by Betsy Israel
Not all marriages followed the stage directions—one partner set to play the whispering, encouraging angel and one to play the boss. But there was an inherent deceit in many male-female transactions. Consider that most men and women, husbands and wives, did not always know each other at the start of marriage. They knew only what to expect. No matter how pleasant on the surface, marriage could be what one young college girl called “a trial of inequality.” And not always in the ways expected. Activist Mary Dodge, who preferred instead of “singly blessed” the term “nobly discontent,” had put it this way: “True, he may be as good as she, but he might not be good enough for her.”
The best relationship a woman had was often with her girlfriends.
Sketches from the mid-and late nineteenth century show two women huddled together at the center of a dark velvet davenport, holding hands. During the Civil War era, they were dressed in crinolines so wide that the women look like matching parachutes—ready to jump, together. Later, in photographs, they’re shown strolling, bustles out and arms linked. A magazine illustration common throughout the Victorian age shows one writing a letter to the other, who is pictured inside a daydream cartoon balloon, the edges frilly, like a valentine, the beloved’s imagined face angelic.
Special friends usually met at boarding school, and typically their parents encouraged the duet. In the ideal parental scenario, two young girls would be “smashed”—think of best friends going steady—and once smashed, they’d learn trust, loyalty, tolerance, patience. Once they’d mastered these skills they would be able, theoretically at least, to transfer them onto a marital relationship. Even if those who wed never felt quite the same about their husbands.
At the time there were far fewer taboos on touching between same-sex friends and it was common for affectionate girls to kiss each other, to sleep in the same bed, and to engage in what we’d consider foreplay—and possibly more. The term “lesbian”—the very idea—did not in its current sense yet exist. Until it was redefined, circa 1919, to discredit “new spinsters,” that is, independent, professional singles, the word conjured a series of images from antiquity, usually transvestites, for example, a medieval Frenchwoman clad in armor and perched on a horse. Many girls’ school professors, prime examples of the singly blessed, lived with special friends—smashes that had turned into lifelong partnerships. To their students, what could have seemed more natural than women in pairs?
The intense devotion of many a smash is revealed in girls’ most secretive correspondence. One girl wrote of “the thrill of our pet dovey times” and a “burning sensation, both when I am with you—as you will know—and when I am alone and imagining back.” Studies made in 1900 of twenty thousand “Boston marriages”—two women who lived as sisters or lovers—and of numerous smashes revealed episodes of mutual masturbation. Other couples give no hint of overt sexual activity—or what we’d consider overt sexual activity—but were, rather, said to be playful and affectionate.
Whatever the precise nature of the bond, smashed girls likely remained friends for life, whether or not one of them married. “My every nerve springs forward at attention when I hear the post arrive!!” wrote a married friend to another who was far off and unwed. In long letters illustrated with ink drawings—self-portraits, fancy matching gowns, two women out strolling—they reaffirmed their feelings for each other and helped each other negotiate the requirements of married life. One engaged New Englander revealed to her dearest friend in 1782 a shocking decision: she would never change her name. “I think it a good [name] and am determined not to change it without a prospect of some great advantage. I am sure to confront a tribunal.”
Threatened by these connections, some men called them immature, proof that women underneath were really children who could not put away girlish toys and dolls and sit properly alongside their mates. As far back as 1847, a visitor to the United States, one Domingo Sarmiento, concurred: “Americans have developed customs which have no parallel on this earth—the unmarried woman flies about with her friends as if it were a butterfly.”
The more unusual man found beauty in these friendships, sometimes collecting and reading aloud women’s letters to one another. For this odd connoisseur, female love letters were refined works of sentimental expression, the prose equivalent of a hand-carved miniature or cameo. Scholar Carroll Smith-Rosenberg writes that Goethe published the love letters sent between his fiancée, Bettina, and a countess she was deeply attached to; Margaret Fuller, respected New England intellectual, found a U.S. publisher for the volume. To underscore how important these bonds were in the young (and older) female life, consider the life span of one early study on the subject, The Friendships of Women, by William R. Alger. It was published in Boston in 1869 and by 1890 had reached its twelfth printing.
It was obvious still that to marry was to win at the era’s female lottery—if not necessarily hit the jackpot—but the point is that a few women actively, and without trace of pathos, had begun to question the contest. In articles entitled “A Loyal Woman’s No,” and “The Difficulties That Accrue to Our Sex from the Marriage Bond,” they argued for allowing some female lives to evolve on their own terms, possibly with their own chosen friends or family. As one midcentury woman, a self-styled biological researcher, wrote to her “dearest dear”: “I cannot wait these days to turn 30! Then I may put away all pretense of being marriageable and concentrate on my interests.”
SEND ME NO FLOWERS
Starting in the 1870s, the marriage rate among educated women plummeted to 60 percent, compared with 90 percent of all women in the general population, and the figure would remain low until 1913 or ’14. Remember that these women lived in an era that celebrated feats of daring and genius in the visual and dramatic arts, social and physical sciences, transportation, politics, and archeology. Explorers, doctors, even realist novelists were heroes, secular gods lauded for their intellectual gifts and their bravery. A talented woman would have been acutely aware of her potential.
