American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Three-quarters of the women questioned, in a remarkable survey taken by a female physician at the end of the century, wrote that they desired and enjoyed sex. Many said they needed it for spiritual, even more than physical, fulfillment, and resisted the idea that sex was for reproduction alone. “My husband and I believe in intercourse for its own sake,” wrote one woman in 1893. “We wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it, rather than physically, when it does not occur, because it is the highest, most sacred expression of our oneness.” But with even a slight risk of pregnancy, “we deny ourselves the intercourse, feeling all the time that we are losing that which keeps us closest to each other.”

  Some middle-class women, including those of some affluence, found their prospects a source of despair. The feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, great-niece of Catharine, Harriet, and Henry Ward Beecher, suffered a crippling depression in 1885 at the age of twenty-five. “I went to bed crying; woke in the night crying, sat on the edge of the bed in the morning and cried—from sheer continuous pain,” she wrote later. “Not physical—the doctors examined me and found nothing the matter.” Still later she would write The Yellow Wallpaper, a fictionalized look at her illness which compared the confinement of a mental patient with that of a wife.

  Other notable, talented women, including Jane Addams and Margaret Sanger, endured the same experience. Alice James, brilliant sister of Henry and William, suffered a mysterious disease from the age of nineteen until she died of breast cancer at forty-two. “I think the difficulty is my inability to assume the receptive attitude, that cardinal virtue in women, the absence of which has always made me so uncharming to & uncharmed by the male sex,” she wrote, referring to her experiences with male doctors in particular. Countless other women, faced with a discrepancy between their potential, their dreams, and reality, took part in an epidemic of invalidism observed by Catharine Beecher as early as 1855. “…[T]he more I traveled, the more the conviction was pressed on my attention that there was a terrible decay of female health all over the land, and that this evil was bringing with it an incredible extent of individual, domestic, and social suffering, that was increasing in an alarming ratio.”

  At the same time the “idle wife” was becoming a status symbol for many an upwardly mobile man. In her vivid, lavish dress, the better-off middle-class woman had become the “chief ornament” of her husband’s household, without the need—or ability—to work. An ideal of feminine beauty evolved in which the wife, pale and fragile, received visitors while languishing on a chaise longue. Charlotte Gilman for one considered a wife’s only work in such a household to be sex, and could see no difference between that and prostitution. In direct opposition to her great-aunt, Gilman believed the household should be less, not more, central to a woman’s life.

  Doctors usually diagnosed the common complaints of these women as arising from disorders of the reproductive organs. Some even perceived a woman’s body as a battleground between the brain and the uterus—generally, they concluded, it was healthier for the uterus to control. Cures abounded, from water cures to bleeding and purges. Toward the end of the century, symptoms of these “female diseases” increasingly included episodes of hysteria. A Viennese physician, Sigmund Freud, stated that these physical symptoms could have a mental source.

  A sensational charge of adultery in the early seventies lifted issues of sexuality out of the whispered gossip of the social elite and plunged them into open courtrooms and the public prints, and hence into middle-class consciousness. These charges pitted the most celebrated preacher of the day, Henry Ward Beecher, against the most notorious woman leader, Victoria Claflin Woodhull.

  Beecher had grown up with every advantage that Woodhull had lacked. He was one of thirteen children of the thrice-married Lyman Beecher, the famous Presbyterian clergyman. Educated at Amherst College, Henry had gone through years of inner turbulence and doubt until he decided to devote his life and love to Christ and man, a decision highlighted by a mystic revelation one May day in the Ohio woods. Throughout, he had the support of his father and two remarkable sisters, Catharine and Harriet. For all his religious devotion, Beecher was no stiff-necked, sanctimonious moralist. A big, genial, rumpled man, with sensual features and the head of a lion, he possessed a warmth and exuberance that endeared him to a multitude of friends, especially women. But he preached all the middle-class virtues to the huge middle-class congregation he drew to his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn.

