America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Ellen Richards equipped an empty laboratory and took on students, most of whom were already teachers, to give them grounding in chemistry. To make the course relevant, she applied the lessons to women’s work, analyzing the ingredients in cleaning products and identifying the chemical processes involved in cooking. Boiling a potato was drudgery, she said, “but the cook who can compute the calories of heat which a potato of a given weight will yield is no drudge.” In her wake, the Boston Cooking School would offer courses in Bacteriology and the Chemistry of Soap, and home economics would become an academic discipline. It also became a career path in academia for women who didn’t want to be home at all. By 1914, more than 250 colleges offered home economics programs, and girls were able to take chemistry and biology and geology under the theory it would help them to become better homemakers.

  In the 1890s, anything scientific was regarded as a good thing. Even laypeople understood the germ theory, and cleaning was no longer about neatness, but a way to vanquish contagion. “To keep the world clean, this is one great task for women,” cheered Household Economics. Turn-of-the-century Americans were in love with the idea of efficiency, “scientific management,” and motion study. Lillian Gilbreth, an industrial engineer, suggested that housewives perform time and motion studies of their work by having a child follow Mother around with a ball of string, unwinding it to measure the distance she traveled. (Gilbreth, the heroine of the book Cheaper by the Dozen, had two college degrees, but when she married she turned her attention to home and overachieved again by having twelve children. When her husband died suddenly, Gilbreth responded to the emergency and took over his consulting business, becoming an international expert in a growing field while two of her offspring wrote best-selling books about her.)

  Nutritionists broke food down into its component parts, and recipes were valued for their efficiency, wholesomeness, and the way they made the plate look tidy. American cuisine, which had never been admired by the rest of the world for anything but the abundance of its ingredients, took another beating from the scientific school of cookery, which emphasized nutrition to the almost total exclusion of anything else. “Cooking has a nobler purpose than the gratification of appetite and the sense of taste,” said a speaker at the World’s Congress of Women at the Chicago World’s Fair. The scientific housewives worshiped the god of protein and the energy-building calorie. (The turn-of-the-century obsession with calories was not about cutting them down, but about finding foods that could deliver the maximum caloric cargo per bite.) Dinners were also supposed to be eye-catching, and experts favored color-coordinated meals with hand-carved vegetables and solids floating in liquids. The early-twentieth-century hostesses particularly liked food that resembled something else. Fish could be pureed and put into a mold to look like anything from a moon to George Washington’s profile. A chicken salad could be shaped like a lamb chop, a pear pierced with almond slivers to impersonate a porcupine. Virtually any dish could be improved by covering it with white sauce—a mixture of flour, milk, and butter that muffled taste while improving the “daintiness” of the plate. The scientific cooks also worried endlessly about digestion. Sarah Tyson Rorer, the founder of the Philadelphia Cooking School who once recommended a dish of boiled chicken covered with popcorn and white sauce, harangued against pork because she believed it took five hours to digest. “Life is too short to spend it digesting pork,” she said.

  Child rearing was also being approached scientifically. The experts demanded that mothers follow a strict schedule and not give in to their wailing infants’ demands. John Watson was an enormously influential child-care specialist whose mission was to protect the younger generation from the potentially smothering mother love. “Dress them, bathe them…never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap,” he advised. “If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning.” The Watsonians regarded the turn-of-the-century child as a little machine that should be oiled and greased regularly, but otherwise let alone. A popular government pamphlet on child care admitted that “the rule that parents should not play with the baby may seem hard, but it is no doubt a safe one.”

  It’s unclear how many women took all this advice to heart. Social workers who tried to preach the gospel of scientific child care despaired when their immigrant clients insisted on nursing their babies whenever they were hungry. Margaret Mead’s middle-class mother consulted a book that urged parents not to pick up a crying baby unless it was in pain. “She accepted the admonition…but she said her babies were good babies who would cry only if something was wrong, so she picked them up.” The best-selling cookbook of the era was actually by Fannie Farmer, who never hesitated to recommend a dish as “tasty.” (Farmer, the first writer to provide exact amounts of ingredients with her recipes, was celebrated as “The Mother of Level Measurements.”)

  Thanks to the obsession with scientific domesticity, people began asking themselves whether keeping house and raising children should become career specialties rather than the vocation of every married woman. Looking Backward, a hugely popular novel by Edward Bellamy, told the story of a man who falls asleep and wakes up in the year 2000—when life is just about perfect, and a happy army of industrial workers does everybody’s laundry “at excessively cheap rates” and cooks delicious meals in public kitchens. It inspired a raft of other utopian novels, and wherever the heroes woke up, they found that society had abolished household chores. One of the people who picked up on these ideas was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a grandniece of Catharine and Harriet Beecher. Her book, Women and Economics, envisioned a world of cooperative kitchens preparing meals for families who didn’t like to cook, and centralized nurseries run by men and women who were talented at child care. “What would shoes be like if every man made his own?” she demanded. For a while, the home economists and theoreticians like Gilman inspired would-be entrepreneurs to invest in equipment that would deliver nutritious meals to the door for housewives who wanted to get out of the kitchen. But the idea never really caught on anywhere but the women’s colleges—Inez Milholland said Women and Economics was “the Bible of the student body” while she was at Vassar. Perkins, in her later life, said she realized that she was never going to live to see the improvements she envisioned. It’s hard to imagine how she would have reacted to fast food.

