It’s hard to justify. It sounds so ridiculous now. But it is how I felt at the time. To have been put in Mary’s position would have crucified me. I would have refused to go, I know I would, and the knowledge that David Livingstone might have had, in those times, the power to make me leave my baby is too painful to contemplate. Without money Mary had no power and no apparent choice. So when I state so stoutly that I would never have left my children, as ordered, to join my husband, what would I, realistically, have been able to do? Go on being ill and unable to travel, I think. Subterfuge was the only resort of the good wife in Mary’s situation. But then there is the other side of the coin: she wanted to be with her husband at least as much as she wanted to remain with all her children. The idea that she could, as his wife, exert enough influence on him to force him to arrange his work so that they might all be safely together never occurred to her. She couldn’t challenge him. She didn’t have the courage. And being a good wife is surely about making those kind of challenges, not allowing the husband to believe that his work, his wishes, his convenience are more important than the needs of his children. It isn’t a question of wanting him to sacrifice his ambition, or his sense of a higher duty, on the altar of family harmony, but of expecting him to accommodate what becoming a husband and father really means.
Nothing in the marriage service gives a job description of the role of wife and yet the tasks she is expected to accomplish, then as now, are many and varied in a way for which no woman can be prepared.
Mary had to take on far more than her share of jobs within the marriage simply through the force of her circumstances. There was very little she did not have to do, enough to make most modern wives turn pale at the thought, and far more than her own contemporaries in England had to contemplate. So what Mary did could never have been taken as normal for anyone but a missionary’s wife. What was the norm then, and remained so for many years afterwards, was that the wife would do the ‘feminine’ jobs and the husband the ‘masculine’. Cooking, housework, needlework, shopping and childcare were feminine; finance, house maintenance, heavy gardening, and any kind of sawing, chopping and hammering were masculine.
These roles are not so rigidly defined now (especially in marriages where the wife works outside the home) and yet I see how I followed the traditional pattern without thinking about it or challenging it. I couldn’t cook, he couldn’t cook, yet because I was the wife I was the one who automatically learned to cook. It took me long enough, solemnly following recipes from a Good Housekeeping volume and then moving on to Elizabeth David. I’d been brought up on a rigid pattern where meals were concerned: in a typical week, Sunday was roast meat, potatoes and cabbage; Monday was the remains of this fried up; Tuesday was sausage and chips; Wednesday was shepherd’s pie; Thursday was tattie pot; Friday was fish and chips; Saturday was cold ham and salad. I hated all those meals and was called ‘faddy’. Now, as a wife in my own kitchen, it was my chance to cook the sort of food I did like but it took me a while and a lot of frustration to get it right. I certainly thought it was my job to do so, even when we were both working and there was no real justification for the cooking to fall to me.
But then there was also no reason for the driving to fall to him. I couldn’t drive, he couldn’t drive, but there was never any question as to who should be the one to learn. He took lessons, and failed the test. He took more, and finally passed. He hated driving, but he drove, and I didn’t. I’d no desire or need to – we lived in London – so I didn’t. But of course part of having no ‘need’ was my reliance on him. I was a bad wife, not learning to drive so that I could do my share. He didn’t do his share of cooking but that seemed different because I soon liked cooking and found it easy, whereas he hated driving and found it stressful. But we’d fallen into the traditional roles and stayed stuck in them.
New jobs come up in marriages all the time, of course, and get allotted in the most inconsistent ways. Sometimes one or other of us has complained – ‘Why should I be the one doing this?’ – and the explanation is never logical. For years I looked after the boiler which runs our central heating. I was the one who knew how to change its setting and organised the servicing. This doesn’t sound much of a job, but it was a temperamental boiler, always going wrong, and there were certain tricks that could persuade it to work. I knew them, he didn’t. It had become mine only because I was the one at home when it was installed, and the one there when the servicing was done, and so I’d been taught how it worked. A lot of these dreary little tasks have fallen to wives precisely because of the wives’ availability, of course, and have nothing to do with their being traditionally feminine or masculine jobs. Housework is the same. Women at home are expected to do the housework precisely because they are at home; and when they, too, work outside the home, it still often falls to them.
