american women

Chapters 3, 4 and 5

CHAPTER 3

Mothers and Daughters of the Revolution

1750–1810

YEARS AFTER THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION ENDED British colonial rule in 1783, Sarah Osborn applied for a widow’s pension from the U.S. government. In her 1837 deposition, she described not only her husband’s service as a soldier but also her contributions to the war effort. During one battle she took “her stand just back of the American tents, say about a mile from the town, and busied herself washing, mending, and cooking for the soldiers, in which she was assisted by the other females. . . . She heard the roar of the artillery for a number of days.”1 Osborn’s account of life close to the fighting suggests a significant break from notions of women’s traditional place at the hearth. But that she performed domestic work for her husband and his fellow soldiers also reveals that, even in the disruptive context of war, women’s customary domestic roles prevailed. Osborn’s experiences were hardly universal, yet her deposition underscores a crucial point. Even though the dramatic events of the second half of the eighteenth century centered on political and international concerns — which were customarily viewed as exclusively male terrain — women actively participated, albeit usually in distinctly gendered ways, in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States of America.

Historians vigorously debate the long-term impact of the American Revolution on women’s lives. Some scholars argue that while white men enjoyed expanded legal and political rights in the postrevolutionary period, women’s relative status declined. Others contend that women developed a new consciousness that led to improved education and increased opportunities to influence public life. These historians also point out that the religious revival that preceded the Revolution, the First Great Awakening, similarly offered women a greater voice in the world beyond their homes. Neither scenario, however, neatly fits the experience of all women. Free black women strove to make a living and build communities as full citizenship became increasingly tied not only to being male, but also to being white. Women of many Indian nations faced a newly empowered, expanding U.S. republic and a transforming continent. This chapter emphasizes the ways in which women participated in the Revolution and traces the complex changes the revolutionary era brought to their lives. Although traditional expectations about women’s roles were challenged, they were rarely overturned.

1750s–1770s

First Great Awakening religious revival reaches greatest intensity

1754–1763

French and Indian War pits French against British in North America

1763

Proclamation Line restricts settlement west of the Appalachians

1764

Sugar Act tightens enforcement of duties on imported sugar

1765

British colonies’ population estimated at 2 million

1765

Stamp Act places direct tax on colonists

1765

First colonial boycott of British goods

1765

Women start to produce homespun

1767

Townshend duties levied on certain colonial imports, including tea

1770

Boston Massacre leaves five colonists dead

1773

Tea Act passed

1773

Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral published

1774

Continental Congress passes nonimportation resolutions

1774

Women support tea boycott

1775

British raid on Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, starts Revolutionary War

1775

Proclamation issued by Virginia’s royal governor offers freedom to slaves

1775–1781

Women take on added responsibilities as men leave to fight in the Revolutionary War

1776

Abigail Adams urges the Continental Congress to “remember the ladies”

1776

Declaration of Independence issued

1778

Mary Hays McCauley tends a cannon in the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey

1780

General Washington orders strict control over women army followers

1780

Esther DeBerdt Reed and Sarah Franklin Bache organize Philadelphia women to support the troops

1780

Reed writes the broadside “Sentiments of an American Woman”

1780s–1807

Property-owning women allowed to vote in New Jersey

1781

British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia

1781

Articles of Confederation ratified

1781

Elizabeth Freeman (“Mum Bett”) sues for her freedom in Massachusetts

1783

Treaty of Paris officially ends war

1783

Slavery banned in Massachusetts

1787

Benjamin Rush’s Thoughts upon Female Education published

1788

U.S. Constitution adopted

1788

Jemima Wilkinson buys land for a religious colony in New York

1789

George Washington becomes first U.S. president

1790

Republican Motherhood ideal emerges

1790

Judith Sargent Murray publishes “On the Equality of the Sexes”

1790

Women’s educational opportunities begin to expand

1790s

Second Great Awakening begins

1790s

Peak of international trade with Pacific Coast Indians for otter pelts

1792

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman published in the United States

