America's Women

by Gail Collins

  “I FOUGHT THE RATS, INSIDE AND OUT”

  Most labor union leaders were still indifferent or hostile to women workers. At best they regarded them as people who should be home with the children. At worst, they saw women as surplus labor who drove down the pay scale for men. In 1930, census takers discovered that while one in nine male workers was a union member, only one in thirty-four women was unionized, mainly those in the garment trade. But one of the more remarkable female union leaders of the era, Mother Jones, was devoted to organizing the all-male mining industry.

  Born Mary Harris in Cork, Ireland, the woman who would become Mother Jones had an intimate and recurring knowledge of stupendous tragedy. She spent her early years amid the great Irish famine and went to Canada with her family on one of the infamous “coffin ships” that left so many of their passengers dead from drowning or disease. But her family survived, and Mary was trained to be both a dressmaker and a teacher. She made her way to Memphis, where she married an ironworker named George Jones. She was well on her way to a happy, unremarkable life as wife and mother when yellow fever struck the city in 1867, killing her husband and four children. “I sat alone through nights of grief,” she wrote later. “No one came to me. No one could. Other homes were as stricken as mine.” She nursed other victims until the disease ran its course, then moved to Chicago where she ran a dressmaking business. When the great Chicago fire broke out in 1871, Mary Jones survived again, although she lost all her belongings. Trying to find some meaning in her life, she embraced the labor movement—her husband had been an active union member—and the cause of the working poor. She became “Mother Jones,” the gray-haired woman in an old-fashioned black dress whose fearlessness inspired men half her age and rallied an unexpected militancy in their wives and daughters.

  Mother Jones traveled constantly, carrying everything she owned wrapped up in a black shawl. “She had a complete disregard for danger or hardship,” said John Brophy, an official in the miners’ union. “She had a lively sense of humor—she could tell wonderful stories, usually at the expense of some boss.” She was also a fire-breathing orator—Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, another Irish immigrant who would become a spellbinding speaker for the labor movement, heard Mother Jones describe the bloody labor wars in the mines when she was eighteen years old, and was so overcome she fainted.

  Because of her age (which she exaggerated) and her gender, Mother Jones could easily embarrass men into action. “I have been in jail more than once and I expect to go again. If you are too cowardly to fight, I will fight. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, actually to the Lord you ought, to see one old woman who is not afraid,” she told them. In 1913, during the labor wars in the Colorado mines, she repeatedly defied official orders that she leave town, and wound up—at age seventy-six—locked in a jail that had previously been condemned as unfit for habitation. “I had sewer rats…to fight, and all I had was a beer bottle; I would get one rat and another would run across the cellar at me,” she told the Commission on Industrial Relations later. “I fought the rats inside and out just alike.”

  Mother Jones was unusual for her era in that she was an equal-opportunity organizer, who welcomed African American workers and brought women and children into the strikes. She organized the wives of miners into teams armed with mops and brooms so they could guard the mines against scabs. She staged pageants where one child was crowned queen of the strikers and parades with children carrying signs that read: “We Want to Go to School and Not to the Mines.” Along with the miners, child workers were her particular concern. During a silk strike in Philadelphia, 100,000 workers, including 16,000 children, left their jobs over a demand that their workweek be cut from sixty to fifty-five hours. Mother Jones organized a children’s march of 100 boys and girls from Philadelphia to New York City “to show the New York millionaires our grievances.” The march attracted considerable publicity, but national bans on child labor were not successfully passed into law until 1941.

  In 1897, the National Labor Tribune declared Mother Jones a “New Woman.”