I’ve never minded that. It’s true I took it on originally because of how I’d been brought up, but I found I liked it, it never seemed a burden. I would have chosen to do it, though in fact, on the rare occasions he’s been obliged to turn his hand to Hoovering and washing floors and cleaning sinks, he’s proved himself a little treasure – but he hasn’t liked it. Jobs within a marriage which a wife chooses to do, which she positively wants to do, can hardly be said to amount to an unfair burden. It’s all about suitability and balance, the allotting of tasks within marriage, or it should be. Mary Livingstone was allotted far too many and never complained about any of them, but had she had the choice, I’m sure she would have chosen to retain at least three quarters of them. But in her day she would never have thought of suggesting to her husband that he should share equally in the housework and childcare. It was women’s work, and no argument possible. Today, plenty of argument is not only possible but essential. Legions of researchers regularly come up with surveys showing that even when wife and husband both work equal hours outside the home it is the wife who does the majority of the work within it. It is also alleged that men don’t ‘do’ lavatory-cleaning and other mundane but necessary jobs – they think they are contributing if they do the easy stuff, like pushing a Hoover around. If all this is true, then each individual wife has a battle on her hands. She has to fight hard to win it, however much it exhausts her; but it is a battle that can be won. In Mary Livingstone’s day it was a battle that would not even be fought.
I would never have been able to endure the hardships Mary did. Five minutes in an ox-wagon and I’d have been screaming to be sent home, lashing David Livingstone with my MaMary type tongue for his thoughtlessness and selfishness. I thought about her in Botswana as we trundled slowly but comfortably, in a four-wheel drive vehicle, through desert areas, in the oppressive heat. When we stopped, it was to sleep in luxurious tents and to eat delicious meals prepared by others, but even then we thought we were roughing it. In the dead of night, lying awake, listening to lions roar around the camp, or flinching as an elephant brushed the canvas with its trunk, I’d think of Mary, having to feed and care for her children in conditions so primitive that merely surviving was a struggle and the danger all round her was an added torture. If ‘wife’ had gone on meaning what it was taken to mean by her, then who would want to marry?
It had to change, this assumption that being a wife was first and foremost to be submissive (fatally so, in Mary’s case), and it did. But never for all women, or never enough. My own mother, though very far from being a weak person, was submissive as a wife. Her marriage was not a happy one, but I am absolutely sure that it never crossed her mind to contemplate divorce. The laws relating to divorce had changed dramatically in the interval between Mary Livingstone’s era and her own but she would never have thought of freeing herself from her marriage. Divorce horrified her. Every bit as much as Mary, she believed marriage vows were for life. She wouldn’t have been able to justify a divorce. My father was not cruel, he did not in any way mistreat her. On the contrary, he was a good, hard-working, loyal husband, who was devoted to her. The idea that she might have a right to divorce h
im because she was unhappy would have seemed preposterous to her (in any case, mere unhappiness was not yet, in the 1940s and 1950s, when she was at her most miserable, grounds for divorce). What had her own unhappiness to do with anything? She’d married in the first place not for love, and certainly not for economic security, but because she wanted children. Children, in her opinion, had to have their father. She was clever, and could have returned to her pre-marriage job, a job better paid than my father’s, so theoretically she could have supported herself and her children. But I am certain she never thought of doing such a scandalous thing. Another sort of life was not possible for her. What she was submissive to was a promise, made when she married in church on 11 April 1931.
