The Scarlet Sisters (17 page)

Down through the ages, it was, and remains, an exercise in futility to persuade a large number of women to trade what is deemed fashionable, no matter how torturous, for comfort. The sisters traditionally wore high-necked dresses and little jewelry or makeup, which did nothing to stop male reporters from noticing their beauty and arresting figures. Fashionable women, on the other hand, went to “enameling studios,” where the face and bust were coated with dangerous enamel, a semi-paste composed of arsenic or white lead. For $10 to $15, a woman could get a coating that lasted a few days. A shellacking that lasted six months cost between $400 and $600—more than most laborers’ annual salary—to retain the dangerous ethereal whiteness. It was not explained how, or if, they’d wash their face after application.

If Mother Nature had not been kind, dentists filled out cheeks from inside with hard composite pads, placed high up inside the mouth. These were not the only “plumpers” in the female sexual armament. If cotton and horsehair padding didn’t produce the “very important” bust, “patent heavers” were in vogue. Two rubber bags, miniature life preservers, costing five to ten dollars, were blown up to achieve high-level perkiness. If women seemed loath to perform a tight embrace, it was not Victorian prudery so much as the fear that, under such pressure, one side of the patent heaver would shrink drastically, accompanied by the sound of a deflating balloon. Plumpness was so admired that slim women sewed padding into dress sleeves and added padding to ankles under their hose.

If women were supposed to be chaste, instead of chased, what were all the pushed-up breasts and beautifiers for? Catching a husband and then resisting sex as much as possible was the Victorian ideal. “Ladies” were not expected to enjoy a happy sexual life, but to remain frail and delicate flowers. (In the insanity of the times, some fashionable women were so
ashamed of any lust they felt that they even resorted to the extreme measure of removing the clitoris, to be discussed later in this chapter.)

At times, Victoria praised reciprocal monogamous love as the desired “higher order,” but she invariably added that it was not possible in most marriages and that “miseries” were “concealed beneath its deceptive exterior.” From their radical sex position, the sisters saw marriage as outmoded: “There are two classes only who have anything more than an imaginary interest in maintaining the marriage system: the hypocritical priests who get their fees for forging the chain and the blackguard lawyers who get bigger ones for breaking the fetters” (that is, charging more because divorces were much fewer). Acid dripped as Woodhull said, “Of course ‘virtue’ must have a legal standard.”

Victoria stumbled in her praise of the Oneida Community, a free love commune, saluting it for not permitting “monogamic [
sic
] attachments. If they are found springing up, the parties are compelled to separate.” Oneida, however, was not a rosy haven for women, and is viewed by female historians as the “most notorious example of male domination in the free love tradition.” It was, in fact, harshly and absolutely controlled by its founder, John Humphrey Noyes.

While other misogynists could well compete for the honor, the Victorian gynecologist was the woman’s worst friend. When suffragists pushed for higher education for women, male “experts” in medicine argued that too much education was unhealthy both physically and mentally. The most invidious medical treatment of women revolved around their sexual organs. Freud would have had a field day probing the psychological makeup of the male pioneers in gynecology; they were sexist, misogynist, and anti-contraception. They castrated women who showed signs of neurosis or insanity, husbands being the judges of such conditions, with gynecologists concurring that hysterectomies would do the trick.

An opposite, if impermanent, solution for the purported female disease of “hysteria” called for doctors and midwives to massage the female
genitalia manually, arousing a woman to “paroxysm.” (
Merriam-Webster
’s synonyms are
convulsion
and
spasm
. Victorians did not use
orgasm
.) When Joseph Mortimer Granville patented the first electromechanical vibrator in the 1880s, the stern Englishman proposed using it for muscular aches, and opposed its use for female sexual gratification, but his invention and refined vibrators to come were soon bringing smiles to the faces of many a Victorian woman. And doctors and midwives found it a relief from manual stimulation. Not until 1952 did the American Psychiatric Association drop the term
hysteria
as a disorder from the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
.

By the 1870s, gynecologists had also begun “to practice surgical treatment of the psychological disorders of women,” including “the excision of the clitoris (clitoridectomy) and female castration (removal of the ovaries) to cure ‘insanity.’ ” By far the most common of the two was the removal of ovaries, a surgical procedure that began in 1872.

