America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Some people blamed this soppiness on Charles Dickens, America’s most popular writer, whose most bathetic characters were saintly, precocious infants and perfect “little” women. (“I observe that feminine virtue is invariably below medium height,” commented novelist Bret Harte.) The other British writer whose work obsessed American women was Charlotte Brontë. “My mother, then a loom-tender in Lowell, has told me how ‘Jane Erie’ as her companions pronounced it, ran through the mill-girl community like an epidemic,” wrote the author R. L. Pattee. Jane Eyre was a brilliant expression of the Victorian woman’s romantic vision of sexual struggle. A great powerful lover tries to dominate Jane in part one, but the intervention of the mad wife in the attic and the terrible fire leave him chastened, blind, and broken. American women purchased one novel after another in which difficult men were brought to heel by spunky heroines. But unlike Jane, most of the women in American novels happily crawled under their lover’s thumb just as the curtain fell. In the extremely popular Beulah, the groom, Guy, demands: “Do you belong to that tyrant ambition or do you belong to that tyrant Guy Hartwell?” And the bride (an orphan who became a famous writer) happily chooses the latter.

  “INTEMPERANCE AMONG THE MEN AND

  LOVE OF DRESS AMONG THE WOMEN”

  Women who weren’t completely fulfilled as wives and mothers gravitated toward reform movements—almost all of which were viewed as the natural outgrowth of maternal concern. Women conducted prayer meetings in front of bordellos in the name of motherhood, expeditions that The Advocate of Female Reform called “thrilling.” They expressed their motherly instincts by marching for temperance and sometimes by breaking up saloons. When a young man was killed in a bar in Greenfield, Ohio, in the 1860s, his family could get no satisfaction from the law. “But a large number of the respectable ladies of the town, after some secret counsels, accompanied by the bereaved mother, proceeded to the saloon and with axes and other weapons knocked in the heads of barrels and casks, and demolished bottles and fixtures,” reported Mother Stewart, a temperance crusader.

  Helping strangers was a relatively new concept in America. Before the Revolutionary War, communities tended to limit their charitable responsibilities to loving their literal neighbors. In the early nineteenth century, most of women’s philanthropic ventures involved raising money for missionary activities among the urban poor or western Indians or sewing clothes for the needy. The more daring got together to discuss strategies for combating “vice”—a catchall that usually referred to prostitution. A handful of women ventured into direct action, like visiting the poor in their urban ghettoes or marching on saloons or bordellos. A few organizations hired surrogates to do it for them, paying outreach workers like Louisa May Alcott. For $500 a year, the future author of Little Women collected clothing for a Boston mission, conducted sewing classes, ran schools for black children, and distributed food for immigrants.

  The bulk of women’s reform activities may have been more important for the way they affected the respectable ladies who took part in them than for anything they did for the unfortunate. Many of the moral improvement projects of the period showed a lack of appreciation for human nature. A refuge for prostitutes in New York required the residents to rise at 5 A.M., go to sleep at 8:30 in the evening, and remain inside the asylum until their betters deemed them sufficiently reformed to venture outdoors. It was eventually closed for lack of clientele. One member of the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children wrote that the principal causes of poverty were “intemperance among the Men and the love of dress among the Women.” Some charities refused to aid Catholics, unless they converted, or to assist women who lived on particularly disreputable streets or who worked at jobs that were considered unladylike, like street vending. Maria Burley, who appeared at the Asylum for Lying-In Women nine months pregnant, “shivering with cold, without comfortable apparel,” was sent back out onto the streets to obtain letters of reference. “It is painful to relate that after a walk of two miles in this extreme cold she was obliged to seek refuge for the night in an open garret with only one quilt for covering and before morning and alone she was delivered of a female infant, which when she was found by two men was frozen to her clothing and with great difficulty restored to life,” reported the ladies. They admitted Mrs. Burley the next day—after they had checked her references.

  But while their accomplishments were mixed, the benevolent organizations did give their members experience in leadership and organizing, in running fund-raising drives and keeping financial records. And doing good almost inevitably led to political activities, no matter how hard women tried to regard their work as simply heavy-duty influencing. “You cannot imagine the labor of converting and convincing. Some evenings I had at once twenty gentlemen for three hours’ steady conversation,” wrote Dorthea Dix as she worked to convince legislators to build an insane asylum in New Jersey. As their goals grew more ambitious and urgent, they tended to become more frustrated by their restrictions, and in the 1840s and 1850s, organizations of temperance advocates and slavery opponents repeatedly splintered over the issue of allowing female delegates to speak before audiences that included men.

