America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Still, the concept of real head-to-toe bathing was slow to catch on. By 1860 there were only about 4,000 bathtubs in Boston, which had a population of 178,000. Washing generally didn’t include soap; people stood in tubs and rubbed themselves with a wet sponge, followed by a brisk toweling. Some women boasted that they could take a complete bath in a carpeted room without spilling a drop. “Females, with all their scrupulous attention to cleanliness, are…too sparing in their use of water,” advised The American Lady’s Medical Pocket-Book. “Many ridiculously suppose that its free and repeated application to the skin gives it a disagreeable roughness, and otherwise injures its beauty.” The idea of washing one’s body was still so novel that people believed in waiting two hours after eating for even a sponge bath.

  Women were also being counseled to keep their hair clean, but shampoo was still in the future. Health and beauty books were full of recommendations about what to use when washing your hair: a beaten egg yolk, cold tea, castor oil mixed with brandy and bay rum, or olive oil in which flowers had been allowed to stand. Although magazines urged readers to brush their teeth, visitors from abroad still commented on the poor quality of American dental care and many women became toothless very young. “The loss of my teeth has been the severest mortification to which my vanity has ever been subjected,” wrote Sarah Gayle, the wife of the future governor of Alabama. Gayle was one of the rare Americans who consulted a dentist, but her efforts weren’t rewarded. The dentist not only subjected her to “unspeakable” pain, he eventually gave her a fatal case of tetanus.

  What nineteenth-century women did about menstruation was still shrouded in secrecy, although the problem must have cropped up much more frequently than in the colonial era, due to better diet and fewer pregnancies. The American Lady’s Medical Pocket-Book urged girls to exercise when they were having their periods but said absolutely not one word about what to wear to absorb the blood. It’s easy to imagine the strategies they used at home. The most important function of the household “rag bag” was to provide pieces of cotton or linen that women could put “between the limbs” during their periods, wash, and then use again. But in the decades before the Civil War, despite the cult of domesticity, women were traveling and working outside the home more than ever before. They took steamboat trips that lasted five or six days, stayed at hotels, and waited overnight for connections at railroad stations. Teachers and mill girls spent long days at work with no chance to return home and clean up. All these women were wearing long dresses, often with petticoats and corsets. Each one of them must have had a personal strategy for making napkins, keeping them secure, disposing of them, and replacing them. Did some of them invent makeshift tampons? Did they simply throw the used linens away, or did they retain them in some way for washing? It was a topic that was simply not discussed in polite society, and the women themselves are utterly silent, even in letters to friends and private journals. At the very end of the nineteenth century, fifteen-year-old Lou Henry, the future wife of President Herbert Hoover, wrote in her diary that she had been excused from gym class that day “for reasons best known to myself.”

  “BEAT IT THREE QUARTERS OF AN HOUR”

  By 1850, the vast majority of homes in the settled parts of the country used stoves for both heating and cooking. Traditionalists bemoaned the loss of the blazing fireplace and questioned whether their forefathers would have fought the Revolutionary War for a hearthless homestead. Nostalgic writers claimed cooking always tasted better when it was done over a fireplace. “To be sweet, nutritious and delightful to the palate, a roast must be cooked in the open air,” claimed the author of Eighty Years of Progress in the United States in 1861. But coal-burning stoves definitely made life easier for the men of the house, who were beginning to have trouble finding firewood in the areas around long-settled communities. The entire family benefited from heat that actually circulated through the room, instead of simply singeing the person closest to the blaze.

  However, the stoves actually compounded the housewife’s cooking chores. Women who were used to preparing dinner by hanging a single pot over the hearth now had an oven and as many as six or ten plates on the top for boiling, simmering, and frying. Their families eventually came to expect five or six different dishes at dinner, and more if guests dropped by. In her recipe book, Catharine Beecher described a dinner that an American housewife might whip up for ten to twelve people: soup, fish, a boiled ham, a boiled turkey with oyster sauce, three roasted ducks, scalloped oysters, potatoes, parsnips, turnips, and celery. And for dessert: pudding, pastry, fruit, and coffee. The days when a housewife could set up her kitchen with a few pans and a spit were long gone. Now there were corers and seeders for different types of vegetables and fruits, and special kettles just for making farina or porridge. In 1850, a Philadelphia hardware store stocked 250 kitchen tools. Each one seemed to introduce a new species of chore.

