All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

by Traister, Rebecca

  Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the Western territories in which women staked out land were places in which woman suffrage would precede passage of the nineteenth amendment. Women could vote in Wyoming, Utah, Washington, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, California, Arizona, Kansas, Oregon, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, and Alaska before 1920, while women in the more urban, established Eastern states (save for New York) had to wait for the Constitution to change.

  The social crusades of the nineteenth century were made possible by the changing nature of female engagement with the world and new ideas about identity and dependence. The rate of American spinsterhood hit its first peak at 11 percent for American women born between 1865 and 1875.35

  Mannish Maidens, Bread and Roses

  By the end of the nineteenth century, the country was awash in fears of insurrection by increasingly independent populations of women and newly freed slaves.

  In addition to participating in social movements, women had been pushing themselves further educationally than ever before. The demand for teachers meant that teaching academies, known as “normal schools,” proliferated. Private colleges for wealthier women had begun to open, starting with Mt. Holyoke in 1837, Vassar in 1861, Wellesley in 1870, and Smith in 1871. Bryn Mawr was founded in 1885, and, in ten years, was under the stewardship of its second president, M. Carey Thomas, a suffragist who would explain to her mother in a letter that since “marriage means loss of freedom, poverty, and a personal subjection for which I see absolutely no compensation . . . Thee must make up thy mind, sweetest mother, to have one old maid daughter.”

  The Morrill Act, in 1862, had established land-grant colleges, including agricultural and mechanical schools in the West and Midwest, where curricular flexibility permitted more women to be admitted alongside men.36 In 1884, the Industrial Institute and College in Mississippi (originally the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls) became the first state-funded university for women’s higher education.37 Spelman, the historically black women’s college founded by two unmarried women, opened its doors in 1881.

  But the insurgent liberty of people whose enforced subservience had until recently undergirded the country’s power structure provoked a new, more damning wave of anti-spinster argument that ever more directly linked social disruption to unmarried women. These “mannish maidens”38 had not just missed out on, but were, in fact, unfit for, family life. Responding to Susan B. Anthony’s temperance work in 1853, the New York Sun published a screed noting that, “The quiet duties of daughter, wife or mother are not congenial to those hermaphrodite spirits who thirst to win the title of champion of one sex and victor over the other.”

  The imagined connection between social agitation and an unmarried state was so firm that even married activists got tarred as single, frigid, or unmarriageable. An 1838 edition of the Mother’s Magazine asserted of women like the Grimké sisters (one of whom, Angelina, wed that same year and would go on to have three children; the other, Sarah, had already turned down at least one marriage proposal), “These Amazonians are their own executioners. They have unsexed themselves in public estimation, and there is no fear that they will perpetuate their race.”39

  Perhaps in response to women’s move away from marriage, law and custom began to make slightly more room for female independence within the institution, though it was a battle. Women had been petitioning for Married Women’s Property Acts and privy examination acts, which allowed a judge to speak privately with a wife outside the presence of her husband, and by 1839, courts had begun to grant them, kicking off the gradual overturn of coverture that would take more than a century. In the late 1860s, Myra Bradwell petitioned for a law license and argued that the 14th Amendment protected her right to practice. The Illinois Supreme Court rejected her petition, ruling that because she was married she had no legal right to operate on her own. When she challenged the ruling, Justice Joseph Bradley wrote in his decision, “It certainly cannot be affirmed, as a historical fact, that [the right to choose one’s profession] has ever been established as one of the fundamental privileges and immunities of the sex.” Rather, Bradley argued, “The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.”40

  Meanwhile, the legal system was cracking down on anything that would help women evade or exert control over those “benign offices.” The Comstock Act of 1873, along with a series of state laws implemented soon after, made it illegal to distribute any materials deemed “obscene,” including birth control and educational material about contraception. States were outlawing abortion, which until then had been legal under some circumstances; by 1880, the procedure was mostly prohibited, except to save the life of the woman.

  In the same period, scientists around the world were working to justify the continued subjugation of women and nonwhites by making medical claims as to their inferior capabilities.

  German scientist Carl Vogt wrote, in 1864, “The grown-up Negro partakes, as regards his intellectual faculties, of the nature of the child, the female, and the senile white.” Gustave Le Bon, a prominent social psychologist, wrote in 1879 that “In the most intelligent races . . . there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion.” Le Bon conceded that “Without a doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely.”41

  There was no doubt about a fear of rebellion that lay just beneath these diagnoses. As Le Bon wrote, “A desire to give [women] the same education . . . is a dangerous chimera . . . The day when, misunderstanding the inferior occupations which nature has given her, women leave the home and take part in our battles; on this day a social revolution will begin, and everything that maintains the sacred ties of the family will disappear.”42

  The American medical establishment built on European pronouncements to rationalize their recommendations to keep women’s lives small, confined, and attached to men. In his 1873 Sex in Education; or A Fair Chance for the Girls, Harvard professor Edward Clarke argued that the female brain, if engaged in the same course of study as the male, would become overburdened and that wombs and ovaries would atrophy.43 Chambers-Schiller reports that in the medical establishment, “a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen.”