  “STANDING UP WITH BARE-FACED IMPUDENCE”

  Most women who managed to achieve fame in the years before the Civil War were careful to behave like discreet housewives in public. When Harriet Beecher Stowe made her triumphant tour of England after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, she sat silently in the “women’s gallery” of the crowded auditoriums, while her husband read her speech from the stage. Actresses, who could not pretend that they abhorred attention, were almost always ostracized by polite society. (Mary Ann Duff, the first great American tragedienne, was buried in 1857 in a grave that only bore the words “My Mother and Grandmother” in order to conceal the fact that a former actress was in the coffin.) Many Americans, who seemed to be terrified by pleasure of almost any sort, regarded plays as not only immoral but potentially addictive. Although the theatrical community was in general well behaved and hardworking, ministers made it clear that any decent man would rather see his sister in the grave than in a play. William Wood, a theatrical manager, was outraged in 1816 when a Baltimore clergyman publicly denounced his latest production and its leading lady—who was both Wood’s wife and one of the clergyman’s parishioners.

  Given the demands of constant travel, not to mention the behavior of those theater audiences, acting was a profession for the dedicated or the desperate. (Wood’s wife survived not only the embarrassment of hearing herself attacked during a Sunday sermon, but also the effects of being hit by a musket ball that was thrown by an overly excited member of the audience.) Still, it was one of the very few lines of work in which women could hope to get salaries equal to their male peers. In 1840, when factory girls made an average of 33 cents a day in New York, the very lowest-ranked stage extra got 25 to 50 cents a night for far less arduous work. A domestic servant made $6 to $7 a month; an experienced actress could make $40 a week.

  Lectures, which carried an aura of self-improvement the theater did not, became very popular in the nineteenth century. The first woman who broke the sexual barrier on the lecture circuit was probably Fanny Wright, an Englishwoman and heiress who immigrated in 1825. Attractive, energetic, and possessed of an extremely impractical form of intelligence, she made a disastrous attempt to found a utopian community that would demonstrate how slaves could be educated and freed. Her friend Frances Trollope was stunned when the place Wright had been describing as a paradise turned out to be three roofless log cabins in a swamp, inhabited by a few of her followers and a small and bewildered colony of slaves.

  In 1828, Wright was the main speaker at an Independence Day celebration at New Harmony, Indiana—possibly the first time a woman addressed a mixed audience at a public gathering in America. (Characteristically, she devoted her breakthrough Fourth of July talk to an attack on “all ideas of military glory,” including parades.) She turned out to have
a gift for speaking, and she embarked on a tour, drawing huge crowds who wanted, at least in part, simply to have a look at the lecturing lady. It was a phenomenon only slightly less surprising than a talking dog. Naturally, Catharine Beecher was appalled. “Who can look without disgust and abhorrence upon such an one as Fanny Wright, with her great masculine person, her loud voice, her untasteful attire, going about unprotected and feeling no need of protection, mingling with men in stormy debate and standing up with bare-faced impudence to lecture to a public assembly?” she demanded.

  Catharine Beecher was a public woman herself, although she would have denied it. She traveled all around the country, raising funds for projects, founding schools, writing about all the great issues of the day. She took part, with her pen, in all the great debates. She testified before Congress. But because she was arguing against a public role for women, she presumably felt her activities didn’t count. Fanny Wright had no cover. She was a radical, an abolitionist, a suffragist, and an enemy of organized religion. When her utopian community failed, a few of her followers wrote about the very active sex life at the settlement, and Fanny was branded “The Great Red Harlot.” Wright never spoke about sex in her lectures—Mrs. Trollope said her most outrageous comment was a statement that “Washington was not a Christian.” Nevertheless, America identified her with free love, and she became the most controversial woman of her era, her name a byword for irresponsible radicalism.

  Although Fanny didn’t get any benefit, the taboo against women speaking in public, which had lasted for so many centuries, fell rather quickly. The Grimke sisters, daughters of a Southern slave owner, began giving antislavery lectures in the North shortly after Wright’s brief career sputtered out; they found the American mood slightly more accepting. Fifteen years later, Antoinette Brown prepared for her work as a minister by spending several seasons lecturing on temperance and women’s rights to mixed audiences, and her talks often received positive reviews in local newspapers. (One of Brown’s biographers noted that the reviewers were so surprised that a woman could speak so well they forgot to mention anything she said.) By 1872, Harriet Beecher Stowe would be undertaking lecture tours to promote her books.

  “OUR SIS CAME OFF WITH FLYING COLOURS”

  The number of American women who stepped out of their assigned sexual roles and became public figures in the pre–Civil War era probably numbered only in the dozens. But other women knew they were out there. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the overseer of a poorhouse asked Dorothea Dix to write an article for the local paper, telling her: “Every man and woman in Lancaster, if not in our state, knows who you are.” Dix was one of the most remarkable self-starters of the age. She had been an anonymous Massachusetts spinster living on a small inheritance and plagued by ill health when, in 1841, a friend asked her to teach a Sunday school class for female inmates in a local jail. Along with the lawbreakers she found a number of mentally ill women who had simply been stashed away in cold, unfurnished cells. Dix became obsessed with the plight of these forgotten people. In the years that followed, she visited every state but California, looking for the out-of-the-way cells, cages, closets, and barns where local officials kept the helpless people they called lunatics. She then used her shocking reports to lobby state legislators to build modern mental hospitals.

