Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  A young woman’s decision to remain single also reflected a small but significant expansion of opportunities for women in education and in the labor market. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, domestic service employed more women than any other field, but Civil War necessity had turned nursing, clerical work, and teaching into acceptable professions for women. Thus, for the first time in American history, young women had the potential to support themselves, albeit tenuously. Alice aimed to be one of these self-supporting women.

  Alice’s path as a teacher was paved by reformer Catharine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who began arguing for the importance of female education and female teachers in the 1820s. To Beecher’s mind, women were naturally suited for teaching because it afforded them an expanded stage on which to perform the instructional work they were already doing at home. Beecher first put her ideas into motion with the Hartford (Connecticut) Female Seminary, which she founded in 1823. Later, she created another school for women in Cincinnati and continued to lobby for teaching as a profession, really the profession, for women. As she explained to members of Congress in the 1850s, not only were women better than men at dealing with children, but women “can afford to teach for one-half, or even less, the salary which men would ask.”7 Women, she promised, would be the best and cheapest teachers.

  Beecher’s arguments coincided with a huge increase in public schools and a pressing demand for teachers. The common school movement, an outgrowth of the Second Great Awakening and widespread concerns about a virtuous citizenry, took hold across America by the 1850s. For the first time, many states in the North and West required free primary school for children, at least up to age fourteen. The literacy gap between men and women closed, and nearly all white Americans could read and write.8 Who better to teach all these new pupils than the thousands of young women left single after the Civil War? Beecher’s arguments proved decisive, and young women took up teaching in earnest.

  As an intellectually curious young woman looking to leave the farm and postpone marriage, if not avoid it all together, Alice Chenoweth regarded teaching as an ideal and expedient way out of Dardenne.

  UPON ARRIVING in Cincinnati, Alice rented a room at 335 West 8th Street, where she could easily walk the two blocks to the new Cincinnati Normal School.9 Cincinnati sustained several dozen schools and institutes in the 1870s, but the Cincinnati Normal School, founded in 1868, was recognized as the biggest and best teacher training school west of the Allegheny Mountains. Its mission was to provide skilled teachers for Cincinnati’s growing number of public primary schools. By the time Alice arrived, Cincinnati’s school system boasted that it was second in excellence and enrollment only to Boston, which everyone knew to be the most educated city in America.10

  Along with Alice Chenoweth, forty-one young women, mostly locals, entered the class of 1873. For young women (all the students were female) who had graduated from Cincinnati schools, tuition was free as long as they promised to teach in Cincinnati public schools after graduation. Students not from Cincinnati had to pass an entrance exam and pay $60 in annual tuition. Graduates of the normal school were guaranteed the first crack at jobs within the district as well as a starting salary of $500 per year, $100 more than the norm. Because of the bump in pay afforded to graduates of the normal school, some veteran teachers enrolled in order to earn the certificate. But, like Alice, most of the students were in their late teens.11

  Normal school leaders prided themselves on the new “natural” teaching method, as opposed to the old “empirical” method. A hallmark of the normal school’s curriculum were the many hours teachers-in-training spent in the classroom with students. All student teachers were under the constant supervision of “critic teachers” who evaluated their efforts in the classroom according to “punctuality, promptness, personal bearing, neatness (in person and work), correct use of language, improvement of time, ability to control, ability to construct, ability to criticize and ability to profit by criticism.”12

  To earn a certificate, Alice had to master mental and practical arithmetic, English grammar, geography, United States history and general history, reading, spelling, natural philosophy, anatomy and physiology, music, drawing, and penmanship.13 School administrators stressed that the most important lessons taught at the normal school were how to teach and how—not what—to think. As Principal Delia Lathrop outlined in her 1873 annual report, normal school graduates did not memorize facts, they learned how to think for themselves. Real thinking “assorts and arranges; it inquires into relations; it looks for causes; it uses authorities but does not accept them unquestionably; it doubts that it may know what it believes. The reason for accepted opinions, the significance of processes, the appropriateness of terms, the causes of the conflict of authorities, are the proper objects of its activity.”14

  This invitation to intellectual freedom starkly contrasted with the traditional morals and memorization emphasized by the McGuffey Readers and church teachings of Alice’s childhood. Alice had already acquired a love of reading and an appreciation for history from her older brothers and religious instruction from her parents; penmanship, as a glance at her diaries reveals, not so much. But questioning authority, tracing processes, trusting nothing without examination, this sort of thinking appealed to a young woman who had already seen her world turned upside down before, during, and after the Civil War. Even as she went about her daily routine, these questions—why, how, and says who?—obsessed Alice as she sought to make sense of her life.

  From afar, Alice may also have been following the women’s rights movement, which had several high-profile events in the early 1870s. Since their mutual inception in the 1830s, the abolition movement and the women’s rights movement had functioned as two branches of the same tree, working toward a shared goal of “universal suffrage.” Believing that black people and white women had been unfairly omitted from the promises of the Declaration of Independence, many reformers, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, hoped that the Civil War would both outlaw slavery and enfranchise all people—black and white, male and female—previously barred from voting. But these reformers had their hopes dashed.

