women history

Chicago style referencing

Total  of 7 ½ pages

Assignment 1 – 1 page

Read chapter 6 of Through Women’ Eyes, paying particular attention to “Reading into the Past” Leonora Barry, p. 311, and Primary Sources: Ida B. Wells, ‘Race Woman’, ‘The Woman Who Toils’, and ‘The Higher Education of Women in the Postbellum Years’.

Describes how the writings and/or images shown in the documents that this chapter showcases convey a sense of how Black women and White women distinguish themselves as similar and different from one another.

Analyzes how women of this time period (1865-1900) struggled to define a notion of equality that was inclusive to all, despite the many racial and economic differences among them.

Assignment 2 – 1 page

Read chapter 7 of Through Women’s Eyes, paying particular attention to the short blurbs by Emma Goldman (p. 369) and Clemencia Lopez (p. 386) in the Reading into the Past sections of this chapter.

Study the content guide on The Black Experience and Westward Migration as well as the primary source documents on Representing Native American Women in the Late Nineteenth Century; Jacob Riis’s Photographs of Immigrant Girls and Women, and these online resources on Alice Austen’s life and work:

Alice Austen House Home Page

Alice Austen Biography

Alice Austen Photography Collection

analyzes :

How conflicting ideas on how women placed themselves in American society at this point in history are reflected in the images and/or writings.

How women’s self-presentation of these ideas sheds light on their perspectives of U.S. historical narratives as well as the nation’s evolving relationship with the world.

Assignment 3 – 1 page

Read chapter 8 of Through Women’s Eyes,  on Women’s Associations and The Progressive Era; and particularly the Primary Source documents on Black Women and Progressive Era Reforms; Parades, Picketing, and Power: Women in Public Space; and Modernizing Womanhood. Optional: Also visit Women and Social Movements website for more ideas.

analyzes:

How women defined equality for themselves as women vis-a-vis men;

How women addressed racial and economic differences within American society in their activism.

 

Assignment 4

The post-Civil War years marked the birth of children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), who chronicled the experiences of her family’s journey across the Midwest and Great Plains of the United States as a pioneering family. Wilder wrote nine books in her much heralded Little House series, as well as a final memoir about the latter years of her life with her husband Almanzo Wilder and daughter Rose Wilder Lane. The popular television series “Little House on the Prairie” was based on the book series, and numerous museums and historic sites have been established throughout the country marking the areas where her family lived and documenting such things as the recipes her family used to cook some of the meals that the books describe. These efforts to preserve the history of her family have created an interesting archive of both fictional and historically reliable artifacts that offer us — as students of women’s history — a unique opportunity to study.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder archive also offers us a model of what public history might look like within the field of U.S.  study part of that archive and write analysis of your findings. Here’s what I’d like you to do:

Part 1  – 1 ½  page

1. define public history.

 

Read the chapters 6-8 from Through Women’s Eyes.

Familiarize yourself with the concept of public history by visiting the National Council on Public History and

Explore the Little House series:

Read an excerpt from one of the nine books in the Little House series or view one of the episodes from the Little House on the Prairie television series. Both the books and DVDs from the television series are widely available through public libraries. You can also find excepts of the books by searching Google Books.

If you read these books as a child or watched the Little House on the Prairie series on television, you may draw on your memories of the stories.

1. summarizes the excerpt you chose. Please be sure to indicate which book or which television episode you chose Or, summarizes what you learned about Laura Ingalls Wilder from two of the following museum sites:  

Visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum and at least one more of the websites below on Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family. If you live near one of the museums or historic sites dedicated to her family, you might want to physically visit the site if you have the time to do so.

Little House on the Prairie Museum

Wilder Homestead in Malone NY

Rose Wilder Lane’s life history from the Library of Congress American Memory Project

Little House in the Census

 

Part 2  – 3 pages

 

• write essay.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder archive that we studied  on Laura Ingalls Wilder offers a model of what public history might look like within the field of U.S. Women’s History.  study part of that archive and write an analysis of your findings.

In this essay, you are considering the sources you looked at in regard to “historical” sources such as websites about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life, or the books she wrote in the children’s book series “Little House on the Prairie”, or the more recent TV show version of the book series.
Consider these various sources as examples of “public history”–that is, history presented in a more accessible [and more creative] form than is usually presented in textbooks.
NOW–based on your reading of our textbook, especially chapter 7, pages 356-367, how do these sources about Laura Ingalls Wilder stand up to the documented history in our textbook about women and the western expansion period? Are the ‘public history’ sources you looked at: websites, children’s books, TV series, historically accurate? Or do they add something to your understanding of the history of the period that the textbook does not provide? Make some evaluative/analytical comments in your essay, along with describing the sources you reviewed.

As you are writing your analysis, make sure that your essay includes:

Brief descriptions of each of the resources in the Laura Ingalls Wilder archive that you consulted. You also may include resources shared by your classmates in the M3 Workshop: Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Analysis of how you as historian interacted with, interpreted, and engaged with the resources.

A synthesis of how your interpretations might provide a public contribution to the “identification, preservation, interpretation, and presentation” of women’s history in the United States for public consumption.

Critique the role of young adult literature, television series, museums, and autobiographical sources in making history relevant to the present.

Additional Resources

You also might want to consult the e-book linked below for additional information as well as the numerous e-books on the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder that are available in the Empire State College’s ebrary collection.

Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane : authorship, place, time, and culture / John E. Miller. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. NDL-OPAC, EBSCOhost

You might also want to revisit the National Council on Public History as you are writing your essay.

 

.

Laura Ingalls Wilder and her signature, Public Domain.

 

PLACE YOUR ORDER NOW

 

Book Citation:

DuBois, Ellen, C. and Lynn Dumenil. Through Women’s Eyes. Available from: MBS Direct, (5th Edition). Macmillan Higher Education, 2018.

Chapter 6

Reconstructing Women’s Lives North and South

1865–1900

IDA B. WELLS, MARY KENNEY, AND M. CAREY THOMAS were all daughters of the Civil War era. Wells was born in 1862 to Mississippi slaves; Kenney in 1864 to Irish immigrants in Hannibal, Missouri; and Thomas in 1857 to a wealthy Baltimore Quaker family. Despite these great differences in background, the unfolding of each woman’s life illustrates the forces that affected American women’s history in the years after the Civil War and, in turn, women’s capacity to be forces in the making of American history.

 

Wells (later Wells-Barnett) was shaped by the violent struggles between former slaves seeking to realize their emancipation and white southerners seeking to retain their racial dominance. As a journalist, Wells exposed new, brutal methods of white supremacy, and her work sparked an organized women’s movement among African Americans. Kenney (later O’Sullivan) was a lifelong wage earner who recognized that workers needed to act collectively rather than individually to improve their lives. A pathbreaking female labor organizer, she helped form the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) in 1903 (see pp. 422–24). Thomas, a self-proclaimed tomboy as a child, never married and became a pioneer of higher education for women. She was one of the first women to graduate from Cornell University and to receive a doctorate (in Switzerland), and she was the founding dean of Bryn Mawr College. In the post–Civil War (or postbellum) years, such individuals laid the basis for an era of extraordinary achievement by American women.

 

“Reconstruction” is the term used to describe the period of American history immediately after the Civil War, the revision of the U.S. Constitution to deal with the consequences of emancipation, the rebuilding of the South after the devastations of war, and the reconstitution of national unity after the trauma of sectional division. The formal period of Reconstruction lasted twelve years. It ended in 1877 when U.S. troops withdrew from the former Confederacy, leaving the South to work out its own troubled racial destiny without federal oversight and the North to concentrate on industrial development and economic growth.

 

The word “reconstruction” can also be used to cover a longer period, during which the U.S. economy was reconstituted entirely around industrial capitalism. The free-labor ethic on which the Republican Party was founded evolved into a commitment to unbridled industrialization. The resulting wealth, optimism, and productivity were not shared equally. On the contrary, the gap between rich and poor grew enormously during the postbellum years, producing great tension and violence between owners and workers. With chattel slavery eliminated, industrial society could no longer ignore its internal class divisions, and by the end of the century, conflict between labor and capital overtook the inequalities of race as the most overt challenge to national unity.

 

Women were reconstructing their lives in these years as well. In the defeated South, women emancipated from slavery grappled with the challenges and dangers of their tentative freedom, while their former mistresses sought to maintain the privileges of white supremacy under new conditions. In the North, a determined group of women sought equal political rights, and the woman suffrage movement came into its own. Industrial capitalism generated both a rapidly expanding female labor force and new leisure and wealth for middle- and upper-class women. Between 1865 and 1900, women’s wage labor, the terms of appropriate womanhood within which women lived, and their scope for public action all expanded. By the end of the nineteenth century, the basis had been laid for an epoch of female assertion and accomplishment unparalleled in American history.

 

1865

U.S. Civil War ends

1865

Abraham Lincoln assassinated

1865

Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery, ratified

 

1865

Freedmen’s Bureau established to aid former slaves

1865

Repressive “black codes” are passed in former Confederate states

1865

Vassar College founded

1866

American Equal Rights Association formed

1866

Ku Klux Klan first appears

1868

Fourteenth Amendment, defining national citizenship, ratified

1868

Sorosis and the New England Women’s Club formed

1868–1870

Susan B. Anthony publishes the Revolution

 

1869

American Woman Suffrage Association and National Woman Suffrage Association formed

1869

Knights of Labor founded

1869–1870

Women enfranchised in Wyoming and Utah Territories

1870

Fifteenth Amendment, forbidding disfranchisement by “race, color or previous condition of servitude,” ratified

1870

The Woman’s Journal begins publication

1872

Victoria Woodhull arrested under the Comstock Law

1873

Susan B. Anthony tried for voting in the 1872 presidential election

1873

Remington Arms Company begins manufacturing typewriters

 

1873

National economy collapses in severe industrial depression

1874

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) formed

1875

Supreme Court rules in Minor v.Happersett that voting is not a right of citizenship

1876

Suffragists protest at the centennial of Declaration of Independence

1877

Federal troops withdrawn from the South, ending Reconstruction

1877

Nationwide railroad strikes herald a quarter century of labor violence

1881

Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, later Spelman College, founded

1884

WCTU, led by Frances Willard, endorses woman suffrage

1886

Leonora Barry appointed head of Woman’s Department of the Knights of Labor

 

1886

Haymarket Square worker protest in Chicago

1886

American Federation of Labor (AFL) founded

1888

International Congress of Women held in Washington, D.C.

1890

General Federation of Women’s Clubs established

1890

Two suffrage factions come together as National American Woman Suffrage Association

1891

Mary Kenney appointed first paid AFL women’s organizer

1892

Ida B. Wells begins her campaign against lynching

1892

Elizabeth Cady Stanton delivers “The Solitude of Self” and departs suffrage leadership

1893

Woman’s Building featured at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago

1895

National Association of Colored Women formed

1896

National Council of Jewish Women formed

 

1896

Supreme Court establishes “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson

1898

Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes Women and Economics

 

GENDER AND THE POSTWAR CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS

American history’s first presidential assassination (Abraham Lincoln), followed quickly by its first presidential impeachment (Andrew Johnson), left the executive branch in shambles and the legislative branch in charge of national Reconstruction. Republicans controlled Congress, and former abolitionists, known as Radicals, controlled the Republican Party. To protect the North’s victory and their party’s control over Congress, the Radicals were determined to enfranchise the only population on whom the Republicans could depend in the defeated Confederacy — former slaves. In 1866, Radicals proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to establish the citizenship of ex-slaves. The Fourteenth Amendment began with a simple, inclusive sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

 

Leaders of the women’s rights movement hoped to further revise the Constitution and reconstruct democracy without distinction of either race or gender. Despite their best efforts, however, the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, followed by that of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, established black suffrage without reference to woman suffrage. Thwarted in Congress, these women turned to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue that women’s political right to the franchise was included within the new constitutional definitions of national citizenship and political rights.

 

Their efforts failed. The only actual enfranchisement of women in the Reconstruction era occurred in the territories of Wyoming (1869) and Utah (1870), where a handful of legislators accorded women the vote in territorial and local elections. Even so, the movement for women’s enfranchisement changed and expanded, drawing new adherents from the Midwest and the Pacific Coast. The old alliance with abolitionists was shattered, and most white women’s efforts for women’s equality were no longer linked to those for racial equality. The advocates of woman suffrage undertook a campaign that would require an additional half century and another constitutional amendment — the Nineteenth, ratified in 1920 — to complete (see pp. 450–52).

Constitutionalizing Women’s Rights

In 1865 and 1866, as Congress was considering how to word the Fourteenth Amendment, women’s rights activists called for woman suffrage to be joined with black suffrage in a single constitutional act. Many northern women had fought for the end of slavery, so, in the memorable words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Would it not be advisable, when the constitutional door is open, for [women] to avail ourselves of the strong arm and blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side?”1 To pursue this goal, Cady Stanton, Anthony, and others formed the American Equal Rights Association, dedicated to both black and woman suffrage. “We resolved to make common cause with the colored class — the only other disfranchised class,” observed Lucy Stone, “and strike for equal rights for all.”2

 

But Radicals in Congress contended that pursuing woman suffrage and black suffrage simultaneously would doom the latter, which was their priority. Accordingly, they wrote the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment, meant to encourage states to grant voting rights to former slaves, to apply only to “male inhabitants . . . twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United States.” This was the first reference to gender in the U.S. Constitution. Woman suffragists petitioned Congress to get the wording changed, but abolitionist Wendell Phillips told them, “This hour belongs to the Negro,” leaving Cady Stanton to wonder impatiently if “the African race is composed entirely of males.”3

 

 

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

 

Taken in 1891, this is a photographic portrait of a political and personal partnership lasting over four decades. Together Anthony (left), the organizer, and Cady Stanton (right), the writer, speaker, and orator, provided leadership to the U.S. woman suffrage movement as it grew from a radical offshoot of antislavery into a mature, mass-based women’s movement. By the 1890s, Anthony was widely admired as the personification of dedication to the cause of women while Cady Stanton continued to push at the edges of acceptable opinion. Nonetheless, their bond remained firm until Cady Stanton’s death, a decade later.

 

Two years after the 1868 ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, congressional Radicals wrote the Fifteenth Amendment to advance black suffrage more forcefully, explicitly forbidding states from disfranchisements on the grounds of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Again gender was not included, leading Cady Stanton to charge that “all mankind will vote not because of intelligence, patriotism, property or white skin but because it is male, not female.”4

 

The American Equal Rights Association collapsed, and in its wake, woman suffragists divided over whether to endorse the Fifteenth Amendment. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony broke with their former Radical Republican allies and formed the rival National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). To reconcile woman suffrage advocacy with the Radical Republican agenda, Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Ward Blackwell, took a different route. In 1869, they organized the American Woman Suffrage Association. They focused on campaigns for suffrage at the state level and in 1870 inaugurated the Woman’s Journal, a weekly newspaper published for the next fifty years.

 

Of the two societies, NWSA pursued the more aggressive, independent path. The organization’s newspaper, defiantly named the Revolution, lasted only two years. It proclaimed on its masthead: “Women their rights and nothing less; men their rights and nothing more.” NWSA gained political autonomy for the suffrage movement but at the cost of an important part of the women’s rights legacy: attention to the interrelation of the hierarchies of race and gender. As the larger society left behind the concerns of the ex-slaves and of Radical Reconstruction, much of the woman suffrage movement did, too, envisioning women’s emancipation largely in terms of white women.

