America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Women like Williams and Ida Wells-Barnett wanted very much to vote, but they had other, more pressing concerns as well. In the North, African Americans were being confronted with newly rigid segregation rules and urban riots while in the South, the lynchings that had begun after Reconstruction had turned into a permanent weapon of political and social intimidation. In 1918 in Georgia, Mary Turner, a pregnant black woman, tried to intervene when a crowd lynched her husband. She was tortured, her body slashed open, and the fetus pulled out before she was burned to death. Members of the National Association of Colored Women in Savannah sent out telegrams begging for an investigation to everyone from the president to white women’s clubs. Although the Savannah Federated Women sent back a note of sympathy, the president of the Georgia Federation of White Women wrote that lynching would not end “until you teach your people not to molest the whites.”

  All things being equal, most of the white suffrage leaders would have been happy to march next to Wells-Barnett in the parade or sit with Sylvanie Williams at a convention. But African American women had virtually no political power and southern whites had all the power in the world, at least in their ability to stop a constitutional amendment. So people like Susan Anthony and Alice Paul were constantly trying to avoid reminding the South that black women were part of the suffrage movement. When people like Wells-Barnett failed to appreciate their position, they explained the situation again, as though the only problem was a lack of political sophistication on the part of the African Americans.

  “LIPS THAT TOUCH ALCOHOL”

  Despite all the publicity the suffrage movement received, most women who became involved in public affairs between the Civil War and World War I were not all that interested in the right to vote. They were concerned with temperance. The liquor industry was right—many women wanted to vote just so they could use the ballot box to ban the sale of alcohol.

  Drinking was the nation’s biggest consumer industry, and alcohol consumption was at one of its highest levels in history. Most Americans were actually abstainers, but the others were drinking overtime. The kind of women who joined reform movements did not drink at all, and they often made it uncomfortable for anyone else who did. An American gentleman, a visitor commented, “thinks it ungallant to drink anything stronger than water in a lady’s company.” One result was the distinct lack of male presence in the drawing room, a solidifying of the separation of the sexes. Temperance represented women’s desire to keep their men at home, and their dedication to that great middle-class American virtue of self-control. It also spoke to fear of a changing world populated by foreign people with strange ways. Immigrants—even many immigrant women—drank. Turning them into abstainers made them less threatening and more American. It was the same impulse that compelled early social workers to urge immigrant women to stop cooking strange dishes like pasta and take up patriotic fare like roast meats and potatoes.

  Before the Civil War, temperance movements had all been led by men, and the goal was usually to reform drunkards—moderation was the byword, and some reformers simply asked members to drink nothing stronger than wine. But in the 1870s, opposition to liquor emerged as a woman’s issue, and the goal became more stark—to shut down saloons and drive all forms of alcoholic beverage out of the country. In 1873, just before Christmas, about eighty married women marched up to the saloons in Hillsboro, Ohio, demanding that they close forever. The demonstrations went on for months, attracting national attention. A reporter from Cincinnati interviewed a Hillsboro man who said he and his friends walked into a bar and ordered drinks when “the rustle of women’s wear attracted their attention, and looking up they saw what they thought was a crowd of a thousand ladies entering.” One of the horrified men saw his mother and sister, another his future mother-in-law. Soon, women in small towns all over Ohio were kneeling in the snow before the town tavern, singing hymns and sometimes taking an ax to the bartender’s wares. Seemingly spontaneous assaults on saloons—which were in fact frequently urged on by male temperance lecturers—occurred in nearly 1,000 communities, involving tens of thousands of women over a period of about six months. It was the start of an antialcohol crusade by America’s middle-class women that would continue until Prohibition became the law of the land in 1919.

  Temperance advocates could be mind-bogglingly self-righteous, and they tended to blame alcohol for everything bad except the weather. (Frances Perkins, who would become the secretary of labor in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, recalled that as a student at Mt. Holyoke, she visited a poor mill town and was stunned that some of the impoverished residents didn’t drink. It had never occurred to her that anything but alcohol caused poverty.) Nevertheless, they were talking about a genuine social issue that ruined the lives of a great many American women. A drunken husband was an emotional burden, a potential physical danger, and a drain on the family finances. With little control over her property or her children’s custody, a woman who had the bad luck to pick a husband with an alcohol problem could do little but watch and worry—unless she came to the end of her rope and grabbed a hatchet and marched to the nearest saloon.

  The ultimate symbol of saloon-smashing was Carry Nation, who first drew national attention in 1900 when she walked into the rather elegant bar of the Hotel Carey in Wichita, Kansas, and threw two stones at a huge nude painting of Cleopatra at the Bath, ripping the canvas. She shattered a $1,500 mirror, drove the patrons from the room with her cane, and broke all the bottles and glasses on the bar. She was dragged away, shouting at her jailers, “You put me in here a cub, but I will go out a roaring lion and make all hell howl.” Nation’s first husband had been an alcoholic, and as she grew older and increasingly eccentric, she became obsessed with the evils of alcohol and tobacco. Her second husband left her when she became a celebrity, and she embarked on a career of lecturing, smashing, and publishing magazines like The Hatchet and The Smasher’s Mail. She also inspired imitators like May Sheriff, who organized “The Flying Squadron of Jesus,” fifty women who raided bars along the Oklahoma border.

