by Gail Collins
The question for the all-male jury was, in effect, whether Lanah had asked for it. Bedlow’s lawyers demanded to know how a seamstress could have believed that a lawyer was interested in her for anything but sex. Why had she been out on the streets at night without an escort anyway? And while the girl might have put up a struggle, she was only going through the motions, like those middle-class girls who refused their suitor’s first proposal of marriage in the full expectation that he’d ask again. “Some degree of force possibly might have been used by the Prisoner at the Bar; but it was a force only to save the delicacy and feelings of the Prosecutrix,” said the defense. “Any woman who is not an abandoned Prostitute will appear to be averse to what she inwardly desires.”
Rape was a capital crime, and the defense reminded the men in the jury that if Bedlow was found guilty, the lives of all male citizens would be put “in the hands of a woman, to be disposed of almost at her will and pleasure.” It took the jury only fifteen minutes to agree on an acquittal. But the story didn’t end quite there. Although Bedlow’s lawyer had referred to Lanah’s family as “an obscure set of people, perhaps of no character themselves,” they were not obscure within the working-class community of Manhattan. The neighborhood rioted, and for three days afterward crowds roamed the city’s red-light district, known as the Holy Ground, looting bordellos and burning down the one where Lanah had been attacked. The working-class men were rebelling—if not against the double standard, at least against the upper-class men’s appropriation of their women.
Decades later, the nation had another trial that homed in on the sexual rules for men and women when Daniel Sickles, a New York congressman, fatally shot Phillip Barton Key, a Washington, D.C., district attorney who had been having an affair with Sickles’s wife, Teresa. Representative Sickles himself had a terrific reputation for dissipation—as a state legislator, he had been censured for bringing his mistress Fanny White onto the floor of the Assembly. After he married Teresa, he left her at home and took Fanny on a trip to England. But the prosecutor chose not to mention Sickles’s own infidelities, and while the defendant sat in the courtroom sobbing loudly, his lawyers referred to Teresa as a “prostitute” and argued that their client had been maddened by grief. Sickles became the first person to be found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity in an American trial. He marched out to cheering crowds while his wife entered a life of disgrace, shunned by everyone from her old friends to the corner grocer. When her husband offered to take her back, she quickly agreed.
But the stain of marital infidelity in a woman was too terrible to be overlooked, and the same people who had ignored Sickles’s own adulteries and forgiven him for killing an unarmed man were outraged when he forgave his wife. “His warmest personal and political friends bitterly denounce this course,” wrote the New York Dispatch. Almost every paper in New York felt compelled to editorialize on the subject and only Horace Greeley applauded the idea of the Sickles’ reunion. When Congress reconvened, Sickles was treated “as if he had the smallpox,” wrote a woman from Washington. The Civil War saved his reputation, and after being hailed as a hero of the Battle of Gettysburg he was appointed ambassador to Spain. He left Teresa behind in New York. She died, a virtual prisoner in her home, at age thirty-one.
“THE CHANCE THAT IN MARRIAGE
SHE WILL DRAW A BLOCKHEAD”
Virtually all nineteenth-century opinion makers and upwardly mobile families agreed that education was important for girls. Women had won the right to schooling during the Revolutionary War when they were given the responsibility of raising the republican citizens of the future. Thomas Jefferson, no great fan of learned women, said he had his daughter Martha well taught because “The chance that in marriage she will draw a blockhead I calculate at about fourteen to one, and…the education of her family will probably rest on her own ideas and directions without assistance.” Martha wound up having twelve children, and a husband who became mentally disturbed.
As young people began choosing their own spouses, and marriage became more a matter of romance and companionship, parents came to believe that their girls needed some education in order to be interesting mates for well-bred husbands. Sarah Hale enthusiastically championed the cause of women’s schooling, although she warned that “we should solicit education as a favor, not exact it as a right.” In a demonstration of Hale’s commitment, an 1846 issue of Godey’s featured a story in which a young man named Ernest expresses a negative opinion of learned females. His cousin Alice points out that their aunt Barbara, a writer, is nevertheless a model of “the spirit of feminine gentleness.” Ernest is forced to agree, recalling that when he had a cold “she not only made me a bottle of cough syrup, but when I complained of nothing new to read, set to work and wrote some twenty stanzas on consumption.”
