by Gail Collins
“I HAVE IT LIKE HEAVEN”
Americans love the story of the immigrant who comes through Ellis Island with no possessions but struggles to success and happiness. It is the story that most defines us, and we tell it to ourselves over and over. But for the real immigrants, each story was different, and the happiness of the ending changed with every telling. Rose Cohen lived out her youth on the Lower East Side of New York, in three-room tenements and sweatshops. “We liked moving from one place to another,” she wrote. “Moving even from one dingy place to another is a change. And then, too, some were less dingy than others.” But despite poor health, she learned to read and write in English and attracted the attention of settlement house workers, who helped her find medical treatment and more congenial work. The family became modestly prosperous when Rose’s father saved enough money to open a grocery store. Her brother went to Columbia University and Rose, after she married Joseph Cohen and had a daughter, stopped working and went to night school.
A genuine American success story, Rose became comfortable enough writing English that she composed her autobiography, which was published to critical praise. She met and became friends with some of the country’s most prominent writers and artists. But her success apparently alienated her from her husband, and she may have fallen into an unhappy relationship with an older married man. She stopped writing and dropped out of history, but a newspaper article in 1922 reported that a forty-year-old Rose Cohen had committed suicide by jumping into the East River from a landing at the New York Yacht Club.
Rosa Cavalleri never learned to write in English. Her story was taken down by social workers at a Chicago settlement house where she was both a cleaning woman and a member who entertained people with her talent for telling stories. When her autobiography was recorded, Rosa was an aging widow in poor health. But she told her friends she had no desire to die. Her youngest son took care of her, and the work at the settlement house gave her some pin money. “I can go to the picture-show and see the good story. I have it like heaven—I’m my own boss.” Her only wish, she said, was to go back to Italy and show everyone that a poor peasant girl could learn to hold her head high and stand up for her rights. “They wouldn’t dare hurt me now I come from America,” she said. “Me, that’s why I love America. That’s what I learned in America: not to be afraid.”
13
Turn of the Century:
The Arrival of the New Woman
“TO DEMONSTRATE PUBLICLY
THAT WOMEN HAVE LEGS”
In 1895, Frances Willard, the longtime head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, wrote a little book called How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle. It recounted how, at age fifty-three, she made herself “master of the most remarkable, ingenious and inspiring [vehicle] ever devised upon the planet.” Although written in a friendly, no-nonsense style, the book followed the temperance movement’s classic story line of error, enlightenment, and rebirth. Willard confessed to her readers that a decade before she would have found the idea of a woman cyclist “shocking.” But she had seen the light, and she urged her millions of female fans: “Go thou and do likewise.”
If there’s any symbol for the transformation that had occurred in the lives of American women as they approached the twentieth century, it ought to be the bicycle. The pictures of Willard tooling around in her long black skirt and high-necked blouse might remind modern readers of the villainous Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz, pedaling off with Toto in her basket. But women who had spent their lives wrapped in corsets and weighed down by heavy skirts must have been thrilled to be able to go flying down the street on two wheels. “Wheeling” offered independence as well as speed, and it was not only respectable; it was fashionable. Lillian Russell began pedaling through Central Park on a gold-plated bike that Diamond Jim Brady gave her. Susan B. Anthony enthused that bicycling “did more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”
The whole nation was crazy about bicycling. By 1900 more than 10 million bikes were on the road, and every manufacturer offered a “lady’s model.” The undergarment industry quickly invented a cycling corset, but it never caught on. The Victorian standards of proper dress were not going to survive the wheeling generation. “A few years ago, no woman would dare venture on the street with a skirt that stopped above her ankles,” wrote an essayist in Scribners. But the bicycle, the writer said, “has given to all American womankind the liberty of dress for which reformers have been sighing for generations.” Lillian Russell confided to her fans (she confided just about everything) that her “wheeling costume consists of the regulation skirt and China silk bloomers with a long woolen shirt. I wear no corset while exercising.” Life noted approvingly in 1897 that “a large proportion of the bicycle girls look exceedingly well in bicycle clothes…. Not the least good thing the bicycle has done has been to demonstrate publicly that women have legs.”
Americans had entered a world in which drastic social changes could occur in a decade instead of requiring a generation. The bicycling craze took over the nation so quickly that people barely had time to go through the traditional soul-searching over whether cycling would make women nervous or endanger their reproductive systems. The Boston Rescue League, however, did claim that 30 percent of the fallen women who came seeking aid had been “bicycle riders at one time.”
“AGGRESSIVE AS BECAME THEIR SEX”
The media called these free-wheelers of the turn of the century the New Women. The country was fascinated with them, although people didn’t always agree on what a New Woman was. (Advertisers, shameless as usual, announced that the New Woman was someone who used Rubifoam tooth powder or a Sweeperette carpet sweeper.) Madame Yale, a popular beauty lecturer of the era, said she was “a hearty playfellow, a good comrade who rides, walks, rows, golfs and wouldn’t be guilty of fainting for a kingdom.” A New York journalist claimed that although men might enjoy her company, “they rarely marry her,” while many men thought—or hoped—that she was sexually liberated.
