by Gail Collins
Having a yard was one of the great attractions of the suburbs. Greenery became extremely important as people’s memories of rural life became more remote and more idealized. The farmer’s wife in the early 1800s, who thought the yard was a good place to toss garbage, had been succeeded by a suburban matron who grew flowers along the borders of a carefully maintained lawn. The gender division of yard labor, in which the men mowed and the women planted, was born. A whole new generation of sports came into being, defined by the fact that they could be played by both sexes on lawns. Archery and lawn tennis were both popular. (In deference to the ladies’ need to play in corsets and long skirts, lawn tennis did not involve any running for the ball—people just swatted it back and forth over the net.) Croquet was a universal favorite—people played croquet on the prairies of Kansas, and some sets were sold with candle sockets on the wickets for night playing. Young people, who had trouble finding places for physical interaction apart from the dance floor, were particularly enthusiastic.
I saw the scamp—it was light as day
Put his arm around her waist in a loving way.
And he squeezed her hard.
Was that croquet?
“ZINC COFFINS”
The Gilded Age kitchen was full of new trinkets—parers, peelers, and pitters, each designed for one specific type of fruit. Yet the great leaps in technology that were transforming industry and transportation were not really doing much for the housewife. Women still performed their basic tasks the same way their grandmothers did. A study by the Boston School of Housekeeping determined that it took an hour a day to take care of even the most modern stove. Another study calculated that a woman with an eight-room house spent an average of eighteen hours a week just removing dust and tracked-in dirt. (Window screens became available for the first time after the Civil War, but for some reason, they were slow to catch on.) All in all, sweeping, dusting, cleaning lighting fixtures, washing windows, and maintaining the furnace and fireplaces took an estimated twenty-seven hours a week.
The greatest boon to the housewife was water. By the end of the century, close to half of the American population had access to public water of some kind. That didn’t necessarily mean it came into the house, however. Women in urban tenements generally had to walk down several flights of stairs to get water from a public pump. Middle-class city dwellers began getting water pumped into their houses in the 1880s, and by 1890, a quarter of American homes had running water. For $48, a family could buy a Family Sunshine Range from Sears that included a boiler to force hot water into any part of the house where the primitive plumbing went. It must have been an incredible boon on washday, when homemakers were still struggling with hand-cranked washing machines, bars of soap that had to be scraped and boiled, and irons that had to be heated on the stove.
In many homes, the water went no farther than the kitchen, where it was pumped into a pan in the sink. Sewerage systems were much slower to arrive than town water, and in houses that had no drains, women toted the dishwater and bathwater outside to a cesspool or gutter. If they were careless enough or exhausted enough, they simply tossed it out the nearest window. But wealthier families slowly acquired complete plumbing systems. Real bathtubs, a rarity before the Civil War, became more common, and in the 1870s the nation embarked on a long debate about the benefits of baths as opposed to standing on an oilcloth mat in front of a basin of water. Some experts decried the idea of bodily immersion in “zinc coffins,” but once Americans had the chance to actually experience a hot bath, their cause was lost.
Even in houses with bathtubs and hot and cold running water, the outdoor privy—or one connected to the far end of the house—was still the rule. Many middle-class households installed water closets, toilets with jerry-rigged waste disposal systems. The result was disaster. Cesspools leaked and poisoned well water, pipes eroded, sewage backed up after rainfalls, and people worried about “sewer gas.” Catharine Beecher championed the earth closet—a commode that dropped dirt on the human waste to eliminate odor and induce fermentation. The earth closet never really caught on though, since all the dirt had to be removed frequently and carted away.
The outhouse had few champions. Among its many other drawbacks, it was beginning to be identified as a threat to women’s health. Experts worried that modest women delayed “their visits to the privy until compelled by unbearable physical discomfort,” allowing themselves “to become so constipated that days and sometimes weeks will pass between stools.” It’s hard to believe women who were raised using outdoor latrines suddenly found them too indelicate. But something was causing a near epidemic of constipation among nineteenth-century women. It may have been the corsets, or the lack of exercise. If modesty was the problem, the first flush toilets, which were noisy, balky contraptions that tended to let the whole household know what was going on in the bathroom, probably didn’t help.