When public schools first began opening to girls, the curriculum was mainly based on memorization and beatings. Elizabeth Buffum Chace, who attended school in Connecticut in 1816, remembered that by the time she was twelve “I had recited Murray’s Grammar through perhaps over a dozen times without a word of explanation or application from the book or the teacher.” Still, Chace wrote, “for that time it was a good school.” Teachers in the middle and southern states were so frequently drunkards that the alcoholic schoolteacher became a stereotype.
As the demand for public schools increased, it became very clear that there were not going to be enough male schoolteachers to go around—in 1833 the estimated teacher shortage was more than 30,000. Thomas Gallaudet, the educator, warned that it would always be difficult to find good male candidates “as there are so many other avenues open in our country to the accumulation of property and the attaining of distinction.” Officials were reluctant to hire women, partly out of concern over whether middle-class females should work outside the home, and partly because they believed that the only way to control older boys was by beating them. One superintendent wrote that a woman teacher was inappropriate “for the same reason that she cannot so well manage a vicious horse or other animal, as a man may do.”
But as always happened in American history, the dogma of appropriate gender roles gave way to necessity. There simply weren’t enough men available to staff the public schools, while the pool of available educated women was huge. And the price was right. In 1838, Connecticut paid $14.50 a month to male teachers and $5.75 a month to women. In Ohio, the Superintendent of Common Schools enthused that his districts “are able to do twice as much with the same money as is done in those counties where female teachers are almost excluded.” By 1870, of the 200,000 primary and secondary school teachers in America, more than half were women. The question of whether it was appropriate to have women working was taken care of by the ever-popular excuse of maternal feeling. “They are the natural guardians of the young,” announced Governor William Seward of New York.
Many of the first generations of women teachers were products of the Female Seminary Movement, which began around 1815 under the leadership of women like Catharine Beecher, Mary Lyon—the founder of Mt. Holyoke College—and Emma Willard, who founded the Troy Female Seminary in 1821 with the intention of offering women the same kind of intellectually rigorous education that boys received. (“They’ll be educating the cows next,” remarked a critic when Willard announced she was offering geometry to her girls in Troy.) Among her students were the daughters of Sarah Hale, one of whom became a career teacher herself.
It became a matter of status for prosperous parents to send their daughters off to boarding school, where they received both advanced instruction and socially desirable lessons in dancing, music, and the arts. It’s not clear how much actual education most of them got there, or indeed how much their mentors felt was appropriate. (Although there have been “women whose minds have been equal to any human undertaking,” The Young Lady’s Companion opined, “happily the giants of their kind are rare.”) Very young teachers were not uncommon. Jane Cannon Swisshelm, the future journalist, became a teacher when she w
as fourteen years old. The Beechers’ friend Delia Bacon began teaching at fifteen, after only a year of formal schooling in Hartford, and she founded her own school when she was seventeen. At eighteen, Harriet Beecher was virtually running her sister’s school in Catharine’s absence.
Margaret Fuller, who was disappointed in her own schooling, concluded that girls covered even more subjects than boys did, but “without being really taught anything.” Certainly parents seemed to expect a wide array of classes for their tuition money. In Petersburg, Virginia, a girl’s academy opened in 1817 with the intention of taking its students through “orthography (spelling), reading, writing, grammar, composition, belles-lettres, geography, natural history, history of nations, chronology, natural philosophy and chemistry.” Catharine Beecher’s first class of fifteen girls learned geography, grammar, and rhetoric, but parental demand convinced Beecher to add philosophy, chemistry, ancient and modern history, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, moral philosophy, natural theology, and Latin. “Dear Madam,” began a parody in Godey’s,
I’ve called for the purpose of placing my daughter at school.