  Nation was not a temperance leader—she was part of the lunatic fringe. But millions of mild-mannered American women defended her ends, if not necessarily her means. They distributed literature that chronicled the terrible fate that befell doubters who rebelled in even the smallest way against the antialcohol creed. (In one story, a farmer insisted on using a few barrels of apples to make hard cider. His brilliant son sampled the drink and swiftly turned into a hopeless inebriate.) Women urged their sons to sign temperance pledges and raised their daughters to regard a man who drank as the worst possible candidate for a husband. The discovery that a suitor indulged even occasionally was enough to break off a relationship. “Lips that touch alcohol shall never touch mine” went the mantra of the day.

  “DO EVERYTHING”

  The Women’s Christian Temperance Union became the biggest mass political organization of American women in history. In the 1890s, ten times as many New York women were in the WCTU as in all the suffrage groups combined. Tampa alone had three different women’s temperance organizations (one for blacks, one for whites, and one for Cuban Americans), but Florida’s suffrage group had only twenty members in the whole state, eight of them men. However, all those temperance women gradually began to feel that having the vote would be a very good thing because it held the key to the prohibition of liquor. They became critical grassroots soldiers for the suffrage movement, organizing all those petition drives and referenda campaigns and state lobbying efforts that kept the effort going during the doldrums and gradually pushed it forward to success.

  The woman who brought these two very different political drives together was Frances Willard, the president of the WCTU for twenty years, and a leader with a far more sweeping vision of how women could reform the country than most of her followers. She was one of the best-known people of her era, and she was certainly the most famous woman of the nineteenth century whose name is virtually unknown today. Willard was the head
of the Ladies College at Northwestern University when her former fiancé, whom she had rejected, was named university president. (Although she would hint vaguely about other romances, all of Willard’s known close personal relationships throughout her life were with women.) It became clear that she needed to find another life’s work. She began making speeches at temperance meetings and then, impelled by what she believed was divine guidance, committed herself to the cause. She toured the country from 1874 to 1883, averaging a lecture a day, staying with local townspeople, attempting to support her mother with the donations she collected. In one eighty-day period, she delivered forty speeches and wrote 2,000 letters.

  Willard had a genius for building a mass movement by finding common ground for compromise. She initiated a policy called “Do Everything” in which the members were encouraged to fight for reform in whatever way struck them as best. The national headquarters had dozens of departments, dedicated to everything from world peace to public health, and one of the most active was the section devoted to woman suffrage. In many small towns, the WCTU was the center of all feminine political activity. Everett Hughes, a Chicago sociologist, remembered the WCTU gatherings his mother hosted, in which the women talked about “general sanitation and improving education, about the child labor laws.”

  Willard became the nation’s most prominent orator, but far from the best paid. Her trips were organized in the cheapest way possible, including overnight rides, slow freights, and even trips in the caboose, one of which took five and a half hours to cover thirty-six miles. She was troubled by ill health, and when she collapsed in February 1898, she went into a rapid decline, during which she was politician enough to call in a sympathetic reporter for a final interview. Thirty thousand people walked past her bier in one day. Crowds stood for hours to see her coffin. In 1905, Illinois chose her to represent the state in Statuary Hall in the nation’s Capitol, calling her “the first woman of the nineteenth century, the most beloved character of her time.”

  “BEAUTIFUL WHITE GIRLS SOLD INTO RUIN”

  The Purity Campaign was the third great strand in the women’s reform movement, and, like temperance, its bottom line was forcing men to behave. The WCTU started a campaign to get men to wear white ribbons, showing they had taken a pledge to be sexually pure until marriage and faithful to their wives afterward. Some of the organization’s other efforts were more dictatorial, from censoring movies to covering up paintings of naked women. “Nude art never helped a soul to belief in the Lord Jesus Christ,” opined the WCTU newspaper in support of a protest against the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Frances Willard supported the WCTU’s censorship impulses, but her own priority was more serious—raising the age of sexual consent for girls, which was as low as ten years old in a number of states and seven in Delaware. By 1920, the WCTU had generally succeeded in making it illegal to seduce a girl under eighteen, although it took enormous effort to keep legislators in some states from bolting and bringing the age back down again.

  The Purity Campaign, like temperance, was based on the idea that middle-class women were morally superior and therefore had the right to tell everyone else what to do. But also like temperance, it targeted a real social problem that brought its worst evils home to torture innocent housewives. Venereal disease had always been a secret fear of American women. When Ladies’ Home Journal warned girls that holding a boy’s hand could be the first step on a path to “crippling illness and disease,” readers understood what that meant. Doctors conspired with their male patients to keep wives from knowing that they had been infected, and in 1904, Dr. Prince Morrow, a New York physician, stunned his audience by estimating “that there is more venereal infection among virtuous wives than among professional prostitutes.” (Other physicians felt that was a wild exaggeration, although they agreed the situation was serious.) Morrow claimed that 60 percent of American men had contacted syphilis or gonorrhea, generally from prostitutes, leaving their wives in danger of disease, sterility, and insanity. The American Social Hygiene Association, which he founded, advocated blood tests before marriage for men and sex education for women to warn them what to watch out for.