  Yet for all of this, women kept on not marrying and they kept on bucking for change.

  The Progressive Era

  The Progressive Era, from about 1890 to 1920, which coincided with the years in which American women were less likely to marry than ever before, was a moment of enormous political and social foment. These decades included defining fights for fair labor practices and reform of the tax code and public education, and a campaign against lynching, which in the south had become a deadly method of addressing the growing power of African-Americans.44

  Immigrants from Europe were flooding East Coast cities, some moving toward the Midwest, while the Japanese population was growing on the West Coast. Chinese immigration had been halted, but Chinese communities already in the country continued to expand. The American puzzle became more intricate; fights for unionization were linked to the suffrage campaign, which, in turn, influenced the push for prohibition and the struggle to implement new social welfare measures. All these battles were tied to a stream of technological innovations that made new professions possible, and employed new populations of Americans, in turn pulling them into the labor, suffrage, education, and civil rights struggles of the day.

  Young women, many forced by financial crises in 1873 and 1893 to seek employment, arrived in cities looking for professional opportunities that were rapidly becoming more diverse. The retail
market for factory-made goods, alongside inventions such as the typewriter and telephone, created jobs for women as shop girls, typists, telephone operators, and secretaries. In 1870, professional women accounted for less than seven percent of the nonagricultural female workforce; that percentage would more than double by 1920.45

  Many women, especially poor immigrant women who labored in factories, worked long hours, seven days a week, in terrifying, unregulated firetraps. The deplorable conditions experienced by millions of female workers were at the roots of the labor struggle, which would be spurred forward in large part by unconventionally wed, or unwed, women.

  “The first industrial strikes in the United States [were] led and peopled by women,” writes historian Nancy Cott, reporting on the account from a Boston newspaper of one of the first “turn-out” strikes in Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1830s, in which, “One of the leaders mounted a pump and made a flaming Mary Woolstonecraft [sic] speech on the rights of women.”46

  Most of the women who were working in factories were young and unmarried. According to historian Kathy Peiss, four-fifths of the 343,000 women working for wages in New York City in 1900 were unmarried.47 “The Uprising of 20,000” was a 1909 walkout of female factory workers who made blouses called “shirtwaists.” The Uprising was organized by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and kicked off by twenty-three-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Clara Lemlich, then unmarried, who told a crowd of shirtwaist workers: “I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions.” That campaign lasted twelve weeks and resulted in union agreements with nearly all shirtwaist manufacturers save a few, including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where two years later, 146 workers, all but seventeen of them women, and most younger than thirty and unmarried, would perish in a fire, unable to escape the building, which was locked to keep workers inside and prevent them from stealing.

  Another participant in the Uprising was Russian-Polish immigrant and labor organizer and suffragist Rose Schneiderman, who would never marry. Her 1911 speech, in which she implored, “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too” became the mantra of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike of female textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and an anthemic phrase in the labor and women’s movements that were to come. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a radical socialist who married at seventeen, but separated from her husband two years later, organized mining and textile strikes around the country and was arrested multiple times. She was dubbed by the writer Theodore Dreiser “an East Side Joan of Arc,” memorialized in a popular song called “The Rebel Girl;” she was a founding member of the ACLU.

  While factory unionizers often focused on the physical dangers in workplaces, the labor movement in education concerned itself primarily with fair pay. The never-married Margaret Haley, known in the press as the “Lady Labor Slugger,” led the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, one of the more militant teaching unions in the nation. She contested assumptions that female teachers could be paid less after a 1910 National Education Association survey found that they were often primary earners, either as single women or the sole supports of parents and siblings. Haley understood that since women couldn’t vote, teachers needed to align with the male labor movement, and decided to join her 97 percent female union to the blue-collar Chicago Federation of Labor, remaking teacher unionism as an urban political force and getting herself dubbed by a conservative, anti-labor businessman, a “nasty, unladylike woman.”48

  By 1920, nearly 40 percent of black women worked for wages, compared to about 18 percent of white women; a 1919 study showed that the typical black laborer in New York City was young, unmarried, and had at least a grammar school education. Historian Paula Giddings describes how, “For the first time [black women] were permitted to use machinery, and some even found jobs as clerks, stenographers, and bookkeepers. These new opportunities had a salutary effect which went beyond better wages.” It remained true, however, that even as opportunities expanded, black women were following in the professional wake of their white sisters, taking jobs only as white women fought for and eventually won better opportunities. Black women got stuck with the hottest, dirtiest and most unsafe jobs in factories, and as Giddings writes, “they were paid from 10 to 60 percent less than ill-paid White women.”49

  During these same years, other reformers—many of them suffragists, socialists, and labor agitators—were building the Settlement House Movement, creating residential spaces where rich and poor might come together to better understand and address class and racial injustice and pacifism. Chicago’s Hull House, founded by two never-wed activists, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, provided everything from childcare to continuing education.

