America's Women

by Gail Collins

  If Southern women felt a sense of betrayal when their men left them alone and went off to lose the war, their slaves, and their property, they must have felt even more aggrieved when those men failed to get hold of themselves once they returned. One newspaper concluded that Southern manhood, “the mighty oak,” had been “hit by lightning” and depended on the “clinging vine” to hold it up. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, might have represented his entire generation when he emerged from a Union prison ill, depressed, and never again able to find a career that could support his family. His wife, Varina, not only struggled to keep the family together and educate their children but also had to cope with the humiliation when Davis moved onto the estate of a wealthy and worshipful widow while Varina was in England recovering from a heart ailment. After they reconciled, she was still required to care for and support an ailing ex-hero who obsessively relived his wartime experiences.

  Many single Southern women had to face the fact that the war had probably deprived them of any chance of getting married. Families who had allowed their daughters to work during the war expected to reel them in afterward. But some of the daughters had other ideas. “I will not be a dependent old maid at home with any allowance doled out to me while I could be made comfortable by my own exertions,” replied Elizabeth Grimball when her family tried to make her give up her job at a private girls’ school. By 1883, an Alabama official reported: “members of the most elegant and cultivated families in the State are engaged in teaching.”

  “IF I STAY HERE I’LL NEVER KNOW I’M FREE”

  After the war, the first thing freed slaves wanted to do was move around—from job to job, and from plantation to city. Patience, an ex-slave in South Carolina, passed up a profitable job cooking for her former owner. “I must go,” she said. “If I stay here I’ll never know I’m free.” The black population of Atlanta, about 20 percent before the war, reached 46 percent by 1870. Most were women who got jobs as laundresses, frequently working in their own homes where they could watch their children while making some money. By the 1880s, nearly 98 percent of black women in the workforce were domestics. But they and their employers had different expectations about how hard their newly freed workers should have to labor, and at what tasks. Black household workers quit their jobs frequently—in what must have been a heady experience after slavery. In response to white complaints, Southern state legislatures began passing laws that turned any worker who had quit her job into an automatic “vagrant.” The Ku Klux Klan took a more direct route. “Many times, you know, a white lady has a colored lady for cook…” explained a state legislator in Georgia, Alfred Richardson. “They have a quarrel, and sometimes probably the colored woman gives the lady a little jaw. In a night or two a crowd will come in and take her out and whip her.”

  Part of the Klan’s strategy for terrorizing the black population was sexual assault. In Georgia, Rhoda Ann Childs was taken from her home and beaten by eight white men. “(T)wo men stood upon my breast, while two others took hold of my feet and stretched my limbs as far apart as they could, while the man standing upon my breast applied the strap to my private parts until fatigued into stopping, and I was more dead than alive,” she said. An ex-soldier then raped her. Although the South was obsessed with the idea of black men molesting white women, the real peril was for black women at the mercy of white men. “It is all on the other foot…colored women have a great deal more to fear from white men,” acknowledged Z. B. Hargrave, a white attorney.

  The Georgia legislature passed the Apprentice Act, allowing employers to get custody of black orphans, allegedly so they could teach them a trade. But it was actually a way for whites to get free labor. The American Missionary Association, which sent orphans to white households looking for domestic help, shipped off not only all the homeless black children that could be found but also a number who had families eager to take care of them. “Somehow these black people have the faculty of finding out where their children are,” complained the matron of an orphanage from which children were recruited, after a few relatives had managed to retrieve nephews and nieces from the Association’s clutches. (They did so at some risk. In South Carolina an ex-slave named Sue was beaten and then shot to death when she opposed her former owner’s attempt to apprentice her nephew.)

  White people—even those who did not go so far as to kidnap the children of ex-slaves—were irritated by the behavior of freed blacks, who wanted the things they had been deprived of, including pretty clothes. “Slavery to our Islanders meant field work, with no opportunity for the women and girls to dress as they chose and when they chose,” said a teacher of ex-slaves in Georgia. Women who had spent their lives alternating between the two smocks they were given each Christmas by the master felt proud and independent walking down the street in colorful dresses and hats. Their husbands felt proud, too, because their wives’ clothing showed the world that they were good providers. The whites concocted endless explanations for why that was inappropriate. “The airs which the Negroes assume often interfere with their efficiency as laborers,” complained a South Carolinian.