 

A New Departure for Woman Suffrage

Once the new constitutional amendments had been ratified, NWSA proposed an inventive, bold interpretation of them. The argument was both simple and profound: first, women were “persons” whose rights as national citizens were established by the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment; second, the right to vote was central to and inherent in national citizenship. Third, and most important, women’s right to vote was thus already established and did not require any additional constitutional change.

 

This argument, which was called the New Departure, brought to prominence one of the most unusual advocates in the history of woman suffrage, Victoria Claflin Woodhull. Born into poverty, Woodhull made her way into the highest ranks of New York society, in large part by cultivating powerful men. Aided by a congressman friend and without the knowledge of other suffragists, in 1871 she presented the case for the New Departure before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Within a year, however, Woodhull, who had boldly criticized sexual hypocrisy within middle-class marriages, had become involved in the most notorious sexual scandal of the age. She went public with her knowledge that Henry Ward Beecher, powerful Brooklyn minister and brother of Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe (see pp. 160–61, 250–51), had had an adulterous affair with one of his parishioners. Under a new federal anti-obscenity law, the Comstock Act (named for Anthony Comstock, the “social purity” crusader who drafted the legislation), Woodhull was jailed for using the federal mail system to distribute her newspaper, which included accounts of the scandal. Cady Stanton, one of the few suffragists who steadfastly defended Woodhull, insisted, “We have already women enough sacrificed to this sentimental, hypocritical prating about purity. If this present woman be crucified, let men drive the spikes.”5 Woodhull avoided jail but dropped out of public life; she eventually moved to England, where she married a wealthy man, remade her reputation, and lived until 1927.

 

Independent of Woodhull, suffragists around the country pursued their voting rights on the basis of the New Departure theory that they needed only to take hold of the right to vote, which was already theirs. During the elections of 1871 and 1872, groups of women went to their local polling places, put forth their constitutional understanding to stunned election officials, and stepped forward to submit their votes. In Washington, D.C., the African American journalist Mary Ann Shadd Cary was able to register but not to vote. Susan B. Anthony convinced polling officials in her hometown of Rochester, New York, to let her vote. “Well I have been & gone & done it!!” she wrote exuberantly. “Positively voted the Republican ticket.”6 Two weeks later, she was arrested for the crime of illegal voting, based on a federal law meant to disfranchise former Confederates. Her trial was a spectacle from start to finish. The judge ordered the jury to find Anthony guilty, which it did, and the judge’s final insult was to refuse to jail Anthony so as to keep her from appealing her verdict.

 

The U.S. Supreme Court finally considered the suffragists’ argument in 1875, in the case of Virginia Minor, of St. Louis, Missouri, who sued the official who had not allowed her to vote. In Minor v. Happersett, one of the most important rulings in the history of women’s rights (see the Appendix, p. A-6), the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, while Minor was indeed a citizen, voting was not a right but a privilege bestowed by the federal government as it saw fit. Not only did this decision strike the New Departure theory dead, but it also indicated that the Court was bent on narrowing the meaning of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in general. Subsequently, the Court permitted more and more ways to deprive black men of their franchise and constitutional civil rights.

 

After the Minor decision, NWSA began to advocate a separate constitutional amendment, modeled on the Fifteenth, to bar states from disfranchising “on the grounds of sex.” This was the wording that would eventually go into the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), but for the time being, the proposed amendment made little headway. In 1876, NWSA leaders, uninvited, forced their way into the national celebration in Philadelphia of the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. “Our faith is firm and unwavering in the broad principles of human rights proclaimed in 1776, not only as abstract truths, but as the corner stones of a republic,” they declared. “Yet we cannot forget, even in this glad hour, that while all men of every race, and clime, and condition, have been invested with the full rights of citizenship under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disfranchisement.”7

WOMEN’S LIVES IN SOUTHERN RECONSTRUCTION AND REDEMPTION

Meanwhile, life in the defeated South was being reconstructed as well. No element of freedom came easily or automatically for the former slaves, and southern whites changed their lives and expectations reluctantly. Black women fought for control over their labor, their children, and their bodies. Elite white women sought new capacities and strengths to accommodate the loss of the labor and wealth that slaveowning had given them. White women from the middle and lower ranks remained poised between loyalties of race and the resentments of class.

 

By 1870, all the southern states had met the terms Congress mandated for readmission to the Union. After the removal of federal troops in 1877, white southerners, in a process known as Redemption, moved to reclaim political control and to reassert white supremacy. As they did so, new laws institutionalized segregation and a race-based system of convict labor. The region’s economy, still largely agricultural, slowly began to industrialize. The complex result of these post-Reconstruction social, political, and economic changes was known as the New South.

 

Black Women in the New South

After the defeat of the Confederacy, many freedwomen and freedmen stayed on with their masters for months because they did not know they had been freed or had nowhere to go. Others took to the road to find long-lost spouses and family members. Those who could not travel posted advertisements, such as this one in the Anglo-African Magazine: “Martha Ward Wishes information concerning her sister, Rosetta McQuillan, who was sold from Norfolk, Va. About thirty years ago to a Frenchman in Mobile, Ala.”8

 

 

The Right to Marry

 

As abolitionists considered disregard of slave marriage one of the fundamental immoralities of slavery, immediately after the Civil War the Freedmen’s Bureau rushed to legalize marriages among freedpeople, who were eager to have their unions recognized. To indicate that slaves had been married in fact if not in law, bureau officials “solemnized” rather than authorized these marriages. In this engraving, an African American chaplain presides at a ceremony for two former slaves; the husband was serving in the U.S. Army.

 

The hard-won family reunions of the freed slaves did not always end happily. Some spouses had formed new unions. Laura Spicer, sold away from a Virginia plantation, was contacted by her husband three years after the war ended. He had since become attached to another woman and was deeply conflicted. “I do not know which I love best, you or Anna,” he wrote to Spicer. “[T]ry and marry some good, smart man . . . and do it because you love me, and not because I think more of the wife I have got than I do of you.”9 Nor were parents always recognized by the children they had been forced to leave behind. “At firs’ I was scared of her, ’cause I didn’t know who she was,” one child remembered of her mother. “She put me in her lap an’ she most’ nigh cried when she seen de back o’ my head . . . where de lice had been an’ I had scratched em.”10

 

In 1865, the U.S. Army, charged with occupying and governing the defeated Confederacy, organized a special division to deal with the former slaves. The Freedmen’s Bureau provided temporary aid, oversaw their labor, and adjudicated disputes with former masters. It was the first government agency established by the United States to address the needs of an oppressed racial minority. One of its tasks was to ensure that freedpeople had rights to their own children. On returning to the Union, southern states had passed laws, known as black codes, to limit the freedoms of newly emancipated slaves. Apprenticeship laws provided for the indenture of black children into servitude regardless of the wishes of their parents. Black mothers and grandmothers fought especially hard against the black codes. “We were delighted when we heard that the Constitution set us free,” Lucy Lee of Baltimore explained, “but God help us, our condition is bettered but little; free ourselves, [but] deprived of our children. . . . Give us our children and don’t let them be raised in the ignorance we have [been].”11

 

The deepest desire of the freedpeople was to have their own family farms. However, Congress was unwilling to reapportion the southern lands that might have established genuine black self-sufficiency. A few former slaves became homesteaders on public lands in Florida, Kansas, Texas, and Alabama, and a handful were able to buy their own property. But the overwhelming majority found that they had to continue to work for others as agricultural labor. The fundamental dilemma of Reconstruction for most ex-slaves centered on their returning to work for white people: On what terms? With what degree of personal freedom? And for what compensation?

 

One of the most subtle and complex aspects of this dilemma concerned the disposition of black women’s labor. During slavery, women worked alongside men in the fields (see p. 184–89). Black women began to leave field work immediately after emancipation, much to the dismay of white landowners, who knew women’s importance to the agricultural labor force. Some observers reported that black men, eager to assert the rights of manhood over their families, were especially determined that their wives not work for whites. Black women, who discovered that any assertion of autonomy toward white employers might be punished as unacceptable “cheekiness,” had their own reasons for withdrawing their labor.

 

To achieve even a small degree of independence from direct white oversight, three out of four black families ended up accepting an arrangement known as sharecropping. Working on small farms carved out of the holdings of white landowners, sharecropping families kept only a portion of the crops they grew. There were no foremen to drive and beat them, and they could work together as families. But in bad times, the value of their yield did not equal the credit that white landowners had extended them to cover their expenses, and most ended up in permanent indebtedness.

 

The ex-slaves were more successful in realizing their desire for education. Even before the war ended, black and white women from the North had gone south to areas occupied by the Union army to begin teaching the black population. Throughout Reconstruction, freedpeople built their own schools, funded by the Freedmen’s Bureau and northern missionary societies, to gain the basics of literacy. Charlotte Forten (later Forten Grimké), born into a prominent free black activist family in Philadelphia, brought her idealism and hopes of racial uplift to her post in coastal South Carolina. “I shall gather my scholars about me, and see smiles of greeting break over their dusky faces,” she wrote. “My heart sings a song of thanksgiving, at the thought that even I am permitted to do something for a long-abused race, and aid in promoting a higher, holier, and happier life on the Sea Islands.”12

 

Many of the colleges and universities that are now referred to as “historically black” began during the era of Reconstruction. Unlike long-standing prestigious white institutions, many of these institutions — for instance Howard University, established in 1867 in Washington, D.C. — were open to women as well as to men. In 1881, white multimillionaire John D. Rockefeller founded the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, an all-female school that later became Spelman College. While most of these institutions provided little more than a high school education throughout the nineteenth century, they nonetheless played a major role in educating black leaders. They educated women who went on to become teachers throughout the South. This fragile educational infrastructure helped to create a small southern black middle class in cities like Atlanta, Richmond, and New Orleans.

 

The right to vote awarded to ex-slave men by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments lay at the very core of ex-slaves’ hopes for the future. During Reconstruction, freedmen’s exercise of the ballot, protected by federal troops, helped to elect approximately two thousand black men to local, state, and national political office. Despite their own disfranchisement, black women understood the political franchise as a community rather than an individual right. They regularly attended political meetings and told men who had the vote how to use it. Southern white women, by contrast, regarded the enfranchisement of black men as yet another insult to their sex and their race.

 

White Women in the New South

At the end of the war, white women in the South faced loss and defeat. Food shortages were compounded by the collapse of the economy. More than a quarter million southern white men died on Civil War battlefields, leaving one generation of widows and another that would never marry. Occupation by federal troops after the war deepened white southerners’ feelings of humiliation. One historian argues that southern white women, who did not share men’s sheer relief at getting off the battlefield, harbored greater resentment than southern white men toward the North.13

 

Elite white women felt the loss of their slaves acutely. If they wanted black men in their fields and black women in their kitchens, they had to concede to some of the freedpeople’s new expectations for wages, personal autonomy, and respect. Elite white women began for the first time to cook and launder for themselves and their families. “We have most of the housework to do all the time,” complained Amanda Worthington of Mississippi, “and . . . it does not make me like the Yankees any better.”14

 

Non-elite white southerners were less affected by the withdrawal of slave labor, but because they lived much closer to the edge of subsistence, they suffered far more from the collapse of the economy and the physical devastation of the South. Economic pressures drove many into the same sharecropping arrangement and permanent indebtedness as ex-slaves. Poor southern white women and their children also provided the labor force for the textile mills that northerners and a new class of southern industrialists began building in the 1880s. Inasmuch as black people were not allowed to work in the mills, white women experienced textile work as a kind of racial privilege. Many poor white women believed as fervently as former plantation mistresses in the inviolability of racial hierarchies.

 

Even so, the collapse of the patriarchal slave system provided new opportunities for public life for those white women who chose to take them. Elite women became involved in the memorialization of the Confederacy. They raised funds, built monuments, and lionized the men who had fought for southern independence, all the while creating an expanded civic role for their sex. Poor farm women found their opportunities in the Grange, a social and educational movement that later fed into the rise of Populism (see pp. 376–79). With a very few exceptions, however, southern white women kept their distance from woman suffrage efforts, which reminded them all too much of the federal intervention to enfranchise their former slaves.

 

Racial Conflict in Slavery’s Aftermath

Changes in gender and racial relations together generated considerable violence in the postwar South. Whites experienced African American autonomy as a profound threat. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, terrorized freedpeople for asserting their new freedoms. Klan members sexually humiliated, raped, and murdered many freedwomen. In Henry County, Georgia, two Klansmen pinned down Rhoda Ann Childs; she told a congressional investigation in 1871, “[They] stretched my limbs as far apart as they could . . . [and] applied the Strap to my Private parts until fatigued into stopping, and I was more dead than alive.” She was then raped with the barrel of a gun.15 Through such actions, white men meant both to punish black men and reassert their slave-era control over black women’s bodies.

 

Having had no legal recourse under slavery, however, African American women determined to use their newly won rights to defend themselves. According to one historian, “black women articulated a radical vision of sexual citizenship” that sought to include bodily sovereignty as part of their equal protection under the law.16 After the deadly 1866 Memphis race riots, for example, five African American women who had been raped by rampaging white men came forward to give testimony before a congressional committee. Among them, sixteen-year-old Lucy Smith told how a group of men assaulted her in her own home. The women’s courageous stand led the Republican committee report to acknowledge and condemn sexual violence against black women.

 

Eventually, the region’s hidden history of cross-racial sex took an even more deadly form. Whites charged that black men were sexual predators seeking access to white women. The irony, of course, was that under slavery, it was white men who had unrestricted sexual access to black women. Southern white women of all classes supported these charges against black men, and most white northerners assumed that they were true. At the slightest suspicion of the merest disrespect to a white woman, black men could be accused of sexual aggression and lynched — killed (usually hanged) by mobs who ignored legal process to execute their own form of crude justice. Lynchings, often involving gruesome mutilation as well as murder, were popular events in the post-Reconstruction South, with white women and children attending amid a carnival-like atmosphere. In 1892, the high point of this practice, 160 African Americans, some women included, were lynched.17

 

 

Women Exodusters (Late 1800s)

 

This late nineteenth-century photograph shows LeAnna Samuels and her daughters (from left to right) Harriet, Margaret, and Mary in the yard of their Nicodemus, Kansas, home. Nicodemus was founded by “Exodusters,” a group of about six thousand African Americans who set out in 1879 for Kansas to escape white violence and economic oppression in Mississippi and Louisiana. As the image shows, black women and men were able to acquire homesteads in Kansas and live in relative safety compared to the Deep South.

 

Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist from Memphis, Tennessee, inaugurated a campaign, eventually international in scope, to investigate and expose the false charges behind the epidemic of lynchings and to get leading white figures to condemn it. In her publication Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, Wells recognized that false allegations of black men’s lewd behavior toward white women were closely related to assumptions of black women’s sexual disreputability and that black women had a major role to play in challenging the system that led to lynchings. Her efforts helped to catalyze the organization of an African American women’s reform movement. (See Primary Sources: “Ida B. Wells, ‘Race Woman,’ ” pp. 325–29.)

 

Southern blacks’ efforts to claim their rights suffered many major setbacks in the late nineteenth century. One by one, all-white Democratic parties “redeemed” state governments from Republicanism and ended what they called “black rule,” instituting legal devices to disfranchise black men, such as requiring voters to demonstrate literacy, to pay exorbitant poll taxes, or to prove that their grandfathers had been voters. By the beginning of the twentieth century, black voting had been virtually obliterated throughout the South.

 

In addition to repudiating civil rights legislation, southern states also instituted new penal codes that shunted black women and men into involuntary labor as leased convicts and prison farmworkers. In Georgia, for instance, the state rented black women, alongside black and white men, to railroad, mining, and brickmaking companies as well as plantations. By the 1890s, reform efforts resulted in a sex-segregated system that assigned black women to hard labor on all-female prison plantations where deprivation and sexualized violence were the norm. Moreover, Georgia’s penal system reinforced elevated notions of white southern womanhood by granting clemency and medical care to white female convicts while denying black women all forms of gendered concessions. Many African American club women used their organizational clout to protest convict leasing, and Ida B. Wells decried convict leasing and lynching as the “twin infamies” of southern society.