1793

Invention of the cotton gin

1796

John Adams elected president

1796

Ona Judge escapes from George Washington’s Executive Mansion

1800

Thomas Jefferson elected president

1804–1806

Sacagawea interprets for and guides Lewis and Clark’s expedition

BACKGROUND TO REVOLUTION, 1754–1775

For two centuries North America was the site of contending colonial powers, with France, Spain, and Britain struggling with Native peoples and each other to dominate the continent’s land and resources. The transformation by which the region came to be controlled largely by Britain, and later the United States, was rooted in the French and Indian War of 1754–1763 and further consolidated by the American Revolution of 1776–1783. A number of factors led to the outbreak of the Revolution. Social changes from the First Great Awakening and new ideas introduced during the Enlightenment loosened the strict hierarchy that had defined social relations up to the eighteenth century. Further, British attempts to recoup the economic losses incurred by colonial wars led to a tightening of economic and political controls on the settler colonists in North America, leading to colonial resistance that brought about the American Revolutionary War.

Social Change in the Eighteenth Century

Two important social factors paved the way for rebellion against imperial power in the eighteenth century. The first was the evangelical revival known as the First Great Awakening (1730–1770). Waves of Protestant revivalism began as early as the 1730s and 1740s, inspired in part by English minister George Whitefield’s preaching tours throughout the British colonies. Outpourings of evangelical fervor reached their greatest intensity between the 1750s and the 1770s, especially in the South, where revivalism touched both blacks and whites. Evangelical worshippers gathered outside at camp meetings, in fields and pastures, where their religious joy could have physical expression. The First Great Awakening split established churches and created increasing numbers of converts to new denominations, such as the Baptists and the Methodists, whose evangelicalism emphasized an emotional spiritual rebirth and validated the religious experience of ordinary people.

In challenging religious authority and church hierarchy, the First Great Awakening promoted a leveling of the social hierarchies that cut across gender, class, and race. Evangelicals within the Methodist and Baptist churches, especially the Separate Baptists in the South, reached out to the poor and uneducated, generally welcoming black converts. A few churches explicitly condemned the institution of slavery, and some slaveholders, moved by the evangelical message, freed their slaves or at the least encouraged their slaves to become Christians. This set of evangelical revivals, in which women were prominent participants, promoted a rough egalitarianism that many scholars think fostered political unrest as well.

In addition to the religious awakening, the onrushing crisis with Britain led some colonists to examine closely not only their relationship to the Crown but also their conceptions of the existing social order and government itself. Among educated elites, the ideas of the Enlightenment had a powerful impact. This European intellectual movement emphasized the rights of individuals, the role of reason, the promise of social progress, and the importance of the scientific method. In America, it contributed to the questioning of the British Crown’s authority and to an appreciation for the rights of the individual. Particularly influential was the seventeenth-century political philosopher John Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government was widely circulated in the colonies.

These public debates occasioned by the British efforts to control the colonies more tightly in the latter half of the eighteenth century were conducted almost exclusively by men. Although many addressed the questions of hierarchical structures within the British Empire and within the colonial governments, few questioned the hierarchy embedded in their gender system. Despite societal assumptions that the weighty considerations of government, diplomacy, and the economy were outside the realm of women’s concerns, many women from diverse groups actively participated in the events surrounding the revolutionary conflict. But while many women found themselves acting in novel ways, for the most part their activities followed the traditional lines of household production and family obligation.