  Newly freed black families also wanted to keep the women at home. Mothers who had been forced to leave their children behind when they went out to the fields wanted to stay with them. Husbands reveled in the idea of having their wives devote all their time to cooking and keeping house. (“When I married my wife I married her to wait on me and she has got all she can do right here for me and the children,” said an ex-slave who refused to send his spouse back into the fields.) Everyone wanted to protect their daughters from the clutches of rapacious employers. The white community, however, was horrified at the idea of black women becoming full-time housewives. They called it “acting the lady” and “the evil of female loaferism.” Southern plantation owners were desperate for farm labor, and they regarded any woman who wanted her husband to “support her in idleness” as a threat to the agricultural economy. Northerners tended to side with the Southern elite on this issue. To be self-sustaining, they felt, black families needed income from all members. But the bottom line was that the sight of blacks behaving like whites in any way—by dress or manner or by keeping their wives at home—threatened the white sense of racial superiority. An agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, which existed to look after the interests of ex-slaves, complained that “myriads of women who once earned their own living now have aspirations to be like white ladies and, instead of using the hoe, pass the days in dawdling over their trivial housework or gossiping among their neighbors.”

  10

  Women Go West: Pioneers, Homesteaders, and the Fair but Frail

  “I THOUGHT WHERE HE COULD GO I COULD GO”

  In 1841, when Nancy Kelsey was seventeen years old, she became the first woman to travel to California on a wagon train, in a party that included her husband, their infant daughter, and about thirty other men. They left Missouri with great expectations and a stunning lack of preparation. The group had no guides or maps or particularly clear idea about how one got to California. It was a wonder they made it to Wyoming before they got lost, but once they did, they wandered around so long they were forced to abandon their wagons and try to outrun the winter weather. Nancy celebrated her eighteenth birthday on the summit of the Sierra Nevadas, worrying about snow and Indians. Several of the pack animals fell over a cliff, and when the last of the cattle had been killed, the party continued on without any food. “My husband came very near dying with the cramps and it was suggested to leave him but I said I would never do that,” Nancy told a reporter in her old age. Amazingly, she and the others all made it to California. Of Nancy, a fellow emigrant said, “She bore the fatigues of the journey with so much heroism, patience and kindness that there still exists a warmth in every heart for the mother and the child.” Baby Ann, the others noted, was never sick a day during the trip. After the Kelseys arrived in California, Nancy rested only a few months before her husband, who was obviously all pioneer and no set
tler, decided to try Oregon. She followed him from place to place throughout the West, giving birth to eleven children. Looking back, she remembered the adventures. “I have enjoyed riches and suffered the pangs of poverty,” she said. “I have seen U.S. Grant when he was little known. I have baked bread for General Fremont and talked to Kit Carson. I have run from bear and killed most all other kinds of smaller game.”

  Americans had been going west—or dreaming about it—since the early colonial days, with the definition of “west” changing in each era. But it was not until the 1840s that American families began emigrating to the actual West Coast, heading for California or the rich, heavily timbered land of the Pacific Northwest. They studied manuals like The National Wagon Road Guide, which provided detailed but optimistic descriptions of what the trip would entail—the books generally estimated it would take three months, when in real life the trip was at least six. (The Daily Missouri Republican advised readers that the trek west would be “little else than a pleasure excursion.”) The manuals suggested what to pack, what livestock to buy, and how to organize a wagon train. But they said little or nothing about how to cook dinner over a campfire, what to do about diapers for the babies, or how to keep small children occupied for ten hours a day in a crowded, jolting wagon.