There were actually all sorts of New Women, but they shared an independent competence that some found rather terrifying. In 1896, Life published a tale about the man of the future, who sits darning socks while “two noisy, sturdy girls, as aggressive as became their sex, romped merrily about the sewing room.” Meanwhile “their gentle little brother sat quietly by his father’s side, studying pictures in an old book” that showed men actually wearing the pants in the family. Ladies’ Home Journal, which teetered back and forth from shock to sympathy, was in a sympathetic mood when it printed a short story in 1902 about Rebekah, a newly minted college graduate, who sweeps into town and saves her family’s farm from bankruptcy. Reminding her cowed stepfather that she is “a girl who…can bring to her work the added assistance of higher education, scientifically applied,” Rebekah saves the cows by summoning a female college chum who has “studied drainage” and promptly cleans out the stables.
Getting rid of the messes that men had let pile up was one of the New Woman’s missions. Except for a few sparsely populated states out west and the occasional school board election, very few American women had the right to vote. But they were still setting the domestic agenda in a way they had never done before and would not do again until the end of the twentieth century. They founded settlement houses to help the urban poor, organized unions, demonstrated for the right to vote, and investigated everything from unsanitary dairies to oil trusts. The New Woman’s younger sisters were reading novels about girls who had adventures without the cover of family emergency. The heroine of the Grace Harlow series not only went to college, she got married, had a child, and then, leaving her baby with her husband, went off globetrotting to solve mysteries and run down smugglers. The extremely popular Outdoor Girls were four teenagers who liked to go camping, take long hikes, and drive their own cabin cruiser.
The New Woman was also sometimes old. Throughout the nineteenth century, girls had been taught that their moment in the sun was going to be a brief one
that began with courtship and ended with marriage. After that, they would be encouraged to live out their remaining years in quiet dignity at home. But by the turn of the century, when Americans were marching into what historians now call the Progressive Era, stage stars like Lillian Russell were still drawing big crowds in their fifties, and reformers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were more popular than they had ever been when they were younger. (Stanton, addressing the men in the audience at a tribute to her eightieth birthday at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1895, assured them: “I fear you think the New Woman is going to wipe you off the planet, but be not afraid. All who have mothers, sisters, wives or sweethearts will be very well looked after.”) A middle-aged Annie Oakley wrote to President McKinley, offering to raise a company of “fifty lady sharpshooters” to serve in the Spanish-American War. Frances Willard said she had learned to ride the bicycle for several reasons, “last but not least because a good many people felt I could not do it at my age.”
Unlike earlier versions of liberated womanhood, this one seemed to have no downside. “Almost the best reason I know for being a suffragist is that there is so much fun and gladness in it,” said Inez Milholland. A skilled equestrian who often rode a horse at the head of political parades, the beautiful Milholland was careful to add that politics was also a “healthy activity,” like lawn tennis or bicycling. The newspapers followed this new generation of daring, competent women with the same avidity they pursued stories about captains of industry and sensational murders. Everybody wanted to read about women like Rose Pastor, a Jewish cigar factory worker who married the wealthy and prominent J. G. Phelps Stokes. Hers was a rags-to-riches story with a Progressive Era twist. Rose refused to promise to “obey” during the wedding ceremony and converted her new husband to socialism. The newlyweds became extremely popular on the lecture circuit—even conservative groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution wanted to hear about left-wing politics when it was explained by the central players in “our greatest social romance.”
Another very New Woman who fascinated the country was Alva Belmont, a wealthy socialite who embraced almost every conceivable turn-of-the-century trend, from suffrage to social climbing. In 1895, she shocked New York society by divorcing her hyperrich husband, William Vanderbilt, on the grounds of adultery and marrying Oliver Belmont, the son of a fabulously wealthy banker who had himself just divorced his wife. It drove home the fact that divorce was no longer a rarity in American society. In fact, the United States had the highest divorce rate in the world, and the trend was particularly strong in the West—Denver would soon be contemplating the fact that one divorce was filed in the city for every two marriage licenses issued. And Alva Belmont was a watershed in that she went on with her social life, after divorce and remarriage, just as she had before. Society still swooned when she appeared at an over-the-top costume ball in 1897 dressed as Marie Antoinette, on the arm of her second husband, who was wearing a suit of gold-inlaid armor he’d borrowed from a cooperative Metropolitan Museum. Divorce began to seem, if not desirable, at least like a necessary evil that need not leave a woman floating in social limbo ever afterward.
