American Experiment (172 page)

Guests allowed into the family quarters marveled at the master’s
corner bedroom, with its single bed and no direct access to his wife’s bedroom, and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s boudoir, a reproduction of a French queen’s bedroom of the Louis XV period. The headwall of the bed was covered with hand-embroidered silk; the heavily napped rug weighed over a ton; and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s bed was separated from the rest of the room by a marble rail, like those behind which French courtiers had presented their petitions to the queen in olden times. Thus was symbolized the ultimate separation of the queens of society from the long hierarchy that stretched below them.

The class structures in other cities contrasted with that of New York and the other eastern metropolises. New Haven had lived for decades under a powerful patrician rule, which came to an end with the elevation of a long line of businessmen following the Civil War. The Richmond and Charleston elites were hardly altered in any fundamental way by the Civil War, while Springfield, Massachusetts, never developed an aristocratic leadership cohesive and powerful enough to hold back the young entrepreneurs.

Chicago of course accepted the rule of the arrivistes more readily than did even New York. But if Chicago scoffed at Boston, New York ignored Chicago. Mrs. Astor, an incessant traveler, had never even been there. To its balls each Patriarch might invite five gentlemen, four ladies, and two “distinguished strangers” from Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Charleston, or from London or the Continent—but not from Chicago or, for that matter, from any other city west of the Alleghenies.

She rose before dawn to dress in a high-collared, long-sleeved dress over flannel and muslin petticoats, bustle, and whalebone corset. After lighting the kerosene lamp in the kitchen and kindling the coals in the firebox, she kneaded the bread dough left to rise overnight in a warm place by the iron range. From part of the dough she baked a basket of rolls before preparing the rest of the heavy meal middle-class Americans ate upon rising—steak, fried potatoes, hotcakes, and coffee roasted and ground at home. Soon her husband, imposing in his waistcoat and “burnsides,” would enter, followed by the children in sailor suits or frilly dresses, one child probably holding a baby brother or sister. After breakfast, she saw children and husband off to school and work, on horse-car or steam railroad.

Monday was always wash day: voluminous linen sheets, tablecloths, and napkins, yards of flannel or muslin petticoats, diapers, soaked in wooden tubs and then stretched across kitchen or backyard. “It was all the lifting that tired my back so,” one woman remarked—water had to be carried in
from the pump, heated on the stove, carried to the washtub, and then emptied outside after each rinse. Petticoats, shirts, cuffs, and collars would be starched, while all else—even diapers—required ironing with a heavy iron reheated on the stove every half-hour or so. In summer, the kitchen would be sweltering; in winter, women risked chilblains while hanging freezing wet garments on the line outside.

Housecleaning usually took a week in the summer and another in the fall. Each room in sequence was turned upside down, the horsehair and mahogany furniture moved aside, and the carpet lifted for a clean, a mend, a dye and then reinstallation. Mirrors, pictures, china, and bric-a-brac were scrubbed and polished, textured wallpaper and heavy ornate curtains brushed, soot cleaned out of fireplaces and lamps. Insects and vermin infested even wealthy homes as a result of inadequate drainage and outdoor privies.

The sewing machine, by the 1870s essential equipment in every home, helped turn the chore of sewing into a housewife’s best chance for creativity. Many women took intense pride in the skill with which they remade old clothes, like “Hattie’s ‘opera cape’ made out of Warrie’s pink flannel baby cloak.” The family’s diverse activities stretched the housewife’s ingenuity—one woman made two-tone graduation dresses for her sisters and later found out that wearing them had been “life’s darkest hour” for the girls.

She might have time during the day to browse through her copy of
Harper’s Weekly,
with its rich mixture of articles, stories, reviews, and George William Curtis’s editorial comment, or through the
Atlantic
or the
Nation
or
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.
If she had been brought up on
Godey’s Lady’s Book
—“The Only Magazine with Lady Editors”—she might now be reading
The Mother at Home.
Or if she had been brought up on
The Lady’s Own,
“Devoted to the Advocacy of Working Females” and costing only three cents an issue, she might now be following one of the many suffragist organs. Her children might read
Home Companion: A Monthly for Young People
which, after going through many transformations, would become the
Home Companion,
“a journal suited to the entire family and read by all,” and later the
Ladies’ Home Companion.
In most of these journals she could scan a plenitude of mail-order advertising, patent-medicine claims, and premium offers.