  Baking was a special challenge. At a time when the eggbeater and baking powder had yet to arrive on the scene, when sugar was sold in loaves, confections required an enormous amount of effort to give them volume. “Take eight eggs, yolks and whites,” instructed one recipe for a basic cake, “beat and strain them and put to them a pound of sugar beaten and sifted; beat it three quarters of an hour together.” For much of this period, women did their beating with a simple fork or whisk. The arrival of the manual eggbeater must have been cause for national rejoicing.

  The cast-iron stove, which made these recipes possible, was very temperamental. Martha Coffin Wright told a correspondent that she was finishing her letter when “whack! Went the stove equal to a cannon and now both windows are open to let out the smoke…Bang! Goes the blamed stove again. I had got all the smoke out and closed the windows and then raised the door to get the stove hot again—before it was too hot I shut it nearly down and it chose to puff.” Stoves were hard to light, but for all their noise and smokiness, surprisingly delicate. They had to be cleaned every night and coated regularly with a black, waxy polish to keep them from rusting. Many of the most genteel families felt wrestling with the stove was a servant’s job; the mistress of the house was perfectly helpless when left alone in the kitchen.

  By 1830, about a quarter of all homes had parlor carpets. About one in five had a painting or engraving, and by the 1840s, when cheap lithographs became available, even poor people had pictures on the wall. Decorated pottery, too, became so inexpensive that almost anyone could acquire a few pieces of dinnerware with views of the Alps or the Roman Forum. A chair could be purchased for as little as 30 cents, which meant that humble families could entertain a number of friends at one time. By the 1830s, upholstered furniture started showing up in prosperous parlors, along with books, vases, plant stands, and pillows. All those extra obstacles to foot traffic may have increased the desire for better lighting; people were getting tired of stumbling around in the near dark. Most middle-class housewives were beginning to use oil lamps, which were cheaper than candles but got dirty quickly and had to be cleaned daily. Like the stove, they could be fragile and cranky. “Who has not, after long deliberation, purchased a set of expensive lamps only to suffocate himself or his friends with smoke?” asked Clarissa Packard in Recollections of a Housekeeper. “Who has not heard his glass shades pop one after another, with a report as harassing as the small arms of an enemy?” By the 1830s, a few big cities had introduced gas service to residential areas, and although it was far too expensive for poor families, the affluent began putting in fixtures immediately. That was a huge transformation. With gas lights, families could sit together and read or work without straining their eyes. There was less danger of people setting fire to themselves while reading in bed.

  But the brighter light made it easier to see household dirt, and things got dirty very fast in the nineteenth century—with soot from the fireplaces and stoves, and mud that arrived from the unpaved streets. (“It is all shoreless tideless hopeless unmitigated mud here,” Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote from Cincinnati in the spring o
f 1849. “Mud without hope or end—dreadful to look upon & like the Egyptian frogs it comes into our houses to our bed chambers & kneading troughs.”) Insects swarmed in during warm weather—the window screen was another household necessity that was still waiting to be invented. Women who wanted to keep bugs off the food when they served dinner had to cover each dish. Writing to her sister-in-law from Detroit in 1853, Lavinia Stuart said the flies had driven her almost mad, and her face felt “as if some unseen spirit was sticking needles into it.”

  Cleanliness was a sign not only of good housekeeping but also of social status, and women became somewhat fanatic about it. The first brooms were sold commercially in 1798, and by 1840 Americans were buying two million of them every year. In the spring, ambitious housewives embarked on the annual big cleaning, which sometimes took a month or more. They took up the carpets and beat them, then mended the worn spots. They polished glasses—the invention of molded glass had made glassware cheap for the first time. They aired out rooms, scrubbed down floors, and dusted the books and artifacts. Nobody seemed to enjoy spring cleaning, or any other part of housework, very much. Everyone complained about inept servants; the brides of the era often had very little in the way of domestic skills. Young couples sometimes avoided housekeeping by moving into a residential hotel. In Chicago in 1844, one person in six listed in the city directory was living in a hotel, and another one in four in a boardinghouse.