  “I AM NOW SURROUNDED

  BY ALL MY DREAMS COME TRUE”

  For all the chances women had to make an impact at the turn of the century, they had far less opportunity to make much money. Only a few women had careers that were lucrative as well as useful. Ida Tarbell was one of them. She was a direct descendant of Rebecca Nurse, the bedridden housewife who became one of the first victims of the Salem witch trials. Tarbell was the star investigative reporter for McClure’s magazine, known for her obsessive research and willingness to go anywhere to follow a lead. “She could mobilize just as swiftly as any lad in the place—could accept a decision at noon to start for Chicago without turning a hair,” said a fellow staff member. (He never knew that Tarbell fought against a fear of strange hotels that caused her hand to shake whenever she signed a register.) Her most famous work, “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” was a pathbreaking exposé of corporate greed and collusion that helped prod Theodore Roosevelt into his career as a trustbuster. “Miss Ida Tarbell is the most popular woman in America,” announced a profile in The Reader. At minimum, the article said, the choice would lie between Tarbell and Jane Addams.

  The successful female entrepreneurs of the era often worked in the business of beauty—one of the first parts of the economy where a woman could be investor, owner, and boss. Florence Nightingale Graham, a poor immigrant from England, became a receptionist in a high-toned Manhattan beauty parlor and worked her way up until she had a shop of her own, then her own brand of products, which she marketed under the name Elizabeth Arden. Harriet Hubbard Ayer, a divorced mother, began manufacturing a face cream in 1886 that became such a big success it eventually inspired her ex-husband and daughter to have her committed to an asylum so they could take over the company. The beauty business was also unique in that it offered opportunities to ambitious black women. The most successful was Sarah Breedlove, who became famous as Madam C. J. Walker, with thousands of agents selling her products all over the country.

  Walker was the daughter of sharecroppers, the first child in the family to have been born free. She was orphaned at age seven and worked as a laundress in Louisiana when she was still a child, trudging across town bearing bundles of clothes and standing for hours with her swollen hands immersed in hot water and lye or wrestling with irons that had to be heated in the hearth. She married young, had a daughter at seventeen, and was widowed. She moved to St. Louis and joined a church whose congregation included many of the city’s black clubwomen. It was under the influence of those helpful ladies that Sarah began to learn middle-class speech and manners while she sent her daughter, Lelia, to college with the money she made over the laundry tub. Meanwhile, she was horrified to discover her hair was starting to fall out. It may have been stress, but hair loss was a common problem for women at that time, possibly because of mercury poisoning from patent medicines. Many of the victims were poor women who had low-protein diets and rarely washed their hair. Scalp diseases were rampant, and pores that became blocked by dirt were a breeding ground for dandruff, eczema, and fungus. Sarah, who was soon to take the name of her third husband, C. J. Walker, developed a lotion that made her hair grow back in. She always claimed it was revealed to her by an African ancestor in a dream. The result was actually not much more than good shampoo, but when used regularly, along with scalp massages and perhaps improved diet, it generally restored lost hair and caused it to grow in more thickly.

  Walker’s success had to do with her energy and her talent for promotion. She inspired her audiences not only with the story of her recovered beauty, but with her vision of a future for black women that went beyond washing clothes and cleaning houses. Women signed up to learn the Walker hair care technique, to sell the products, and to open Madame C. J. Walker beauty parlors. She traveled endlessly, at first in the hated segregated railroad cars and, later, as her business began to prosper, in her own touring car. When she moved to New York, she and her
daughter were as well known for their benevolence as for their expensive lifestyles. During World War I, Walker was a continual subscriber to war bond drives, determined that Harlem would not be outstripped by other neighborhoods when it came to patriotism. Her town house and hair salon on 136th Street in Harlem were as elegant as anything on Fifth Avenue, and her estate on the Hudson, in a neighborhood where the Rockefellers and other magnates had their mansions, was built on her commission by a black architect. “I had a dream, and that dream begot other dreams until I am now surrounded by all my dreams come true,” she said shortly before she died.

  “TELL ME, PRETTY MAIDEN,

  ARE THERE MORE AT HOME LIKE YOU?”

