new arrivals discovered that eggs, which had cost a few cents apiece back home, were a dollar, and chickens, which they remembered as costing a dime, were suddenly $10. Louise Clappe’s remote mining village ran out of fresh meat over a long winter, and the residents were left with dried mackerel and “wagon loads of hard, dark hams…[that] nothing but the sharpest knife and stoutest heart can penetrate.” On the plains, farm families just starting out often lived on nothing but corn and corn flour.

  For clothes, most women made do with a couple of gingham or calico dresses, a sunbonnet, and an apron. The Sunday clothes were the same, only newer and cleaner. If they could not get cloth for sewing, some women wove their own. (One pioneer claimed his aunt used the fleece of wolves to spin into yarn.) Others ransacked the trunks they had brought with them, and used blankets, shawls, the canvas from the covered wagon, or heavy grain sacks. “Someone had said that the real pioneer in Kansas didn’t wear any underwear, but this was not true of the Ellis County pioneer, and the clothes lines with undergarments advertising I. M. Yost’s High Patent Flour were the best evidence,” said one woman. Despite the sunbonnets, women’s complexions often became weathered, and they complained that the alkali in the water made their hair dull and dry.

  “BESIEGED BY A CROWD OF MEN,

  ALL ANXIOUS TO EMPLOY HER”

  In 1879, thousands of ex-slaves left the Deep South, intent on resettling in Kansas. They were fleeing post-Reconstruction Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee, where the fury of ex-Confederates against the freed African Americans was bitter and frequently violent. They knew that if they could make their break from the South and farm 160 acres of Kansas land for five years, the law said it would be theirs. They were called Exodusters, and one of the main reasons for their migration was concern for the welfare of their women. “The white men here take our wives and daughters and serve them as they please, and we are shot if we say anything about it,” one member wrote to the governor of Kansas. The wives and mothers prodded them along. “These sable workwomen claim they are exposed to robbery, murder, swindling and all the other foibles and pleasantries. They have organized an emigration society and say they propose to move,” reported an unsympathetic white Tennessee paper. Thousands of African Americans took riverboats up the Mississippi or walked the Chisolm trail to Kansas. Armed whites, alarmed at losing their cheap labor, closed the Missisippi and threatened to sink boats that transported the Exodusters. The poorest ran out of money as they waited helpless on the riverbank for a boat with the courage to pick them up. Those who made it to Kansas arrived broke and exhausted. But within a few years most of the 15,000 Exodusters who stayed in Kansas were settled homeowners.

  Black women who went west—particularly those who traveled on their own—were independent and fighters. They were usually better educated than the average white female pioneer, and less interested in farming. (“The scenery to me was not at all inviting and I began to cry,” said Williana Hickman, a black woman who found herself living in a plains dugout in 1889.) Isolated communities and army outposts had very little discrimination because there were so few blacks—or people in general. “In the earliest days…each family was grateful for the help of each other family and we were all on a level. However later differences arose and sentiment against Negroes developed,” recalled a black pioneer. Being the only black people in a thinly populated land was doubly lonely. “I ain’t got nobody and there ain’t no picnics nor church sociables nor buryings out here,” moaned Eliza, a cook on a frontier outpost.

  Black women in western towns could only find work as servants, although those jobs paid two or three times as much as they did in the East. Even the wealthiest black woman in California, Mary Ann Pleasant, always encouraged the impression that she was working as a domestic for the white men with whom she did business. Pleasant had, indeed, gotten her start working as a cook. When she arrived at the San Francisco wharf, she was by one account “besieged by a crowd of men, all anxious to employ her.” She accepted one of the offers, for $500 a month, and invested her first earnings in an accounting firm.