  The idea of going west almost always seemed to come from husbands, and although wives were consulted, not many had actual veto power. In their diaries and letters, when pioneer women describe arguments with their spouses about migration, they were generally fighting to be included on a trip the man was planning to make solo. “I would not be left behind,” wrote Luzena Wilson. “I thought where he could go I could go, and where I went I could take my two little toddling babies…. I little realized then the task I had undertaken.” Wilson wound up gaining and losing several small fortunes in the West, where her skills as a cook turned out to be much more valuable than her husband’s talent as a gold miner.

  Although most of the women who went west came from farm families, they were not necessarily used to lives of great hardship. Poor people rarely migrated. Buying and outfitting a wagon cost between $600 and $1,000, at a time when a factory worker might make $300 a year, so pioneer wives were generally middle class. They certainly thought of themselves as ladies. Most rode sidesaddle during the trip, with one leg hooked over the pommel and their long skirts covering their legs. It might have been more decorous, but it was difficult to keep one’s balance. (Bethenia Owens-Adair, one of the early female doctors in the West, expanded the crusade for simpler dress into a call for simpler saddles. She urged women to ride as men did, not with “the right limb twisted around a horn and the left foot in a stirrup 12 or 15 inches above where it ought to be.”) Pioneer women urged their daughters to wear sunbonnets to protect their skin, and some prescribed gloves to keep the hands smooth and soft. If they did a great many things that would normally be considered unladylike, there is no evidence they were trying to break out of the Victorian female mold. They saw chores like pushing wagons out of the mire, driving teams of oxen, pitching tents, and even handling guns as temporary emergencies.

  As usual, the emergency only worked one way. The wives and daughters took on new, masculine duties, but the husbands and sons saw no necessity to repay the favor. “Some women have very little help about the camp, being obliged to get the wood and water (as far as possible) make camp fires, unpack at night and pack up in the morning and…have the milking to do, if they are fortunate enough to have cows,” wrote Helen Carpenter, who was grateful that her husband was among the minority who pitched in. Many women were pregnant, but they still yoked loaded wagons and coped with morning sickness during the jostling ride. They crossed raging rivers on rafts and helped drag their children up the sides of mountains. One pioneer recounted assisting in a birth during a thunderstorm when the pregnant woman was placed on two chairs in the leaky wagon, with “the nurses wading around” to assist in her delivery.

  The wagons stopped only at nightfall and started rolling again at dawn, and women learned how to do their domestic chores on the move. Some could roll a piecrust on the wagon seat while driving a team of oxen. But there weren’t many chances to do laundry, and families went for a month or longer between clean clothes. Diapers were a particular problem, and many women wound up scraping and drying the used diapers and putting them back on the baby. One wrote that she washed the diapers out every night and made her husband hold them over the campfire until they dried. Nobody discussed menstruation, but if the women relied on rags, keeping them laundered must have been extremely difficult. Perhaps some of them followed the Indian custom of using grass or moss.

  As the trains moved into the plains, where there were few trees and no firewood, the only fuel for the campfires was buffalo chips—the dried dung left behind by the herds, which the more playful pioneers referred to as “meadow muffins.” Except for the smell, the chips made relatively good fires. But some wives never got used to the idea of cooking over dried manure and worried that the smoke was contaminating the food. Others had trouble learning how to make meals over an open fire. But most adapted. James Clyman wrote that he had watched a woman cooking next to a wagon on a rainy night in 1844: “After having kneaded her dough she watched and nursed the fire and held an umbrella over the fire and her skillet with the greatest composure for near 2 hours and baked bread enough to give us a very plentiful supper.”

  The rigors of the trail convinced at least a few women to adopt the bloomer uniform. But most stuck to the traditional long skirts and aprons, even though they were always in danger of catching their clothes on fire during the dinner preparation. (One migrant near the end of her trip described her frequently seared skirt as “a piece of wide fringe hanging from belt to hem.”) Finding a private place to answer the call of nature was a continuous problem. On the plains, where there was no brush to crouch behind, women sometimes stood in a circle, their skirts fanned out to shield the person in the middle. Frances Grummond was traveling with an army wagon train through hostile Sioux country when she went off to find a concealed place to relieve herself. When she came back, the column had gone on without her. “In my haste to reach the road or trail I had the dreadful misfortune to run into a cactus clump,” she recalled. “My cloth slippers were instantly punctured with innumerable needles. There was no time to stop even for an initial attempt to extricate them, as fear of some unseen enemy possessed my mind as cactus needles possessed my feet.” She ran nearly a mile in that crippled state before she caught up with the column.