Few women had the luxury of fretting over such embarrassments. In 1893 in New York, far and away the most advanced American city when it came to sewage treatment, an estimated 53 percent of families were still using outside privies; in other large cities, the figure was 70 percent or more. But middle-class Americans all knew what they wanted, and in Catharine Beecher’s post–Civil War book American Woman’s Home, the model house had complete indoor plumbing.
“OH, DOCTOR, SHOOT ME, QUICK!”
One of the more grisly trends in the late nineteenth century was the removal of women’s reproductive organs as a cure for their mental disorders. When the reformer and free love advocate Victoria Woodhull was bankrupt, under indictment, and being assailed by every newspaper in the country as a female Satan, she suffered a breakdown and was taken to a doctor. His diagnosis was that she suffered from “a female ailment, amenable to surgery.” Woodhull managed to recover with her organs intact, but other, more tractable women offered themselves up to doctors, hoping that their antisocial behavior could be curbed by surgery. Removing the clitoris was prescribed for nymphomania and persistent masturbation. More common was ovariectomy, in which doctors effectively castrated their patients as a treatment for everything from painful menstruation to overeating. At the turn of the century, by one estimate 150,000 women had undergone the procedure. “Patients are improved, some of them cured…the moral sense of the patient is elevated…she becomes tractable, orderly, industrious and cleanly,” said one enthusiast.
It’s possible that a connection existed between the increasing independence of many women and the surgical assault on them. But it’s even more likely that doctors started removing women’s sexual organs simply because the arrival of anesthetics had made it safe to do so. Doctors had always regarded female reproductive organs as the source of all women’s medical problems. The founders of Woman’s Hospital in New York claimed “25 to 40 percent of all cases of insanity in women arise directly from organic female disease which, in most cases, might be remedied by appropriate and timely treatment.”
Doctors were particularly likely to recommend removal of the ovaries for women who they regarded as oversexed. Dr. E. W. Cushing of Boston claimed that he had performed the operation on a woman who had sunk into depression because she masturbated, and that his grateful patient told him that “a window has been opened in heaven.” It did not take much in the way of sexuality for a doctor to prescribe the knife. One doctor claimed to have treated a case of “virgin nymphomania.” And physicians did not believe that even very young girls minded being deprived of their clitoris or ovaries. “We must not impute to a woman feelings in regard to the loss of her organs which are derived from what we as men would think of a similar operation on a man. A woman does not feel she is unsexed, and she is not unsexed,” Dr. Cushing counseled his fellow physicians.
The aggressive use of new medical tools went beyond castration. Dr. Marion Sims discovered a condition called “vaginismus,” in which a woman felt such pain from intercourse she was unable to bear penetration. He prescribed surgery, but another treatment was to put the woman
under anesthesia so her husband was able to have sex with her. Sims described one case in which a physician had to visit the couple two or three times a week to anesthetize the woman before lovemaking.
Another new weapon in the doctor’s arsenal was the hypodermic syringe, which arrived in America in 1856. Physicians quickly learned that by injecting their patients with opium or morphine, they could provide near-instantaneous relief from a wide range of symptoms. A report from the American Pharmaceutical Association noted that when a doctor was summoned to a prosperous home, he knew “a practice might be secured which would be valuable if he can only show his ability, and he does—there is not very much pain in the prick of a needle, and the result is so quick, so calming—wonderful man—the patient begins to improve at once.” A doctor reported in an 1870 medical journal that one of his female patients always exclaimed when he entered her room, “Oh, doctor, shoot me, quick!”
Somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 late-nineteenth-century Americans were addicted to drugs, and the typical addict was an older middle-class white woman, who was introduced to the habit by her doctor. When the playwright Eugene O’Neill was born in 1888, the doctor ordered morphine to ease Ella O’Neill’s pain. She became addicted, and her son, who came home from school when he was twelve to find his mother giving herself an injection, described her as “a walking twilight zone.” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s daughter Georgiania also became addicted to morphine. Jefferson Davis’s female relatives all referred to it frequently in their diaries, as did Mary Chesnut.
Women had always relied on doctors more than men did, and they were also particularly vulnerable to drugs that took the edge off reality. There were millions of farm wives in remote areas, and women whose husbands traveled on business or spent their evenings at a club or saloon. All of them sat alone in silent houses. A traveler who spent time among the wives of seamen in Nantucket claimed the women had a long-standing addiction to opium “and so deeply rooted is it that they would be at a loss how to live without this indulgence.” Women were lonely, and they were often in pain from ailments that medicine had not yet learned how to cure. They were not supposed to drink. But they were given to “taking something” to ease their depression. Laudanum, an opium derivative, was particularly common among southern frontier wives. “When she first commenced the use of it to relieve her mind after the loss of her son, little did she think future existence and tolerable comfort would render its use absolute necessity,” said one southern woman about a friend.
Drugs were generally legal and easy to get. In 1897, the Sears Roebuck catalog featured hypodermic kits, including carrying case, for $1.50. Women who would never have thought of sending their children to the corner saloon for a bottle of rum routinely sent them to the druggist with a coin and a note for morphine. “No name is signed, no questions asked. The bottle of morphine is wrapped up and passed to the child over the counter,” a Tennessee doctor wrote. Doctors and pharmacists had little compunction about dispensing narcotics. “Young women cannot go to a ball without taking a dose of morphine to make them agreeable,” a druggist said in 1876. A North Carolina doctor claimed he had given one patient between 2,500 and 3,000 shots over eighteen months “and so far see no signs of the opium habit.” Dr. Alexander Morgan, a physician in Chicago who had made extensive use of opium in his practice, died in 1872, leaving behind an addicted widow. When her children and grandchildren got the local druggists to cut her off, she rode cable cars to faraway neighborhoods to get her fix.
The habit of “taking something” also extended to alcohol-laced patent medicines, which were enormously popular with women in the late nineteenth century. The most famous was Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, which was invented by a Massachusetts housewife whose face was on every bottle. The Pinkham family members were strict temperance advocates, and it apparently did not occur to them that there was anything wrong in the fact that Lydia’s medicine contained more alcohol than the average table wine. Their advertising got increasingly expansive as time went on, promising to cure everything from painful menstruation to unhappy marriages. “I do wish that every woman who feels dissatisfied with her lot would realize that she is sick, and would take steps to make herself well…. Mrs. Pinkham’s medicine will make a woman cheerful and happy, will make her more ready to meet the wishes of her husband…” the ad copy promised. Probably a bit more than three tablespoons of compound a day was required to produce all that good cheer and obliviousness.
American women of the late nineteenth century were drowning in drugs and alcohol that they ingested under the guise of medication. Colonel Hoestetters Stomach Bitters aided the digestion with a compound that was 44.3 percent alcohol—one tablespoon fed through a gas burner could maintain a bright flame for almost five minutes. Some of the alcohol-laced medicines were even recommended as cures for alcoholism.
“THAT SO LITTLE SHOULD BE SAID ABOUT THEM
SURPRISES ME FOR THEY ARE EVERYWHERE”
The post–Civil War generation had more women who never married than any other in American history. Of the women born in the United States between 1860 and 1880, more than 10 percent remained single. The changing economy made it easier for women to support themselves without a husband’s help, and spinsterhood began to seem more acceptable. Suddenly, women were beginning to be celebrated for staying unattached and serving the community. In 1906, when a newspaper in Chicago ran a contest for “the best woman in Chicago” (Jane Addams won), the nominees were restricted to single women. “Unless the married woman ignores the wishes of her husband, it is difficult for her to achieve the same degree of goodness the unmarried woman does,” the paper decreed.