  Clara Brown, a freed slave, talked her way onto a wagon train to Pike’s Peak by promising to do the cooking and washing for the would-be prospectors. In Cherry Creek, the future city of Denver, she made a good deal of money running a laundry and became a well-loved citizen who, in the words of a local paper, turned her house “into a hospital, a hotel, and a general refuge for those who were sick and in poverty.” At the end of the Civil War, she took her savings and tried to find her husband and four children, who had been sold off to different owners before she was freed. Unsuccessful, she returned to Colorado instead with twenty-six former slaves, some of them orphaned, and helped them find homes and jobs. Her search for her family, her charity, and the duplicity of white businessmen drained her money. But thankfully, this story had a happy ending. In 1882, past eighty years old and impoverished, she received word from an old friend who had stumbled across Brown’s daughter, Eliza Jane, a widow living in Iowa. With money donated by neighbors, Brown went by train to meet her daughter in Council Bluffs. She arrived in a rainstorm, and Eliza Jane slipped in the mud, but the two women embraced so joyfully they were oblivious to the wet. Clara brought her granddaughter Cindy back to Denver, where they continued her work and charitable efforts. When she died in 1885, the mayor and governor of Colorado were among the mourners and the minister eulogized “one of the most unselfish lives on record.”

  “WE NOW EXPECT QUITE AN IMMIGRATION

  OF LADIES TO WYOMING”

  In the summer of 1869, the suffragist Anna Dickinson was on her way to a speaking engagement in California when her train stopped briefly in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Venturing out on the platform for a breath of air, Dickinson was immediately surrounded by a crowd of local residents. When she retreated to the passenger car, they clustered around the windows, flattening their noses against the glass in an attempt to get a better look. It isn’t entirely clear if they were drawn by Dickinson’s celebrity, or simply her gender. (Wyoming was particularly short of women, with six adult men to every one female.) “Anna is good looking,” reported the Cheyenne Leader, whose twenty-seven-year-old editor, Nathan Baker, expressed the hope that Dickinson would return and favor Cheyenne with her oratory.

  Whether she found the residents of Cheyenne enthusiastic or simply alarming, Dickinson did indeed return in September, addressing a crowd of 250, including the governor and territorial secretary. There is no record of exactly what she said—the Leader remained fixated on her figure (“well formed”). But Wyoming, which was gearing up for the first election of a territorial legislature, was definitely aware of the suffrage issue. On the eve of the voting in 1869, Esther McQuigg Morris invited some of the most prominent citizens of her hometown of South Pass City to tea. The guests included local candidates for the state legislature, and the hostess asked each whether he would introduce a bill to give women the right to vote.

  Morris was a large woman, nearly six feet tall, and she had been a milliner and a nurse in Oswego, New York. She came west with her husband, John, who was bent on prospecting. The family located in South Pass, which despite its small size was the largest town in Wyoming Territory, and Esther quickly became a popular citizen. She was a longtime supporter of the suffrage cause, and both candidates promised her they would support giving the vote to women. William Bright, the Democratic candidate who won, may already have been an advocate in his own right. He was a saloonkeeper whose young wife was as ardent about suffrage as Esther Morris. Legend had it that as he left for the legislature he told her: “You are a great deal better than I am; you know a great deal more and you would make a better member of the Assembly than I
. I have made up my mind that I will do everything in my power to give you the ballot.”

  The Wyoming legislature, which had only twenty-one members in total, assembled for the first time on October 1, 1869, on the second floor of a dusty post office in Cheyenne. Bright was elected president of the all-Democratic Senate and proposed his suffrage bill, which some of his friends were convinced Mrs. Bright had written. “The favorite argument…and by far the most effective was this: it would prove a great advertisement, would make a great deal of talk and attract attention to the legislature, and the territory, more effectively than anything else,” recalled one man. Other participants remembered that the whole issue was treated as a joke, but if so the legislature must have stayed in a frolicsome mood for a long time, because it also passed legislation to protect married women’s property rights and require equal pay for female schoolteachers.