“LESS ABOUT SOUL AND MORE ABOUT PIMPLES”
The physical ideal of turn-of-the-century American women was the Gibson Girl, the creation of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, who himself became a celebrity thanks to her popularity. Like the Gilded Age beauties, the Gibson Girl had a full bust and hips, but her body was thinner, firmer, elongated. She was tall, often dressed for sport, and she appeared to be wearing comfortable clothes, although her waist was so tiny, there had to be a corset somewhere. The New York Herald admired her “wholesome athletic air that does not smack too much of athletics.” The Gibson Girl looked a little like Lillie Langtry, the British blond who was a celebrity in Europe thanks to her affair with the Prince of Wales. When Langtry made her stage debut in America, people were taken aback at first by her athletic figure and her much-publicized fetish for exercise. But by 1900, the fashionable American woman no longer literally resembled an hourglass. “Diet” became a verb for the first time, though women did not become obsessed with counting calories until later. They were encouraged to believe that a beautiful appearance was connected to beautiful thinking. Lillie Langtry claimed her lovely complexion came from the serenity she got studying Buddhism—although once, in need of cash, she gave the credit to Pear’s soap. Lillian Russell, who had a popular beauty column in the Chicago Tribune, wrote so much about the importance of having a lovely spirit that her editor telegraphed her, begging her to “write less about soul and more about pimples.”
“WHENEVER SHE WAS DISTURBED OR DEPRESSED
SHE WOULD MOVE THE FURNITURE”
The most remarkable woman in this remarkable era was Jane Addams, the pioneer of the settlement house movement, reformer, writer, and (much less popularly) peace activist. Addams was the daughter of the wealthiest man in a small Illinois town. Her mother died when she was two years old, and Jane was the pet of both her rather stern father and older siblings. Perhaps it was that combination of being both fussed over and bereaved that gave her the air of cool sympathy that other people, particularly other women, found so attractive. In college, where she was class president and valedictorian, one girl wrote that she relied on Jane “as I do the Sun, as I do on divine help.” Jane was daring enough to try opium in an attempt to better understand the fevered writings of the addict Thomas de Quincey, but Victorian enough to take only an ineffectual dose. She was so independent she never wore a corset.
After she graduated from college, Addams wanted to study medicine. The number of female doctors was growing at the turn of the century, and the percentage of women in medicine in 1910 would not be matched again until 1980. But a series of crises, including ill health and the death of her father, plunged her into a depression that lasted eight years. Eventually, she became convinced that her problem was the lack of an occupation—a common dilemma for women who graduated from college and then found no task serious enough to match their skills and ardor. When she visited a London settlement house run by dedicated college men who worked with the poor, she became determined to start a similar institution in Chicago, run by women.
Chicago was full of two populations that helped define American society at the turn of the century—poor immigrants and well-educated women who were looking for something to do with their lives. Addams’s genius was in bringing them together. The immigrants may have been drawn to her because she was not judgmental, and she was a good listener, interested in understanding how her neighbors viewed things. When she became a renowned speaker later in life, she was their interpreter. She disapproved of dance halls, but she could tell her audiences why poor girls liked them, why they preferred factory work to domestic service, and the practical reasons why their fathers voted for corrupt ward heelers rather than reform politicians.
Wealthy women saw Addams as one of their own and readily gave her their money. She and her former college classmate, Ellen Starr, quickly became a “fashionable fad” as they went around Chicago raising funds and looking for a place to start their settlement. In 1889, they discovered Hull House, an old mansion that stood in the middle of a poor Italian community. It was owned by Helen Culver, an heiress and real estate dealer. After extensive coaxing, Culver leased the property to the settlement, then eliminated the rent and finally handed over the title. As Addams darted from one meeting to another, she discovered that most of her physical and emotional ailments had disappeared. In describing her work later, she would always say that the settlement house did more to help the young women who worked there than it did their clients.
Moving into Hull House, Addams nested. She put her family’s heirloom silver on the sideboard, brought in handsome furniture, hung pictures. She was a homebody with a different kind of home. “Whenever she was disturbed or depressed she would move the furniture in all the rooms,” said a friend. The settlement house was a good symbol for the difference be
tween the age of the New Woman and that of the Victorians. Jane Addams was a natural descendant of Clara Barton and Dorothea Dix and Catharine Beecher, whose rootless lives seemed to embody the principle that there would never be a place where such forceful women could permanently fit in. But Addams and her fellow settlement workers had a home. They achieved domesticity, not with a husband and children, but with other women.
Addams and Starr established the first playground in Chicago, on a vacant lot near Hull House. They started a nursery school and organized women’s clubs, lecture series, and art exhibits. Within two years the settlement had more than fifty rooms and endless classes that occupied every corner of the house for the twelve hours a day it was open. A thousand people came to its programs every week. Hull House residents organized demonstrations against bad health conditions, and after Addams had protested 700 times in one summer about the same overflowing garbage boxes that had horrified Rosa Cavalleri, she submitted a bid for the garbage removal contract. Although the bid was unsuccessful, the publicity forced the mayor to appoint her garbage inspector, and the nation was both inspired and charmed by the idea of this tiny, well-born woman marching around the slums to make sure the refuse was picked up.
By 1907, Hull House was a complex of thirteen buildings, including a residence for working girls known as the “Jane Club,” and Jane herself had become a household name. She wrote for women’s magazines, gave speeches everywhere, and in 1912 was chosen to second the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt for president. Thanks to her example, the six settlement houses that existed in the United States in 1892 became nearly 100 by 1900. Like so many great transitional figures in American history, she introduced the public to new ideas while assuring them they were not buying into anything dangerously radical. She was on every list of most admired people in America, and when she won the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize, many felt it was a long overdue honor for work she did before World War I.