The Growing Confrontation

In the British colonies, settlers on the frontier experienced the events leading up to the Revolution as part of an ongoing struggle over colonial freedom from British intervention. During the early years, colonists had enjoyed a high degree of freedom from British intrusion in their domestic affairs. But the French and Indian War, in which British and colonial troops conquered New France, brought dramatic changes. It was a costly war, and Britain insisted that the colonials pay their share through increased taxation, a burden that women, as consumers, often experienced firsthand. Moreover, the victory had opened up more land for British settlement: by the terms of the Treaty of Paris that ended the war, the French yielded their vast lands in North America to the British, who now claimed all the territory east of the Mississippi River (see Map 3.1). The war also drew in various Native American peoples, who sided and fought with whichever European power they thought most likely to honor individual tribal claims to territory. Usually this was the French, who, unlike the British, had learned to live with Native Americans rather than drive them off their lands. The British victory imperiled Native Americans in part because they could no longer play off European powers against one another, and in part because of the avidness with which British colonists eyed the newly acquired territories.

Map 3.1 British Colonies in North America, 1763

Following the French and Indian War, the Treaty of Paris gave Britain control over all of New France east of the Mississippi and all of Spanish Florida. At the same time, Britain imposed the Proclamation Line of 1763, which prohibited white settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. Subsequent legislation designated most of the western lands reserved for Indians. This western policy angered settlers hungry for land and land speculators eager to make a profit, and it contributed to the crisis in the British colonies that eventually led to the American Revolution.

The promise of land won during the war accelerated European emigration. Irish, Scots, Ulster Scots, German, and English peoples expanded the population of the British colonies, which counted almost 2 million settlers by 1765. Cities grew, but so did the population of the backcountry. Pressured for years by a scarcity of good, affordable land, settlers as well as land speculators coveted Native American lands along the frontier. The British, hoping to put an end to the recurring Indian wars, issued the Proclamation of 1763, which temporarily closed the land west of the Appalachians to settlement. Expansion-minded colonists resented (and often ignored) the Proclamation Line, thus fomenting conflict with Native Americans and creating tension between the colonies and the mother country.

Other British efforts to exert more control over the American colonies included a series of fiscal and administrative reforms. The Revenue Act of 1764 (known as the Sugar Act) lowered duties on sugar but firmly established the means of enforcing their collection. Designed to defray the cost of keeping British troops in North America, the Sugar Act was followed by the 1765 Stamp Act, which required the use of embossed paper for legal documents and other printed matter. Forced to rescind the Stamp Act because of colonial protests, the British Parliament in 1767 passed the Townshend Act. By placing new duties on tea, coffee, and other items of household consumption, the Townshend Act directly affected women’s domestic responsibilities and consequently heightened their political consciousness. At the same time, the British increased their bureaucratic presence in the colonies — the number of Crown officials doubled during this period — and sought to limit the autonomy of the colonies’ governing assemblies.

As tensions between Britain and the colonists took center stage in the years after the French and Indian War, waves of social and economic problems roiled the colonies. Seaport towns and cities suffered an economic downturn after the war boom, and the colonists, especially those indebted to English creditors, became all the more resentful of British taxation. Tax-related unrest prompted the British occupation of Boston, where a 1770 clash between colonists and British soldiers resulted in the death of five colonists; this “Boston Massacre” set off a wave of anti-British sentiment and propaganda. Hard times widened the gap between rich and poor in the colonies, deepening dissatisfaction. Extraordinary unrest in the backcountry regions of the southern and middle colonies — where poor farmers went on rampages against Native Americans and resisted the authority of colonial elites on the seaboard — also promoted the desire for change. While perhaps resenting the wealthy colonial merchants and landed gentry who controlled so much of the economic and political life of the colonies, in some areas, especially the mid-Atlantic colonies, poor people diverted much of their anger toward British authority and its efforts to bring the American colonies more tightly into the imperial fold.

Liberty’s Daughters: Women and the Emerging Crisis

Women made critical contributions to settler colonists’ resistance to the new British policies. When the colonists resisted the new taxes by boycotting British goods, women were necessarily involved. Where colonists had formerly relied on imported cloth, they now proposed to make their own cloth. Even though most textile production was women’s work, initial reports of the substitution of homespun cloth for imported fabric often ignored women’s contributions. In 1768, the Providence Gazette commended one man for the large quantities of cloth and yarn “spun in his own house,” without reference to the women who were doing the work. But male patriots (as colonials who protested British domination were called) quickly realized their dependence on women’s efforts, and northern newspaper reports of patriotic women’s production of homespun cloth escalated.2 In New England, spinning bees for manufacturing the yarn for homemade cloth were particularly popular.