  It made sense that a place like Wyoming would embrace women’s rights. With very few women around, there was no danger that they could impose their will on the male majority. And the territory very much wanted to attract more women to come, so anything that served to distinguish Wyoming as a place that was friendly to feminine concerns was good. “We now expect quite an immigration of ladies to Wyoming,” said the Cheyenne Leader after both the House and Senate voted in favor of the suffrage bill. Esther Morris’s son, Robert, sent a report on the passage to The Revolution, a suffrage newspaper, that ended with a call for “the girls to come to this higher plain of Human Rights, as well as to have a home in our high, clear mountain atmosphere.”

  The bill was signed into law by Governor John Campbell on December 10, 1869. “Won’t the irrepressible ‘Anne D’ come out here and make her home?” demanded the still-smitten Leader. “We’ll even give her more than the right to vote—she can run for Congress.” On September 6, 1870, led by Louisa Ann Swain, a seventy-year-old Laramie housewife, Wyoming women became the first ever to take part in a public election. “Many ladies have voted and without molestation or interference,” the Leader reported that evening. Observers noted that the presence of women at the polls made election days far more decorous than had previously been the custom: “There was plenty of drinking and noise at the saloons, but the men would not remain, after voting, around the polls. It seemed more like Sunday than election day.” Nevertheless, a Wyoming resident felt compelled to write to the Ladies’ Home Journal and assure the nation that voting had not made the local women lose their femininity.

  When Wyoming applied for statehood, members of the House of Representatives objected to women there having the ballot, and the territory delegate in Washington telegraphed home that it would be easier to get congressional approval if only men were permitted to vote. The state legislature telegraphed back: “We will remain out of the union a hundred years, rather than come in without our women.” The statehood bill passed Congress by a narrow margin anyway. On July 23, 1890, Wyoming celebrated its official statehood in Cheyenne, with a two-mile-long parade. Mrs. Theresa Jenkins led off the speeches with a review of the struggle for suffrage. Her delivery was so forceful that her words could be heard at the back of the crowd, four blocks away. (Mrs. Jenkins had been practicing on an open prairie, orating while her husband rode farther and farther away in his buggy, shouting back, “Louder!”) Esther Morris presented the governor with a new flag bearing forty-four stars. Back east, women who had been fighting for the ballot since before the Civil War gloried in the realization that they would live to see the day when at least some American women would be able to vote for president. Suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, made pilgrimages to Wyoming. “Neither is handsome,” reported the disappointed editor of the Cheyenne Leader. Grace Greenwood, the famous writer, also arrived, expecting a great deal of the state capital. “I should rejoice to find it a very Eden, a vale of Cashmere—which it isn’t,” she reported.

  The first dozen states to give women the right to vote were all in the West. Wyoming just managed to beat out Utah, which passed a suffrage law in February 1870. Colorado and Idaho followed suit before 1900. Westerners did not have any different ideology about women’s role, but they had different needs. Wyoming was not the only state passing laws in hopes that more women might want to emigrate. When the California legislature was debating a married woman’s property act, one bachelor argued that the proposal was “the very best provision to get us wives that we can introduce into the Constitution.”

  Not long after Wyoming gave women the right to vote and hold office, Esther Morris was appointed to fill out a vacated seat as justice of the peace, making her the first woman judge anywhere in the country. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper reported that on her first day in court, Morris “wore a calico gown, worsted breakfast-shawl, green ribbons in her hair and a green neck-tie.” Despite the newspaper’s amusement, and the fact that her predecessor refused to turn over his docket and records to a woman, she apparently fulfilled her duties firmly and impartially. Discussing her service later, she said she felt she had done a satisfactory job and that she had not neglected her family any more than if she had spent the time shopping.

  11

  The Gilded Age:

  Stunts, Shorthand, and Study Clubs

  “THERE WAS PLENTY OF HER TO SEE”

  In the decades after the Civil War, Americans began living large. Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s new Fifth Avenue mansion had a forty-five-foot dining room with jewel-studded ceiling and oak beams inlaid with mother-of-pearl. A nation of newspaper readers devoured stories about fancy dinner parties where every guest got an oyster containing a black pearl, or a cigar wrapped in hundred-dollar bills. The Gilded Age, as it came to be known, was also perhaps the only era in the nation’s history that favored large women. An Englishman reported that young American women appeared to be morbidly frightened of getting thin. “They are constantly having themselves weighed and every ounce of increase is hailed with delight, and talked about with the most dreadful plainness of speech,” he reported. A “beautiful Connecticut girl,” he added, told him proudly that she had “gained eighteen pounds in flesh since last April.”