 

Meanwhile, a new legal system of rigid racial separation in social relations was being put in place. Called Jim Crow, after a foolish minstrel character played by whites in black makeup, these laws and practices were a way to humiliate and intimidate black people. Under slavery, when black people had no rights, racial segregation operated as a customary practice, but now its codification became a way to reassert white domination. Recalling what enforced segregation felt like, a southern black woman wrote, “I never get used to it; it is new each time and stings and hurts more and more. It does not matter how good or wise my children may be; they are colored. . . . Everything is forgiven in the South but color.”18

 

Segregation affected many things, including education, public services, and public accommodations, but black women particularly resented Jim Crow regulations in public transportation. Wells began her career as a defender of her race in 1884 by suing the Tennessee railroad company that ejected her from a special “ladies” car and sent her instead to the “colored” car. Twelve years later, the Supreme Court considered a similar suit by Homer Plessy against a Louisiana railroad for its segregation policy. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court characterized the entire Jim Crow regime as “separate but equal” and thus compatible with the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement of equality before the law. This constitutional defense of segregation survived for nearly sixty years. (See Appendix, p. A-7.) (For a case of legal segregation outside of the South, see Reading into the Past: “What Right Have You?”)

 

 

Mary Tape and Her Family (c. 1884–1885)

 

Pictured from left to right are Joseph, Emily, Mamie, Frank, and Mary Tape, Chinese American residents of San Francisco in the 1880s. Mary Tape emigrated from China in the 1860s and married Chinese immigrant Joseph Tape in 1875. The family became well-known for a legal challenge to school segregation that culminated in a landmark 1885 California Supreme Court decision, Tape v. Hurley. (See Reading into the Past: “What Right Have You?”) Mary Tape took her Anglicized maiden name from Mary McGladery, the matron of the San Francisco Ladies Protection and Relief Society where Mary lived when she first arrived from China as a young orphan.

 

READING INTO THE PAST

MARY TAPE

 

“What Right Have You?”

 

De jure (stated by law) racial segregation was not limited only to the South. Chinese immigrants Mary and Joseph Tate established their home in San Francisco in the expectation that their children could attend public schools. When the principal of their local primary school refused to enroll their daughter Mamie, Mary Tape sued the school. In the 1885 Tape v. Hurley case, the California Superior Court decided that Mamie Tape had a right to attend the school on the basis of both California law and the U.S. Constitution. Although the state Supreme Court upheld the decision, the school board lobbied the state legislature to quickly pass a provision that legalized the segregation of students of “Mongolian or Chinese descent.” In response, Mary Tape wrote a fiery letter of protest to the San Francisco School Board, excerpted here with original spelling and punctuation. Though visionary, Tape’s objections proved unsuccessful and her children ultimately attended the segregated Chinese primary school.

 

Mary Tape, 8 April 1885

 

To the Board of Education — Dear Sirs: I see that you are going to make all sorts of excuses to keep my child out off the Public schools. Dear sirs, Will you please to tell me! Is it a disgrace to be Born a Chinese? Didn’t God make us all!!! What right! have you to bar my children out of the school because she is a chinese Decend. . . . It seems no matter how a Chinese may live and dress so long as you know they Chinese. Then they are hated as one. There is not any right or justice for them. . . . It seems to me Mr. Moulder [school superintendent] has a grudge against this Eight-year-old Mamie Tape. I know they is no other child I mean Chinese child! care to go to your public Chinese school. May you Mr. Moulder, never be persecuted like the way you have persecuted little Mamie Tape. Mamie Tape will never attend any of the Chinese schools of your making! Never!!! I will let the world see sir What justice there is When it is govern by the Race prejudice men! just because she is of the Chinese decend, not because she don’t dress like you because she does. Just because she is decended of Chinese parents I guess she is more of a American then a good many of you that is going to prewent her being Educated. Mrs. M. Tape.

 

SOURCE: “Chinese Mother’s Letter,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1885.

 

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What appeals to equality and American identity does Mary Tape use to make her case?

 

Why does Tape focus on the question of her daughter’s dress versus her ethnicity in the letter?

FEMALE WAGE LABOR AND THE TRIUMPH OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM

Industrial growth accelerated tremendously after the defeat of the slave system and the northern victory in the Civil War. Intense competition between industrialists and financial magnates gradually gave way to economic consolidation. By 1890, industries such as steel, railroads, coal mining, and meat production were dominated by a handful of large, powerful corporate entities. The mirror reflection of the growth of capital, the American working class, also came into its own and organized to find ways to offset the power of its employers.

 

The growth of the female labor force was an important part of this development, although it flew in the face of the still-strong presumption that women belonged exclusively in their homes. Domestic service was the largest sector, but manufacturing labor by women, especially the industrial production of garments, with its distinctive and highly exploitative form of production — the sweatshop — was growing faster.

 

The dynamic growth of industrial society produced a level of class conflict in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as intense as any in American history. Starting in 1877, as the federal army retreated from the South and the first postwar depression receded, waves of protests by disgruntled workers shook the economy and drew a powerful and violent response from big business and government. Coming so soon after the Civil War, escalating class antagonism seemed to threaten national unity again, this time along economic rather than sectional lines. Women played a major role in these upheavals and, in doing so, laid the groundwork for a female labor movement in the early twentieth century (see pp. 422–24).

Women’s Occupations after the Civil War

Between 1860 and 1890, the percentage of the nonagricultural wage labor force that was female increased from 10.2 to 17 percent (see Chart 6.1). Since the population in these years increased enormously, the change in absolute numbers was even more dramatic: by 1890, 3.6 million women were working for pay in nonagricultural labor, more than twice the number in 1870. The average pay for women remained a third to a half of the pay for men. The great majority of white working women were young and unmarried. The outlines of black women’s labor were somewhat different, remaining largely agricultural until well into the twentieth century. Black women also were much more likely to work outside the home after marriage.

 

Chart 6.1 Women and the Labor Force, 1800–1900

 

Year        Percentage of All Women in the Labor Force         Percentage of the Labor Force That Is Female

1800      4.6       4.6

1810      7.9       9.4

1820      6.2       7.3

1830      6.4       7.4

1840      8.4       9.6

1850     10.1       10.8

1860      9.7       10.2

1870     13.7       14.8

1880     14.7       15.2

1890     18.2       17.0

1900     21.2       18.1

SOURCE: W. Elliot Brownlee and Mary M. Brownlee, Women in the American Economy: A Documentary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, part 1, Bicentennial Edition, Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1975. “Marital and Family Characteristics of Workers,” March 1983, U.S. Department of Labor. Statistical Abstract of the United States, Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1983 and 1992; Daphne Spain and Suzanne Bianchi, Balancing Act (New York: Russell Sage, 1996).

 

Much of what historians have written about working women of the nineteenth century, especially the numbers and statistics, is guesswork. Although women had been working for wages since the 1830s, it was not until 1890 that the U.S. census began to identify or count working women with any precision. After the Civil War, some states investigated female wage labor, framing their inquiries in moralistic terms. State labor bureaus paid a great deal of attention, for instance, to disproving the assertion that working women were inclined to prostitution. These statistical portraits were fleshed out by investigative reporting, usually by middle- or upper-class women who went among the working classes to report on their conditions. (See Primary Sources: “The Woman Who Toils,” pp. 330–35.)

 

Nonetheless, it is clear that for white women, paid domestic work was on the decline. Domestic servants, who before the war were the majority of the white female labor force, constituted less than 30 percent by the end of the century. Working women had long been impatient with domestic service and left it whenever they could, usually for factory labor. After the Civil War, the end of slavery tainted personal service even more. Investigator Helen Campbell took testimony in the mid-1880s in New York City from women who had abandoned domestic service. “I hate the very words ‘service’ and ‘servant,’ ” an Irish immigrant renegade from domestic labor explained. “We came to this country to better ourselves, and it’s not bettering to have anybody ordering you around.”19

 

As white women workers shifted out of domestic service, their percentage in manufacturing increased to 25 percent as of 1900. Women continued to work in the textile industry, and in the shoe industry women organized their own trade union, the Daughters of St. Crispin (named after the patron saint of their trade), but it survived only a few years. The biggest change in women’s manufacturing labor was the rise of the garment industry, as the antebellum outwork system began to give way to more fully industrialized processes (see pp. 167–68).

 

The industrial manufacture of clothing depended on the invention of the sewing machine, one of the most consequential technological developments in U.S. women’s history. The introduction of the sewing machine accelerated the subdivision of clothing production into discrete tasks. Thus a single worker no longer made an entire piece of clothing but instead spent her long days sewing sleeves or seams, incurring the physical and spiritual toll of endless, repetitive motion. Unlike the power looms and spindles of the textile mills, sewing machines did not need to be housed in massive factories but could be placed in numerous small shops. As sewing machines were also comparatively inexpensive, the cost of buying and maintaining them could be shifted to the workers themselves, who were charged rent or made to pay in installments for them.

 

 

Stripping Tobacco Leaves in a Tobacco Factory (c. 1890)

 

The filthy and exhausting work of processing tobacco leaves was one of the few industrial jobs open to African American women. In this Richmond, Virginia, factory during the 1890s, both women and children worked in close quarters to strip the leaves from tobacco plants. White southern photographer Huestis Cook made the photograph as part of a series on tobacco production from field to factory. What does the image tell you about the physical conditions of black women and children’s industrial labor?

 

Profits in the garment industry came primarily from pushing the women workers to produce more for less pay. This system became designated as the “sweating” system, meaning that it required women workers to drive (or sweat) themselves to work ever harder. Women workers were usually paid for each piece completed, whereas men tended to be paid for time worked. Employers set a low piece rate, lowering it even further as women produced more. Often workers were charged for thread and fined for sewing errors. The work was highly seasonal, and periods of twelve-hour workdays alternated with bouts of unemployment. At the beginning of the Civil War, the average earnings of sewing women were $10 per week; by 1865, they were $5 per week.

 

Regardless of their ability or speed, women in the garment, textile, and shoe industries were generally considered unskilled workers, in part because they worked in a female-dominated industry, in part because they were easily replaced by other women, and in part because they learned their work on the job rather than through a formal apprenticeship. The higher pay associated with so-called skilled labor was reserved for trades that men dominated. A few women gained entrance to male-dominated trades, such as typesetting, where they earned up to $15 per week. Initially, women made their way into print shops by replacing male workers who were out on strike, but they were let go when the men came back to work. Eventually, the printers’ union voted to admit women as equal members, only the second male trade union to do so.

 

In the 1870s, a new field began to open up for female wage earners: office work. Before 1860, the office environment had been totally male, filled by young men aspiring to careers in business or law. During the Civil War, young women began to replace men as government copyists and stenographers. The shift to female labor was accelerated by another crucial technological development, the typewriter. Women, with their smaller hands, were thought to be especially suited to typing. Office work required education and a command of the English language, adding to its prestige as an occupation for women. It also paid more than textile mills or garment sweatshops. Yet from the employers’ perspective, hiring women rather than men to meet the growing demand for clerical labor constituted a considerable savings. By 1900, office work was still only 9 percent of the female labor force, but it was the fastest-growing sector, a harbinger of things to come in the twentieth-century female labor force (see the Appendix, p. A-20).

 

Who Were the Women Wage Earners?

Age and marital status were crucial elements in the structure of the female labor force. In 1890, three-quarters of white working women were unmarried. As a leading historian of working women puts it, “In the history of women’s labor market experience in the United States the half century from about 1870 to 1920 was the era of single women.”20 Unlike working men, whose wages were supposed to provide for an entire family, these young women allegedly had no one but themselves to support. “Working girls” were expected to work for pay for only a few years, then marry and become dependent on the earnings of their husbands. This was the principle of the so-called family wage, which justified men’s greater wages as much as it did women’s lesser. Wage labor for women was meant to be an interlude between childhood and domestic dependence, while men expected to work throughout their adult lives.

 

The reality of working women’s lives was considerably more complex. Approximately 10 to 15 percent of urban families were headed by single mothers and were acutely disadvantaged by the family wage system.21 A working woman who was a wife and/or mother was considered at best an anomaly and at worst an indicator of family and social crisis. African American women wage earners were three times as likely as white women to be married, partly because their husbands’ pay was so low and partly because many chose to work themselves rather than send their daughters into work situations where they would be vulnerable to sexual harassment from white men. In historical hindsight, African American women were pioneering the modern working women’s pattern of combining wage labor and domestic responsibilities, but at the time, the high number of black working mothers was the object of much disparagement.

 

 

Advertising Women and Typewriters

 

A practical machine for mechanical writing was devised just after the Civil War. It was first manufactured for the mass market by the Remington Company, which adapted the production process it had developed for rifles. The machine retained the name Remington even after production shifted to the Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict Company. This 1897 advertisement explicitly links the modernity of its product to its skilled women operators. The elegantly dressed, self-composed typist suggests a quite different image from that of the overworked, underpaid woman factory worker, a contrast that is made explicit by the claim that technology means “less labor” for her and yet more output for her boss.

 

Most unmarried wage-earning women lived in their parents’ homes, where, contrary to the ideal of the single male breadwinner, their earnings were crucial supplements to family support. However, perhaps as many as a third of single women wage earners lived outside of families. Carroll Wright, a pioneering labor statistician, reported in The Working Girls of Boston (1889), a Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor report, that in Massachusetts many young women workers were “obliged to leave their homes on account of bad treatment or conduct of [a] dissipated father or because they felt the need of work and not finding it at home, have come to [a large city].”22 Philanthropists established charity boardinghouses to protect these “women adrift,” who seemed vulnerable without parents or husbands to protect them. One of the major purposes of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), formed soon after the Civil War, was to provide supervised housing for single, urban working women.

 

Responses to Working Women

Contemporaries’ attempts to grapple with the growing female labor force contained a revealing contradiction. On the one hand, social observers contended that only women driven by sheer desperation should work outside the home. Less desperate working women were taking work away from truly needy women and — even more disturbing — from male breadwinners. If young working women used any part of their pay to buy attractive clothing or go out with men, they were castigated for frivolity. “[Working girls] who want pin-money do work at a price impossible for the self-supporting worker, many married women coming under this head,” observed journalist Helen Campbell.23

 

On the other hand, those women who were driven into wage labor by absolute necessity were so ill-paid, so unrelentingly exploited, as to constitute a major social tragedy. “All alike are starved, half clothed, overworked to a frightful degree,” wrote the same Helen Campbell, “with neither time to learn some better method of earning a living, nor hope enough to spur them in any new path.”24 Sympathetic observers concluded that the only humane response was to remove young women from the labor force altogether. Wage-earning women were therefore criticized if they worked out of choice or pitied if they worked out of need. In either case, they seemed to be trespassing where they did not belong: in the wage labor force.

 

Set against middle-class social observers’ steady chorus of criticism or lament, the lives and choices of working women hint at a different picture. Working girls objected to the constant supervision at philanthropic working girls’ homes, stubbornly spent their wages as they pleased, engaged in recreational activities that were considered vulgar, occasionally continued to work even after they got married, and preferred their morally questionable factory jobs to the presumed safety of domestic service. Though they were criticized for taking jobs away from the truly deserving, many regarded themselves simply as women who liked to earn money, preferred the sociability of sharing work with others, chose the experience of manufacturing over endless domestic routine, and enjoyed their occasional moments of hard-earned personal freedom.