  Dix spent much of her time sitting up on wooden benches in cold, empty railroad stations and took coaches and lumber wagons through the mud to the towns where the trains could not go. She reached one destination in Pennsylvania via a trip downstream with “an old waterman astride upon a drift log half under water,” followed by a ride in which four separate carriages broke down and a five-mile hike. She was on board a stagecoach in Kentucky when it was stopped by a robber; he let the passengers go unscathed when he recognized Dix as the teacher of his old prison Bible class.

  Margaret Fuller was another member of this small cadre of female superstars. (“Humanity is divided into three classes: Men, women and Margaret Fuller,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe.) Fuller was the one female writer of the period who declared war on the idea that women’s place was in the home. “Let them be sea captains if they will,” she urged in her most famous work, Women in the Nineteenth Century. To supplement her writing income, Fuller organized a series of “conversations” in which groups of up to thirty-five women paid to have her lead them in a night of intellectual inquiry, on topics from Greek mythology to the difference between the sexes. She went to Europe as a foreign correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, married a young Roman nobleman, and joined him in the fight for a new Roman republic. When their cause failed, Margaret and her husband and young son sailed for New York. Their ship ran aground on a sandbar just offshore, and the three of them were drowned. Henry David Thoreau spent days unsuccessfully searching for her body and the lost manuscript of her book on the Italian revolution.

  It’s hard to imagine how women made the leap into professions for which they had no role models, no invitation, and very little encouragement. Antoinette Brown ignored her weeping parents and went off to Oberlin College determined to become the nation’s first ordained female minister, even though the faculty assured her it would never happen. (Oberlin did allow her to take theology classes and publish an essay in its Quarterly Review in which she reinterpreted that directive of St. Paul’s to “let your women keep quiet in church,” which had tortured American women with an interest in theology from the days of Anne Hutchinson.) Brown was not permitted to graduate, but she eventually found a progressive parish in New York where she was ordained and made pastor.

  Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from an American medical school, claimed she was inspired to go into medicine by a friend in Cincinnati who was dying of uterine cancer and, like so many women, had been unable to discuss her medical problems freely with a male physician. “If I could have been treated by a lady doctor, my worst sufferings would have been spared me,” the woman said. Blackwell may also have been spurred on by her upbringing as the daughter of a freethinking British sugar refiner who emigrated to the United States with his wife, a large brood of children, and four single aunts. Certainly there was something about the family that nurtured pioneering women. Two of the Blackwell daughters became physicians, and one of Elizabeth’s brothers eventually married the Reverend Antoinette Brown.

  But probably most important, Blackwell had a taste for combat. “The idea of winning a doctor’s degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me,” she wrote. Dozens of medical schools turned down her application. (A few helpful faculty members suggested she disguise herself as a man and try Paris.) Finally, she was accepted by Geneva College, a small medical school in upstate New York. The faculty had put the question of admitting a woman up to a vote of the student body, and the students, in a particularly rowdy mood, voted unanimously to have women. Some of them apparently thought the application was a joke perpetrated by a rival college. The men were in a more subdued mood when Elizabeth actually arrived on campus. “A hush fell over the class as if each member had been stricken by paralysis,” recalled one of the students at her first lecture. However, she went on to graduate first in her class and later to found both the New York Infirmary and a medical college for women. “Our sis came off with flying colours,” reported Henry Blackwell, who had accompanied Elizabeth to her graduation and who later expressed the family genes by marrying Lucy Stone, the pioneer feminist.

  The first few women struggling to establish themselves in professional careers immediately ran into problems over how to balance the demands of career and the desire for a family. Elizabeth Blackwell, who decided that medicine and marriage would not mix, eventually adopted a homeless Irish girl. “Who will ever guess the restorative support which that poor little orphan has been to me?” she wrote in her journal. Her sister Emily, who also became a doctor, set up what seemed to be a happy home life with an adopted daughter and another female physician. The
image of domestic life with a grateful orphan, sensible companions, and no demanding males seems to have been seductive for the Blackwells’ set. Before she married, Antoinette Brown wrote to Lucy Stone, proposing they adopt some “ragged” children and create a domestic nest for themselves without the interference of husbands. “I need a pleasant happy home to rest in and some pleasant happy children there to keep me from being a misanthrope,” she wrote. Brown, who traveled continually in her ministry, seemed to have thought the home and orphans would be cared for by servants. She learned about reality later, when she had seven very real children of her own.

  “APPEAR TO BE AVERSE

  TO WHAT SHE INWARDLY DESIRES”

  Trials of the century, which seemed to happen about once a decade, often gave women a good lesson in the true balance of power between the sexes. Just before the nineteenth century opened, Henry Bedlow, a wealthy rake from a good New York family, went on trial for the rape of Lanah Sawyer, a seventeen-year-old daughter of a local sea captain. It was the first of the great American sex scandals in which the double standard went on trial with the defendant. The basic facts weren’t in dispute. Bedlow had met Lanah, a seamstress, when she was out walking. He introduced himself as “Lawyer Smith” and escorted her home, asking permission to see her again. On their third outing, he lured her into a bordello, where he forced himself on her.