And she also would have been acutely aware that marriage carried with it specific dangers. One in every thirty women died in childbirth. And there was plenty of opportunity to witness a live unanesthetized birth before marriage, an experience that Susan B. Anthony herself called “a very nasty business.” (The entire nature of the business would become far nastier in 1880, when the U.S. government declared abortion and the few extant forms of contraception illegal—a ban on all abortions that would remain in place until the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.)
Then one had to contemplate husbands.
Even the loyal and genuinely loving ones couldn’t help but domineer, and many of them, even the very best, were likely to drink. In fact, it was widely accepted that all men drank, just as all men used spittoons and knew their way around a rifle. (Some even claimed drinking was healthy. Midcentury it was often argued that whiskey was cleaner and safer to drink than New York City public water.) Earlier in the nineteenth century the little-known but remarkable Women’s Moral Reform Society had railed against alcohol as the primary cause of spousal battering, rape, and the use of prostitutes. There were always pious groups who specialized in social cleanup, “municiple housekeeping,” as it was called. But none had made the explicit link between male drinking and male abuse of women. In its women-run newspaper, The Advocate, Moral Reform editors listed the names of men seen leaving brothels. As they saw it, this was “The Everyman” and they also called him “The Destroyer.” One Advocate writer stated, “I’d as soon bed down with a nice clean dog as with a man… holding a bottle.”
That’s not to say that the singly blessed used terms such as “The Destroyer” or that they refused to hear marriage proposals. Many young women had simply learned to reject them—no matter how often they were repeated.
In one famed case, a Boston woman refused the same man sixteen times; another allegedly turned down twenty-six different men. Poet Lucy Larcom, who worked for years as a mill girl in Lowell, Massachusetts, reported that her firs
t proposal left her with hives for a week. Florence Nightingale seems to have turned them down weekly, pausing to consider just one man so exceptional, famed, and intelligent that only the most beautiful and brainy of the famed Nightingale girls would do. She spent six months writing furiously in her journals to explain her refusal, a grueling narrative alternating between rage and self-loathing, a suspicion of mental illness, and a tenuous pride in following the secret pledge she had made to her herself about her duties. My favorite terrorized-fiancé story belongs to Jane Austen, a young woman said by one of her closest friends to “shift,” to be charming and decorous and yet to possess “eyes the color of a viper’s.” Once, while visiting friends, she listened warily as a young suitor made so passionate a case, she stunned herself by accepting, then left for home. But not long into the ride she began to feel queasy. One hour later, she had her driver turn back, despite bad weather, to rescind her agreement. After seven hours of additional traveling she arrived home physically ill but relieved.
As more unattached women seemed to be working, giving speeches, or just out walking around at odd hours, the Massachusetts governor once again proposed direct action. This time he hoped to ship the state’s twenty-one thousand redundant women to Oregon or California, where wives, as always, were in short supply. (As historians would later point out, so were prostitutes, although this particular need the governor did not publicly address.)
The proposal died, but not the paranoid views of single women. What seemed to be changing was the way some single women, the “blessed” in particular, responded. In public situations, even the youngest had been trained to ignore nasty epithets and walk proudly. College women took an eager part in debates, for example, at Oberlin, “Is Married Life More Conducive to a Woman’s Happiness than Single?” or “Is the Marriage Relation Essential to the Happiness of Mankind?” True, for girls at coed schools it was hard, in almost any situation, not to run off crying. But there are records of girls who braved the taunting (“The Co-ed leads a wretched life/She eats potatoes from a knife!”). In an 1863 diary one college girl remarks that she is developing “a natural armor, which seems attached and fastened tight on to my body and brain. I hope someday I may step out of it.”
Professional women out on the road needed an even stronger suit of armor and perhaps a sword. The original abolitionists were typically booed off stages. Men called them hags who’d never had men and wanted to free the black “species” only so they could snag themselves a black male. Social workers and nurses typically slept in the worst parts of a city, sometimes among people who had contagious diseases. Others, traveling for pleasure, to see friends who’d married or gone to teach at far-off schools, suffered nasty comments along the way. Still, a trip for the single woman was a test, an adventure that would have been unimaginable to her as a girl; some stayed on the road for up to six months. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founding feminist and the mother of seven, once wrote jokingly to her single and suddenly absent colleague, Susan B. Anthony: “Where are you? Dead or married?”)
Back at home, Theodore Roosevelt, an up-and-coming public figure, accused them of committing “race suicide,” meaning that they were failing to produce healthy white babies amid the many (I paraphrase) filthy, copulating immigrants. But as single women saw it, that was the vision of a paranoid man who happened, by chance, to be a politician. Ignoring him, they continued their school studies, their work, and their travel. Clara Barton’s sister, Mary, had an idea for them all. Like everyone else, she had “viewed from a safe distance the exquisite happiness of marriage.” In response, she declared, “Let us form an Old Maid’s Hall!”