  “HAS SUCH A THING EVER HAPPENED…BEFORE?”

  World War I began in Europe in 1914, and long before America entered the fray in 1917, American women were crossing the ocean and volunteering to serve as nurses, canteen hostesses, ambulance drivers, and switchboard operators. An estimated 25,000 women made the trip, often with no idea what they would do when they got to the fighting. The sixty-year-old American writer Margaret Deland, who was herself doing relief work in France, was inspired by their determination. “Has such a thing ever happened in the world before: A passionate desire on the part of the women of one people to go to the help of the men of another people?” Deland wondered if young European women would have gone as readily to the aid of soldiers in a North American war. The answer was probably no, because no other young women in the world enjoyed the independence of American girls in that era.

  Relief and medical services in the early years of World War I were so uncoordinated that women who were daring and willing could easily assign themselves to duty. Barnard College sent women overseas as canteen workers after a one-week course that allegedly included instruction in French, cooking, history, customs of the European allied nations, games, and storytelling. Other volunteers found themselves assisting doctors in the French hospitals. “I knew nothing about nursing and had to learn on my patients, a painful process for all concerned,” said Juliet Goodrich, who had been a canteen worker until she was recruited to work in a Paris medical facility in 1918. Although the image of the relief worker was a dewy young girl, some of the American women who volunteered were middle-aged or older, like Deland. “I’m too old to fight, but I’m sending my m
other,” said Florence Kendall’s son when she set sail for Europe. Edith Wharton, the American novelist, was fifty-two years old and living in Europe when the war broke out. She started a sewing workroom to employ displaced women, and established clinics, free clothing centers, a cooperative where refugees could buy cheap groceries, a day nursery, an employment agency, vocational training classes, and a tuberculosis clinic. She did it all without fanfare and told a friend she had discovered that “it takes a great deal more time to do good than to have fun.”

  Sympathy for the overrun Belgians and imperiled French was high in America, and millions of women back home organized committees to roll bandages, raise relief funds, or even send aid to suffering French animals. But the volunteers who crossed the ocean were also in search of adventure. “To be in the front ranks in this most dramatic event that was ever staged, and to be in the first group of women ever called out for duty with the United States Army…is all too much good fortune for any one person,” enthused Julia Stimson, a nurse. Their derring-do was unflappable. “It isn’t exactly an alluring prospect to be exiled in the backwoods of Russia for a couple of months with only two English-speaking people to run an infectious hospital, but it will be rather fun,” insisted Ruth Holden.

  There were nearly 200,000 black servicemen overseas, and they were often ignored by white female volunteers. Black women eagerly offered to help, but they were almost always rebuffed by white officials. Some Red Cross administrators refused to allow them to do canteen work in the United States because they did not want African Americans wearing their uniform. Two thousand black nurses volunteered and were certified as ready for duty overseas, but American officials preferred not to bother finding them accommodations. Addie Waites Hunton, a college graduate who was on the national board of the YMCA, was turned down when she first requested that the organization send her overseas. Eventually, the Y did agree to send Hunton and two other black women. They attended a three-day conference for YMCA secretaries in France, and when one of the women told the minister who had run the gathering how much she appreciated it, he replied: “I’m glad you enjoyed it, but we don’t mix in the States and you must not expect to here.” Hunton and her friends wound up as virtually the only African American women serving in Europe. They were overwhelmed by the black soldiers’ reaction to their presence, and the men’s longing for the women they had left behind. One night when they were showing a newsreel, a Red Cross parade in Manhattan appeared on screen. “When a group of colored women were shown marching the men went wild. They did not want that particular scene to pass and many approached and fondled the screen with the remark ‘Just look at them!’”

  The canteen work, although hardly as dramatic as nursing, could be a wearing business for all the volunteers, black or white. “We have only twenty girls and there are always two thousand or more men,” said Marian Baldwin. The rule was that whenever a whistle blew, soldiers could cut in on dancing couples. “The consequence is that a girl is literally hurled from one man to another while dozens of eager hands try to snatch her away from him. Of course it is all pretty rough and one comes out of it every night with black and blue spots.” The women also reported that they never had enough to eat and suffered from the cold. Virtually all the volunteers wanted to get as close as possible to the fighting, although conditions at the front were far worse than most had imagined. Julia Stimson worked at a casualty clearing station and reported that the odor in the operating room from the steam, ether, and filthy soldiers’ clothes “was so terrible that it was all that any of them could do to keep from being sick.” After fourteen hours in surgery, Stimson said, the nurses went off “with freezing feet to the meal of tea and bread and jam and off to rest if you can in a wet bell tent in a damp bed without sheets.” Mary Elderkins and a dozen other nurses shared seven cots underground, to protect them from the shelling. “If we sat erect on our cot our head struck the rough stone above. Water dripped on us all night long. Huge black bugs crawled about, and after we quieted down we could hear the rats.” Writing about the soldiers she treated, Elderkins said, “I don’t believe one of us had ever imagined men could be so absolutely ‘shot to pieces.’” Anna Coleman Ladd, an American sculptor, volunteered to make “portrait masks” for mutilated men to wear so they could go out in public without frightening people.