  The great American beauty of the Gilded Age was the voluptuous Lillian Russell, famed singer, actress, and dining partner of Diamond Jim Brady. At her thinnest, the five-foot, five-inch Russell weighed about 140 pounds, but she frequently exceeded 160. She never attempted to conceal her love of food. Reporters covered her contests with Brady to determine who could eat the most corn on the cob. After one long battle, she revealed to the press that before dining she left her corset with the restaurant owner for safekeeping. “There was plenty of her to see,” said Clarence Day, who was at Yale when Miss Russell made appearances in New Haven. “We liked that. Our tastes were not thin or ethereal.”

  Dance troupes from Europe that toured the United States featured chorus girls who were definitely Rubenesque, and American stage shows followed their lead. In the 1890s, Metropolitan Magazine claimed that the “regulation chorus girl type” had “thick ankles, ponderous calves and a waist laced so tight that the lines of the hips and bust were distorted into balloon-like curves.” Perhaps fleshiness was appropriate in an era when Americans finally discovered the joys of appetite. Or perhaps it was a reaction against the morbid fragility of the “fairylike” women in the pre–Civil War era. Helen Hunt, a delicate widow who had gone west in 1872 to escape ill health and depression, wrote to her sickly friends proudly reporting that she now weighed 163 pounds.

  Photography became common, and when women had their pictures taken they demanded that their cheeks look redder, their skin whiter, their hair brighter, until, one photographer complained, the subjects “looked like a ghastly mockery of the clown in a pantomime.” It was only a small step from tinted photographs to tinted faces. Makeup was still considered the mark of a fast woman, but the late-nineteenth-century equivalent of the jet set used it anyway. “She is a compound frequently of false hair, false teeth, padding of various kinds, paint, powd
er and enamel…and she utterly destroys the health of her skin by her foolish use of cosmetics,” complained one New York writer. Fashionable women used hot tongs to curl their hair into effortful coiffures, which were sprinkled with gold or silver dust for special occasions. They wore elaborate hats—huge affairs bearing flowers, lace, organdy, and every possible kind of feathers, from ostrich plumes to stuffed birds. Women wore the bodies of entire pheasants on their heads and one Chicago writer in 1900 wrote that he expected “to see life-sized turkeys…on fashionable bonnets before I die.” The slaughter of wild birds for hat decorations finally reached such outrageous proportions that it led to the nation’s first public environmental protests.

  The rejection of the small, thin, and retiring female image came at a time when women were, in every way, becoming more visible. Wives completely took over the family shopping; the ones who had enough money turned that chore into a social pastime. And they were beginning to go out by themselves for amusement—to have lunch with friends or see a play at the theater. Women of all classes were experimenting with the pleasures of a night—or at least an afternoon—on the town.

  Until the Gilded Age, nice restaurants generally did not serve women, and when couples went out to dinner, it was to the home of a friend. Men went to restaurants by themselves, to the theater by themselves, and even to the beach by themselves. It was only after the Civil War that people started to seriously explore the idea of entertainment that families could enjoy together. Summer vacations came into vogue and circuses became the most popular form of paid entertainment in the 1860s and 1870s. Small carnivals and stunt performers popped up everywhere. “I went down and saw Miss Ella LaRue walk a rope stretched from the brick building corner of D and Union streets to the balcony of the Opera House—about 160 feet,” reported a man in Virginia City. “She was dressed in short frock, tights and trunks…. Great ‘shape’—more of it than I ever saw in any female. Immense across the hips—huge thighs.”