 

Class Conflict and Labor Organization

Women participated in all the dramatic strikes and labor conflicts of the late nineteenth century. During the nationwide rail strikes in 1877, in which workers protested layoffs and wage cuts, women joined the mobs that burned roundhouses and destroyed railroad cars. Women’s involvement in such violent acts underlined the full fury of working-class resentment at the inequalities of wealth in postbellum America. “Women who are the wives and mothers of the [railroad] firemen,” reported a Baltimore newspaper, “look famished and wild and declare for starvation rather than have their people work for the reduced wages.”25 President Rutherford B. Hayes sent federal forces, recently withdrawn from occupying the South, to suppress the riots. More than a hundred strikers were killed nationwide.

 

In the late 1870s, many angry workers joined the Knights of Labor, originally a secret society that became the largest labor organization of the nineteenth century. The Knights aimed to unite and elevate working people and to protect the country’s democratic heritage from unrestrained capitalist growth. In 1881, the Knights, unlike most unions, admitted women (housewives as well as wage earners). At its peak, the Knights of Labor had 750,000 members, of whom some 10 percent were women. Its goal was to unite “the producing classes,” regardless of industry or occupation or gender. Race was more complicated. In the South, the Knights admitted black workers in segregated local chapters, but in the West, the organization excluded Chinese men, whom it regarded as unfair economic competitors rather than as fellow workers.

 

The Knights played a major role in the nationwide campaign to shorten the workday for wage earners to eight hours, a movement of obvious interest to women. On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of workers from all over the country struck on behalf of the eight-hour day. At a related rally a few days later in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, a bomb exploded, killing seven policemen. Although the bomb thrower was never identified, eight male labor leaders were charged with conspiracy to murder. Lucy Parsons, the wife of one of the accused, helped conduct their defense. A mixed-race woman, Lucy had met her husband in Texas, where he had gone after the war to organize black voters for the Republican Party. Defense efforts eventually won gubernatorial pardons for three of the accused men, although not in time to save Albert Parsons. The violence and repression unleashed by the Haymarket incident devastated the Knights of Labor. By 1890, it had ceased to play a significant role in American labor relations. The eight-hour workday would not be won for many decades.

 

 

Lucy Parsons

 

Lucy Gonzalez Parsons was born in Texas of black, Mexican, and Native heritage. She crossed the color line to marry and moved with her husband to Chicago, where they were both labor activists. Albert Parsons was one of the eight men arrested for the alleged conspiracy behind the Haymarket Riot of 1886. Lucy fought and failed to prevent his conviction and execution. An avowed anarchist, she continued to lead protests and give speeches against social, racial, and gender inequality for another thirty years.

 

After the collapse of the Knights, the future of organized labor was left to male-dominated trade unions and their umbrella organization, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded in 1886 by Samuel Gompers, a cigar maker from New York City. While the goal of the Knights was inclusive, to unify the producing classes, the purpose of AFL unions was exclusive, to protect the jobs of skilled and relatively well-paid labor from less-skilled, lower-paid workers. Most members of AFL unions regarded women workers as exactly this sort of threat: unskilled, underpaid workers who took men’s jobs during strikes. Adapting the domestic ideal of true womanhood from the middle class, the AFL subscribed to the notion that women belonged in the home and that a male worker deserved a wage sufficient to keep his wife out of the labor force.

 

Nonetheless, the late nineteenth-century labor movement did provide a few exceptional working women with the chance to begin speaking and acting on behalf of female wage earners. Leonora Barry and Mary Kenney were among the first women appointed by unions to organize other women workers. In 1886, the Knights of Labor designated Barry, a widowed Irish-born garment worker, to head its Woman’s Department (see Reading into the Past: “Women in the Knights of Labor”). Although meeting with her might mean being fired, women workers around the country shared with Barry their complaints about wages and working conditions. Barry was their devoted advocate, but after two years, frustrated with the timidity of many working women and perhaps also with the limits of her support from the male leadership of the organization, she resigned her position.

 

Mary Kenney’s trade was bookbinding. She joined an AFL union in Chicago and in 1891 was appointed the federation’s first paid organizer for working women. She believed that working women should organize themselves but that they also needed the moral and financial support of middle- and upper-class women. The AFL was less committed to working women than the Knights, and Kenney was dismissed from her post after only six months. In the decades to come, many more female labor activists followed Barry and Kenney to play important roles in shaping women’s history.

 

READING INTO THE PAST

LEONORA BARRY

 

Women in the Knights of Labor

 

Leonora Barry (1849–1930) was one of the first female labor organizers. Her first report after being appointed head of the Women’s Department of the Knights of Labor revealed a wide variety of industries with often unhealthy, low-paid, and dangerous labor performed by women. Barry, a widow when she began her assignment, resigned in 1890 when she remarried. She frequently expressed her frustration with the difficulties of organizing female labor. This report began by calling for more education of working women by the Knights of Labor. Barry decried the “selfishness of their brothers in toil” who had “sworn to demand equal pay for equal work” but failed to invest energy in female laborers. She then went on to review her many factory inspections and meetings with women wage earners.

 

December 6th I went to Trenton, N.J., in compliance with the request of L.A. 4925 [the L.A., or local assembly, was the basic organizing unit of the Knights of Labor]. While there made an investigation in three woolen mills, and found the condition of the female operatives to be in every respect above the average. Also visited the potteries, where many women are employed. Those people stand greatly in need of having their condition bettered, as they receive poor wages for laborious and unhealthy employment. Also visited the State Prison, and noticed, with regret, the vast amount of work of various kinds the inmates were turning out to be put on the market in competition with honest labor. While in the city, I addressed five local assemblies and held one public meeting of working women. . . .

 

On January 6, 1887, took up the work again in Trenton, N.J., per instruction. Held several meetings, both public and private, of working-women for the purpose of getting them into the order, as the women of this city are not well organized. Went to Bordentown to a shirt factory there, but the unjust prejudice which they have always held towards organized labor cropped out on this occasion and they refused me admission.

 

SOURCE: Leonora Barry, Report to the Knights of Labor, October 1886–1887, reprinted in Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor and Industries of New Jersey (Somerville: Unionist-Gazette Printing House, 1888), 202–3.

 

QUESTION FOR ANALYSIS

How did Leonora Barry use her position to attempt to both improve women’s working conditions and heighten the political consciousness of working-class women?

WOMEN OF THE LEISURED CLASSES

Paralleling the expansion of the American working class was the dramatic growth, both in numbers and wealth, of the middle and upper classes. For this reason, one of several terms used for the post-Reconstruction years is the Gilded Age. The phrase, first used by Mark Twain in a novel about economic and political corruption after the Civil War, captured both the riches and superficiality of the wealthier classes in the late nineteenth century. In the United States, with its proud middle-class ethic, the distinction between upper and middle class has always been hard to draw with precision, but in these years what was more important was the enormous and growing gap between those who lived comfortable, leisured lives and those who struggled with poverty. While the poor labored unceasingly, the upper class enjoyed unprecedented new wealth and influence, and the middle class imitated their values of material accumulation and display. For women of the middle and upper class, the Gilded Age meant both new affluence but also growing discontent with an exclusively domestic sphere.

 

New Sources of Wealth and Leisure

The tremendous economic growth of the post–Civil War era emanated from the railroads that wove together the nation and carried raw materials to factories and finished goods to customers. The great fortunes of the age were made especially in iron mining, steel manufacturing, and railroad building — and in financing these endeavors. New technologies, government subsidies, cutthroat competition, and the pressure on workers to work faster and more productively contributed to this development. Dominated by a few corporate giants, this wealth was distributed very unevenly; in 1890 an estimated 1 percent of the population controlled fully 25 percent of the country’s wealth.26 In New York City alone, the number of millionaires went from a few dozen in 1860 to several hundred in 1865. Indeed, many of the great American family fortunes were begun in the Gilded Age: John D. Rockefeller in oil, Cornelius Vanderbilt in railroads, J. P. Morgan in finance, and Andrew Carnegie in steel. One of the very few women to amass spectacular wealth on her own was Hetty Robinson Green. She began her financial career with a $10 million inheritance, which she multiplied tenfold through shrewd investment. Because she operated in the man’s world of high finance, her womanliness was suspect. The popular press played up her eccentricities, dubbing her “the witch of Wall Street” rather than one of the brilliant financiers of the epoch.

 

Wives of wealthy men faced no such criticism. On the contrary, they were regarded as the ultimate in womanly beauty and grace. In the world of the extremely wealthy, men’s obligation was to amass money while women’s was to display and spend it. Wealthy women were also responsible for the conduct of “society,” a word that came to mean the comings and goings of the tiny upper class, as if the rest of the population faded into insignificance by contrast. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), sociologist Thorstein Veblen astutely observed that upper-class women not only purchased expensive commodities but were themselves their husbands’ most lavish and enviable possessions.

 

Shopping was a new and important role for leisure-class women in the postbellum years. Middle-class women, who no longer had responsibility for a great deal of productive household labor, became active consumers. With the dramatic increase in the country’s manufacturing capacity, their obligation was now to purchase rather than to produce, to spend rather than to economize. They flocked to the many department stores established in this period, grand palaces of commodities such as Marshall Field’s in Chicago (founded in 1865), Macy’s in New York (1866), Strawbridge and Clothier in Philadelphia (1868), Hudson’s in Detroit (1887), and May’s in Denver (1888). They filled the elaborate interiors of their homes with furniture and decorative items. Even at a distance from the proliferating retail possibilities of the cities, rural women had mail order catalogs to look at, long for, and occasionally purchase the many commodities of the age.

 

Rising incomes lifted the burden of housekeeping off urban middle- and upper-class women in other ways. Cities laid water and sewer lines, but only in wealthy neighborhoods in which households could afford the fees; indoor plumbing and running water made housework easier for prosperous women. But the most important factor in easing the load of housekeeping for leisure-class women was undoubtedly the cheap labor of domestic servants. Despite constant complaints about the shortage of domestic help, middle-class families regarded having at least one or two paid domestic servants as a virtual necessity. The wealthy had small armies of them. Laundry, which required enormous energy and much time when done in an individual household, was sent out to commercial establishments, where poor and immigrant women pressed and folded sheets and linens in overheated steam rooms.

 

Another important factor in freeing middle- and upper-class women from domestic demands was the declining birthrate (see the Appendix, p. A-17). Between 1850 and 1890, the average number of live births for white, native-born women fell from 5.42 to 3.87. African American birthrates were not recorded in the federal census until several decades later, but by all impressionistic evidence, they declined even more dramatically, as freedwomen took control of their lives at the most intimate level. Ironically, birthrates declined in inverse proportion to class status: the wealthiest, with money to spare, had proportionately fewer children than the very poor, whose earnings were stretched to the limit but who relied on their children for income.

 

 

Rike-Kumler Co. Department Store, Dayton, Ohio

 

Department store counters were one place where working- and leisure-class women met. Neat dress, good English, and middle-class manners were job requirements, even though pay was no better than for factory work. Customers like the woman being fitted for gloves in this 1893 photograph sat, but clerks stood all day, one of the conditions of their work to which they most objected.

 

In understanding the many individual decisions that went into the declining birthrate among leisure-class women, the explanation is not obvious. There were no dramatic improvements in contraceptive technology or knowledge in these years. On the contrary, traditional means of controlling pregnancy — early versions of condoms and diaphragms — were banned by new laws that defined them as obscene devices; even discussions aimed at limiting reproduction were forbidden. Following the Comstock Act of 1873, which outlawed the use of the U.S. mails for distributing information on controlling reproduction, twenty-four states criminalized the dissemination of contraceptive devices.

 

Rather, declining birthrates seem to have been both a cause and an effect of the expanding sphere of leisure-class women. Women’s decisions to limit their pregnancies reflected a growing desire for personal satisfaction and social contribution beyond motherhood. Even though maternity remained the assumed destiny of womanhood, many women were coming to believe that they could choose when and how often to become pregnant. In advocating “voluntary motherhood,” Harriot Stanton Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter, encouraged women to choose for themselves when to have sexual intercourse. Her speeches brilliantly exploited the nineteenth-century belief that motherhood was woman’s highest vocation, in order to argue for women’s rights to control whether and when they had children. Reformers like Blatch did not yet envision the separation of women’s sexual activity from the possibility of pregnancy, but they did believe that women should have control over both. The very term “birth control” and the movement to advance it came later in the twentieth century (see pp. 441–44), but basic changes in female reproductive behavior were already under way.

 

As women’s reproductive lives changed, so did their understanding of their sexuality. To be sure, many restrictive sexual assumptions remained in place. Some physicians still regarded strong sexual desire in women as a disease, which they treated by methods ranging from a diet of bland foods to surgical removal of the clitoris. But the heterosexual double standard — that men’s sexual desire was uncontrollable and that women’s was nonexistent — was beginning to come under fire. By the end of the century, even the conservative physician Elizabeth Blackwell was writing in carefully chosen language that “in healthy, loving women, uninjured by the too frequent lesions which result from childbirth, increasing physical satisfaction attaches to the ultimate physical expression of love.”27

 

Lesbianism, in the modern sense of women openly and consistently expressing sexual desire for other women, had not yet been named, but in these years many leisure-class women formed intense attachments with each other. These “homosocial” relationships, as modern historians have designated them, ranged from intense, lifelong friendships to relationships that were as emotionally charged, as beset by jealousy and possessiveness, and quite possibly as physically intimate, as any heterosexual love affair. Mary (Molly) Hallock and Helena De Kay were two such friends. They met in 1868 as art students in New York and wrote frequently and passionately to each other. When Helena announced that she was marrying New York publisher Richard Gilder, Molly angrily wrote to him: “Until you came along, sir, I believe she loved me almost as girls love their lovers.”28

 

Most of what we know about such homosocial relations comes from leisure-class women, perhaps because they wrote more letters that were preserved and handed down to families and archivists than working-class women did. But surely some working-class women experienced similar passions. A set of letters between two African American women living in Connecticut during the 1860s offers the rare example of a cross-class homosocial relationship, moreover one that was strongly suggestive of physical intimacy. Rebecca Primus, a schoolteacher, and Addie Brown, a seamstress, domestic worker, and laundress, conducted what the historian of their bond calls “a self-consciously sexual relationship” focused on fondling breasts.29

 

By the late nineteenth century, such intense bonds were coming under scrutiny from physicians. Recognizing the obvious erotic qualities of these intense same-sex relationships, neurologists sought to give them the dignity of scientific recognition, even as they characterized them as “unnatural” or “abnormal.” Women-loving women who, in an earlier decade, would have believed unquestioningly in the asexual purity and innocence of their attachments, were beginning to read scientific writings about homosexuality and to wonder about the meaning and nature of their own feelings.

 

 

Alice Austen and Friends Dress Up as Men (1891)

 

This photograph is by and of Alice Austen, a brilliant amateur photographer who left a visual record of Gilded Age leisure-class female lives. Here, Austen (on the left) posed in drag with two of her female friends. “Maybe we were better looking men than women,” she quipped when, as an old woman, she looked once again at the photo. In the context of Austen’s decision not to marry but to live her life with another woman, this photo made her a historical icon for modern lesbians.

 

The “Woman’s Era”

Before the Civil War, women had formed charitable and religious societies and had worked together on behalf of temperance, abolition, and women’s rights (see pp. 235–48). After the war, associational fervor among women was more diverse, secular, and independent of male oversight. Participation in Gilded Age women’s societies provided numerous women with new opportunities for collective activity, intellectual growth, and public life. By the end of the nineteenth century, leisure-class women had almost totally commandeered nongovernmental civic life from men. Thus, another apt label for the post-Reconstruction years is the Woman’s Era.