Part of the reason so many women stayed single was the large number of men who had taken off to seek their fortunes in the West. In 1880, Massachusetts had 50,000 more women than men, and among the most marriageable age group, the odds were as bad as 86 men for every 100 women. The reformer Mary Livermore gave a popular speech around the country in the 1870s and 1880s that urged parents to train their daughters for self-support because their chances of getting a good husband were dwindling. Men were dying from alcohol, debauchery, or overwork, she said, and those who survived were still likely to be invalids or deserters, lazy or depraved.
Women in America had almost always found satisfaction in friendships with each other, and in the late nineteenth century, they had the option of stretching those friendships into something more akin to a marriage. The “Boston marriage,” named in honor of that male-short city, was a permanent relationship between two women who lived together and supported one another. What was unstated was whether they shared sexual relations. Certainly many women of the era talked and wrote to each other in ways that suggested a physical relationship. “If only you were here so I could put my arm close around you and feel your heart beating against mine as in lang syne,” wrote Antoinette Brown to Lucy Stone before the two young feminists married the Blackwell brothers. But the Victorian era was a determinedly innocent time, in which some sexual liaisons were so unthinkable they became relatively easy to carry out. The idea that respectable middle-class ladies could be lesbians was so far over the top that, with a little discretion, actually living as lesbians was no problem at all. Women had always slept together, the better to keep warm in unheated houses, and they had always been physically affectionate. On whatever terms the single women of the late nineteenth century shared their lives, many apparently found their situations more rewarding than life with men. “The loves of women for each other grow more numerous each day…. That so little should be said about them surprises me for they are everywhere,” said Frances Willard, the head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, in 1889.
12
Immigrants:
Discovering the “Woman’s Country”
“AS YOU SEE, I AM NOT STAYING FAR BEHIND”
In Europe, peasants wore shawls and only women of means wore hats. For poor women who immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth c
entury, buying a hat was a big moment, when they left the old world behind and became Americans. “They say in this country you don’t go to work without a hat,” wrote Rose Pasternak, a newcomer whose brother greeted her at the boat and took her directly to a milliner. Neighbors jealously monitored the rate at which “greenhorn” women succumbed to American fashions. “In the old country she used to carry baskets of tomatoes on her head and now she carries a hat on it,” they sniped.
Many older women kept to their shawls, remaining suspended between cultures, while their daughters created new selves in the new world. It took courage to make the change. Rose Cohen, who came to New York from Russia with her family, noticed her mother looked older than her father, who had begun cutting his beard like an American while his wife continued to wear the traditional scarf and wig, even indoors. One day, when Rose and her mother were alone, Rose persuaded her to uncover her head. She was surprised by how much prettier her mother looked. “She had never before in her married life had her hair uncovered before anyone,” Cohen recalled in her autobiography. Sitting on her mother’s lap, she pointed out that when women looked old-fashioned, “the husbands were often ashamed to go out with them.” That must have done the trick, because Rose’s father came home that night and found his wife bareheaded. “What! Already you are becoming an American lady?” he exclaimed. Rose’s mother, with unexpected gumption, replied, “As you see, I am not staying far behind.”
Beginning in the 1830s, immigrants poured into the United States, seeking opportunity—the chance to become, or help their daughters become, the kind of woman who wore a hat. Marie Prisland, a Slovenian immigrant, got her first surprise at Ellis Island, the New York disembarking point. She and about 100 countrymen and women were waiting to be processed when someone asked a guard for a drink of water. When he returned with a pail, the men stepped forward, but the guard pushed them back, insisting “Ladies first.” When “Ladies first” was translated into Slovenian, Prisland and her friends were stunned, “for in Slovenia, as in all Europe, women were second to men.” As they mulled this over, an elderly lady stepped up, took a drink, and cried, in Slovenian, “Long live America, where women are first!”