  The debates surrounding the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, ratified in 1868 and 1870, respectively, made clear that women would not be enfranchised after the Civil War. To the contrary, the Fourteenth Amendment inserted the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time. The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed that voting rights could not be “denied or abridged” on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Significantly, it also granted the federal government, not individual states, the power of enforcement. Republican leaders and many abolitionists argued that enfranchising women together with black men would be too radical; they insisted instead on one reform at a time. Stanton and Anthony had thrown themselves into supporting the Union cause and were devastated by what they felt was a betrayal. They refused to support the Fifteenth Amendment, prompting a rift in the movement (the reformers who did support the Fifteenth Amendment soon formed the American Woman Suffrage Association). Dismissing the arguments of black women—including Sojourner Truth and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—who pointed out that it was impossible to separate sex from race and who urged the movement to keep its focus on universal suffrage, Stanton and Anthony severed ties with many of their reformist friends, started their own group called the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), vowed to work no more with men and, in 1869, began working toward a federal amendment to enfranchise women.15

  At the same time, several women’s rights activists began to argue that women had, in fact, been enfranchised by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments because they, too, were “citizens” and because they interpreted the Constitution as conferring voting rights on all citizens. They referred to this legal strategy, championed by Victoria Woodhull in 1871 when she became the first woman to testify before a House committee, as “the New Departure.”
To test the theory that citizenship inherently included voting rights, women across the country—including Anthony and a group of her female friends in Rochester, New York—registered and voted in the 1872 election. For this offense, Anthony was arrested. She fought the charges in court and refused for the rest of her life to pay the fine. Meanwhile, in Missouri, a woman named Virginia Minor approached the local registrar with a similar question. If she was a citizen, why couldn’t she vote? Minor, along with her husband Francis, developed the constitutional argument for the New Departure and took her case testing the limits of national citizenship all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1875, the court ruled that the Constitution did not “confer the right of suffrage upon any one.”16

  After the defeat of both the universal suffrage and national citizenship arguments, Stanton and Anthony redoubled their efforts for a Fifteenth Amendment for women—a law that would prohibit sex discrimination in conferring voting rights (but remain mute on other forms of discrimination) and that would be enforced by the federal government. So Stanton drafted the text of a proposed Sixteenth Amendment, modeled word for word on the Fifteenth, substituting “sex” for “race.” This amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1878. As a young woman, Alice lived through these debates and maybe even read about them in the news coverage of women’s rights and especially the New Departure. But she could never have predicted that debates about the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would later consume her life.

  ON A TYPICAL DAY, Alice woke at dawn in her small room. She then walked a few blocks to the 8th District School. She spent the rest of the day, five or six days a week, inside its small, dark, overcrowded classrooms. Street lamps lit her walk home, but inside she supped and read by candlelight. For a special treat, she could have ridden Cincinnati’s first funicular railway, the Main Street Incline built in 1872, to the top of Mt. Auburn and enjoyed a snack at the Lookout House while surveying the panoramic views of the city and the Ohio River that had until just recently separated slavery from freedom.

  After growing up in a house dominated by her father and older brothers, in a world consumed with the business of men—the ministry, war, politics—Alice must have enjoyed discussing ideas with other smart women. She befriended the other students and admired the normal school’s esteemed principal, Delia Lathrop, who was just a few years older than her charges. Shortly after Alice graduated, Lathrop announced her retirement so that she could enter into her true calling: marriage. Her colleagues threw her a bittersweet retirement party and showered her with gifts. Friends celebrated that Miss Lathrop left her post to, as the Cincinnati Enquirer put it, “enter upon a consummation that is, no doubt, wished upon by other school-marms.”17

  Teaching allowed women to provide for themselves and better their marital prospects in the years between coming of age and finding an acceptable mate. Ideally, this period was to last but a short time. Testifying to the brief tenure of the ideal teaching career, teacher salaries topped out after seven years and laws barred married women from working altogether.18

  For Alice, teaching was a means to an end, but unlike her principal and most of her classmates, her end goal was not marriage. Having witnessed the many pitfalls of women’s dependence on men, she sought out alternative domestic arrangements.

  JUST AS HER SECOND SEMESTER of normal school began, Alice’s sister Julia died, most likely as a result of childbirth. Julia was twenty-four. She left behind no living children, no obituary was published to mark her life, no diaries or letters remain to illuminate her thoughts and experiences. Separated by just three and a half years, Julia and Alice had gone through life together side by side in church pews, in wagon seats, at family meals, and probably in a shared bed. Their sister Kate was five years older than Julia and nearly nine years older than Alice; she had been more of a minder to them, less a compatriot. Alice’s perspective on life may have grown to differ from Julia’s, but their bodies had always been in close, familial contact. After Julia died on the Hatcher family farm, Alice likely experienced intense grief mixed with relief: Julia’s fate would not be her own.

