by Betsy Israel
For “economic salvation” she considered marriage. She considered it all of one day, coming to the same conclusion that Susan B. Anthony reached on behalf of an undecided niece: “Marriage. It is an all absorbing profession.” Instead, she worked as a seamstress, a paid companion. She took teaching jobs at her father’s school and argued with him about his plans to leave her the school (she didn’t want it). As her mother aged, more of the housework fell to Louisa and her less-than-enthusiastic youngest sister. She had to get out. The Civil War was on, and she wrote in her diary: “November—30 years old. Decided I must go to Washington as a nurse, if I would find a place. Help is needed and I love nursing and MUST LET OUT MY PENT UP ENERGY in some way. I want new experiences…. So I’ve sent my name in if they will have me.”
In Washington she worked diligently as a nurse-in-training at the Union Hotel Hospital, where she treated thousands of injuries, witnessed terrifying operations and many deaths. For a woman who’d spent most of her life indoors, it was an astonishing experience and she afterward reworked her letters home into a book called Hospital Sketches (1868).
She never really went “home” after the war. Living but not slaving in Concord, she became the editor of a children’s magazine, Merry’s Museum, and worked continuously for the suffrage movement. (She was the first woman to register to vote in Concord after Massachusetts passed its state suffrage law.) She wrote ten novels and two volumes of nonfiction. When her youngest sister died, she adopted her niece, Lulu, who’d been named for her, and took her to Boston, where she established a new family compound.
Louisa May Alcott never married because she could not envision the latter half of her life, like the first part, trapped in a house that needed cleaning. As she put it: “The loss of liberty… and self-respect is poorly repaid by the barren honor of being Mrs. instead of Miss.”
Like Louisa May Alcott, Clara Barton, the youngest of five children, longed to escape from Massachusetts, once writing in her diary, “Have ye work, my brave countrymen, real work for me there?… Is there anything useful I can do?” She’d been working since age fifteen when, after tutoring her at home, the family sent her out as a teacher. For years she reported feeling nervous in these jobs, insecure, and always tired. She later worked to organize free schools in towns throughout New England—apparently still feeling very shy but not always quite so nervous. She was most proud of an experimental free school she had planned and opened in New Jersey. But when she learned that her male coworkers, even those beneath her in the hierarchy, were earning more than she was, she quit, “full of familiar uncertainty and queer sickness.”
Through an acquaintance, Clara took a “real” job in the U.S. Patents Office in Washington—at just about the time wounded Civil War soldiers started appearing in the city. Although her only nursing experience had been the two years she spent tending a sick brother, she immediately began to organize relief efforts. Her quick, critical observation was that nurses were plentiful; supplies were short. She collected and advertised for food, blankets, and medicine and soon after founded an organization that would distribute goods to battle sites. The scheme was so efficiently executed that the U.S. Surgeon General granted her a pass to travel with army ambulances “for the purpose of distributing comforts for the sick and wounded, and nursing them.”
She was one of the only women on the front lines of the Civil War, appearing as if on schedule at every major battle and making sure there was enough of everything to go around. After the war she spent years working to find soldiers still missing in action. She also took her first trip to Europe and while there met with members of the International Red Cross. Immediately she envisioned an American branch, an organization that would function like a Clara Barton during the Civil War: getting supplies and other assistance to disaster sites. Despite complex political opposition, she opened the first chapter of the American Red Cross in 1881 and began training recruits in emergency procedures and a new concept she had devised called “first-aid skills.” Barton invented the first-aid kit. She wrote a book called The Women Who Went to the Field, a Civil War study that included Louisa May Alcott. She was present at many Red Cross interventions—fires, floods, tornados. As an older woman, she became one of the first female diplomats in U.S. history and spent six months as a substitute prison warden. She was the first woman ever to hold such a resolutely male post. It was often said—and this was a real first—that she was “very popular among the prisoners.”
* * *
Florence Nightingale’s story had a far stranger and more ambiguous ending. When the Crimean War ended, something in Florence, arguably the most famous woman in England, seemed to snap.