An esteemed gynecologist, J. Marion Sims, was one of the elite brigade who performed both. For generations, male historians lauded Sims for his work in sterility, for the invention of the speculum, and for surgery that repaired tears in the vagina (vesicovaginal fistulas) often brought about by torturous childbirth or violent sex. Sims was called the “father” of gynecology, and a statue was erected to honor this founder of the Woman’s Hospital in New York. Later, female (and a few male) historians exposed the horror of his 1840s experiments. Although anesthesia had been invented, Sims operated on black slave women without it, performing as many as thirty failed operations on one woman over the course of four years. The slaves endured horrific pain, but Sims argued, “I kept all these negroes at my own expense all the time.… this was an enormous tax on a young doctor.” When he tried operating on a white woman, the “pain was so terrific that Mrs. H. couldn’t stand it and I was foiled completely.” This Victorian Mengele bought some slaves expressly for his experiments. He termed them “adequate material.” In New York his guinea pigs were uneducated poor women. Only when he had perfected his surgical treatment for vesicovaginal fistula did he operate on wealthy white women.
Sims’s success spurred the tendency “toward general, frequent and drastic use of the knife in American gynecology.” His motto was “look upon the knife not as the last weapon but as the first.”

The director of the American Medical Association and other leaders in the field approved and performed such surgeries as well as Sims, believing that “women’s entire psychology was governed by her sex organs.” Another excuse for surgery was to cure “oversexed” women, which meant women who had confessed to masturbation. Renowned gynecologists Robert Battey (the originator of hysterectomies for nonmedical conditions) and E. W. Cushing reported that a woman castrated for nonmedical reasons improved dramatically. She had “previously shrunk into a state of profound melancholia on account of her belief that her masturbation eternally damned her.” Husbands and fathers unable to enforce what they considered their control over women handed over disorderly women to the gynecologists for hysterectomies. A crusading doctor against the practice, Eli Van de Warker, primarily faulted the medical profession for performing clitoridectomies and removing ovaries; he also described the “collaboration of careless, passive and wealthy women,” who found it “fashionable” even to the extent of proudly viewing their scars “as pretty as the dimple in the cheek of sweet sixteen.” Twenty years after the sisters’ era, in 1893, a hysterectomy proponent still claimed that a woman “becomes tractable, orderly, industrious and cleanly” after having her female organs removed.

When the sisters first arrived in New York, a vigorous battle was under way between clerical-led moralists who fought contraception and those who supported it for overburdened mothers and to stem rampaging venereal disease. Noted gynecologists were often on the side of the anti-contraception clergy. Gynecologist Augustus K. Gardner dedicated his popular book
Conjugal Sins
to the U.S. clergy who were the “great moral lever-power” who “can make this vice [contraception] disgraceful… They can prevent it being the common boast of women that ‘they know too much to have babies.’ ” Class snobbery came into play among doctors such as Dr. William Goodell, professor of clinical and didactic gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania, who feared immigrants would take over
the country because they bore so many children. He lectured to WASP cadres that the “unwillingness of our women to become mothers” was one of the “dangers of the hour.” Critics blamed as selfish women who, through industrial progress, were now freed from many domestic chores that had kept them from their duty—the “reproduction of the race.”

Women were having sex, whether they liked it or not, and many of them resisted male opprobrium in religious and medical hierarchies. They resorted to contraception and abortion, dramatically reducing the birth rate in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The sisters informed women of vaginal sponges but never mentioned their own private habits, although it seems likely that both practiced contraception. Tennie was briefly married in her teens and had at least one “sweetheart” in New York. Whatever relationship she had had with Vanderbilt did not produce children, and gossip about her freewheeling early days was never proven. Whatever liaisons Tennie had, she had no children. After the stressful births of Victoria’s two children with Woodhull, she had no more, despite her passionate free love days with Colonel Blood.