She’s only thirteen I assure you,
And remarkably easy to rule.
I’d have her learn painting and music
Gymnastics and dancing pray do,
Philosophy, grammar and logic,
You’ll teach her to read of course, too.
“THEY WEAR OUT FASTER
THAN ANY OTHER CLASS OF PEOPLE”
Women’s arrival in the public schools was an enormous change—both for the schools and the women, who finally could train for a respectable profession that would make them self-supporting. Although the percentile of women working as teachers at any given time was tiny, a much larger number had the experience at some point in their lives. A quarter of the native-born women in pre–Civil War Massachusetts were current or former schoolteachers. Thanks to teaching, a large minority of American women knew what it was like to have earned their own bread.
It was a difficult job. Maria Waterbury, a teacher who went to a “water cure” resort in Elmira, New York, to recover her health, reported that the physician who greeted her said he was used to seeing members of her profession: “We have the most trouble with teachers of any class of patients. They are worn out. They wear out faster than any other class of people.” Female teachers proved able to maintain discipline in the classroom without violence, but they still had the challenge of trying to instruct up to sixty children in what was usually an uncomfortable one-room schoolhouse. A special commission in Connecticut reported in 1830 that out of forty schoolhouses in one county, only one had any ventilation. The average size of a building was 181/2 feet by 71/2 feet, and 7 feet high. A later report, in 1848, found that only about half of the schoolhouses in the state offered the luxury of an outhouse. When Elizabeth Blackwell taught early in her career, she wrote that her school in Kentucky was so cold she wound up teaching in gloves and blanket shawl, with a hood around her head. Conditions were, unsurprisingly, even worse on the frontier. “Went over to make my fire, and the wood was all wet and unchopped except a couple of sticks which lay under the stove,” wrote a young teacher in Des Moines. “And as I puffed away to make the wet mass burn I found myself all at once crying like a child.”
Southern women, who had been taught to regard any sort of paid work as unladylike, seldom became teachers except under extreme duress. “Teaching before dependence, death before teaching,” vowed one Louisiana woman. Before the Civil War less than 8 percent of the teachers in North Carolina were female, and that was the highest percentage in the South. In the West, the extreme shortage of teachers drew eastern women who were eager for adventures. A would-be teacher named Martha Rogers rode in a stagecoach for three days, followed by a trek in a lumber wagon to get to her job in Missouri. When she arrived, sick from exhaustion, she discovered that the school had given her job to someone else. Another young teacher, Annie Perry, was in a steamboat wreck on the Ohio River.
The frontier teachers had wildly mixed classrooms—Ellen Lee, aged twenty, found herself in a log schoolhouse facing fifty pupils, aged fourteen to twenty-two. Fanny Warner, who brought a globe with her, discovered her rural Wisconsin students thought the world was “round like a wheel rather than an orange.” Even given extremely modest standards of living, some of the teachers found it impossible to survive on their salaries. “Expect when I get what clothes worn out that I brought with me I shall be obliged to wear a blanket,” wrote Arozina Perkins, who was eventually forced to leave her job in Des Moines to look for better-paying work.
Most of the teachers lived with local families, a situation that was almost never completely comfortable. Mahala Drake wrote back from Iowa that her landlady expected her to do the sewing and take care of the baby after school. Another teacher in rural Indiana said her room was so small and cold she could not sit in it, and that the house itself lacked even the most primitive toilet facilities. Elizabeth Blackwell was forced to share a bedroom with three members of her host’s family. Augusta Hubbell boarded with an Iowa couple and wound up having to flee home when the wife became jealous of her. The teachers were all single—well into the twentieth century, school systems required women to resign when they married. Many school boards prohibited their teachers from anything they regarded as a potential impropriety, ranging from riding in a carriage with a man to being out after 8 P.M. In the South during the Civil War, one sixteen-year-old teacher was told that she was required to stay inside the schoolhouse during daylight hours and then go directly to her quarters to shut herself up for the night. She was forbidden, the school officials added unnecessarily, to do anything that might “create talk.”