PART TWO
Fanny Stevenson
1840–1914
I
FANNY STEVENSON WAS married twice (the second time to Robert Louis Stevenson), and in both cases it was a challenge for a woman like her to be a ‘good’ wife according to the standards of her times. Her times were different from those of Mary Livingstone, though their lives overlapped – the status of women had already begun to change, and marriage as an institution was also in the process of changing. When Fanny was eight years old, a Married Women’s Property Bill was passed in America, where she was born, and the Seneca Falls Convention had seen the first public declaration of women’s rights; by the time she was twenty-seven, the National Women’s Suffrage Association had been formed and two years later in 1869 Wyoming gave women the vote. Things were happening, and happening fast. Women were no longer willing to be as submissive and subservient as wives. Nothing had yet altered in the marriage service – women were still bound to promise to obey – but the spirit in which this promise was made had begun to change. Brides no longer went so humbly to the altar.
But the first time, in spite of not being in the least docile by nature, Fanny went quite humbly. She married aged seventeen, as though becoming a wife had been her destiny. Born on 10 March 1840, in Indiana, she’d grown up in a boisterous family, the eldest of six children (five girls, one boy). Her mother Esther was of Swedish descent and her father, Jacob Vandergrift, of Dutch origin. He was a powerfully built man, said to have striking eyes, who was adored by all his children. Successful in the lumber business, he was affluent enough to live with his family in a large, red-brick house on the corner of the main street of Indianapolis, then a small town. Esther and Jacob were, it seems, happily married, and so Fanny, like Mary Livingstone, grew up in a household where the role of wife didn’t seem particularly oppressive. Fanny’s father was the dominant partner but her mother seemed entirely content to minister to his needs and those of her children. Fanny was trained, like Mary, to be a competent housewife. She learned to sew, to cook and to garden like a model daughter, only revealing an adventurous, tomboyish side in her love of horse-riding and her enjoyment of climbing trees and playing games. Interestingly, her parents did not try to make her more ladylike – they appeared proud of her athleticism, and liked to show off her daring. She was also artistic, drawing well, and wrote her own stories to read to her sisters. At school, she excelled at Composition but otherwise did not shine academically. There was never any hint that she might have a ‘career’ other than that of wife and, in due course, mother.
Marriage came sooner than her family had anticipated, all the same. Fanny was not thought of as a beauty – she was dark-complexioned and dark-haired – so it was a surprise when the conventionally handsome, blond Samuel Osbourne proposed. He was only eighteen himself, a law student from Kentucky and a member of an old plantation family, who when he graduated had become Secretary to the Governor of Indiana. He and Fanny were instantly attracted to each other and married in December 1857. It was a big wedding (unlike Mary Livingstone’s quiet ceremony), with all the town notables present, and the young couple dazzling in their finery. The bride wore a gown of heavy white satin with a long skirt and train, and her low-necked, revealing bodice was trimmed with old lace. The bridegroom was hardly less splendid. Six feet tall (1.8 m) and towering over the diminutive Fanny, he looked impressive in a bright blue, brass-buttoned coat worn over a white shirt and white brocade waistcoat sprigged with tiny lavender flowers, which matched his high, lavender silk stock, and set off his immaculate tight fawn trousers. They looked the ideal bridal pair – young, healthy, attractive and very much in love. They had their own house from the beginning, and here, nine months later, their daughter Isobel was born. It seemed Fanny had settled down nicely to be a wife and that her happiness was surely complete.
But then, in 1861, not quite four years into the marriage, Sam went off to fight in the Civil War (on the side of the North). He couldn’t resist the challenge and Fanny scarcely expected him to – she was only one of many wives left at home to look after house and child. Unlike Mary Livingstone, she was no clinging vine, but in spite of her independent spirit she found being without her husband far more difficult than she had anticipated. She missed Sam terribly. He, on the other hand, relished his freedom, though not enough to stay with his regiment. He left it after six months to go prospecting for silver in Nevada, expecting Fanny and Isobel to join him. The long, arduous and downright dangerous journey tested Fanny to the limit but she managed it, though the misery and difficulty of the travelling was as nothing compared to the shock of arrival. Nevada was a scene of desolation, an endless vista of rock and sand and thorn-bushes, a place where the dust blew in the eyes all the time and there was no shelter to be had. Reese River, where Sam was prospecting with some four thousand other hopefuls, was a rough miners’ camp. There were only fifty-seven women there, twelve of them prostitutes, and five of them girls under ten years old. Here Fanny was supposed to adapt to the hardship of her new circumstances and learn to be a different kind of wife from the one she had been in cosy Indianapolis.