Southern white women also produced homespun, but because they lived on farms and plantations often widely separated from one another, they rarely did so in the large groups typical in the North. Nor was there much publicity for their work, and indeed the southern press tended to criticize women for their extravagant taste in clothes and to suggest that men would have to persuade their wives to provide the necessary assistance.3 Although free white women did provide assistance, masters of large plantations bought equipment and set groups of slave women to spinning. Robert Carter of Virginia had his overseer “sett a part, Ten black Females the most Expert spinners . . . — they to be Employed in Spinning, solely.”4 This method of using slaves to produce cloth continued through the Revolutionary War, allowing some slave women to acquire new skills.

While enslaved black women had little choice in the matter of assisting their masters in their boycotts against the British, free white women could and did see themselves as acting in a patriotic cause, and many called themselves “Liberty’s Daughters.” Their spinning bees may not have resulted in a large amount of cloth, but their efforts took on symbolic importance and reinforced their importance as consumers — or nonconsumers — in the boycott. The spinning bees were, says one historian, “ideological showcases” that demonstrated women’s contribution to the colonial struggle.5

Beyond producing homespun, women practiced all sorts of economies as they spurned a wide variety of British goods. Tea became the focus of boycotts in the early 1770s, especially after 1773, when the British instituted new regulations designed to undercut the colonials’ illegal importation of non-British tea. Some women substituted herbal teas and coffee and engaged in collective efforts to encourage other women to do the same. In Edenton, North Carolina, Penelope Barker declared, “We women have taken too long to let our voices be heard.” She organized fifty-one women who signed a proclamation acknowledging their “duty” to support the nonimportation resolutions passed by the First Continental Congress in 1774 (see Figure 3.1, p. 135).6 Women boycotters were roundly applauded in the press for their sacrifice. Presbyterian leader William Tennent III told women that “you have it in your power more than all your committees and Congresses, to strike the Stroke, and make the Hills and Plains of America clap their hands.”7

Articles attributed to women appeared in both northern and southern newspapers. Whether these were actually written by women or by men using female pseudonyms, they helped to legitimate the idea of women as authors with valuable insights to impart. Some women wrote poems denouncing tea drinking8 (see Reading into the Past: “The Female Patriots, Address’d to the Daughters of Liberty in America”). Others produced thoughtful essays, such as one that appeared in 1774 in the Virginia Gazette, which was edited and published by Clementina Rind. The essay explained that American women “will be so far instrumental in bringing about a redress of the evils complained of, that history may be hereafter filled with their praises, and teach posterity to venerate their virtues.”9

Despite the widespread sense that politics was not a woman’s affair, participation in the boycotts and in the production of homespun did bring women to the margins of political action and encouraged them to see themselves as part of a larger American whole. Even someone as young as thirteen-year-old Anna Green Winslow wrote in her diary in 1771, “As I Am (as we say) a daughter of liberty, I chuse to wear as much of our own manufactory as possible.”10 Another young girl, Betsy Foote, recorded her daily labor at spinning and carding, and reported that she “felt Nationly into the bargain.”11 Women wrote of duty, of civic virtues, of freedom, and of sacrifice. However, despite the centrality of women’s contributions to the success of the Americans’ resistance, their efforts were extensions of their roles within the home — as goodwives and consumers — and, as such, the potential challenge to the gender order was minimized.