  “CHILDREN ARE KILLED BY THE MANNER

  IN WHICH THEY ARE DRESSED”

  One theme that showed up perpetually in the women’s literature of the nineteenth century was infant death. Fanny Fern’s Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio had twelve different children dying off in twelve different short stories, and of the six stories in Lydia Sigourney’s The Young Lady’s Offering, five closed with a funeral procession. Magazines were packed with stories like “Agnes and the Key of Her Little Coffin,” or “The Empty Crib,” in which saintly children die in the most inspiring manner conceivable. When she was five, Helen Hunt, the future novelist, received a gift subscription to Youth’s Companion, a magazine that included in every issue at least one story about the death of a small child, who departed this vale of tears in greatest piety.

  Although Americans were more likely to live to adulthood than ever before, childhood death was still common, and people found comfort in the thought that it was actually a triumphant passage into a better life in heaven. (Harriet Beecher Stowe had been mourning the death of her own small son from cholera when she created the ultimate saintly dying child, Little Eva.) Medicine was not much further along than it had been in the colonial era. The difference was that now it was the mother, not God, who society held accountable if anything happened to the baby. One physician announced that most infant mortality stemmed from “ignorance and false pride of the mothers. Children are killed by the manner in which they are dressed, and by the food that is given them as much as any other cause.” It must have been terrifying for young wives who lived in the mobile, urban society that didn’t provide them with neighborhood women to turn to in time of trouble. Their husbands were gone most of the time, and they didn’t have telephones to connect them with the rest of the world. Everybody knew dozens of stories of infants who died, suddenly and mysteriously, or thriving toddlers who woke up with a fever and passed away before nightfall. The mother had no clear weapons against the danger except her manuals, the leeches, and the newer medical potions that probably did more harm than good.

  One happy result was a new concern for keeping youngsters clean. The habit of letting wet diapers dry without washing them faded away. Swaddling was also abolished in favor of clean, loose clothes that the modern mother could wash. But some Puritan childrearing influences were slow to die. The influential Dr. William Dewees, in his 1826 Treatise on the Physical and Medical Treatment of Children, set a goal of toilet training by one month. And parents were increasingly likely to drug their children. An 1833 guide used by southern women suggested daily doses of laudanum, an opium derivative—four drops for a nine-month-old and five to six drops for a toddler.

  Motherhood was not only woman’s highest calling, it was an obsession in a period that was trying to redefine the relationship between parent and child, rejecting the Calvinist theories about babies being born sinful and in need of correction. People began to believe that children were born unsullied innocents. And since they spent their formative years under maternal supervision, it was probably the mother’s fault if they went astray. Women’s magazines made a fetish of celebrating George Washington’s mother, who had managed to produce the perfect American son. It was an ironic choice, since Washington had found her a most unsatisfactory parent and avoided visiting her whenever possible.

  “FADED AT TWENTY-THREE”

  Visitors to America were struck by how quickly women seemed to age. “As the principal cause of the sudden decline, some allege the climate,” wrote a visitor. “But I ascribe it more willingly to the great assiduity with which American ladies discharge their duties as mothers. No sooner are they married than they begin to lead a life of comparative seclusion, and once mothers, they are buried from the world.”

  If American mothers failed to force their daughters to learn the domestic skills they’d need as wives, it was probably because they understood how very sweet, and short, the life of an unmarried young woman could be. Daughters, who had the least status and freedom of any family member during most of the colonial period, were liberated in the nineteenth century. A Spaniard, Domingo Sarmiento, wrote in 1847 that Americans had developed methods of treating well-bred young girls “which have no parallel and which are unprecedented on this earth. The unmarried woman…is as free as a butterfly until marriage. She travels alone, wanders about the streets of the city, carries on several chaste and public love affairs under the indifferent eyes of her parents, receives visits from persons who have not been presented to her family, and returns home from a dance at two o’clock in the morning accompanied by the young man with whom she has waltzed or polkaed exclusively all night.”