She did. She made the log cabin in which she lived into a home and adapted to the circumstances in which she found herself. They were tough. The cabin had a stove, a table and bunks to sleep in. It was freezing in winter when the snow lay thick on the rocky ground for months, and stiflingly hot in the summer. Everything to do with the way of life there was primitive. Fuel for the stove had to be searched for, then chopped, water had to be carried in metal pails from a stand-pipe, food had to be brought in from a great distance. Fanny managed. She learned how to cook beef fifteen different ways and how to improvise with the few other ingredients at her disposal. This kind of pioneer existence would have been hard enough, but what made it even more challenging was the constant fear of attack. There were Indians around (naturally, since it was their country) and from time to time there would be raids, which were terrifying. Anxious that something would spark off hostility, when she and Belle (as Isobel was always called) were alone in the cabin Fanny set herself to placate the Indians, offering them coffee when they appeared at her door, and gradually losing her fear. But as a precaution, she learned to use a revolver (and soon enjoyed the thrill of being able to shoot straight).
She also learned to smoke. It helped dull the boredom, and her days, though busy, were very boring. Sam and the other men, nearly all of them like him college-educated and adventurous, were under ground prospecting and when they came home they were exhausted. There were no libraries or meetinghouses, no shops, no entertainment of any kind – Reese River was a mining-camp, after all. Being a wife there was a permanent endurance test, one Fanny passed with flying colours, but she was far from contented. Everything depended on Sam. If he found no silver, their prospects were grim. Sam gave it a year, and then admitted defeat. The three of them left the camp and moved to Virginia City where he became clerk of the local court to support his family. All that they could afford to rent was a shack, little better than the Reese River cabin, and in some ways not as secure. Fanny found that the desolation and gruelling hardship of living in the camp were replaced by the ugliness and squalor of living in what she soon learned was one of the most brutal and dissolute towns in the West. It was no
place to bring up a child. Sam didn’t like it any more than she did but felt he had the harder time, doing a dull job he hated instead of prospecting for silver. Doubtless, with both of them miserable, there were rows – Fanny was not a wife like Mary Livingstone, who believed she had no right to criticise or point out the error of a husband’s ways.
They began quarrelling, and soon Sam went in search of comfort and distraction, and found them. When Fanny discovered he was sleeping with other women, she was furious. She could put up with anything so long as she had Sam, but his unfaithfulness humiliated and disgusted her. Not for Fanny the game of keeping up appearances rather than have everyone know the reason she’d quarrelled with her husband. Unusually for her times, pride did not mean she would sanction any behaviour for the sake of her marriage. She would rather be on her own than be the wife of a womaniser. Very soon, she was – Sam threw up his job and went off prospecting again to Montana. He was away months, and Fanny decided she had had enough. If she was to be a deserted wife she would have to fend for herself and Virginia City was no place to do it. So she and Belle left, and went to San Francisco, where, posing as a widow, she set out to make her living as a seamstress. Then news reached her that Sam had been killed. She believed it, dressed herself in black, and prepared for a future as a genuine widow. She and Belle lived in a cheap boarding-house in a run-down area, and Fanny spent her time crocheting baby clothes and embroidering pillow slips. Whenever she went out, to collect and deliver her sewing, she had to take Belle with her. Fortunately the child, now seven, was obedient and docile, but Fanny was well aware that her daughter was being denied the happy family life she had enjoyed herself. She could, of course, have gone home to Indiana but that would have been to admit defeat. Fanny would not be defeated.
Good Wives Page 13