READING INTO THE PAST

HANNAH GRIFFITTS

The Female Patriots, Address’d to the Daughters of Liberty in America

The controversy over the Townshend Act led women to use not only their consumer power as a political voice, but also their pens. In this extract of a 1768 poem, Philadelphia Quaker Hannah Griffitts wittily expresses defiance toward the British consumer taxes, including those on paper and dyes. The stanzas below urge women to refuse to buy tea. “Grenville” refers to Lord George Grenville, chancellor of the British Exchequer and author of the hated taxes. First circulated among Griffitts’s literary women friends, the poem was later published in the Pennsylvania Gazette, a newspaper that often praised women’s contribution to the colonials’ cause.

Since the Men from a Party, on fear of a Frown,

Are kept by a Sugar-Plumb, quietly down.

Supinely asleep, and depriv’d of their Sight

Are strip’d of their Freedom, and rob’d of their Right.

If the Sons (so degenerate) the Blessing despise,

Let the Daughters of Liberty, nobly arise,

And tho’ we’ve no Voice, but a negative here,

The use of the Taxables, let us forbear,

(Then Merchants import till yr. Stores are all full

May the Buyers be few and yr. Traffick be dull.)

Stand firmly resolved, and bid Grenville to see

That rather than Freedom, we’ll part with our Tea

And well as we love the dear Draught when adry,

As American Patriots, — our Taste we deny . . .

. . . .

Join mutual in this, and but small as it seems

We may jostle a Grenville and puzzle his Schemes

But a Motive more worthy our patriot Pen,

Thus acting — we point out their Duty to Men,

And should the bound Pensioners, tell us to hush

We can throw back the Satire by biding them blush.

SOURCE: William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 34 (1977): 307–8. Noted as from the Commonplace Book of Milcah Martha Moore, but The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (1999) identifies the author as Griffitts.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What does the author mean by the phrase “And tho’ we’ve no Voice, but a negative here”? What action does the poem call for?

In what ways does Griffitts suggest that women are better American patriots than men?

WOMEN AND THE FACE OF WAR, 1775–1783

Colonial resistance escalated from boycotts and protests to armed conflict in April 1775, when British troops marched on Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, in an effort to put down the growing rebellion. Although colonial leaders did not issue the Declaration of Independence until July 1776, the Revolution had begun. A struggle between imperial Great Britain and its colonies, the American Revolution was also a civil war in which British subjects fought one another and former friends and neighbors became enemies. While many colonists tried to avoid taking sides, historians estimate that about one-fifth of the white population were loyalists (that is, loyal to Britain and opposed to the Revolution), also called Tories by their enemies. Probably two-fifths were patriots, supporters of the Revolution. Native Americans and African Americans, too, became embroiled in the conflict on both sides of the fence. A wide spectrum of Americans, both male and female, thus faced profound disruptions and complex decisions.

Choosing Sides: Native American and African American Women

Native American communities confronted particularly weighty choices. In part because their experiences with land-grabbing settlers had been so negative, many Indian nations opted to side with the British — who had made some efforts to control the colonists’ encroachment into Indian territory — and they waged war against the patriots and their Indian allies throughout the backcountry. In many of the Indian nations, including the Iroquois and the Cherokee, women traditionally exerted significant influence over the decision to go to war; the causes were often linked to the desire to avenge deaths of loved ones killed by enemies. As Native Americans became enmeshed in European and American conflicts, the rationale for warfare shifted from kinship issues, and women’s role may have diminished. Nonetheless, when some of the Iroquois peoples (the Mohawks, Cayugas, Senecas, and Onondagas, but not the Oneidas and Tuscaroras) decided to ally with the British, they announced that the “mothers also consented to it,” and some well-known Native American women were highly visible in the war effort. Molly Brant, the Mohawk wife of Sir William Johnson, a British official on the frontier, followed the path of many Native American women who had married white men and then mediated between the two cultures (see p. 21). After Johnson died, Brant returned to her people and enjoyed unusual wealth and status. She so actively engaged in revolutionary era diplomacy on the side of the British that one officer claimed that her influence among her tribe was “far superior to that of all their Chiefs put together.”12