Family members returned for a dinner of roast and Indian pudding, and then spent the evening hours together in the parlor, reading aloud or playing cards by lamplight. While the wife mended or embroidered, daughters played the piano or received gentlemen callers, always with the family or a chaperone present. At an early hour the family retired, the wife
putting out the milk can and the husband banking the fire and barring the shutters.

Many middle-class housewives hired live-in “help,” usually young women from small rural towns or newly arrived immigrants from Ireland, Sweden, or the Deep South. Housewives often proved exacting mistresses, grumbling audibly about newcomers’ slow adjustment to service—“She seemed to have all the faults, and none of the virtues of help”—and vigilantly alert for signs of stealing or shirking. The maid, the complaints went, used “the weapon of degraded races pretty freely—Deceit,” or “She is a
slouch
Poor white trash.” Friction between mistress and servant masqueraded as “the servant problem” and made some women decide to “do their own work”—which often meant, in fact, supervising a cleaning woman several days a week.

To find guidance through the crises, large and small, of domestic life, most middle-class women read manuals of housekeeping or “domestic science,” such as
The Mother at Home,
with recipes and tips on hygiene, physiology, nutrition, how to decorate, or how to get along with domestics. Educator Catharine Beecher explained how to have “Economical, Healthful, Beautiful and Christian homes.” These guides, which poured forth from publishers in the latter half of the century, were especially important to a mobile society in which many women lost the benefit of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ knowledge. They also set higher standards of cleanliness, household skills, and child-rearing, standards that often consumed as much time as was gained from the new labor-saving devices.

Mothers also lightened their burdens by training daughters of the house from an early age in the skills of home management. One woman wrote proudly that her daughter, just turned three, “sweeps and dusts and bakes and enjoys it very much.” At four, the little girl sewed a patchwork quilt for her dolls. All too often a young girl would have to leave school prematurely in order to take over management of the house—to substitute for a sick mother or to enable the family to concentrate all its resources on a son’s education. “Mother explained very regretfully, that she couldn’t afford the lessons which would be needed to train me for a (music) teacher,” one woman wrote. “She explained that she wanted David to have as much education as possible, so that if ever she, or father, couldn’t take care of us adequately he’d be able to help.” Much might depend on a daughter’s ability to hold the home together.

One subject a mother did not discuss with her daughter was sex. Canons of modesty and purity kept some women from completely undressing
throughout their adult lives and convinced others that sexuality was for men alone. Clergymen and politicians claimed that corresponding to the male sex drive was women’s maternal instinct, a chaste tenderness never to be “tainted” with sex. “The full force of sexual desire is seldom known to a virtuous woman,” announced one male authority.

At the same time, women’s fashions were tending to maximize femaleness and limit freedom. “The poetry of dependence,” feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton called the combination of romance and restriction. The corset, a contraption of whalebone and steel tightly bound in back with laces in order to create a curvaceous form, was de rigueur, even for little girls, for almost a century. “It is no rare thing,” wrote one English visitor, “to meet ladies so tightly laced that they cannot lean back in a chair or sofa; if they did so, they would suffocate.” The tighter a woman’s waist, the more ladylike she was, as hinted by her frequent swoons and headaches.