“I AM LIVING ON NO ONE”
Just as the school boards came to like female teachers, the nation’s infant factory system was taken with the idea of mill girls. American employers were worried about creating a permanent class of rough, hard-to-handle industrial workers, like the ones who were causing so much trouble in England. Girls did not usually stay long enough to become troublemakers—after a few years, most left to get married. In the meantime they were cheaper than male workers, and easier to control. By the 1820s, New England was full of textile factories where virtually all the workers were women, each making $2 or $3 a week. (The supervisors, who were men, got $12.) At first, they lived in paternalistic, company-owned boardinghouses, where they were barred from staying out late, and required to attend Sunday services. The girls, who had probably expected to stay home or go into domestic service until they married, seemed pleased that they could make enough money to accumulate a trousseau, or help their families, or simply support themselves. “Don’t I feel independent!” wrote Anne Appleton to her sister. “The thought that I am living on no one is a happy one indeed to me.” Harriet Hanson, who entered the mills at age ten, said she wanted “to earn money like the other little girls,” and she may have been telling the truth. Her mother ran a boardinghouse, and until little Harriet entered the factory, her job was to wash the dishes for forty-five people, three times a day.
Life in places like Lowell, Massachusetts, during the textile industry’s earliest days sounded rather idyllic to outsiders. In 1833, when President Jackson visited Lowell, he was greeted by mill girls who “walked in procession, like troops of liveried angels, clothed in white (with green-fringed parasols)….” The girls contributed essays to a literary magazine, The Lowell Offering, and formed their own “improvement circles” in which they read and criticized each other’s stories and poetry. A third of the female workers went to night school, and some went on to become teachers, artists, librarians, and missionaries.
But when the panic of 1837 hit, the mills’ management became less paternalistic and more tightfisted. Within a short time, the mill girls were on strike against speedups and wage cutbacks. Much of their dissatisfaction focused on the length of the workday. It had always been long—in 1834 it stretched from eleven to twelve hours—but by 1850 women
were working thirteen-and-a-half-hour days, and at a much faster pace. In 1845, millworker Eliza Hemingway testified before the Massachusetts House of Representatives that in the summer she worked from 5 A.M. to 7 P.M. with two breaks for meals. “She thought there was a general desire among the females to work but ten hours, regardless of pay,” reported a newspaper account. Many of the native-born mill girls were replaced by immigrants of both sexes, who were desperate enough to accept starvation wages.
In the period before the Civil War, there were only a handful of ways respectable women could earn their own living, and teaching and millwork were two of them. Some women kept boarders—88 of the 150 boardinghouses in 1800 New York were run by women, though it’s doubtful most of them made enough to support a family. The bookbinding and typesetting trades accepted a select number of female applicants. Otherwise, women were limited to needlework—which often meant piecework sewing in their homes—or domestic service. They were bleak options. (A survey of New York City prostitutes in the 1850s showed that a quarter of the women had previously been in the sewing trade, and half in service.) In 1845, the New York Daily Tribune estimated that twice as many women were seeking jobs as seamstresses as there were jobs available. Everybody wanted to avoid domestic service, both because the pay was poor and because most women disliked being so directly under the supervision of a demanding housewife. Millworker Mary Paul said most of the girls she knew “would live on 25 cents per week at sewing or school teaching rather than work at housework…. This all comes from the way servants are treated.” Many Northern women seemed to expect that their domestic servants would develop a loyalty to their “family,” just as southerners imagined such devotion from their slaves. The wealthy housewife Elizabeth Sullivan Stuart, growing irritated with the revolving door of Irish servants in the 1850s, exclaimed in outrage: “I believe nothing will bind them but dollars and cents.”