Whether it was battle fatigue, psychosomatic or genuine illness—she’d been exposed to hundreds of viruses—she retreated to bed, alone, refusing all requests to appear or speak. The quarantine lasted months, until she was named to a royal commission investigating health issues in the British army. She was also commissioned to write a monograph on the health of the British military in India. In 1860 she published Notes on Nursing, a guide that is still in print, and used the rest of her Crimean funds to open her own training hospital. But most of this activity, including her involvement in the Nightingale clinic, took place from her room. She communicated through letters and rarely spoke.
By age forty she had done it all—reached her professional peak and permanently won the war with her mother. It is hard to believe, but during the remaining fifty years of her life, Florence rarely left her flat. Now and then she heard or gave lectures, attended openings for hospitals, and had graduating students of the institute over for tea. But the majority of her time she spent in bed with a malady even she could not cure.
I’ve always thought that Charlotte Perkins Gilman had Florence in mind when she wrote her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), the tale of a woman confined to bedrest. (The diagnosis: nerves, neuritis, neuralgia—the vague ailments ascribed to uppity women—a version of which appeared on aspirin labels into the 1960s.) All day the woman stares at the wallpaper, until one day its shapes and patterns—yellow flowers, loops, and vines—start to undulate. Then one day a vine turns into a tiny struggling woman. Every day thereafter, she wakes to see tiny women crawling everywhere, trapped inside the yellow wallpaper, until the entire room is overtaken by a howling morass of fairy-size women.
Florence Nightingale is pictured in most history texts as a female crusader wearing a halo. Fair enough. She was a brilliant exemplar of what single women could accomplish despite intense opposition. But she is also a strange and bitter reminder of the high personal price such women paid.
AND NOW THE POOR DEAR THING
During the nineteenth century, many novels set out to map aspects of the spinster experience—Cranford (1853) by Elizabeth Gaskell, The Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot, The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) by Anthony Trollope, Emma (1816) by Jane Austen, which featured the classically inept Miss Bates, the ultimate spinster biddy, fluttering, talking out of turn, and babbling on at the sidelines. Miss Bates has a twittery cousin in Jane Osborne, the stuck-at-home daughter in Vanity Fair (1848) by William Makepeace Thackeray, and another relative in Miss Tonks, the schoolteacher in Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862).
But none of these books—and there are hundreds of them—“solve” the spinster’s problem. Some of the characters walk through life oblivious, unaware that most people think them useless, afeminine, and dim-witted. Other spinsters have analyzed their social status and feel all the proper outrage, only what to do? They speak out in long angry monologues addressed either to mirrors or to parents who are powerless to help.
Very few novels propose alternatives. One entertaining exception is a British novel called The Odd Women (1898) by George Gissing. His story begins with a widowed doctor who, in the first paragraph, dies in a carriage accident. He leaves behind five daughters, none of whom has any known skills. He leaves them no money, and due to the sexis
t British inheritance laws, no house. They abandon the country estate that is no longer theirs and head for London. There they begin the downward spiral of so many single women of the time, both in life and fiction. Two sisters die. The youngest, prettiest, and least able to withstand it is sent out to do factory work while the older two talk a great deal about starting schools or perhaps just teaching in one. Yet they never do. They sit about the parlor of their hotel and, later, on the beds of shabbier rooming houses, and as months pass, their plans and their conversations make less and less sense. They’re always drunk.
Then the three surviving sisters are reunited with an intense young woman they’d met years earlier. Her name is Rhoda Nunn, and she is hawkish-looking, unmarried, and proud, a spinster who considers her position a privilege. With an older friend of hers, Miss Barfoot, Rhoda has started a special school for single women; she teaches them how to “typewrite,” and to take dictation. Recognizing that there is little she can do for the elder two, Rhoda persuades Monica, the youngest, to leave the factory and enroll at her school. But Monica is a poor, unfocused student and soon leaves to marry a much older man who has pursued—some might say stalked—her for months. Monica does not love him, but she knows she cannot support herself, that she has neither the will nor the talent to live in the world like Rhoda Nunn. The marriage is disastrous. The husband expects his young wife to wait on him. Monica is shocked by the presumption, uninterested and resentful. Watching it transpire, Rhoda again feels blessed.