Black women’s choices in the Revolution were of a completely different nature. Although small communities of free blacks existed throughout the colonies, the Revolution affected slaves far more profoundly. For example, scarcities of foodstuffs and clothing were particularly hard on slaves, whose owners gave their needs a low priority. However, wartime labor shortages and political circumstances gave slaves more room for maneuvering in their relations with their masters. Southern whites repeatedly complained about slaves’ insolence and intractability. Slaveowners were particularly worried about the prospects of insurrection and flight, especially after November 1775, when Virginia’s royal governor offered freedom to rebels’ slaves who agreed to fight for the British. His goal was twofold: to acquire troops and laborers, and to pressure white slaveholders to stay within the loyalist fold. His offer led to a massive flight of slaves, including men expecting to serve as soldiers and also women and children.

Throughout the war, slave men and women pondered their choice: Could they make it safely to the British lines? Would the British be true protectors? Would the British or the rebels win? An estimated fifty-five thousand southern slaves escaped during the Revolution. Some made their way to the British; others, like Mary Willing Byrd’s slaves in Virginia, had the British come to them. When the British left after occupying Byrd’s home, forty-nine slaves went with them. Many other slaves simply escaped, looking for freedom independent of the British. Those who went over to the British often did so in groups, frequently with family members. Historians estimate that one-third of those who fled were women, a much higher proportion of runaways than before the Revolution. With nearby British troops offering sanctuary, women with children were willing to take the risk.

Escape from an owner, however, did not mean escape from danger and hardship. Former slaves were forced to work for the British, often at the most disagreeable tasks. When the British occupied Philadelphia, for example, they formed a “Company of Black Pioneers.” This group of seventy-two men, fifteen women, and eight children were to “assist in Cleaning the Streets and Removing all Newsiances being thrown into the Streets.”13 Living conditions were harsh. In the British camps, many former slaves succumbed to smallpox and other diseases. In 1781, the British general Alexander Leslie reported that “about 700 Negroes are come down the River in the Small Pox.” In an eighteenth-century version of germ warfare, he decided to “distribute them about the Rebell Plantations.”14 This callous attitude toward the black men and women under his care underlines the fact that most British officers viewed the slaves seeking freedom as pawns in the imperial struggle. Despite the unsettled conditions of wartime, black men and women fought an uphill battle to escape to freedom and survive.

White Women: Pacifists, Tories, and Patriots

White women also had to make decisions about the war, but of a very different sort than those of black slave women. The war created a painful situation for Quaker women, whose pacifism was a tenet of their religion. Patriots were often suspicious of Quakers, and Quakers themselves clearly struggled with their political identity. Margaret Morris, a Quaker from New Jersey, was concerned about the welfare of soldiers on both sides, yet she was critical of the patriots’ rowdy and aggressive efforts to capture loyalists and proudly recounted her success in hiding a friend from a group of armed men who appeared at her door. At the same time, she described General George Washington’s troops as “our side.”

American or British, patriot or Tory: Did a woman’s political identity follow her husband’s? To whom would the wife of a Tory man show allegiance? Women whose loyalist husbands had been exiled or who had gone to fight with the British were subject to ostracism. They sometimes found their land and personal goods plundered. State laws permitting the confiscation of land of known Tories differed slightly regarding the rights of the wife or widow of an “absentee.” Massachusetts, for example, acknowledged her dower rights in the estate only if she had remained in the state and not followed her husband. Most generally, states presumed that a woman’s allegiance followed her husband’s, in accordance with the assumptions of feme covert. Significantly, most states did not require the loyalty oaths of women that they required of men, an indication that women were not viewed as political actors.