 

The women’s club movement began in the Northeast just after the Civil War among white middle-class women. In 1868, New York City women writers formed a group they named Sorosis (a botanical term that suggested sisterhood) to protest their exclusion from an event held by male writers. Simultaneously, a group of Boston reformers led by Julia Ward Howe (author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) organized the New England Women’s Club, dedicated to the cultivation of intellectual discussion and public authority for leisure-class women. Despite their impeccable reputations, both groups were publicly lambasted for their unladylike behavior. “Woman is straying from her sphere,” warned the Boston Transcript.30

 

Despite such criticisms, women’s clubs thrived among those middle-aged married women whose childrearing years were behind them. The concerns of the women’s club movement evolved from literary and cultural matters in the 1870s to local social service projects in the 1880s to regional and national federations for political influence in the 1890s. Many public institutions established in the Gilded Age — hospitals and orphanages as well as libraries and museums — were originally established by women’s clubs. From the Northeast, the club movement spread to the West and then the South.

 

Clubs by their nature are exclusive institutions, and the sororal bonds of women’s clubs reflected their tendency to draw together women of like background. In the larger cities, class differences distinguished elite women’s clubs from those formed by wives of clerks and shopkeepers. Working women’s clubs were rarely initiated by wage-earning women themselves but were likely to be uplift projects of middle- and upper-class clubwomen. Race and religion were especially important principles of association. German Jewish women and African American women organized separately from the mainstream women’s club movement, which was largely white and Protestant. Generally, middle-class Jewish or African American women formed their own clubs both to assist poorer women and to cultivate their own skills and self-confidence.

 

The ethic of women’s clubs was particularly compelling to African American women. They formed organizations not just to enlarge their horizons as women but to play their part in the enormous project of post-emancipation racial progress. “If we compare the present condition of the colored people of the South with their condition twenty-eight years ago,” explained African American clubwoman Sarah J. Early in 1893, “we shall see how the organized efforts of their women have contributed to the elevation of the race and their marvelous achievement in so short a time.”31 By her estimate, there were five thousand “colored women’s societies” with half a million members. Black women organized separately from white women because they were serving a different population with distinctive needs but also because they were usually refused admission into white women’s clubs. Racism was alive and well in the women’s club movement.

 

The relation of the Gilded Age women’s club phenomenon to woman suffrage is complex. At first, white women who formed and joined clubs took care to distinguish themselves from the radicalism and notoriety associated with woman suffragists. Yet women’s rights and woman suffrage were standard subjects for club discussion, and over time members came to accept the idea that women should have political tools to accomplish their public goals. Black clubwomen were less hesitant to embrace woman suffrage in light of their concerns over the disfranchisement of black men. Over time women’s clubs incubated support for woman suffrage within a wide swath of the female middle class and prepared the way for the tremendous growth in the suffrage movement in the early twentieth century (see pp. 434–39).

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union

The largest women’s organization of the Woman’s Era was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Following on women’s temperance activities in the 1850s (see pp. 236–37), the WCTU was formed in 1874 after a series of women’s “crusades” in Ohio and New York that convinced local saloon owners to abandon the liquor trade. Initially focused on changing drinking behavior at the individual level, the organization soon challenged the liquor industry politically and undertook a wide range of public welfare projects such as prison reform, recreation and vocational training for young people, establishment of kindergartens, labor reform, and international peace. These projects and the ability of the WCTU to cultivate both organizational loyalty and individual growth among its members were characteristics it shared with women’s clubs, but the WCTU was different in crucial ways. On the one hand, it defined itself explicitly as Christian; on the other, it was racially more inclusive than the club movement. The writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was one of several African American WCTU spokeswomen, and black women were welcomed into the organization, though in segregated divisions. The WCTU’s centers of strength were less urban and more western and midwestern than those of women’s clubs.

 

 

Frances Willard Learns to Ride a Bicycle

 

Frances Willard, president of the WCTU, combined sympathy with conventional Protestant middle-class women and an advanced understanding of women’s untapped capacities. In 1895, “sighing for new worlds to conquer,” she learned to ride a bicycle, one of the signature New Woman activities of the period. “Reducing the problem to actual figures,” she methodically reported, “it took me about three months, with an average of fifteen minutes’ practice daily, to learn, first, to pedal; second, to turn; third, to dismount; and fourth, to mount.”32 Willard, not yet sixty, died in 1898, after which the WCTU never regained its prominence or progressive vision.

 

Finally, unlike the women’s club movement, the WCTU was to a large degree the product of a single and highly effective leader, Frances Willard. Willard was born in 1839 and raised on a farm in Ohio. She never married. Determined to serve “the class that I have always loved and that has loved me always — the girls of my native land and my times,”33 she became the first Dean of Women at Northwestern University at age thirty-four. In 1879, she was elected president of the WCTU, rapidly increasing its membership, diversifying its purposes, and making it the most powerful women’s organization in the country. Disciplined and diplomatic, she was able to take the WCTU to levels of political action and reform that the unwieldy mass of clubwomen could never reach. Notably, this included active advocacy of woman suffrage, which the WCTU formally and enthusiastically endorsed in 1884. “If we are ever to save the State,” Willard declared, “we must enfranchise the sex . . . which is much more acclimatized to self-sacrifice for others. . . . Give us the vote, in order that we may help in purifying politics.”34

 

Consolidating the Gilded Age Women’s Movement

The endorsement of woman suffrage by the WCTU convinced Susan B. Anthony to encourage and draw together the pro-suffrage leanings developing within so many women’s organizations. “Those active in great philanthropic enterprises,” she insisted, “[will] sooner or later realize that so long as women are not acknowledged to be the political equals of men, their judgment on public questions will have but little weight.”35 Accordingly, in 1888, in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, the National Woman Suffrage Association sponsored an International Congress of Women, attended by representatives of several European countries and many U.S. women’s organizations. Out of this congress came an International Council of Women and a U.S. National Council of Women, both formed in 1893. Both organizations were so broadly inclusive of women’s public and civic activities as to admit anti-suffrage groups, and much to Anthony’s disappointment, neither served as the vehicle for advancing the prospects of woman suffrage.

 

Other overarching organizational structures were formed. In 1890, NWSA and the American Woman Suffrage Association reconciled, forming the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which led the suffrage movement for the next thirty years. On the international level, U.S. suffragists joined with European colleagues to initiate the formation of an International Woman Suffrage Association in 1902. The associative impulse was constantly tending to greater and greater combination, amalgamating women in clubs, clubs in state federations, and state federations in national organizations. The vision shared by these federative efforts was of a unity of women so broad and ecumenical as to obliterate all differences between women. But the vision of all-inclusivity was a fantasy. For as women’s social activism and public involvement grew, so did their ambitions and rivalries. Even as the National Council of Women was formed, the leaders of the venerable Sorosis club, who felt they should have been chosen to head this endeavor, set up a rival in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Nor were federations any more racially inclusive than individual clubs. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs refused to admit black women’s clubs. In 1895, African American women’s clubs federated separately as the National Association of Colored Women, and the next year the National Council of Jewish Women was formed.

 

 

The American Jewess

 

In the 1890s, many Jewish American women became active in promoting social reform and Americanization programs through the National Council of Jewish Women (founded in 1896), which was part of the broader movement toward women’s clubs. Printed from 1895 to 1896, The American Jewess was the first English-language magazine for Jewish women. It was published by Rosa Sonneschein, a progressive who challenged the discrimination women experienced within the synagogue and sought to promote an Americanized Jewish identity for women. As she put it, The American Jewess was intended “to connect the sisters dwelling throughout . . . this blessed country, concentrate the work of scattered charitable institutions, and bring them to the notice of the various communities as an imposing and powerful unit.”

 

The ambitious scope and unresolved divisions of “organized womanhood” were equally on display in Chicago in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition, America’s first world’s fair. The Board of Lady Managers received public funds to build and furnish a special Woman’s Building. Eighty sessions held at the Congress of Representative Women addressed “all lines of thought connected with the progress of women.” But African American women were excluded from the planning and management, and women from indigenous cultures, including the American Eskimo, were “on display” on the fair’s midway as exotics.

 

Looking to the Future

By 1890, a new, more modern culture was slowly gathering force under the complacent surface of late nineteenth-century America. The Gilded Age was organized around grand and opposing categories: home and work, black and white, capital and labor, virtue and vice, masculine and feminine. While nineteenth-century society subscribed to a rigid hierarchy of values and a firm belief in absolute truth, modernist convictions allowed for greater contingency and relativism in assessing people and ideas. The concept of morality, so crucial to nineteenth-century cultural judgment, was losing some of its coercive force, giving way to a greater emphasis on individuality, inner life, the free development of personality, and psychological variety.

 

An important sign of this cultural shift was the growing displacement of the ideal of the “true woman” by the image of the “New Woman,” both in women’s rights circles and in popular representations of femininity. For modern women of the late nineteenth century, true womanhood no longer seemed virtuous and industrious but idle and purposeless. New Women pushed against the boundaries of woman’s sphere to participate in public life. (See Primary Sources: “The New Woman,” pp. 345–52.) Their ethic emphasized “woman’s work,” a term that sometimes meant paid labor, sometimes public service, but always an alternative to exclusive domesticity.

 

Clubwoman and author Charlotte Perkins Gilman was the first great spokeswoman for the New Woman. Gilman went so far as to criticize the single family household and the exclusive dedication of women to motherhood. “With the larger socialization of the woman of today, the fitness for and accompanying desire for wider combination, more general interest, . . . more organized methods of work for larger ends,” she wrote in her widely read Women and Economics (1898), “she feels more and more heavily the intensely personal limits of the more primitive home duties, interests, methods.”36 Gilman’s writings emphasized a second element of the New Woman ethic, the importance of female individuation, of each woman realizing her distinctive talents, capacities, and personality. Individualism was a long-standing American value, but it had been traditionally reserved for men. Men were individuals with different abilities; women were members of a category with common characteristics. New Womanhood challenged this vision of contrasting masculinity and femininity and claimed the legacy of individualism for women.

 

At age seventy-seven, Elizabeth Cady Stanton stressed this individualist dimension in her 1892 speech “The Solitude of Self,” presented to a committee of the U.S. Congress and then to the National American Woman Suffrage Association. “The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion,” she began, “is the individuality of each human soul. . . . In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny.”37 The speech was Cady Stanton’s swan song from suffrage leadership. Anthony’s vision of a moderate, broad-based suffrage movement contrasted with Cady Stanton’s inclination to challenge relentlessly women’s conventional values. A few years later, Cady Stanton went so far as to lambaste the Bible for its misogyny. The greatest expression of her lifelong passion for individual women’s freedom, “The Solitude of Self” looked forward to a future of women’s efforts for emancipation that would be so different from the approach of the Woman’s Era, so modern in its emphasis on the self and on psychological change, as to require a new name: feminism.

CONCLUSION: Toward a New Womanhood

The end of the Civil War ushered in a period of great conflict. Reconstruction sought to restore the Union and to replace sectionalism with a unified sense of nationhood, but at its end in 1877 unity remained elusive for all Americans. Various terms for the post-Reconstruction era indicate its different aspects. In the New South during Redemption, black and white women regarded each other over an embattled racial gulf, altered and intensified by emancipation. Meanwhile, in the America of the Gilded Age, a new divide had opened up between labor and capital. As the American economy became increasingly industrialized, the numbers and visibility of women wage earners grew, along with their determination to join in efforts to bring democracy to American class relations. For their part, middle- and upper-class women created what is called the Woman’s Era as they pursued new opportunities in education, civic organization, and public authority. (See Primary Sources: “The Higher Education of Women in the Postbellum Years,” pp. 336–44.)

 

Two other aspects of the changing face of America in the late nineteenth century are considered in Chapter 7: the massive immigration that underlay the growth, and much of the assertiveness, of the American working class; and the physical expansion and consolidation of the nation through the further incorporation of western lands. Women were important actors in the multifaceted political crisis in the 1890s, which brought together all of these phenomena — racial and class conflict, woman’s expanding sphere, massive ethnic change, and the nation’s physical expansion up to and beyond its borders. By 1900, women were poised on the brink of one of the most active and important eras in American history through women’s eyes, the Progressive years.

CHAPTER 6 REVIEW

KEY TERMS AND PEOPLE

Terms

 

Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments

Comstock Act

Minor v. Happersett

Knights of Labor

“voluntary motherhood”

Women’s Christian Temperance Union

National American Woman Suffrage Association

General Federation of Women’s Clubs

National Association of Colored Women

National Council of Jewish Women

“New Woman”

People

 

Victoria Woodhull

Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Charlotte Forten Grimké

Ida B. Wells

Lucy Parsons

Leonora Barry

Mary Kenney

Frances Willard

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

REVIEW QUESTIONS

What was the impact of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments on the women’s rights movement, and what new strategies did suffragists develop after their ratification?

Analyze the different meanings of emancipation for black and white women of the South. How did race, class, and gender politics in the “New South” compare to those in the Old South?

What were the most significant changes in women’s labor between 1865 and 1900? How, if at all, did labor organizations in this period attempt to address women worker’s issues?

What new organizations did American middle-class and leisure-class women create to address the conditions resulting from industrialization?

Making Connections How did women shape American society in the post–Civil War decades as workers, social and political reformers, and intellectuals?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Ida B. Wells, “Race Woman”

IN THE YEARS AFTER 1877, when the federal protections of Reconstruction ended and the freed black population of the South was left on its own to resist resurgent white supremacy, a generation of exceptional female African American leaders emerged. Of these, none was more extraordinary than Ida B. Wells. Born in 1862 in Mississippi, she was orphaned at the age of sixteen by a yellow fever epidemic. Determined to assume responsibility for her siblings and to keep her family together, she found work first as a teacher and then as a journalist. In 1889 in Memphis, she purchased part ownership of an African American newspaper, Free Speech and Headlight. Her goal was to expose and publicize the mistreatment of her people. In an age notable for its florid and euphemistic writing, Wells’s style was straightforward and explicit. She was not afraid to use the word “rape” to describe the accusations against black men and the experiences of black women.

 

Wells was catapulted into the role that changed her life when her friend Thomas Moss, a prosperous grocer and mail carrier, was lynched by a Memphis mob in 1892. Taken in the months following the lynching, Figure 6.1 shows Ida B. Wells posing with widow Betty Moss and the Moss children. Wells spent time with the Moss family as they mourned the loss of a father and husband. She recalled how “the baby daughter of Tom Moss, too young to express how she misses her father, toddles to the wardrobe, seizes the legs of his letter-carrier uniform, hugs and kisses them with evident delight and stretches her little hands to be taken up into arms that will never more clasp his daughter’s form.”38 What details in the photograph provide clues to the close emotional bond between Ida Wells and Betty Moss?

 

 

Figure 6.1 Ida B. Wells with the Family of Thomas Moss (1893)

 

Although the practice of lynching had a long history elsewhere, in the South during this period, the accused were black and the mobs white. Wells concluded that Moss’s “crime” had been the competition that his successful grocery business posed to whites. Over a hundred years later, we take for granted the connections that she was the first to make: between the postwar political and economic gains made by freedpeople and the brutal violence unleashed on them by resentful whites; and between the long history of sexual exploitation of black women during slavery and the inflammatory charges made after emancipation to justify lynching — that black men were sexual predators.