THE MAKING OF A FEMALE COMMUNE
There was no precedent for group life among American single women who were not nuns. Most unmarried women ended up back where they’d started—at home, tending to the usual family crises: illnesses, pregnancies, and the usual miserable complaints. Poet Lucy Larcom put it this way: “I cannot think my own thoughts in the thick of other people’s lives.”
Louisa May Alcott echoed the sentiment in 1868: “I want to realize my dream of supporting the family and being perfectly independent. Heavenly hope!” This she is said to have written in her journal, so we may assume she wrote it in secret, separate from the diary her relatives would have seen. In many households anything a family member wrote, any letter received, was considered open for reading or recitation. This passed the time and served also as a means—especially in houses occupied by teachers or writers—for exercising one’s critical faculties. Or just for criticizing. (Louisa May Alcott’s father, the famed preacher and educator Bronson Alcott, noted that, of his daughters’ journals, “Anna’s was about other people. Louisa’s is about herself.”)
One contemporary, Ellen “Nelly” Wheeton, was caught with the contraband: a journal hidden beneath some papers in a drawer. In it, she had apparently expressed disdain for the married state. As she managed later to write: “[Mother] found it necessary to prohibit the use of pen and ink, or slate and pencil, except while receiving instruction from her or the writing master. My brother was made to spy upon my actions… he often threatened to tell mother when he had seen me writing upon the wall with a pin, which I sometimes did when I had no other resources.”
But could such a young woman have simply moved in with like-minded female friends? Consider it: a house, a self-sustained universe, where women could live happily among themselves, refusing marriage and, more important, childbearing. The idea was blasphemous. It was as if Herland, the utopian 1915 novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, had sprung to life. (In this work, serialized in the author’s own magazine, a British expedition sets out to find a hidden country populated solely by genius women warriors; as they discover, men of all classes have been extinguished.) In short, the idea of an all-female house incited alarm.
Yet there was a long tradition of communal living among single women. In Great Britain it dated to A.D. 385 and the founding of the Ursuline and Pauline orders, religious communes that were actually more like early social-work agencies. Lone girls from all over England arrived daily so desperate and grateful that, from the descriptions, it’s not hard to imagine them standing on the steps and shouting “Sanctuary!” These groups—and there were constantly new ones—quickly earned the title “bastard flocks,” for their loose approach to devotional life. Without quite meaning to, they had devised the only viable escape for unwed women stuck at home: an unquestionably proper religious setting in which girls could learn something useful. In fact, to claim a religious calling—whether fantasized or cleverly invented—would become the means for many determined single women to break free. Florence Nightingale, for example, claimed that she’d had an epiphany as opposed to a rebellious fit and this calling, this quasi-religious mission, allowed her slowly to extricate herself from her controlling family.
But the conventual life was a hard one. The novitiates, or the new girls, spent a year working through strictly regimented days on the grounds. After that they were trained to perform charitable works for the poor. These works—nursing, child care, housecleaning, cooking—were physically draining and carried out in places so run-down, in weather so bad, few girls told their parents just what they did. (One communard, a nurse trainee, returned home, told her family what she did, and found that no one would come near for fear of disease.) But the rewards! A justifiable life outside the house! A job, a place, procured on her own! Most thrilling was the chance to be judged for one’s skills and bravery and not one’s ability to please a man.
Some communards were tremendously influential. Annie Macpherson, a young Scottish woman, established a fund to take in Arab street kids who’d been abandoned all over London. Working with a small team, she arranged for their safe transport and adoption by families in Canada. That’s how I describe her achievement. One of her male contemporaries saw it differently. Here was yet another woman blindly ignoring her responsibilities. Instead of marriage she was determined to “explain the world to swarthy stu
dents.”
She had her American counterparts. Single abolitionist Fanny Wright, along with her spinster sister, established an all-women commune on some uncleared land in Tennessee and called it Nashoba. Their goal was to educate freed slaves, but the effort was cut down by charges of free love and unfair labor practices; poor finances ultimately forced the school to close. As if in penance, Wright at thirty-six entered a loveless marriage.
But another sort of British commune, this one originally male, would have a serious and lasting impact on American spinsters. That was the settlement house, a social-work institute set down in the worst parts of major cities and, in America, run by corps of women, often college friends who then lived there together for the rest of their lives. Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago, and Lillian Wald of New York’s Henry Street Settlement are the most famous, and their “houses,” of course, are still in business. But there were many others that did the same—offered to poor women, and especially immigrant women, necessary services, whether medical referrals, English-language classes, or specific items such as blankets, food, and clothing.
And their sights were set higher. Senior staff trained young women “of promise” (meaning girls with a clean appearance, a serious demeanor, and a college diploma) and sought out others with political backgrounds. House leaders formed alliances with one another to construct what scholar Carroll Smith-Rosenberg calls “a delicate web of interlocking social justice organizations.” Over time, settlement leaders and their allies campaigned for child-labor legislation, women’s unionization, and the founding of the NAACP (despite all the justified charges of early white feminist, specifically suffragist, racism). And many settlement causes, suffrage for one, eventually became U.S. law. Some of their residents would later move into positions of power, especially during the 1930s, when Eleanor Roosevelt tapped them to run New Deal agencies that dealt with women.