Contraceptive devices were called “French Shields for Women” and “Wife’s Protector.” By midcentury, contraceptive vaginal sponges were increasingly available commercially, with differing views on their efficacy. Critics argued that “quacks” charged five dollars for contraceptive sponges with silk threads attached when all women needed to do was buy a sponge about the size of a walnut, twist together silk threads to make a string, wet it in a weak solution of sulphate of iron, and insert the sponge. After intercourse, the string was used to withdraw the sponge. Douches were common, and the “womb veil,” a rubber shield, was the forerunner to the diaphragm of the twentieth century. Lydia E. Pinkham, famous for her “Vegetable Compound and Uterine Tonic,” disdained gynecologists and urged women customers to write her, promising complete anonymity, for any help needed and to “let the doctors alone.” Her tonic promised to cure everything from menstrual cramps to infertility to prolapsus uteri. Happy matrons had no idea they were downing a hefty slug of booze; the tonic was 20 percent alcohol.

The sisters saw abortion as the inevitable result of a social system that kept women in terrible marriages, forever dealing with unwanted pregnancies. As Tennie wrote in the
Weekly
, “Abortion is only a symptom of a more deep-seated disorder of the social state.” Childbearing was a beautiful thing, she said, “but to our faded-out, sickly, exhausted type of women… abortion is the choice of evils.” Folk remedies for abortion “survived essentially unchanged over many centuries,” but after 1840, abortion became a commercial business. Laws were fairly lenient until 1873, provided that abortions were performed in the first trimester. Mainstream newspapers advertised “female” doctors, and drug firms offered pills touted to induce miscarriage, among them “The Samaritan’s Gift for Females.” Abortions were slyly mentioned: “
LADIES CURED AT ONE INTERVIEW
with or without medicine $5.” Pills with a promise of producing abortion were touted as “Regulating Pills, $5; sure and safe.”

Women resorted to spoons, uterine probes, and abortion instruments that were readily available through the mail and at retail establishments. In 1870 the
Days’ Doings
scandal sheet carried ads for seven medicines that left no doubt they were for abortions. Poor women were often the victims of amateur abortions, which produced a death rate 15 percent higher than the maternal death rate.

On the other hand, high-society women could afford famed Manhattan abortionist Madame Restell, who advertised in Manhattan’s major papers and lived in a four-story marble-and-gold mansion on Fifth Avenue, a monument built on the money of rich male clientele who brought their mistresses and wives secretly to her private quarters. Tennie referred contemptuously to the hypocrisy of Madame Restell’s carriage trade.

Anthony Comstock, a one-man vice squad, dressed in disguise as a destitute man one January night in 1878, entered Restell’s basement office and asked for some abortion powder for a woman in distress. As soon as Restell agreed to help, he arrested her. Restell made a decision. She had been in jail before, including in the infamous Blackwell’s Island prison, and could not bear it again. Upon her release after posting bail, she went home and, on April 1, 1878, drew a warm bath in her ornate
marble bathtub, climbed in, and slit her throat with a pearl-handle knife. She was found the next morning in the cold crimson water, her throat so severely cut that she had severed her carotid artery and both jugular veins. Comstock famously wrote on the police blotter, “A bloody ending to a bloody life.” His sentiments were echoed in the
New York Times
, which called Restell an “evil murderer.” Restell’s success points to a swift business among the rich; upon her death she was said to be worth $1.5 million, the equivalent of several million today.

Male condoms were originally bought as protection against disease from prostitutes, rather than for contraception. Made of skin and India rubber, they offered various degrees of reliability, if price was an indication. They ranged from two dollars to four dollars per dozen, with no explanation for the difference. Ads in
The Gentleman’s Companion
spelled out the horrors of venereal disease: “
PRIVATE DISEASES. BOTH SEXES CURED WITHOUT MERCURY
,” blazed one ad featuring “Seminal Pills.” One “doctor” offered late services at 651 Broadway until 9:00 p.m. for the convenience of customers. The ad contained a telling comment about symptoms of venereal disease: “For Nervous Debility, $1 per box, or six boxes for $5 by mail or at office.” Bachelors were supposed to “sow their wild oats,” and doctors were among those who did not ascertain until late in the nineteenth century that venereal disease “constituted a special danger to the family” and had become a massive problem. Too late for countless women and their children, doctors recognized the devastating illness, infant death, and deformities caused by syphilis and gonorrhea.