 

Perhaps the most remarkable element of Wells’s analysis was her insistence that black and white people sometimes voluntarily chose to be each other’s sexual partners. She was not particularly in favor of the practice. She was what was called in this period a “race woman,” meaning that her concerns were less for integration than for the happiness and progress of African Americans. “A proper self-respect is expected of races as individuals,” she later wrote. “We need more race love; the tie of racehood should bind us [through] . . . a more hearty appreciation of each other.”39 Nonetheless, she appreciated the difference between willing and coerced sex and defended the former while criticizing the latter. She understood that so long as interracial sex was concealed as a fact of southern life, black people would pay the deadly price.

 

Her investigations into the practice of lynching got her driven out of Memphis in 1892. This autobiographical account details the impact that her harrowing experience had on African American women in the North, who went on to form the National Association of Colored Women and to join in the work of exposing the true nature, extent, and causes of southern lynchings. Exiled from the South, she moved to Chicago, where in 1895 she married Frederick Barnett, also a journalist and activist, and continued to battle for justice for her race by working for greater political power for black people. She played an early role in organizing African American women to secure and use the right to vote. Her autobiography remained unfinished and unpublished until brought into print by her youngest child, Alfreda Duster, more than a century after her mother’s birth.

 

As you read, consider what led Wells to undertake an exposé of lynching and how doing so challenged the expectations of race and gender that she faced. What does Wells’s analysis of the causes of and attitudes toward the lynching of African Americans reveal about the dynamics between whites and blacks several decades after the end of slavery?

 

IDA B. WELLS

Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1970)

 

While I was thus carrying on the work of my newspaper, . . . there came the lynching in Memphis which changed the whole course of my life. . . .

 

Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart owned and operated a grocery store in a thickly populated suburb. . . . There was already a grocery owned and operated by a white man who hitherto had had a monopoly on the trade of this thickly populated colored suburb. Thomas’s grocery changed all that, and he and his associates were made to feel that they were not welcome by the white grocer. . . .

 

One day some colored and white boys quarreled over a game of marbles and the colored boys got the better of the fight which followed. . . . Then the challenge was issued that the vanquished whites were coming on Saturday night to clean out [Thomas’s] Colored People’s Grocery Company. . . . Accordingly the grocery company armed several men and stationed them in the rear of the store on that fatal Saturday night, not to attack but to repel a threatened attack. . . . The men stationed there had seen several white men stealing through the rear door and fired on them without a moment’s pause. Three of these men were wounded, and others fled and gave the alarm. . . . Over a hundred colored men were dragged from their homes and put in jail on suspicion.

 

All day long on that fateful Sunday white men were permitted in the jail to look over the imprisoned black men. . . . The mob took out of their cells Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart, the three officials of the People’s Grocery Company. They were loaded on a switch engine of the railroad which ran back of the jail, carried a mile north of the city limits, and horribly shot to death. One of the morning papers held back its edition in order to supply its readers with the details of that lynching. . . . The mob took possession of the People’s Grocery Company, helping themselves to food and drink, and destroyed what they could not eat or steal. The creditors had the place closed and a few days later what remained of the stock was sold at auction. Thus, with the aid of city and county authorities and the daily papers, that white grocer had indeed put an end to his rival Negro grocer as well as to his business. . . .

 

Like many another person who had read of lynchings in the South, I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed — that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching; that perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.

 

But Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart had been lynched in Memphis, one of the leading cities of the South, in which no lynching had taken place before, with just as much brutality as other victims of the mob; and they had committed no crime against white women. This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and “keep the nigger down.” I then began an investigation of every lynching I read about. I stumbled on the amazing record that every case of rape reported . . . became such only when it became public.

 

Many cases were like that of the lynching which happened in Tunica County, Mississippi. The Associated Press reporter said, “The big burly brute was lynched because he had raped the seven-year-old daughter of the sheriff.” I visited the place afterward and saw the girl, who was a grown woman more than seventeen years old. She had been found in the lynched Negro’s cabin by her father, who had led the mob against him in order to save his daughter’s reputation. That Negro was a helper on the farm. . . .

 

It was with these and other stories in mind in that last week in May 1892 that I wrote the following editorial:

 

Eight Negroes lynched since last issue of the Free Speech. They were charged with killing white men and five with raping white women. Nobody in this section believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will overreach themselves and a conclusion will be drawn which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.

 

This editorial furnished at last the excuse for doing what the white leaders of Memphis had long been wanting to do: put an end to the Free Speech. . . .

 

Having lost my paper, had a price put on my life, and been made an exile from home for hinting at the truth, I felt that I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth now that I was where I could do so freely. Accordingly, the fourth week in June, the New York Age had a seven-column article on the front page giving names, dates and places of many lynchings for alleged rape. This article showed conclusively that my editorial in the Free Speech was based on facts of illicit association between black men and white women.

 

Such relationships between white men and colored women were notorious, and had been as long as the two races had lived together in the South. . . . Many stories of the antebellum South were based upon such relationships. It has been frequently charged in narratives of slave times that these white fathers often sold their mulatto children into slavery. It was also well known that many other such white fathers and masters brought their mulatto and quadroon children to the North and gave them freedom and established homes for them, thus making them independent.

 

All my life I had known that such conditions were accepted as a matter of course. I found that this rape of helpless Negro girls and women, which began in slavery days, still continued without . . . hindrance, check or reproof from church, state, or press until there had been created this race within a race — and all designated by the inclusive term of “colored.”

 

I also found that what the white man of the South practiced as all right for himself, he assumed to be unthinkable in white women. They could and did fall in love with the pretty mulatto and quadroon girls as well as black ones, but they professed an inability to imagine white women doing the same thing with Negro and mulatto men. Whenever they did so and were found out, the cry of rape was raised, and the lowest element of the white South was turned loose to wreak its fiendish cruelty on those too weak to help themselves. . . .

 

The more I studied the situation, the more I was convinced that the Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income. The federal laws for Negro protection passed during Reconstruction had been made a mockery by the white South where it had not secured their repeal. This same white South had secured political control of its several states, and as soon as white southerners came into power they began to make playthings of Negro lives and property. This still seemed not enough “to keep the nigger down.”

 

Here came lynch law to stifle Negro manhood which defended itself, and the burning alive of Negroes who were weak enough to accept favors from white women. The many unspeakable and unprintable tortures to which Negro rapists (?) [here Wells inserted a parenthetical question mark to indicate her skepticism of these charges] of white women were subjected were for the purpose of striking terror into the hearts of other Negroes who might be thinking of consorting with willing white women.

 

I found that in order to justify these horrible atrocities to the world, the Negro was branded as a race of rapists, who were especially after white women. I found that white men who had created a race of mulattoes by raping and consorting with Negro women were still doing so wherever they could; these same white men lynched, burned and tortured Negro men for doing the same thing with white women; even when the white women were willing victims.

 

That the entire race should be branded as moral monsters and despoilers of white womanhood and childhood was bound to rob us of all the friends we had and silence any protests that they might make for us. For all these reasons it seemed a stern duty to give the facts I had collected to the world. . . .

 

About two months after my appearance in the columns in the New York Age, two colored women remarked on my revelations during a visit with each other and said they thought that the women of New York and Brooklyn should do something to show appreciation of my work and to protest the treatment which I had received. . . . A committee of two hundred and fifty women was appointed, and they stirred up sentiment throughout the two cities which culminated in a testimonial at Lyric Hall on 5 October 1892.

 

This testimonial was conceded by the oldest inhabitants to be the greatest demonstration ever attempted by race women for one of their number. . . . The leading colored women of Boston and Philadelphia had been invited to join in this demonstration, and they came, a brilliant array . . . behind a lonely, homesick girl who was an exile because she had tried to defend the manhood of her race. . . .

 

So many things came out of that wonderful testimonial.

 

First it was the beginning of the club movement among the colored women in this country. The women of New York and Brooklyn decided to continue that organization, which they called the Women’s Loyal Union. These were the first strictly women’s clubs organized in those cities. Mrs. Ruffin of Boston, who came over to that testimonial . . . called a meeting of the women at her home to meet me, and they organized themselves into the Woman’s Era Club of that city. Mrs. Ruffin had been a member of the foremost clubs among white women in Boston for years, but this was her first effort to form one among colored women. . . .

 

Second, that testimonial was the beginning of public speaking for me. I have already said that I had not before made speeches, but invitations came from Philadelphia, Wilmington, Delaware, Chester, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. . . .

 

In Philadelphia . . . Miss Catherine Impey of Street Somerset, England, was visiting Quaker relatives of hers in the city and at the same time was trying to learn what she could about the color question in this country. She was the editor of Anti-Caste, a magazine published in England in behalf of the natives of India, and she was therefore interested in the treatment of darker races everywhere. . . . [Thus happened] the third great result of that wonderful testimonial in New York the previous month. Although we did not know it at the time, the interview between Miss Impey and myself resulted in an invitation to England and the beginning of the worldwide campaign against lynching.

 

SOURCE: Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 47–82.

 

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What were the underlying tensions and larger conflicts that led to the lynching of Thomas Moss?

 

What was the prevailing opinion about lynching that Wells was determined to challenge?

 

What did Wells see as the relationship between the long history of white men raping black women and the charges raised against black men of raping white women?

 

How did Wells’s campaign contribute to the consolidation of the organized African American women’s movement?

PRIMARY SOURCES

The Woman Who Toils

THE LIVES AND LABORS of white wage-earning women and leisure-class women intersected in numerous ways in the late nineteenth century. Maids, cooks, nannies, and laundresses provided the labor that made possible the elaborate homes and active social lives of leisure-class women. Working women and their children were the objects of the charitable and philanthropic projects that middle- and upper-class women, aiming for a larger role in community affairs, organized in these years. Above all, working women provided the labor to manufacture the food, clothing, and luxuries that distinguished the rich from the poor. As the authors of The Woman Who Toils explained to wealthy women, working women provided “the labour that must be done to satisfy your material demands.”40

 

By the end of the century, working-class women were also the subject of professional women’s journalistic and sociological investigations, of which The Woman Who Toils: Being the Experiences of Two Ladies as Factory Girls (1903) is a notable example. The authors, Bessie and Marie Van Vorst, were upper-class women. Marie was born a Van Vorst, and Bessie married into the family. Neither went to college. Both were educated instead in the manner preferred by the upper classes for their daughters, by private tutors and at female academies. After Bessie’s husband (Marie’s brother) died, the two women, both still in their thirties, decided together to establish greater economic independence for themselves. They moved to Paris and cowrote a novel about an upper-class American woman abroad. Their next collaborative effort was The Woman Who Toils, a journalistic account of the lives of wage-earning women. As upper-class New Women aspiring to independence, they were motivated by both their growing awareness of the lives of working-class women and their own authorial ambitions.

 

To research the book, they returned to the United States, assumed fictional identities, and took a series of working-class jobs. Marie worked in a New England shoe factory and a southern textile mill. Bessie became the Irishwoman “Esther Kelly” and took a job in a pickling factory in Pittsburgh, where she went from eagerness to exhaustion in a few short days. Moving from job to job in the factory, Bessie explored how different it felt to work for a preset daily wage and to work for payment by the piece — an arrangement that led workers to drive themselves to work faster. A day in the male workers’ dining room allowed her to compare manufacturing to domestic service labor.

 

Throughout Bessie’s account, the distance she maintained from the women she wrote about is evident. She and her sister-in-law chose a subtitle to clarify that they were still “ladies” despite their brief stint as factory girls. The young men with whom their coworkers associated, the recreation they sought, and the clothes they wore seemed to them “vulgar.” Like most reformers, they did not endorse wage labor for women with children, a point emphasized by President Theodore Roosevelt in his introduction to their book. Nonetheless, Bessie came to appreciate the generosity of her coworkers, the pleasures of collective work, and the “practical, progressive” democracy of working-class life. Above all, it was the sheer physical demands of doing the job, descriptions of which are among the best parts of the Pittsburgh pickling section of The Woman Who Toils, that seem to have broken through her shield of gentility and brought her a measure of closeness to the women workers about whom she wrote.

 

As you read this account of working in the pickle factory, identify what Bessie Van Vorst finds attractive about the jobs she does and the women who do them, and what she finds repellent. Consider the points at which her class prejudices emerge, and the points at which she gets beyond them.

 

MRS. JOHN (BESSIE) VAN VORST AND MARIE VAN VORST

The Woman Who Toils: Being the Experiences of Two Ladies as Factory Girls (1903)

 

“What will you do about your name?” “What will you do with your hair and your hands?” “How can you deceive people?” These are some of the questions I had been asked by my friends.

 

Before any one had cared or needed to know my name it was morning of the second day, and my assumed name seemed by that time the only one I had ever had. As to hair and hands, a half-day’s work suffices for their undoing. And my disguise is so successful I have deceived not only others but myself. I have become with desperate reality a factory girl, alone, inexperienced, friendless. I am making $4.20 a week and spending $3 of this for board alone, and I dread not being strong enough to keep my job. I climb endless stairs, am given a white cap and an apron, and my life as a factory girl begins. I become part of the ceaseless, unrelenting mechanism kept in motion by the poor. . . .

 

My first task is an easy one; anybody could do it. On the stroke of seven my fingers fly. I place a lid of paper in a tin jar-top, over it a cork; this I press down with both hands, tossing the cover, when done, into a pan. In spite of myself I hurry; I cannot work fast enough — I outdo my companions. How can they be so slow? Every nerve, every muscle is offering some of its energy. Over in one corner the machinery for sealing the jars groans and roars; the mingled sounds of filling, washing, wiping, packing, comes to my eager ears as an accompaniment for the simple work assigned to me. One hour passes, two, three hours; I fit ten, twenty, fifty dozen caps, and still my energy keeps up. . . .

 

When I have fitted 110 dozen tin caps the forewoman comes and changes my job. She tells me to haul and load up some heavy crates with pickle jars. I am wheeling these back and forth when the twelve o’clock whistle blows. Up to that time the room has been one big dynamo, each girl a part of it. With the first moan of the noon signal the dynamo comes to life. It is hungry; it has friends and favourites — news to tell. We herd down to a big dining room and take our places, five hundred of us in all. The newspaper bundles are unfolded. The menu varies little: bread and jam, cake and pickles, occasionally a sausage, a bit of cheese or a piece of stringy cold meat. In ten minutes the repast is over. The dynamo has been fed; there are twenty minutes of leisure spent in dancing, singing, resting, and conversing chiefly about young men and “sociables.”

 

At 12:30 sharp the whistle draws back the life it has given. I return to my job. My shoulders are beginning to ache. My hands are stiff, my thumbs almost blistered. The enthusiasm I had felt is giving way to numbing weariness. I look at my companions now in amazement. How can they keep on so steadily, so swiftly? . . . New girls like myself who had worked briskly in the morning are beginning to loiter. Out of the washing-tins hands come up red and swollen, only to be plunged again into hot dirty water. Would the whistle never blow? . . . At last the whistle blows! In a swarm we report: we put on our things and get away into the cool night air. I have stood ten hours; I have fitted 1,300 corks; I have hauled and loaded 4,000 jars of pickles. My pay is seventy cents. . . .

 

For the two days following my first experience I am unable to resume work. Fatigue has swept through my body like a fever. Every bone and joint has a clamouring ache. . . .

 

The next day is Saturday. I feel a fresh excitement at going back to my job; the factory draws me toward it magnetically. I long to be in the hum and whir of the busy workroom. Two days of leisure without resources or amusement make clear to me how the sociability of factory life, the freedom from personal demands, the escape from self can prove a distraction to those who have no mental occupation, no money to spend on diversion. It is easier to submit to factory government which commands five hundred girls with one law valid for all, than to undergo the arbitrary discipline of parental authority. I speed across the snow-covered courtyard. In a moment my cap and apron are on and I am sent to report to the head forewoman. . . .