  “WE SAW LONG BRAIDS OF GOLDEN HAIR”

  The wagon trains left in the spring, so they could get across the Sierras before snow fell. The early part of the trip was often marked by drenching thunderstorms, with winds that tore through the canvas and rain that soaked the wagon interiors. In their diaries, women complained constantly that they had no time to dry out the bedding. Then the wet springs gave way to hot, dry summers. “Very dusty roads,” reported Elizabeth Dixon Smith. “You in the states know nothing about dust. It will fly so that you can hardly see the horns of your [oxen]. It often seems the cattle must die for want of breath, and then in our wagon such a spectacle—beds, clothes, victuals and children all completely covered.” When autumn arrived, the trains were generally headed toward the mountains, where they were vulnerable to cold and snow. “I carry my babe and lead or rather carry another through snow and mud and water almost to my knees,” said Smith. Two days later she wrote: “I froze or chilled my feet so that I cannot wear a shoe so I have to go round in the cold water barefooted.”

  As the trail got tougher and the animals got weaker, many families lightened their load and got rid of everything other than the most crucial possessions, leaving future pioneers to pass by their abandoned furniture and precious keepsakes. “Boxes and trunks of clothing were thrown out, chests of costly medicine…cooking utensils, cooking stoves, vessels of every description…table ware of every description, and in fact you can name nothing that was not lost
on this road,” wrote one woman. To relieve the animals, people got out of the wagons and walked. Toddlers invariably wandered off and headed straight into a patch of cactus. “Days passed before all could be picked out of the skin,” wrote one mother. Inevitably, women wound up carrying the smaller children. Juliette Brier walked 100 miles through the sand and rocks when her wagon train was lost in Death Valley. She carried one child on her back and another in her arms, while she led the third by a hand. Mrs. Samuel Young, who had just given birth, climbed the cliffs of the Sierra Nevadas with her newborn baby in her arms.

  The possibility of sudden death was omnipresent. Cholera struck wagon trains that left Missouri in 1849 and swiftly killed 5,000 people. Children fell into campfires, or under the wheels of the wagons; men drowned in the rivers. Travelers who were alive and laughing one moment were dead the next, from a horse’s kick or a rattlesnake’s bite. When the wagon train stopped for the night at an established campsite, the pioneers often saw the remains of someone who had died from disease or accident on an earlier train. “If there were any graves near camp we would visit them and read the inscriptions,” said Martha Gay Masterson, who traveled west as a child. “Sometimes we would see where wolves had dug into the graves after the dead bodies, and we saw long braids of golden hair telling of some young girl’s burying place.” Eventually, the children became used to the skeletons. They wrote verses on the skulls and left them behind for other youngsters to read and add a line or two.

  The trains also passed stranded families who had come to desperate straits, many because of the sudden loss of a father. One pioneer remembered seeing “an open bleak prairie, the cold wind howling overhead…a new-made grave, a woman and three children sitting near by, a girl of 14 summers walking round and round in a circle, wringing her hands and calling upon her dead parent.” Janette Riker was only a young girl when she headed for Oregon with her father and two brothers in 1849. Late in September they camped in a valley in Montana, and the men went out to hunt. They never returned. While she waited, Janette built a small shelter, moved the wagon stove in with all the provisions and blankets, and hunkered down. She killed the fattest ox from her family’s herd, salted down the meat, and lived alone through the winter, amid howling wolves and mountain lions. She was discovered in April by Indians who were so impressed by her story that they took her to a fort in Washington. She never found out what happened to her family.