  Victoria Claflin grew up in a small Ohio town, one of ten children of a mother suspected of mania and a father of pyromania. After the neighbors gave a benefit to help the family out of town, Victoria and her sister Tennessee roamed through Ohio as itinerant spiritualists and vendors of such patent medicines as Elixir of Life, until one of Tennessee’s “patients” died of cancer of the breast and the “healer” was indicted for manslaughter. Victoria, having married and divorced one Woodhull, and then one Colonel Blood, made her way to New York, with both men and her sister in tow. There the two sisters prospered. Tennessee, now plump and flirtatious, so entranced Commodore Vanderbilt with her “magnetic healing” that the aging tycoon wanted to marry her but settled for establishing the two sisters—with a check—as the “lady brokers” of Wall Street.

  That was just the start. In April 1870, Victoria Woodhull announced her candidacy for President of the United States. Six weeks later she put out the first issue of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. Advertisements for bond issues and brokerage houses—including Jay Cooke & Co.—filled page one although, weekly, the masthead proclaimed, “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives!” Inner pages advertised books on “The Physiology of Menstruation,” “Impregnation,” “Sexual Generation,” “Monstrosities,” “The Law of Sexual Intercourse.” Woodhull set up and headed the Victoria League, which had nothing to do with the British queen, and she won a big following in labor and socialist circles. Viewed askance by some of the more respectable woman leaders, she made such an eloquent plea for woman’s suffrage before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives that she was invited to sit on the platform with Susan B. Anthony and other suffragists then meeting in convention in Washington. Endorsed by her own Weekly and by the Equal Rights party in 1872, she marched to the polls but was denied a ballot—and was unlisted on the ballot she was denied.

  Woodhull’s main concern, however, was always sexual freedom. Week after week her paper poured out pleadings, indignations, charges, and outrages. With the aid of Stephen P. Andrews, scholar, spelling reformer, spiritualist, and advocate of free love, she confronted the issues that middle-class Americans had ducked. Now that Negro slavery was overthrown, she said, “I intend to do all in my small power toward the overthrow of that other slavery, more deeply rooted, more subtle, more obscure and tenacious, and more demoralizing! than ever the slavery of the black man was.” She went on: “Whether it be agreeable to people to hear these questions of marriage, divorce, abortion and prostitution discussed or not, the time is coming, nay, is upon them, when they will not only be compelled to hear, but to decide.”

  More and more she veered toward open advocacy of Free Love. At a tumultuous meeting in New York’s Steinway Hall, advertised by huge posters calling for “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” in the social as well as the political and religious sphere, she took her stand. Goaded by a heckler who shouted, “Are you a free lover?” she cried:

  “YES! I AM A FREE LOVER! I HAVE AN INALIENABLE, CONSTITUTIONAL, AND NATURAL RIGHT TO LOVE WHOM I MAY, TO LOVE AS LONG OR AS SHORT A PERIOD AS I CAN, TO CHANGE THAT LOVE EVERY DAY IF I PLEASE!” The hall erupted in cheers, hisses, and catcalls, but Woodhull went on. Not only must no law interfere with this right, she declared, but “it is your duty” both to accord it and “see that I am protected in it.” By free love she did not mean “sexual promiscuity,” she explained that evening and thereafter, but “the highest kind of love” whose supreme “gratification comes from rendering its object the greatest amount of happiness.”


  But, more than sexual promiscuity, Woodhull despised sexual hypocrisy, and increasingly the man she saw as its chief embodiment—Henry Ward Beecher. Through mutual friends she learned that Beecher had carried on an affair with one of his parishioners, Mrs. Theodore Tilton; the wounded husband himself not only complained to Victoria but had an affair with her for six months. Goaded by the insinuations of Beecher’s sister Harriet (long famous as author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), desperate over her weekly’s loss of advertising and readers, she revealed the whole story in the November 2, 1872, issue, in a long, detailed article that she hoped would “burst like a bombshell into the ranks of the moralistic social camp.” It did. In the same issue she told in most intimate detail how a prominent man-about-town—not related to the Beecher situation—had seduced two young virgins. This charge aroused to action Anthony Comstock, secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and shortly not the alleged seducer but the two Woodhull sisters were thrust into the Ludlow Street jail.