 

She wears her cap close against her head. Her front hair is rolled up in crimping-pins. She has false teeth and is a widow. Her pale, parched face shows what a great share of life has been taken by daily over-effort repeated during years. As she talks she touches my arm in a kindly fashion and looks at me with blue eyes that float about under weary lids. “You are only at the beginning,” they seem to say. “Your youth and vigour are at full tide, but drop by drop they will be sapped from you, to swell the great flood of human effort that supplies the world’s material needs. You will gain in experience,” the weary lids flutter at me, “but you will pay with your life the living you make.”

 

There is no variety in my morning’s work. Next to me is a bright, pretty girl jamming chopped pickles into bottles.

 

“How long have you been here?” I ask, attracted by her capable appearance. She does her work easily and well.

 

“About five months.”

 

“How much do you make?”

 

“From 90 cents to $1.05. I’m doing piecework,” she explains. “I get seven-eighths of a cent for every dozen bottles I fill. I have to fill eight dozen to make seven cents. . . .”

 

“Do you live at home?” I ask.

 

“Yes; I don’t have to work. I don’t pay no board. My father and my brothers supports me and my mother. But,” and her eyes twinkle, “I couldn’t have the clothes I do if I didn’t work.”

 

“Do you spend your money all on yourself?”

 

“Yes.”

 

I am amazed at the cheerfulness of my companions. They complain of fatigue, of cold, but never at any time is there a suggestion of ill-humour. The suppressed animal spirits reassert themselves when the forewoman’s back is turned. Companionship is the great stimulus. I am confident that without the . . . encouragement of example, it would be impossible to obtain as much from each individual girl as is obtained from them in groups of tens, fifties, hundreds working together.

 

When lunch is over we are set to scrubbing. Every table and stand, every inch of the factory floor must be scrubbed in the next four hours. . . .

 

The grumbling is general. There is but one opinion among the girls: it is not right that they should be made to do this work. They all echo the same resentment, but their complaints are made in whispers; not one has the courage to openly rebel. What, I wonder to myself, do the men do on scrubbing day. I try to picture one of them on his hands and knees in a sea of brown mud. It is impossible. The next time I go for a supply of soft soap in a department where the men are working I take a look at the masculine interpretation of house cleaning. One man is playing a hose on the floor and the rest are scrubbing the boards down with long-handled brooms and rubber mops.

 

“You take it easy,” I say to the boss.

 

“I won’t have no scrubbing in my place,” he answers emphatically. “The first scrubbing day they says to me ‘Get down on your hands and knees,’ and I says — ‘Just pay me my money, will you; I’m goin’ home. What scrubbing can’t be done with mops ain’t going to be done by me.’ The women wouldn’t have to scrub, either, if they had enough spirit all of ’em to say so.”

 

I determined to find out if possible, during my stay in the factory, what it is that clogs this mainspring of “spirit” in the women. . . .

 

After a Sunday of rest I arrive somewhat ahead of time on Monday morning, which leaves me a few moments for conversation with a pieceworker who is pasting labels on mustard jars. . . .

 

“I bet you can’t guess how old I am.”

 

I look at her. Her face and throat are wrinkled, her hands broad and scrawny; she is tall and has short skirts. What shall be my clue? If I judge by pleasure, “unborn” would be my answer; if by effort, then “a thousand years.”

 

“Twenty,” I hazard as a safe medium.

 

“Fourteen,” she laughs. “I don’t like it at home, the kids bother me so. Mamma’s people are well-to-do. I’m working for my own pleasure.”

 

“Indeed, I wish I was,” says a new girl with a red waist. “We three girls supports mamma and runs the house. We have $13 rent to pay and a load of coal every month and groceries. It’s no joke, I can tell you.” . . .

 

Monday is a hard day. There is more complaining, more shirking, more gossip than in the middle of the week. Most of the girls have been to dances on Saturday night, to church on Sunday evening with some young man. Their conversation is vulgar and prosaic; there is nothing in the language they use that suggests an ideal or any conception of the abstract. . . . Here in the land of freedom, where no class line is rigid, the precious chance is not to serve but to live for oneself; not to watch a superior, but to find out by experience. The ideal plays no part, stern realities alone count, and thus we have a progressive, practical, independent people, the expression of whose personality is interesting not through their words but by their deeds.

 

When the Monday noon whistle blows I follow the hundreds down into the dining-room. . . . I am beginning to understand why the meager lunches of preserve-sandwiches and pickles more than satisfy the girls whom I was prepared to accuse of spending their money on gewgaws rather than on nourishment. It is fatigue that steals the appetite. I can hardly taste what I put in my mouth; the food sticks in my throat. . . . I did not want wholesome food, exhausted as I was. I craved sours and sweets, pickles, cakes, anything to excite my numbed taste. . . .

 

Accumulated weariness forces me to take a day off. When I return I am sent for in the corking-room. The forewoman lends me a blue gingham dress and tells me I am to do “piece”-work. There are three who work together at every corking-table. My two companions are a woman with goggles and a one-eyed boy. We are not a brilliant trio. The job consists in evening the vinegar in the bottles, driving the cork in, first with a machine, then with a hammer, letting out the air with a knife stuck under the cork, capping the corks, sealing the caps, counting and distributing the bottles. These operations are paid for at the rate of one-half a cent for the dozen bottles, which sum is divided among us. My two companions are earning a living, so I must work in dead earnest or take bread out of their mouths. . . .

 

There is a stimulus unsuspected in working to get a job done. Before this I had worked to make the time pass. Then no one took account of how much I did; the factory clock had a weighted pendulum; now ambition outdoes physical strength. The hours and my purpose are running a race together. But, hurry as I may, as we do, when twelve blows its signal we have corked only 210 dozen bottles! This is no more than day-work at seventy cents. With an ache in every muscle, I redouble my energy after lunch. The girl with the goggles looks at me blindly and says: “Ain’t it just awful hard work? You can make good money, but you’ve got to hustle.”

 

She is a forlorn specimen of humanity, ugly, old, dirty, condemned to the slow death of the over-worked. I am a green hand. I make mistakes; I have no experience in the fierce sustained effort of the bread-winners. Over and over I turn to her, over and over she is obliged to correct me. During the ten hours we work side by side not one murmur of impatience escapes her. When she sees that I am getting discouraged she calls out across the deafening din, “That’s all right; you can’t expect to learn in a day; just keep on steady.” . . .

 

The oppressive monotony is one day varied by a summons to the men’s dining-room. I go eagerly, glad of any change. . . . The dinner under preparation is for the men of the factory. There are two hundred of them. They are paid from $1.35 to $3 a day. Their wages begin upon the highest limit given to women. The dinner costs each man ten cents. The $20 paid in daily cover the expenses of the cook, two kitchen maids, and the dinner, which consists of meat, bread and butter, vegetables and coffee, sometimes soup, sometimes dessert. If this can pay for two hundred there is no reason why for five cents a hot meal of some kind could not be given to the women. They don’t demand it, so they are left to make themselves ill on pickles and preserves. . . .

 

[In the dining room] I had ample opportunity to compare domestic service with factory work. We set the table for two hundred, and do a thousand miserable slavish tasks that must be begun again the following day. At twelve the two hundred troop in, toil-worn and begrimed. They pass like locusts, leaving us sixteen hundred dirty dishes to wash up and wipe. This takes us four hours, and when we have finished the work stands ready to be done over the next morning with peculiar monotony. In the factory there is stimulus in feeling that the material which passes through one’s hands will never be seen or heard of again. . . .

 

My first experience is drawing to a close. I have surmounted the discomforts of insufficient food, of dirt, a bed without sheets, the strain of hard manual labor. . . . In the factory where I worked men and women were employed for ten-hour days. The women’s highest wages were lower than the men’s lowest. Both were working as hard as they possibly could. The women were doing menial work, such as scrubbing, which the men refused to do. The men were properly fed at noon; the women satisfied themselves with cake and pickles. Why was this? It is of course impossible to generalize on a single factory. I can only relate the conclusions I drew from what I saw myself. The wages paid by employers, economists tell us, are fixed at the level of bare subsistence. This level and its accompanying conditions are determined by competition, by the nature and number of labourers taking part in the competition. In the masculine category I met but one class of competitor: the bread-winner. In the feminine category I found a variety of classes: the bread-winner, the semi-bread-winner, the woman who works for luxuries. This inevitably drags the wage level. The self-supporting girl is in competition with the child, with the girl who lives at home and makes a small contribution to the household expenses, and with the girl who is supported and who spends all her money on her clothes. It is this division of purpose which takes the “spirit” out of them as a class. There will be no strikes among them so long as the question of wages is not equally vital to them all. . . .

 

On the evening when I left the factory for the last time, I heard in the streets the usual cry of murders, accidents and suicides; the mental food of the overworked. It is Saturday night. I mingle with a crowd of labourers homeward bound, and with women and girls returning from a Saturday sale in the big shops. They hurry along delighted at the cheapness of a bargain, little dreaming of the human effort that has produced it, the cost of life and energy it represents. As they pass, they draw their skirts aside from us, the cooperators who enable them to have the luxuries they do; from us, the multitude who stand between them and the monster Toil that must be fed with human lives. Think of us, as we herd in the winter dawn; think of us as we bend over our task all the daylight without rest; think of us at the end of the day as we resume suffering and anxiety in homes of squalour and ugliness; think of us as we make our wretched try for merriment; think of us as we stand protectors between you and the labour that must be done to satisfy your material demands; think of us — be merciful.

 

SOURCE: Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst, The Woman Who Toils: Being the Experiences of Two Ladies as Factory Girls (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co, 1903), 21–58.

 

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What different sorts of women does Bessie Van Vorst meet in the factory, and how and why do their responses to their work vary?

 

Why does Van Vorst conclude that working women are passive in accepting their working conditions and unwilling to stand up for themselves in the way of working men? Do you think she is right?

 

How might the working women described in The Woman Who Toils have responded on reading the book?

 

In light of Van Vorst’s final comments, how do you think her life and attitudes were changed by her experience as a factory girl?

PRIMARY SOURCES

The Higher Education of Women in the Postbellum Years

WHEREVER WOMEN HAVE BEGUN to improve their lives, almost invariably they have started by aspiring to better education. “The neglected education of my fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore,” wrote British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792.41 In the era of the American Revolution, grateful political leaders praised educated women for their role in mothering an enlightened (male) citizenry (see pp. 128, 130). Within fifty years, women were teachers in America’s burgeoning system of public education. Even so, women continued to have far less access to education than men. Before the Civil War, women could rise no further than the high school level at all-female seminaries. Only Ohio’s Oberlin College, an evangelical Protestant institution founded in 1833, admitted a few women to its regular baccalaureate course, most famously women’s rights advocate Lucy Stone, who graduated in 1847. Even at Oberlin, however, most women students were educated in a special “ladies’ program,” with easier language and mathematics requirements than those for men.

 

Two developments in the 1860s made higher education much more available to women. In 1862, the Morrill Land Grant Act provided federal lands to states and territories for the support of public institutions of higher education. While the act did not explicitly mention women, as one historian has explained, “taxpayers demanded that their daughters, as well as their sons, be admitted.”42 As coeducation spread, long-standing concerns that such easy association between the sexes would coarsen women students and distract men began to give way. Not only were many new land-grant institutions of higher education established throughout the West and Midwest in the 1860s and early 1870s, but public universities founded earlier changed their policies to admit women. Private institutions such as Northwestern and the University of Chicago in Illinois, Stanford in California, Tulane in Louisiana, and Grinnell in Iowa also followed the trend. By the end of the century, coeducational institutions granted college degrees to approximately four thousand women each year.

 

The University of California was one of the first of the newly established public universities to enroll women. Founded in 1868, “Cal” graduated its first woman, Rosa L. Scrivener, in 1874. By 1878, women’s rights to equal education, including in the university’s law school, were enshrined in the state constitution. By 1882, women constituted over 30 percent of the student body. Being a college student meant access not only to the serious matter of higher education, but also to a tradition of high-spirited and sometimes transgressive carousing. This part of the college experience was more difficult for women, with their obligations to maintain a ladylike demeanor, but by the end of the century at Cal they had broken through this barrier as well. In Figure 6.2, Berkeley women students are happily sporting the headgear that college juniors and seniors of the era prized — “plug” hats that had been battered and generally made to look as disgusting as possible. What do you imagine joining in these carefree practices meant to these young women?

 

 

Figure 6.2 Women Students Modeling Senior Plugs, University of California (c. 1900)

 

After the Civil War, the establishment of all-women’s colleges were the other source of increased women’s opportunities for higher education. The first of these, Vassar College, opened in 1865, funded by a wealthy brewer from Poughkeepsie, New York, who wanted to create an educational institution “for young women which shall be to them, what Yale and Harvard are to young men.”43 Philanthropists endowed other all-female institutions, and by 1891 Smith and Wellesley Colleges in Massachusetts, Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia, and Goucher College near Baltimore were graduating women with bachelor’s degrees. (Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, begun many years before as a female seminary, upgraded to college level in 1890.) These all-women institutions produced about sixteen hundred college graduates each year. According to statistics combining all-female and coeducational institutions, both public and private, by 1890 women were approximately 40 percent of the total of college graduates — an extraordinary development in less than four decades.

 

There was much debate about whether women students received a better education and had a better collegiate experience at an all-women’s college or at a coeducational institution. To strengthen their claims to intellectual superiority, the top women’s colleges were dedicated to providing a first-class education in the sciences, which were becoming increasingly important in modern higher education. The Wellesley College class pictured in Figure 6.3 is studying zoology. The students are examining a fish skeleton and a piece of coral to learn about animal physiology. This photograph, like so many photos of late nineteenth-century college women, is carefully posed. How does the deliberate positioning of the students convey the intellectual seriousness, intensity, and engagement of the scientific learning going on in this all-female classroom? Consider the simple and functional character of the students’ clothes, especially compared to the elaborate and costly appearance of elite women engaged in less serious pursuits (see photo on p. 315).

Figure 6.3 also underscores the opportunities that all-female colleges in this period provided for the employment of educated women. Here, unlike in most coeducational schools, women could be professors and administrators. The zoology professor, the young woman seated at the center, is Mary Alice Wilcox, a graduate of Newnham College, the women’s college of Britain’s Cambridge University. Standing behind her and slightly to the right is Alice Freeman, the twenty-eight-year-old Wellesley College president. Freeman, an early graduate of the University of Michigan, was the first woman to head an institution of higher education in the United States. In 1886, she married Harvard professor George Herbert Palmer and resigned her position as college president. Why might women professors have been employed only at all-women’s colleges? What difference do you think they made to women’s experience of higher education? How might the youth of professors such as Wilcox and administrators such as Freeman have influenced the learning of these women students?

 

 

Figure 6.3 Class in Zoology, Wellesley College (1883–1884)

 

Concerns went beyond the intellectual. Did coeducation provide too many opportunities for undue familiarity between young unmarried men and women? Were women’s colleges hotbeds for passionate female friendships? Anxiety that higher education would have a negative impact on women’s health, in particular on their reproductive capacities, haunted the early years of women’s higher education. In 1873, Dr. Edward Clarke published a controversial book, Sex in Education, in which he argued that higher education for women drained vital physical energy — literally blood — from the reproductive organs to the brain. Defenders of women’s education rushed to challenge Clarke’s argument that higher education endangered women’s reproductive and maternal capacities. They undertook scientific studies of women college students to demonstrate that physical health and intellectual growth were not incompatible. Proponents of women’s education were particularly anxious to prove that the menstruation of college girls was not disrupted by too much study.