Young women and men entered marriage with little understanding of each other’s sexual needs. Marriage often came as a shock to young brides who had only known their suitors through the formality of chaperoned courtship. “How many young hearts have revealed the fact,” wrote Catharine Beecher after a tour, “that what they had been trained to imagine the highest earthly felicity, was but the beginning of care, and disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering.” “I am nearly wrecked and ruined by … nightly intercourse,” one woman wrote. “This and nothing else was the cause of my miscarriage ... he went to work like a man a-mowing, and instead of a pleasure as it might have been, it was most intense torture….” Thinking their wives “unaccommodating and capricious,” some men fled the house to visit prostitutes. And women turned to one another to find the intimacy and warmth they missed in marriage, developing a network of lifetime friends who exchanged diaries, sewed one another’s trousseaux, supervised one another’s pregnancies and childbirths, vacationed together, and shared chores, skills, and life’s major events.

The fear of unending pregnancies and prolonged motherhood may have contributed more than any crusading clergyman or insensitive husband to the female aversion toward sex. “Confinement” indoors during and after pregnancy, lack of fresh air and exercise, and the physiological effects of the viselike corset often made childbirth all but unbearable. The intensifying shift to a money economy made smaller families more desirable, especially in the urban middle-class home where children’s labor was less needed, and women were beginning to realize that by regulating their—and thereby, their husbands’—sexuality, they could augment their power within the family and also enjoy the autonomy that an endless parade of
bawling infants denied them. The result of these developments was fewer, and healthier, babies.

Contraception was another unmentionable. After the passage of the “Comstock” law in 1873, it was illegal to advertise or distribute birth control material—“obscene literature and articles of immoral use”—through the mail. Male withdrawal, the most common method of birth control, was discreetly discouraged by male doctors as being unhealthy to the husband; the rhythm method, though popular, was ineffective due to ignorance of the female fertility cycle. Abortion was a last resort, often induced by patent medicines.

Defying all these obstacles, many women did enjoy happy sex lives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in 1883, “Walt Whitman seems to understand everything in nature but woman. In ‘There is a Woman Waiting for me,’ he speaks as if the female must be forced to the creative act, apparently ignorant of the great natural fact that a healthy woman has as much passion as a man, that she needs nothing stronger than the law of attraction to draw her to the male.” Love and sex preoccupied young girls. “For such a person that I could so love, I would brave all—anything, I would give myself up soul and body,” wrote Harriet Burton at age fifteen, with the passionate intensity that would characterize her later speeches for suffrage.

Three-quarters of the women questioned, in a remarkable survey taken by a female physician at the end of the century, wrote that they desired and enjoyed sex. Many said they needed it for spiritual, even more than physical, fulfillment, and resisted the idea that sex was for reproduction alone. “My husband and I believe in intercourse for its own sake,” wrote one woman in 1893. “We wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it, rather than physically, when it does not occur, because it is the highest, most sacred expression of our oneness.” But with even a slight risk of pregnancy, “we deny ourselves the intercourse, feeling all the time that we are losing that which keeps us closest to each other.”

Some middle-class women, including those of some affluence, found their prospects a source of despair. The feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, great-niece of Catharine, Harriet, and Henry Ward Beecher, suffered a crippling depression in 1885 at the age of twenty-five. “I went to bed crying; woke in the night crying, sat on the edge of the bed in the morning and cried—from sheer continuous pain,” she wrote later. “Not physical—the doctors examined me and found nothing the matter.” Still later she would write
The Yellow Wallpaper,
a fictionalized look at her illness which compared the confinement of a mental patient with that of a wife.

Other notable, talented women, including Jane Addams and Margaret Sanger, endured the same experience. Alice James, brilliant sister of Henry
and William, suffered a mysterious disease from the age of nineteen until she died of breast cancer at forty-two. “I think the difficulty is my inability to assume the receptive attitude, that cardinal virtue in women, the absence of which has always made me so uncharming to & uncharmed by the male sex,” she wrote, referring to her experiences with male doctors in particular. Countless other women, faced with a discrepancy between their potential, their dreams, and reality, took part in an epidemic of invalidism observed by Catharine Beecher as early as 1855. “…[T]he more I traveled, the more the conviction was pressed on my attention that there was a terrible decay of female health all over the land, and that this evil was bringing with it an incredible extent of individual, domestic, and social suffering, that was increasing in an alarming ratio.”