That is, until Miss Barfoot introduces Rhoda to her nephew, Everard. He is deeply impressed with the solidity and devotion Rhoda brings to her work and, to Rhoda’s amazement, he expresses romantic interest. For a long dreamy time Rhoda is enraptured by this attentive nephew and with the idea that a man should pursue her at all. It starts to seem that she might leave the school and marry Everard. Then Monica dies in childbirth and Rhoda, after agonizing contemplation, rejects Everard, relieved, it seems, to have that part of her life, that possibility, over and done with. “No man had ever made love to her,” Gissing writes. “She derived satisfaction from this thought, using it to strengthen her life’s purpose; having passed her thirtieth year, she might take it as a settled thing… and so shut the doors on every instinct tending to trouble her intellectual decisions.”
Rhoda returns to the school and with the two reformed alcoholic sisters takes in Monica’s child from the useless husband to claim as theirs. It makes sense. As she says, for women like herself, “the world is moving.”
That meant the women who were known as “strong-minded.” As The Independent observed in 1873, “A dozen years ago hardly one female could be found… who would openly acknowledge that she was strong-minded…. Now they not only acknowledge that they are such, but they glory in it.” Investigative reporter Ida Tarbell added, “Four hundred years ago, a woman sought celibacy as an escape from sin. Today she adopts it to escape inferiority and servitude; superiority and freedom are her aim.”
But even the strong-minded would find their own lives, their own gloried versions of an Old Maid’s Hall, hard to sustain. Spread out among schools, settlements, and all receptive points between, single women struggled to keep up contact. Letters were very slow in arriving, and it was costly to travel. Holidays and birthdays passed without one’s primary friends and relatives around to celebrate. Important news—of a move, an illness, sometimes of a death—arrived weeks, sometimes months, after the fact.
Losing a job could be traumatic. Aging single women found the hunt for work an exhausting, demoralizing process, and it was tiring to imagine reorganizing an unconventional life at age forty-plus. Some maintained the stamina for political work, living meagerly on small honoraria augmented by donations and article writing, but much about their lives seemed increasingly difficult. Serious politico-feminists traveled year-round, claiming no residence, their days spent on bad roads (in horse-drawn carriages or on wooden-seated trains) to reach provincial places that were often dangerous. Protestors sometimes broke up their speeches by hurling raw eggs, symbolic reminders of the speaker’s presumably unfertilized ova.
“I do not feel like myself these times,” wrote a teacher who was “staying on against my wishes” in Virginia, to a sister staying on against her own wishes in Ohio, 1875. “I dare not look at a map and the spaces between us and the impossibility of it so weakens me. I admit I have dropped into tears…. Will I ever see you? Or anyone?”
These separations, and other anxieties of spinster life, were most realistically expressed in a tiny genre of short fiction known as “spinster stories.” Written in the mid-nineteenth century, these tales were often collected in year-end gift books, elaborately illustrated volumes of the year’s best literature, essays, and short fiction that made fancy and beloved Christmas presents.
In these stories the spinster often appears as a wise, older aunt who one day decides to talk of her life to a young niece. Usually, the niece is not prepared to hear about it. My spinster aunt once fell in love? My spinster aunt had a life outside this house? Of course, in the end the niece is forced to reevaluate not only her views of her aged aunt (who isn’t really as old as she’d seemed) but her presumptions about women, marriage, what it might really be like to live alone.