  Middle-class girls might have dreamed of becoming a journalist or going off to help the poor, but working-class girls liked to imagine themselves performing on stage. The chorus girl was a New Woman, too—she made her own money, and her public image was one of assertive independence. Her spunk was supposed to be rewarded with fancy dinners, expensive gifts, and ultimately marriage to a wealthy admirer. Most chorus girls, of course, lived the unglamorous lives of traveling theater folk, dragging their meager baggage from one small town venue to the next. Still, the dream had some validity. The ultimate chorines at the turn of the century were the Floradora Girls—six fashionably dressed, minimally talented young women of the same size and coloring who sashayed around the stage twisting parasols while their male partners sang, “Tell me, pretty maiden, are there more at home like you?” All six of the originals married millionaires very soon after Floradora opened on Broadway. They were replaced by more pretty brunettes—five feet four inches, 130 pounds—who were not required to do anything but look enticing on stage and be clever about choosing among the suitors who waited outside the stage door after the show.

  But the classic training camp for the New Woman was the college campus. The first generation of female college students enrolled around 1870, when there had been the inevitable controversy about whether their delicate systems were up to the challenge. Dr. Edward Clarke, a retired professor at Harvard Medical School, made a big splash when he published Sex in Education, or, a Fair Chance for Girls, which warned that women who used up all their vital energies on studies would endanger their “female apparatus.” Nevertheless, a decade later 40,000 women were in college—nearly a third of all the students. The idea of higher education for women became so acceptable by 1890 that Ladies’ Home Journal sponsored a contest in which the girl who sold the most subscriptions won a scholarship to Vassar. By 1910, when 5 percent of all college-age Americans were enrolled in school, 40 percent were female. Nearly half of all college students were coeds in 1920, when the percentage would peak and then begin receding.

  The women students tended to be serious. Florence Kelley remembered her freshman year at Cornell as “one of continual joy…. Noone, as far as I know, read a daily paper…. Our current gossip was Froude’s Life of Carlyle.” Some of the elite colleges were alarmed at the number of women flocking in. When the University of Chicago discovered that the proportion of women had risen from 25 to 50 percent, the administration developed a curriculum aimed at attracting more men. At Cornell, women were barred from joining campus organizations. Some large state schools restricted women to home economics and teaching courses. But other schools were far more welcoming. The year the University of Kansas was founded, the classes were almost all preparatory, and only two of the students were taking actual college courses. However, they were both women.

  “SMASHED”

  Most women who attended college went to coeducational public schools. But the all-female, private colleges were the ones that provided the parade of young graduates into politics, social work, and academia. While preparing for the outside world, the students at places like Smith and Vassar lived a rather cloistered life, with limited contact with the opposite sex. Even the spring proms at many schools were all-girls affairs. At Smith, the sophomores escorted the freshmen to the annual Freshman Frolic. The Cosmopolitan reported in 1901: “Each soph considers herself a cavalier for the freshman to whom she is assigned. She sends her flowers, calls for her, fills her order of dance, introduces her partners, fetches ice and frappes between dances and takes her to supper…and if the freshman has taken advantage of the opportunity and made the desired hit, there are dates for future meetings and jollifications, and a good night over the balusters, as lingering and cordial as any freshie has left behind her.” In many of these events, the girls playing “cavalier” dressed as men, and the colleges were nervous enough about what this all meant to ban any photo-taking. One former Vassar student explained the concept of “smashes” among undergraduates: “When a Vassar girl takes a shine to another, she straightaway enters upon a regular course of bouquet sendings, interspersed with tinted notes, mysterious packages of ‘Ridley’s Mixed Candies,’ locks of hair perhaps and many other tender tokens, until at last the object of her intention is captured, the two become inseparable, and the aggressor is considered by her circle of acquaintances as—smashed.”

  The hero worship young women felt for their teachers, mentors, and the stars of the social reform movement also took on sexual overtones. While Jane Addams was sitting on a window seat at Hull House one afternoon, a volunteer came up and grabbed her ankle, saying, “If you won’t let me hold your hand, do let me hold your foot.” Addams never had a serious romantic relationship with a man, and the degree to which she understood, or was comfortable with, her own sexuality will never be known. She kept that as closed off as most of her deep feelings. But the only people who penetrated the cool, benevolent surface of her personality were Ellen Starr and later Mary Rozet Smith. Smith, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer, happily devoted her life to supporting Addams and her money to backing the settlement house. Starr may have been thinking about Smith’s wealth as well as her love when she told her old friend, near the end of their lives, that she had “for a great many years been thankful that Mary came along to supply what you needed.”