  Settlement Houses were, in many cases, designed as sustainable places where single and divorced women might find community and a respectable life structure outside marriage; they were also a breeding ground for progressive economic policy. Frances Perkins, who worked at Hull House, would marry at thirty-three (and fight in court to keep her name), and remain the sole breadwinner for her family. Perkins would go on to become Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s secretary of labor and the creator of Social Security. Florence Kelley, a suffragist, socialist, civil rights leader, and labor organizer who opposed child labor and sweatshops, fought for minimum wage laws and petitioned the Illinois legislature for eight-hour workdays for women and children; after leaving her husband, she moved to Hull House and then to the Henry Street Settlement, founded by the never-married social activist Lillian Wald, in New York.

  The labor and Settlement House movements merged with the ongoing suffrage fight in natural ways. As Clara Lemlich explained, “The manufacturer has a vote; the bosses have votes; the foremen have votes; the inspectors have votes. The working girl has no vote.”

  An older generation of activists, including Anthony and antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells, teamed with younger women who also picked up strategies from England’s radical feminists. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, both unmarried, were often described as being of “one mind and spirit;” they picketed the White House and staged hunger strikes in the name of voting rights. In later years, Paul would draft the Equal Rights Amendment, which read, simply, “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction;” it would be introduced to every Congressional session from 1923 until 1972, when it finally passed but was not ratified by the states. (It has been reintroduced, though never passed, in every session since 1982).

  But the biggest victory would change the gender politics of the country forever. In 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment; it was ratified by the states in 1920. For the first time in America’s history, its female citizens could legally (if not practically, in the Jim Crow South) vote.

  Over a century in which women had exercised increasing independence, living more singly in the world than ever before, the movements that independent women had helped to power had resulted in the passage of the 14th, 15th, 18th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution.

  They had reshaped the nation.

  The New Women: Backlash and Redirection

  The twentieth century dawned on a cultural landscape that was as remade as the political one.

  Electric street lamps had come to cities around the country, creating “white ways” that made it feel safer for women to be on the streets at night. This development changed the kinds of jobs women could work, as well as the ways in which they could spend money and leisure time. Working-class young women in cities may have struggled economically, but the lit streets, Nickelodeons, Vaudeville houses, bowling alleys, music and dance halls that began to proliferate meant that these women (and men), according to Kathy Peiss, “spent much of their leisure apart from their families and enjoyed greater social freedom than their parents or married siblings, especially married women.” Young women “Putting on finery, promenading the streets, and staying late at amusement resorts became an important cultural style for many working wom
en.”50

  Peiss writes of the drive of some working-class women toward increased social and sexual freedoms, noting that single working women “were among those who flocked to the streets in pursuit of pleasure and amusement, using public spaces for flamboyant assertion.” Although these so-called “rowdy girls” were vulnerable to public censure for immorality, Peiss writes, “young women continued to seek the streets to search for men, have a good time, and display their clothes and style in a public arena.”51

  African-Americans continued the great migration from the south into northern cities, while new waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe poured into New York City. Blacks and immigrants began to mix in urban centers, not always peaceably. But the coming together of different kinds of people helped the sharp class and ethnic lines begin to blur, if only slightly, producing new, liberated fashions in dress and entertainments.

  Syncopated rhythms, rooted in the black neighborhoods of New Orleans, led to ragtime-era dance crazes, which in turn gave way to sexually expressive fads like the Charleston and the Black Bottom that would take hold in the Jazz Age. Working women of New York’s Bowery and West Village began to experiment with cropped hair and shorter hemlines that made it easier and safer for them to work in factories; as they became more visible on sidewalks and in public gathering places, middle- and upper-class women began to mimic their styles. Women were soon unburdening themselves of fashions that had, in the nineteenth century, weighed an estimated thirty pounds, turning to shorter skirts and looser fits.52

  In 1914, as courtship rituals moved away from family homes or closely watched community dance halls, the Ladies’ Home Journal used the term “dating” in its modern sense. Couples could engage more easily in sexual experimentation, and Stephanie Coontz reports that ninety-two percent of college girls surveyed in the 1920s said they had participated in sexual, below-the-neck fondling, and that, by this time, “young middle-class men were more likely to lose their virginity with women of their own class than with prostitutes.”53