  Some women were appalled by the war even if they never saw it firsthand. Jane Addams lost most of her popularity when she came out strongly against American involvement. Jeanette Rankin of Montana, the first woman to serve in the House of Representatives, voted “no” when Congress authorized U.S. entry into the fighting. She had been elected on a peace platform in a year when most politicians, including President Woodrow Wilson, were vowing to stay out of the conflict, and Rankin felt she could not break her word to her constituents. “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war,” she said. Her vote, only four days after she had taken her seat in the House, was the first cast by any woman in Congress. The final tally was 373–50 and Rankin’s action was widely interpreted as a sign that women could not face the hard facts of political life. She was not reelected the following year.

  14

  Reforming the World:

  Suffrage, Temperance, and Other Causes

  “LIKE ALL THINGS TOO LONG POSTPONED,

  NOW GETS ON EVERYBODY’S NERVES”

  In an era when American women were becoming not only typists and teachers but also labor organizers, investigative reporters, and college presidents, it sometimes seemed there was only one thing they couldn’t do. “We have got the new woman in everything except the counting of her vote at the ballot box,” remarked Susan B. Anthony in 1895. “And that’s coming. It’s coming sooner than most people think.” But actually, success was still a quarter of a century off. When the Wyoming territory gave women the full right to vote in 1869, it was an international breakthrough. But by the time America enacted national suffrage for women in 1920, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, the Soviet Union, Australia, and a number of other countries had gotten there first.

  At the turn of the century, the woman suffrage movement revolved around Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, just as it had in the era before the Civil War. They were friends and comrades in arms for more than fifty years, even though they spent relatively little time together and had entirely different personalities. Anthony, the gaunt, selfless reformer who never married, was one of those restless peripatetic women of the Victorian era. Stanton was stout, fond of fancy dresses, and anchored to her responsibilities as a wife and mother. Her childbearing was the despair of Anthony, who tended to regard marriage and maternity as betrayal of the cause. When Stanton became pregnant with her seventh offspring, Anthony was shocked that “for a moment’s pleasure to herself or her husband, she should thus increase the load of cares under which she already groans.” And Stanton complained that Anthony had no sympathy for her domestic burdens. “I must buy butter and meat, hear youngsters spell and multiply, coax parted threads in stocking heels and toes to meet again…and smooth down the ruffled feathers of imperious men or cross chambermaids and cook. Then comes Susan, with the nation on her soul, asking for speeches, resolutions, calls, attendance at conventions.” (Stanton was a devoted and famously permissive mother, and her daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch recalled later that the sight of Susan on the doorstep “was not a matter for rejoicing.”)

  No one knows exactly how Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony first became friends, but the community of people who believed in women’s rights before the Civil War was so small, they would inevitably have run into each other. In any case, they discovered that the combination of their very different talents produced a virtually unstoppable force. Stanton was the idea person, the writer of speeches and newspaper essays, interested in everything and boldly urging Anthony to expand her reformist impulse to issues like divorce reform and religion. She was unflappable, always speaking her mind, and happy to shock people. (At her eightieth birthda
y party she told her audience of dignitaries that it was time to rewrite the Bible.) Anthony was the organizer, the worker bee who would take the suffrage message to every corner of the country and rally women behind its banner. Unlike her friend, Anthony second-guessed herself constantly and persevered through force of will rather than self-confidence.

  Both were abolitionists who spent the Civil War years pressing for full emancipation of all slaves, speaking out before hostile white mobs, collecting signatures on petitions, campaigning, and lobbying. But they had assumed, perhaps naively, that women would get the vote at the same time as African American men. When that didn’t happen, they turned on old friends and aligned themselves with a racist benefactor, arguing for woman suffrage by comparing educated white women like themselves to semiliterate black men who were getting the ballot first. It was a bitter, dark period during which Stanton shocked her friend Frederick Douglass with her denunciation of “Patrick and Sambo and Yung Tung…making laws for…the daughters of Adams and Jefferson…women of wealth and education…” The women’s movement split, leaving radical feminists like Anthony and Stanton on one side and the more moderate women, like Lucy Stone, on the other. (“Mrs. Stone felt the slaves’ wrongs more deeply than her own—my philosophy was more egotistical,” said Stanton later.) The breach would not really be healed until the next generation took over.