Not all women followed the allegiance of their husbands. A few took up the patriot cause despite their husbands’ loyalty to the British Crown. Florence Cook of Charleston, South Carolina, attempted to regain her family’s dispossessed property after the war. In her petition, she described herself as a “Sincere friend to her Country,” who taught her daughter “the love of Liberty and this her Native Country.” Jane Moffit of Albany, New York, was protected from expulsion despite her husband’s political sentiments because, said city leaders, she “has always been esteemed a Friend to the American Cause.”15

In case after case, decisions about the fate of wives were based on the assumption that wives could not act independently of their husbands, but they also reflected the reality that some women directly aided the loyalist cause. Many women who remained behind when their loyalist husbands left did serve as couriers and spies or in other ways assisted the British. In Albany, thirty-two women were brought to the attention of the New York State Commissioners for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies in 1780. Some, like Lidia Currey and Rachael Ferguson, were jailed for hiding loyalists in their homes. Others smuggled messages to British troops. In Philadelphia, Margaret Hutchinson carried “Verbal Intelligence, of what, she had seen of their [the Rebels’] different Movements” to British spies. While in absolute numbers such daring women were not numerous, they were considered so serious a threat that patriot committees of safety sought the help of “discreet Women, of Known attachment to the American Cause” to search for contraband and hidden letters on the persons of suspected female Tory couriers.16

Maintaining the Troops: The Women Who Served

Service to one’s country during wartime often becomes a defining moment of citizenship. Sacrifices become emblems of civic virtue and worthiness. Since the ultimate signs of service are bearing arms and risking death, women’s contributions are frequently less valued than men’s. During the Revolution, few women actually fought in combat. But the exceptions are notable. In South Carolina, one woman joined her son-in-law to resist 150 British soldiers who were trying to destroy a cache of ammunition. Pennsylvanian Mary Hays McCauley, perhaps the inspiration for the legendary Molly Pitcher, routinely carried water to troops in battle. When her husband fell at the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey, in 1778, she took his place, keeping a cannon loaded in the face of enemy fire, for which she later received a pension from the state of Pennsylvania “for services rendered in the revolutionary war.” Deborah Sampson, later Gannett, was one of a handful of female cross-dressers in the Revolution. Donning men’s clothing and enlisting as Robert Shurtleff in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, she served eighteen months from 1782 to 1783 and was wounded twice before her sex was discovered and she was discharged. Another woman attempted to enlist in 1778 at Elizabethtown, New Jersey. A suspicious officer required that she submit to a physical exam, and the following day, “ordered the Drums to beat her . . . Threw the Town with the whores march.”17

Joseph Stone, Deborah Sampson (1797)

In 1797, Herman Mann commissioned Joseph Stone to paint this image for the frontispiece of his book on Deborah Sampson’s life, titled The Female Review: or Memoirs of an American Lady. Sampson had come of age as an indentured servant in Middleborough, Massachusetts. When her period of indenture concluded at age eighteen, she became a masterless woman, an unusual status in the colonial era, having neither husband, father, nor a master to whom she was bound. This gave her rare freedom for a woman, and she moved from town to town, working sometimes as a teacher, sometimes as a weaver. After her service and honorable discharge from the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment (see pp. 112–13), she married and had three children. With the help of her friend Paul Revere, she obtained a small military pension from the U.S. Congress. Although in later statements, she appeared at times apologetic for her “uncouth actions,” she also pronounced, “I burst the tyrant bonds which held my sex in awe and clandestinely or by stealth, grasped an opportunity which custom and the world seemed to deny, as a natural privilege.”18

More generally, women’s role in the military was one they had historically taken in warfare: the so-called camp follower. Some who attached themselves to the patriots’ Continental Army under George Washington’s command were prostitutes, but more were soldiers’ wives. While officers’ wives did make protracted visits to encourage their husbands and to participate in entertainments, most women who followed the army were poor men’s wives. Their presence may have signaled a patriotic fervor to aid the cause, but more probably it indicated their desire to attend to their husbands’ welfare as well as their inability to function on their own financially. Camp followers, often with their children in tow, faced extraordinary challenges, risking disease, injury, and death. Living under primitive conditions with scanty provisions, some even gave birth in army camps.