An interesting example of this genre is a story called “One Old Maid,” from a Scribner’s collection entitled Handicapped (1881), by Marian Harland. The story begins on New Year’s Eve in the opulent dining room of a mansion. There, beneath the chandeliers, we meet Juliana Scriba, a handsome middle-aged woman whose family has gathered for a private meal that includes for the first time the fiancé of her daughter Emma. As the guests debate their topic—“Is it nobler to live for others?”—the butler announces a Miss Boyle, “a tall meager lady…wrapped in a thick plaid shawl, simpering and blinking.” She enters, apologizing, declaring that she’s there but a moment and dare not sit. She was only passing and, but, oh… Juliana, as if speaking to a servant, demands that “Co”—who is her sister—sit down this instant!
Co, short for Corinne, sits and starts to talk. She talks for so long that the entire table stares at her as she eats, her bonnet strings trailing around on the plate. After applying a grandiose adjective to every food item, she takes a “noble” orange and readies to leave. A butler hands her a large basket, and one son is instructed to see “his aunt” out with it. The fiancé is shocked: Aunt? Sister to Juliana? That? He embarks on a long monologue on the evils of celibacy, while the girls ask their mother, “How old is Aunt Co? Forty? Fifty? Seventy-five?” Juliana defends Corinne, but it is useless. They are all deep in discussion of the curse that befalls careless women.
It’s a long walk back to Co’s, the original family homestead, miles it seems, all of it through snowy marsh. Corinne wishes out loud she’d worn her boots, but such is the weather of a spinster aunt. After what seems like an hour, she stops by a tiny house without lights, hears shrieking, and rushes her way to the back. Corinne hurries in to find a whalish woman jerking around on the floor. An impatient nurse, standing nearby, declares, “She has been this way the whole time.” Corinne comforts “Lulu,” the sprawling creature, announcing that “Sister” has come. Corinne and Lulu, as we’ve learned in a conversational aside between Juliana and her husband, are twins.
Meanwhile, back at Juliana’s, there’s another unexpected visitor, Aleck, a man once rejected by the busy, committed Corinne. As he explains, he has recently lost his wife and has come in search of his onetime love. Thrilled to learn that she’s just left, he rushes out to her house (in a closed carriage, mind you). He enters rapidly, then stops cold as he sees an old woman rise from her chair. “Miss Corinne Boyle?”
“I don’t wonder you ask, Aleck,” Corrine says, faltering, “but I should have known you anywhere.” Then she starts to sob. After a while, with her nose red and skin chalky white, they speak as old friends, although he cannot hide his disappointment and revulsion. His thoughts: “What a fool! What a sentimental simpleton he had
been to forget that a woman must fade fast in a life like hers! Fade, and shrivel, and dry into hardness!”
For a while after he leaves, Corinne cries out to God at this unfairness. And yet as she calms down she reassures herself that God has guided her well in this life. Her ability to love, and receive love, was not to be within the realm of men; it is love born of commitment, honor, the keeping of a promise long ago made to a dying mother. She has kept her word and in return received unconditional love.
She has also upheld her end of one classical spinster formula: Divide a family of girls into wives and outcasts. The wives reign, and the outcasts, even if they chose their fate, as did Corinne, tell themselves elaborate religious stories about the rewards of their sacrifice. One recent example of this sisterly dichotomy occurs in Marvin’s Room, by Scott McPherson (1992), a play first and then a movie starring Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton as the sisters. The sister who has remained at home all her life to care for ailing relatives is now ill herself with leukemia. After some persuasion, the prodigal, biker-chick sister returns home with her surly adolescent son. After many conflicts and awkward attempts at reconciliation, the sick one explains to the prodigal how she was able to stand her life as family nurse. It’s because, simply, she has been unconditionally loved. And although she doesn’t say this, she has been able to shut herself off from the world, avoid sex and the messiness of men in exchange for an unshakable sense of nunlike purpose. In the voice of the deluded martyr, she cries: “I’ve had so much love.”
We are supposed to find this pathetic, and because it invokes such a profound denial of a fully lived life, we do. At the same time, she’s had the love she claims to have wanted. In remaining true to her vow, so has Corinne. But the reader understands the spinster formula, the essential code. We are never allowed to consider her choice as anything less than insane.