  Victoria, bailed out after four weeks, spoke on “The Naked Truth” and was arrested again. She and her sister were acquitted of printing obscene matter, and the alleged seducer lost his suit against them for libel. Later, Tilton filed a charge against Beecher for adultery with Mrs. Tilton; after a long and sensational trial Beecher got off with a hung jury. First his congregation, and then 244 representatives of Congregational churches, backed him to the hilt. His popularity hardly dimmed, Beecher continued as “spokesman for a middle-class America,” in the words of a biographer, though he was unquestionably an enlightened spokesman, defending women’s and Negro rights, evolution, science, reform in general.

  To the glee of her critics, Woodhull’s Weekly failed; she was accused of using her lists of prostitutes’ middle-class clients for blackmail purposes; she was denied lecture halls for her free-love talks. When Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877 and his family contested his will, “Mrs. Satan” and her sister sailed to England amid rumors that Vanderbilt money had paid their way. But in England the sisters had their final revenge. Victoria married into a rich banking family, Tennessee into a viscountcy. Thus virtue was rewarded, as the two sisters, captivating as ever, escaped the American middle class by bounding into the English upper.

  The Farmer’s Lot

  Women migrating to the West would have scoffed at the “problems” of middle-class wives and mothers in eastern cities and suburbs. Often of middle-class status themselves, as they and their husbands had to possess some capital to strike out toward the prairie states and set up a new home, women pioneers and settlers were often reduced to a condition of labor that, by official finding, made them a vast and dispersed collection of sweated workers. “In plain language,” concluded a Department of Agriculture study in 1862, “a farmer’s wife, as a general rule, is a laboring drudge.” On three farms out of four, “the wife works harder, endures more, than any other on the place; more than the husband, more than the ‘farm hand,’ more than the ‘hired help’ of the kitchen.”

  Once the settlers had finished camping out, usually under wretched conditions, while putting up their sod or frame house, farm women settled into their routine. For a time they might cook over an open hearth, bending low over the coals, until cast-iron, wood-burning stoves became available. In the postwar years, many farm women continued to spend hours at the spinning wheel, using flax and wool off the farm and buying a little cotton thread. They were still making soap by pouring boiling water into a hopper of hardwood ashes, collecting the lye in the trough below, stirring in kitchen fats and grease, and pouring the “come” soap into tubs or molds. On Mondays they heated water over hearth or stove, added the soap, pounded the clothes against a washboard, then rinsed them, wrung them out by hand, and hung them out on a line. Theirs was not only “inside” work. With the help of older children, women planted gardens, milked cows, cleaned out henhouses, helped the men butcher hogs and plant fields, along with cooking three big meals a day and bearing and nursing children. Rosie Ise, raising twelve children, not only had to wash clothes and cook meals for her Kansas family but care for frequent guests and churn butter to sell in town.

  Conditions slowly improved in the homestead as farm women could buy factory goods and labor-saving devices. Yet, for many years, even a kitchen sink or a rotary egg beater were oddities. There was always a contrast between the husbands’ huge machines in the field and the wives’ primitive equipment in the home.

  Somehow farm women coped—and some much preferred their rural way of life to that of the “old country” or the East. When E.B., a Missouri farm wife, complained in The Household in the late 1870s about a three-hour tussle with an “obstinate churn,” cooking first for plowboys and then for harvesters and then for wheat stackers, and taking care of her twelfth baby, and entertaining “Mrs. Elite and her sister Miss Stylish,” and “their nephew Bon Ton,” and working often from 4:30 in the morning almost to midnight, other women wrote the journal to upbraid, advise, or reassure her. “When she wrote that,” said one letter, “she must have had a fit of the blues, or her bread would not rise, or the cow had kicked over the milk pail.”