 

To further counter the charge that higher education weakened women physically, but also to strengthen women’s bodies as well as their minds, colleges added women’s athletics and physical education to their curricula. Competition, however, was prohibited as unladylike, certainly between the sexes in coeducational institutions, but even among the women themselves. Nonetheless, in the 1890s, soon after basketball was introduced among young men, a modified version of the game became the rage among college women. Figure 6.4 is a photograph of the team of the class of 1904 from Wells College, an all-women’s college in Aurora, New York. In addition to their white-tie blouses, the players are wearing loose, divided “bloomer” skirts. What in the photograph gives evidence of the physical freedom that sports brought to women’s college experience? Why might the photographer have posed the team members with their hands folded, rather than in a more forceful representation of young women in action?

 

 

Figure 6.4 Basketball Team, Wells College (1904)

 

Black women faced extraordinary educational challenges. In the first years of emancipation, the overwhelming goal for ex-slaves was basic literacy. During Reconstruction, black educational institutions were founded, virtually all of them opened to women as well as men, but these schools provided secondary and vocational rather than baccalaureate education. Even the nation’s premiere all-black college, Howard University, founded in Washington, D.C., in 1867, did not open its collegiate program until 1897 and did not graduate its first woman BA until 1901. In the same year, Atlanta’s all-female Spelman College also granted its first BA degree.

 

By 1900, an estimated 252 African American women held bachelor’s degrees, but almost all had been granted by predominantly white institutions, one-quarter from Oberlin College alone. Committed to equal education by both race and gender, Oberlin had produced the very first black woman college graduate — Mary Jane Patterson — in 1862. Many of its black female graduates, including Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper, went on to become leading spokeswomen for their race and their sex.

 

In southern black educational institutions, the dramatic downturn in race relations in the 1880s and 1890s had a discouraging impact on higher education for African Americans. Instead of striving for academic equality with white colleges, they concentrated on preparing their students for skilled trades and manual vocations. This approach to higher education was preached by Booker T. Washington, the era’s premiere African American educator. Figure 6.5 is a photograph of a history class at Virginia’s Hampton Institute, where Washington began his career. A school for ex-slaves founded in 1868, Hampton was a model for many similar institutions throughout the South. In a controversial experiment in interracial education, Hampton also began enrolling Native American students in 1878.

 

Freedpeople regarded the educational opportunities that Hampton and other such schools provided them as immense privileges. Speaking at the 1873 graduation, Alice P. Davis, born a slave in North Carolina in 1852, praised Hampton Institute as her alma mater: “[A] mother indeed she has been to us, for she has given us more instruction in these three years than our dear but illiterate mothers ever could.”44 Nonetheless, such institutions, which were often overseen by white benefactors, maintained strict controls over their black students and trained them in the virtues of industriousness and self-discipline. The young women were prepared for jobs as teachers, but also as domestic servants and industrial workers.

 

In 1899, Hampton’s white trustees hired America’s first important female documentary photographer, Frances Benjamin Johnston, who was white, to portray the students’ educational progress. Her photographs were displayed at the Paris Exposition of 1900, where they were much praised for both their artistic achievement and their depiction of racial harmony. Figure 6.5, titled “Class in American History,” is an exceptionally rich image for the diversity of its subjects and the complexity of its content. A white female teacher stands among her female and male, African American and Native American, students. All are contemplating a Native American man in ceremonial dress. He can be likened in some way to the scientific specimens in Figure 6.3. Consider what the man himself might have been thinking as he was exhibited to the gaze of both the photographer and the history class. Historian Laura Wexler has unearthed the name of one of the students, the young Indian woman standing at the far right: she is Adele Quinney, a member of the Stockbridge tribe.45 What lessons were she and the other students being taught about American history by the living exhibit of traditional Indian ways placed before them? What do their precise posing and uniform dress suggest about the discipline expected of Hampton students?

 

 

Figure 6.5 Class in American History, Hampton Institute (1899–1900)

 

During the post–Civil War years, many “normal colleges” were established to concentrate exclusively on the training of teachers. Such schools provided a briefer, less demanding program of study than baccalaureate courses. With less competitive standards for admission and lower costs, they educated a much larger number of women students. The first teacher training institution supported with public funds was founded in 1839 in Framingham, Massachusetts. Normal colleges also benefited from the 1862 Morrill Act and were an important avenue of upward mobility for the working class, immigrants, African Americans, and other people of color.

 

Many of these institutions survived into the twentieth century and became full-fledged colleges and universities. Figure 6.6 is a photo of a class at Washington, D.C.’s Normal College, established twenty-six years before in 1873. Because Washington was a southern town, public education there was racially segregated, and the Normal College enrolled only white students. Washington’s Myrtilla Miner Normal School, founded in 1851 and named after a heroic white woman educator of African American girls, enrolled only African American students. The two schools remained separate and segregated until 1955, one year after the Supreme Court found segregated education unconstitutional in the case of Brown v. Board of Education (see p. 573). Then they were merged into the District of Columbia Teachers College, now named the University of the District of Columbia.

 

As in Figure 6.3, the students in Figure 6.6 are studying science, once again illustrating the importance of this subject in meeting the ambitions of the leaders of women’s higher education to offer young women a modern and intellectually challenging education. And yet the kinds of teaching and learning that went on in an elite college such as Wellesley and a teacher training institution such as the Normal College were very different. The former had a far more educated faculty and resources of equipment and specimens that the latter lacked. Consider what other differences can be detected by comparing this photograph with Figure 6.3. Figure 6.6 also invites comparison with Figure 6.5 because both photographs were taken by Frances Johnston. How has Johnston positioned her subjects in this picture, compared to those at Hampton Institute? What educational message is this different staging meant to communicate?

 

 

Figure 6.6 Science Class, Washington, D.C., Normal College (1899)

 

Like teachers, doctors were trained in specialized medical colleges. For most of the nineteenth century, a bachelor’s degree was not a prerequisite to study medicine in the United States. Instead, students studied medicine at special medical schools and in undergraduate medical departments of large universities. The first major obstacle that women faced was gaining admission into these all-male programs of medical education. Anxieties about coeducation were particularly intense over the prospect of women sitting beside men at lectures about the human body. But women’s desire for medical education was strong. Medicine, unlike other professions such as law or the ministry, fit comfortably with women’s traditional role as healers. In 1849, after applying to a dozen major medical schools, Elizabeth Blackwell broke this educational barrier by graduating from Geneva Medical College in upstate New York.

 

One remedy was the establishment of all-female medical colleges. The Boston Female Medical College was established in 1849 by Dr. Samuel Gregory, who wanted to train women to attend their own sex in childbirth. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell founded the Women’s Medical College of New York in 1868 to help other women follow her into the profession. Such all-female schools played a major role in educating women physicians, but as they lacked adequate clinical resources and opportunities, women continued to demand admission to men’s medical colleges, where they were eventually accepted.

 

By 1890, women represented between 15 and 20 percent of all medical students. After 1890, the number of medical colleges shrank, even as their standards rose. Educationally, the crucial change came in 1893 when the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore established the first postgraduate medical course in the United States. A group of women, led by Mary Garrett, close friend of Bryn Mawr College dean M. Carey Thomas, donated $500,000 to the new postgraduate medical college on the condition that women be admitted along with men. Overall, however, women began to lose access to medical education after 1890, and the percentage of women in most medical schools dropped by half or more by the turn of the century.

 

Figure 6.7 is a photograph of the 1876 class of the Medical College of Syracuse University, which in 1872 absorbed the resources of Geneva Medical College, Elizabeth Blackwell’s alma mater. This medical class was impressively diverse, not only because four of the students were women but because one of them was African American. Sarah Loguen (after marriage, Fraser) was the daughter of a fugitive slave who became an abolitionist. After graduation, she practiced medicine in Washington, D.C. Notice that the men look much more directly at the photographer than the women, several of whom look down or away. Does this photograph provide any hints about how the male students regarded their female colleagues or how the women felt about their presence in the medical classroom?

 

 

Figure 6.7 Graduating Class, Medical College of Syracuse University (1876)

 

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Nineteenth-century women’s higher education proceeded along two parallel lines: the struggle for coeducation and the establishment of all-women’s institutions. What were the advantages and disadvantages of each approach?

 

In what way did the motivations for and rewards of higher education differ for white and African American women?

 

How did the growth of higher education for women relate to other major postbellum developments in PRIMARY SOURCES

The New Woman

BEGINNING IN THE 1880S AND CONTINUING INTO THE 1920S, a new form of femininity evoked the ways in which women were beginning to break down barriers in both the public and private realms. Americans watched as the “New Woman” agitated for suffrage and reform, pursued higher education, and made modest gains in the professional world. She also demonstrated new patterns of private life, from shopping in the new urban department stores to riding bicycles and playing golf, hinting at changes in what was considered appropriate behavior. African American women, especially those associated with reform organizations, envisioned a New African American Woman, much in the mode of Ida B. Wells (pp. 325–29). But in the popular imagination, the New Woman was white and of the leisure class.

 

The concept of the New Woman set off an immense controversy in the late nineteenth century. Critics insisted that voting, higher education, and athletic endeavors would damage women’s health and undermine their femininity and that professional women’s work and increased personal freedoms would harm the middle-class family ideal. Defenders praised the New Woman as an icon of progress and modernity. The many versions of this new phenomenon emerged particularly clearly in visual representations.

 

Critics of the New Woman in the 1890s often satirized her in cartoons and drawings that featured men and women swapping roles. Usually, men are shown in emasculating situations, doing housework or tending a baby, while women appear in mannish clothing and are depicted variously as attorneys, suffragists, and businesswomen. Figure 6.8, from the humor magazine Puck, is typical of this representation. How does the image convey the sense that “What We Are Coming To” is an alarming state of affairs? How are both man and woman made to appear ludicrous?

 

 

Figure 6.8 What We Are Coming To (1898)

 

Contrast Figure 6.8 with Figure 6.9, an 1895 Life illustration titled “In a Twentieth Century Club,” which features women at leisure, enjoying an atmosphere that replicated a men’s drinking and eating club. Here, although role reversal still provides the humor, the women waitresses and patrons are physically attractive. While the women’s unladylike posture and clothing would have been viewed as shocking, equally significant is the cross-dressing entertainer: a man dressed in an abbreviated female costume typical of the burlesque shows designed for male audiences. What is the artist suggesting about the New Woman’s sexuality by the inclusion of the male dancer? What other features in the drawing hint at the possibility of new sexual patterns in the twentieth century?

 

 

Figure 6.9 In a Twentieth Century Club (1895)

 

In contrast to these negative or ambiguous portrayals of women’s demands for political and economic advancement, the New Woman’s physical vitality was attractive to some illustrators, most famously Charles Dana Gibson. Starting in the mid-1890s, his creation of the beautiful and statuesque “Gibson Girl” became a pervasive icon of American femininity. She appeared not only in print media, but on jewelry and calendars, and her clothing and hairstyle were imitated across class and race lines. The Gibson Girl was independent, athletic, educated, and confident. Yet this self-assurance was oriented not toward careers, social reform, or politics, but toward attracting, and generally manipulating, men through her beauty. As one historian has noted, in many ways Gibson appropriated the New Woman and adjusted her attributes to more conservative ends.46 Although the Gibson Girl often appeared engaged in genteel athleticism, such as bicycling or golfing, the beauties in Figure 6.10 sit somewhat languorously on the beach. As in Figure 6.9, the contours of women’s legs are shown. How do these two depictions of the modern New Woman compare? Note that these hourglass figures are accomplished through corsets. What does that suggest about the extent of the New Woman’s physical freedom?

 

 

Figure 6.10 Picturesque America (1900)

 

Conservative critics argued that bicycling for women might damage their reproductive health and certainly undermined their femininity. Authors in medical journals even worried that a bicycle saddle might stimulate the rider sexually. Women’s rights activists like Frances Willard, however, viewed the bicycle as a means of female independence (p. 319). As Susan B. Anthony put it in 1896, the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in this world. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammeled womanhood.”47 Although working-class women apparently used the bicycle to travel to and from work, its most common use was recreational. By 1895, the sight of women astride bicycles, dressed in a variety of costumes, including bloomers, had become commonplace. Certainly, the images of women bicyclists were everywhere in print media and advertising. Figure 6.11 is a coversheet for a dance tune, “The Scorcher.” The title referred to a fast, speeding bicyclist. Why might the illustrator have chosen to feature the young woman in the foreground? What aspects of her demeanor and dress convey the qualities of the New Woman?

 

 

Figure 6.11 The Scorcher (1897)

 

An actual embodiment of the career-driven New Woman was Elizabeth Jane Cochran, a journalist who went by the pen name of Nellie Bly. Bly was one of the most famous of the many women “stunt” reporters who blended “hard” news, usually associated with male writers, with “soft” news, or emotional, personal interest stories. These reporters often engaged in gimmicks such as impersonation to get their stories, which moved them from the society page to the front page. Bly worked for the New York World and first came to fame when she pretended to be a madwoman in order to gain entrance to New York’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum. The serialized report established her as a crack investigative reporter whose sensational stories sold newspapers. Bly’s most famous exploit was a replication of the fictional journey of Phineas Fogg, Jules Verne’s hero of Around the World in 80 Days. She set forth on November 24, 1889, alone and carrying only a small traveling bag and $250. As she sent back reports, the World ’s circulation climbed. Close to a million readers sent in coupons for a contest to guess the exact length of time her journey would take. On her triumphant return to New York seventy-two days later, Bly commented, “It’s not so very much for a woman to do who has the pluck, energy and independence which characterize many women in this day of push and get-there.”48 Bly’s celebrity led to a successful board game and a thriving advertising, or “trade” card, market for a wide range of products. Figure 6.12 depicts “Nellie Bly, on the Fly.” She wears her trademark plaid traveling coat and neat hat and carries her single bag. How does her clothing and bearing suggest Bly’s New Womanhood? How does the surrounding imagery convey her adventurous spirit?

 

 

Figure 6.12 Nellie Bly, on the Fly (1890)

 

As a successful working woman, Bly represented the independent New Woman of the city. Single women professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, were part of this phenomenon, but so too were artists, illustrators, writers, and actresses. New Woman Mary Heaton Vorse, in reflecting on her own move to New York City, wrote of “the strange army of all the girls who in my mother’s time would have stayed at home and I wonder what necessity sent us all out . . . more and more of us coming all the time, . . . and as we change the world, the world is going to change us.”49

 

Mary Guy Humphreys’s 1896 article, “Women Bachelors in New York,” described the army Vorse identified. Although Humphreys argued that these women worked primarily to finance consumer goods and pleasures, she also stressed their pleasure in independence, in earning one’s own income, and in living alone or with female flatmates. The article’s illustrations show women reporters at work at night, commenting that “Mr. Edison’s” electric lights offered women more freedom of the streets. Other images depict the women’s small but cozy quarters. In commenting on the attention given to comfortable surroundings, Humphreys noted, “In the measure that women are determining their own lives, they want their own homes. . . . The woman who is occupied with daily work needs greater freedom of movement, more isolation, more personal comforts, and the exemption, moreover, from being agreeable at all times and places.”50 Figure 6.13 features the woman “bachelor” reading in her “roof-top study.” In what ways does the artist convey a different kind of home life for women as part of their newfound freedom? What is the significance of the city skyline in the distance?

 

 

Figure 6.13 Women Bachelors in New York (1896)

 

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What qualities of the New Woman do these popular culture images convey?

 

How does the Gibson Girl (Figure 6.10) compare with other positive renditions of the New Woman (Figures 6.11, 6.12, and 6.13)?

 

Why do you suppose the New Woman, portrayed in either a positive or a negative light, was such a pervasive image in the popular culture of the era?women’s history discussed in this chapter?

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