  Within months, Alice’s older brother William (still her legal guardian), his wife Parmela, and their children left Dardenne, Missouri, for Cowley County, Kansas. Alice never saw her brother again. Shortly after the birth of her seventh child, Parmela died, leaving William, who still suffered from his Civil War leg injury, struggling to keep the family together. William remarried shortly after the death of Parmela, only to die a few months later himself. He was not yet forty.19

  The single life Alice had embarked on was a risky, new path for women, but she knew all too well that for women, married life came with its own limitations and hazards. The best-selling women’s magazines and books, including The American Woman’s Home (1869) by Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catharine, extolled the blessings of marriage and motherhood, creating a nationwide “cult of domesticity.” Writers like the Beechers promised women that true happiness could be found only in well-appointed homes with a bushel of children, dotingly attended to by Christian mothers. But such teachings must have rung hollow to Alice, whose main observations of home thus far had involved loss, abandonment, endless drudgery, downward mobility, and death. The cascading traumas Alice experienced in her adolescence surely shaped her conception of home and family. For much of her adult life, she would be drawn to the familiarity of chaos even as she craved security and belonging.

  Besides marriage, other types of romantic encounters presented themselves to Alice and the other teachers-in-training, many of whom were living on their own in the big city for the first time. The Cincinnati Enquirer published numerous stories warning of “woman’s weakness” and the “naughty conduct of a truly good man.” The good man in this instance was the son of a pastor and a teacher at another normal school who had recently been run out of town for attempting to register a hotel room for himself and a “Miss H” to whom he was not married.20

  Cautionary tales such as this one detailed courtship gone awry when young, unmarried women got swept up by passion upon meeting older, more experienced men. Alice would have read such stories in the local newspaper, as well as in novels, an entire genre that, by some accounts, centered on the trope of the “fallen woman.”21

  For much of the nineteenth century, parents had regulated the courtship of their children. Most young people had remained at home until marriage, so parents could easily control, monitor, and in some cases arrange the marriages of their children. But after the Civil War, when industrial and economic need drew thousands of young women and men away from their homes to new urban centers, there was no telling who young women would meet or be seduced by. The prospect of virile, unmarried young people living on their own terrified parents, clergy, and community leaders who proposed various solutions—from single-sex residential centers, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), to sex-segregated public amusements, to censorship—in the hopes of curbing premarital sex. Such checks were not enough to safeguard young women from more experienced men or from exploring their own natural sexual urges, as Alice Chenoweth would soon find out.

  3

  A Very Bad Beecher Case

  A man is valued of men for many things, least of which is his chastity. A woman is valued of men for few things, chief of which is her chastity. This double code can by no sane or reasonable person be claimed as woman made.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1890

  ALICE CHENOWETH graduated from the Cincinnati Normal School on June 21, 1873, the first day of summer and a day symbolic of new beginnings. Because travel was expensive, it is unlikely that her mother or her surviving siblings attended the commencement ceremony. With crops to tend and small mouths to feed, the Chenoweths of Missouri could not make twenty-year-old Alice the priority. Most likely, Alice marked her accomplishment in the same way that she had achieved it: alone.

  Alice began the 1873 school year with a classroom of her own in Sandusky, Ohio, 230 miles north of
Cincinnati, where she had been offered a promising position in a growing school district and her first regular paycheck.1 For the second summer in a row, Alice placed her belongings in her trunk and headed for the train station. Sandusky’s leading citizen, Oran Follett, had helped create several of the city’s new railroad lines, including the Sandusky-Columbus-Cincinnati track that would have ferried Alice to her new home in one day’s time. This was the farthest north Alice had yet traveled, and besides her stay in Cincinnati, it was her first experience living in a community not dominated by white transplants from Virginia.

  Sandusky was settled by residents of Connecticut in the early 1800s and had the look and feel of a New England town. Located on the shores of Lake Erie, blue water as far as the eye could see, Sandusky had long served as a hub on the Underground Railroad. From Sandusky, freedom seekers crossed over into Canada or took the train to Detroit or Chicago to join long-standing communities of freed people. The Civil War was also marked on Sandusky’s landscape and psyche by the presence of Johnson’s Island in Sandusky Bay, which had imprisoned more than 15,000 Confederate soldiers and officers during the war.

  When Alice arrived in Sandusky, less than ten years after the sectional peace, the city was remaking itself into a transport and recreation hub. Louis Zistel had built the ships used to transport Confederate prisoners to Johnson’s Island. After the war, he repurposed them to carry tourists to nearby Cedar Point, the “Queen of American Watering Places.” Tourists and residents could also avail themselves of several popular steamboat excursions to the islands of Lake Erie, known collectively as “vacationland.”2 Compared with Cincinnati’s telltale odors and coal-choked vistas, Sandusky’s charms appealed.