  Whatever the tales of hardship and woe, Americans continued to trek west by the hundreds of thousands. Most of the settlers who poured into the Plains came from nearby states like Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, but a large number arrived from Canada, Germany, Sweden, England, and Ireland. The westward expansion accelerated in the 1880s and became an unprecedented boom. Kansas attracted the greatest number of settlers during this period—though it lost the most in the 1890s. The legislatures of Kansas and other prairie states carved out new counties by the dozens and new cities and towns by the hundreds.

  Some settlers were lured west by advertising campaigns. Eager to sell portions of the vast landholdings given them by the federal government—a total area larger than the state of Texas, or one-tenth of the entire United States—railroads wanted a flood of settlers to build up their freight and passenger income. The Homestead Act of 1862 and follow-up legislation were not so great a boon to the new settlers as their proponents had hoped—except for Northern Civil War veterans, who were given a number of special advantages. The railroads, speculators, and vast “bonanza” farms—which hired migrant labor—took most of the best land, leaving homesteaders quarter sections that were often rocky and distant from railroad lines.

  The more fortunate pioneers bought or laid claim to land that was by a river or creek. They constructed their homes and barns out of nearby timber, or out of sod made into bricks and dried in the sun. Solid and well insulated, sod houses could be kept fairly warm even in the coldest months, often with the help of buffalo chips and sunflower stalks as well as firewood. Weather was a constant concern. From the Dakota Territory down through Texas, rainfall came in mysterious cycles, and in the more westerly portions of this region, where rain was always sparse, droughts were especially long-lasting and severe. Drought or not, hot scorching summer winds sometimes seared the wheat and corn in their husks. Farm families had to cope as well with prairie fires, dust storms, tornadoes, buffalo herds, and devastating invasions of grasshoppers.

  Human adversaries were often more threatening than natural ones. Banks and mortgage companies proliferated in the prairie regions, fueled by a surplus of eastern investment capital. Although farmers had to pay exorbitant interest rates of up to 25 percent or more, they tended to borrow more and more to build new barns and fences, buy the latest equipment, and expand their domains. The ubiquitous loan agents secured mortgages first on the land and then on farm equipment, working stock, and other chattel. The farmer’s accelerating indebtedness soared over the years as the dollar appreciated, the currency contracted, and wheat and corn prices dropped.

  The farmers might set out as did German immigrant Henry Ise in western Kansas, breaking up the sod with a hatchet in order to plant his corn, but new factories in the not-too-distant cities of Chicago, Rock Island, Moline, and Davenport mass-produced a cornucopia of newly develo
ped farm machinery that alleviated the grueling toil. While some farmers in the Deep South continued to labor with hoes, shallow one-mule plows, and their bare hands, most farmers of the West cultivated the soil with disc gang plows and five-section disc harrows, planted wheat with grain drills and corn with “checkrowers,” and harvested the crops with newfangled haymaking, harvesting, and threshing machines, many of which were driven by steam. American-style silos were first developed in 1875, starting out square or rectangular, then mushrooming everywhere in their circular shape. Much of this equipment was quite expensive—a wheat binder, for instance, cost $235—and thus put the farmer further into debt.

  As the Plains states became the “granary of the world,” the income of many farmers fell off. Despite an occasional good year, the prices for wheat and corn plummeted. Wheat which had gone for a dollar a bushel in 1870 sold for half that or less in the 1890s. Yet the markets for these grains kept growing steadily, particularly in Europe, which eventually consumed a third or more of the crop. With the shipping and marketing of their wheat, corn, and hogs to the East and across the Atlantic even more beyond their control than droughts and grasshopper plagues, farmers felt sorely exploited by railroads, trusts, “middlemen,” and other capitalists big and small.