  Alexis De To queville, who felt that “nowhere are young women surrendered so early or so completely to their own guidance,” was also astounded at how fast the door shut after marriage. “In America, the independence of women is irrecoverably lost in the bonds of matrimony,” he wrote. “If an unmarried woman is less constrained there than elsewhere, a wife is subjected to strict obligations. The former makes her father’s house an abode of freedom and pleasure; the latter lives in the home of her husband as if it were a cloister.” Another visitor, Moreau de St. Mèry, who found American women “charming and adorable at fifteen…faded at twenty-three, old at thirty-five, decrepit at forty,” was amazed by women’s “universal eagerness to be married, to become wives who will for the most part be nothing but housekeepers.”

  The thought was occurring to a number of American women, too. The percentage of nonimmigrant women who never married was beginning to rise, and although it would get much higher later in the century, women were no longer all seeing spinsterhood as the worst possible fate. In the 1840s, the Young Ladies Association of Oberlin College conducted debates on the topic “Is married life more conducive to a woman’s happiness than single?” Magazines urged women not to marry for money or social position, and they depicted maiden ladies positively, although perhaps somewhat depressingly, as unselfish beings who dedicated their lives to others. “Better single than miserably married” was one of the aphorisms of the era, and heroines in novels declared they would remain alone rather than marry a man they didn’t love and respect. But as a reward for their solid values, the right suitor always showed up in the end.

  Some places seemed to produce bumper crops of spinsters. An estimated 40 percent of the Quaker women in pre–Civil War Philadelphia never married, and one western New York city in 1855 had a 17 percent rate of spinsterhood. Massachusetts had almost twice as many unwed women as the nation in general. In 1850, the governor of Massachusetts worri
ed about the 30,000 “surplus” women in his state and suggested shipping them to Oregon or California, where there were plenty of bachelors. But the legislature disagreed, citing the economic impact: “The whirring music of millions of spindles would be silent as a sepulcher, while the mistresses of more than 100,000 dwellings would be in consternation from the catastrophe of such a withdrawal of 1, 2, or 3 or more domestics from their premises.”

  7

  African American Women:

  Life in Bondage

  “THE WOMEN WERE THE PLUCKIEST”

  Most American slaves came from West Africa, where women frequently worked as both farmers and merchants. In fact, outsiders had the impression that the women did pretty much everything that needed to be done. “They are the ones who work the fields, and plant the crops, and the houses in which they live, even though small, are clean and bright,” wrote a Portuguese man who lived in West Africa in the late seventeenth century. Perhaps their usefulness was one of the reasons that white slave traders found it easier to acquire male captives. “Women are scarce,” reported the English captain of a slave ship that arrived in the colonies with three men for every woman.

  A slave ship took anywhere from three weeks to three months to cross the Atlantic from West Africa. By various estimates, somewhere between one-sixth and two-thirds of the Africans died along the way. Suicides were common. One ship, acquiring slaves in Angola, was preparing for departure when eighteen of the women flung themselves into the ocean. The men spent the voyage chained together in the hold, packed so tight they could not sit upright, lying in their own body wastes. Sometimes the women fared better and were allowed to spend time on deck with the children. Occasionally, they used their liberty to help stage rebellions. In 1721, an African woman stole weapons and served as lookout for two male slaves who attempted to take over the slave ship Robert. On another boat in 1785, the captain said he had been attacked by a group of women who tried to toss him overboard. When they were overpowered, some of the women threw themselves to their death down the hatchway, and others starved themselves. Edward Manning, a sailor on an American slave ship, had a low opinion of the male Africans his ship picked up. “The women were the pluckiest,” he said, “and had they all been of that sex we should probably have had a mutiny on board before the ship had been at sea two weeks.”