  “RACE SUICIDE”

  When Jane Addams was asked why most women in her circle had never married, she said that men “did not at first want to marry women of the new type, and women could not fulfill the two functions of profession and homemaking until modern invention had made a new type of housekeeping practicable.” But the emergence of the career wife and mother wasn’t simply waiting for the invention of the vacuum cleaner; Addams added that women had to be patient “until public opinion tolerated the double role.” At the turn of the century, public opinion was definitely not ready. College graduates—the first American women who had the luxury of a career crisis—could marry, or they could become “professionals”—teachers, librarians, social workers. Almost no one felt they could do both. Even union leaders and college presidents retired when they became wives. But, frequently, educated women opted for jobs over husbands. Nearly half of all female college graduates in the late nineteenth century remained unmarried.

  It was the golden age of the American single woman, and magazines routinely published pieces by unmarried professionals, defending their decision to forgo matrimony. The authors assured their readers that they had not been lacking in offers—one essay, which Ladies’ Home Journal regarded as among the most popular pieces it had ever published, was by a single woman who said she had turned down five suitors. Few of the writers really discussed their careers—they said they had chosen celibacy because the men weren’t good enough. “I never married because I never met a man whose love covered the faults in his character which I was sure would make me unhappy,” declared “Old Maid.” Their choosiness was possible, however, because of the new opportunities for women to work. “My earning powers are no more liable to wane than are those of a man,” wrote “A Spinster Who Has Learned to Say No.”

  The white middle class worried about “race suicide.” The best-educated native-born women were failing to reproduce while immigrant families had tons of healthy babies. President Theodore Roosevelt was
a particular fretter. “If Americans of the old stock lead lives of celibate selfishness…or if the married are afflicted by that base fear of living which…forbids them to have more than one or two children, disaster awaits the nation,” he proclaimed. G. Stanley Hall, that professional worrier, warned that “if women do not improve,” men would have to look for immigrant wives or perhaps undertake “a new rape of the Sabines.” Ladies’ Home Journal, which never seemed to regard consistency as a particular editorial virtue, alternated its essays by happy spinsters with short stories about women who grabbed for matrimonial happiness in the nick of time. “I’m too much a woman to be wasted this way!” proclaimed a college teacher who is inspired by the sight of a happy family at Christmastime and shucks her career to marry the boy back home.

  “LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO SPEND IT DIGESTING PORK”

  With the ascension of “professional women,” housewives were in need of a Catharine Beecher for a new generation, to reinterpret housekeeping for the twentieth century and give it some of the cachet it had lost. They found her in Ellen Swallow Richards, the founder of the science of home economics.

  Swallow was one of those intense female college students who literally walked around campus with a book in front of her face. She loved science, and after graduating from Vassar, she attempted to get an advanced degree in chemistry at MIT, where there were no female students. The faculty reluctantly allowed her to enroll as a special student, making no promises about what kind of degree she might qualify for. In an attempt to win over the professors, she mended their shirts and swept the laboratory floors. “Perhaps the fact that I am not a Radical…and that I do not scorn womanly duties but claim it as a privilege to clean up and sort of supervise the room and sew things is winning me stronger allies than anything,” she wrote to her parents hopefully. MIT was never grateful enough to give her any degree higher than another B.S., but in the meantime Ellen fell in love and married one of her professors—Robert Hallowell Richards, a specialist in metallurgy. Richards had opposed coeducation at MIT, which he said introduced “feelings, interests foreign to the lecture room.” But he respected his wife as a scientist. She acted as a chemist for his experiments while he gave financial support to her efforts to improve scientific education for women.