  For the first time, people began considering sex education in the schools. But the classes offered were generally extremely vague—or so chilling in their depiction of the dangers of promiscuity that impressionable girls came out of them wondering if sex was really worthwhile. One psychologist studied the reaction of teenage girls to a class about venereal disease and discovered eleven of the twenty-five students “developed a pronounced repulsion for men.” A women’s college graduate claimed that “lectures…showing lantern slides of the ravages of disease” turned several of her classmates against men and marriage forever. One friend, she said, broke an engagement with “a fine young chap” after he confessed that once, while in college, he had “gone to a party with the boys.”

  The most common reaction from middle-class women was not a desire for education; when Ladies’ Home Journal ran a series of articles on venereal disease in 1906, 75,000 readers canceled their subscriptions. And they certainly did not approve of trying to keep venereal disease in check by treating prostitution as a public health issue. In 1870, St. Louis legalized brothels and required licensed prostitutes to pass weekly health inspections, only to have the program killed by opposition from clergymen and female reformers. Even Elizabeth Cady Stanton hated the idea. Their goal was not to have men sleep with prostitutes safely, but to have them stop using women as sex objects altogether.

  Ending prostitution had always been a primary goal of women’s reform movements. The Sexual Purity Campaign created a panic over the issue of “white slavery,” producing books and tracts that described swarms of innocent girls lured away from their small-town homes by pimps and kept prisoner in brothels by brutal gangsters. The idea fit into white women’s gut conviction that none of their sex (or at least none of their sex and race) would fall into prostitution voluntarily. One reformer noted wryly that the old middle-class vision of the prostitute as a “ruined and abandoned thing…too vile for any contact with the virtuous and respectable” had been replaced by a fantasy of the prostitute as “a shanghaied innocent kept under lock and key.”

  The white slavery hysteria also played on people’s sense that the younger generation of women was spinning out of control, dancing the shimmy and going out to dinner with boys they weren’t planning to marry. The same women who lived in terror of their sons taking to drink began to worry about their daughters falling into sexual slavery. Books and movies picked up on the theme, some clearly more interested in titillating their readers than mobilizing them into action. “Beautiful White Girls Sold into Ruin…Illustrated with a large number of startling pictures,” one promised.

  “CAN THEY NOT USE SELF-CONTROL?”

  Sexual Purity crusaders blamed the falling birthrate on the plague of venereal disease, in part because they didn’t want to acknowledge that nice women were using birth control. As with alcohol, disapproval of contraception quickly translated into a drive for a national ban. In 1873, Congress passed a law prohibiting the dissemination through the mail of birth control literature, drugs, or devices. It was the work of Anthony Comstock, an antipornography crusader who had accumulated enormous influence while heading the New York Committee for the Suppression of Vice. Comstock, who lost his only daughter as a baby and later adopted a child, may have resented women who limited the size of their families when he and his wife had difficulty conceiving. Or perhaps the fact that Comstock arranged for the adoption without telling his wife suggests that he simply disliked the idea of female control. He supported only “natural” contraception, which meant total or periodic abstention. Once, when a journalist asked if it was all right for a woman to use other means if a pregnancy would endanger her life, he replied: “Can they not use self-control? Or must they sink to the level of the beasts?”

  Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, which managed to acquire legal enforcement powers for itsel
f, arrested 105 men and women for birth-control-related offenses. Posing as an impoverished father, Comstock approached the famous abortionist Madame Restell and asked her for birth control devices. When she complied, he had her arrested, and Restell, then a sixty-seven-year-old millionaire, put on a diamond-studded nightgown and cut her throat in the bathroom of her Fifth Avenue mansion. “A bloody ending to a bloody life,” Comstock wrote. Another of his targets, Ida Craddock, was a spiritualist who had published a guide to marital sex for women. When she was imprisoned for violating the Comstock law, she, too, committed suicide. When Comstock brought Sarah Chase, a homeopathic physician, before a grand jury for the sale of birth control devices, the all-male jurors declined to charge her, and one demanded to know if Comstock intended to drive Chase to suicide, too. Outraged, Comstock snuck into the grand jury room and persuaded the foreman to sign two bills of indictment he had prepared on his own.

  Artificial birth control was not at that point an issue for which women reformers had much sympathy. Women’s rights advocates argued for “voluntary motherhood,” by which they meant the right to say no to marital sex. The idea that women would want to indulge in intercourse while avoiding pregnancy was strange to many people who still believed that women were too pure to be interested in sex. But the Comstock Act did not necessarily have much effect on private behavior—the size of families continued going down. The fertility rate for white native-born women dropped from 278 live births per 1,000 in 1800 to 124 in 1900.