But camp followers did provide valuable services. Some were “sutlers,” merchants who sold provisions to the troops. More commonly, women such as Sarah Osborn, whose story opens this chapter, did laundry or worked as cooks. Women served as nurses, both in the fields and at the general hospitals for the sick and wounded where conditions were primitive. While male doctors and their assistants performed the skilled work, female nurses were assigned “to see that the close-stools or pots are emptied as soon as possible after they are used . . . they are to see that every patient, upon his admission into the Hospital is immediately washed with warm water, and that his face and hands are washed and head combed every morning.”19 The sexual division of labor relegated women to menial tasks, and no matter how important this work was, women’s compensation was small.

Thus, although camp followers lived and worked in the very midst of war, drawing on a physical fortitude associated with male activities, they did not break down traditional expectations about women’s proper role. Their presence with the army was for the most part a reflection of their dependence. Women continued to be controlled not only by their husbands but also by what one historian terms “that most male of institutions, the military.”20 Their activities were extensions of women’s traditional household work. Although many undoubtedly took pride in their patriotic contributions, they did not exhibit a new sense of independence.

Some women did not follow the armies but did observe the fighting as it came to them. Occupying armies commandeered homes for quartering soldiers, and women frequently bore the brunt of their demands for food and firewood. In September 1777, Elizabeth Drinker, alone with her children in Philadelphia, found herself the unwilling hostess to a British officer: “Our officer mov’d his lodging from the bleu Chamber to the little front parlor, so that he has the two front parlors, a chamber up two pair of stairs for his bagge, and the Stable wholly to himself, besides the use of the kitchen.”21 Catherine Van Cortlandt, a Tory woman, wrote disparagingly to her husband about the patriot troops who commandeered her house in New Jersey and complained that “the farmers are forbid to sell me provisions, and the millers to grind our grain. Our woods are cut down for the use of their army, and that which you bought and left corded near the river my servants are forbid to touch, though we are in the greatest distress for the want of it.”22 Women caught in the crossfire worried about their personal safety and that of their children. While reported rapes were infrequent, British soldiers were brutal on occasion. More commonly, women had to adjust to being alone and to handling the day-to-day affairs of running a farm or managing a business in a husband’s prolonged absence. Their independent management proved to be one of their most significant roles in the revolutionary era.

A small group of patriot women, reminiscent of the Daughters of Liberty who had organized spinning bees in the early stages of the Revolution, carved out more public ways of participating in the war effort by raising funds for the beleaguered Continental army. Following a discouraging defeat at Charleston in 1780, Esther DeBerdt Reed, the wife of the governor of Pennsylvania, and Sarah Franklin Bache, the daughter of Benjamin Franklin, organized the Ladies Association of Philadelphia to raise the considerable sum of $300,000 for the troops. In a powerfully worded broadside, Reed announced that “the Women of America manifested a firm resolution to contribute as much as could depend on them, to the deliverance of their country.” The broadside urged prosperous women to go without luxuries to aid the cause and asked poorer women to offer what they could. After outlining the rationale for the fund-raising, Reed challenged anyone who would doubt the group’s patriotic purpose: “[H]e cannot be a good citizen who will not applaud our efforts for the relief of the armies which defend our lives, our possessions, our liberty.”23

The Pennsylvania women publicized their efforts and sent letters to women in other states, urging them to raise funds as well. In Virginia, the scattered nature of settlement made an exact duplication of Pennsylvania’s door-to-door effort impossible, but Martha Wayles Jefferson, wife of Governor Thomas Jefferson, did encourage other Virginia women to raise funds (Martha herself was not in good health), describing it as an “opportunity of proving that they also participate on those virtuous feelings.”24 In most cases, the sums raised were modest. In New Jersey, women collected $15,488 in paper dollars, but because of high inflation, the money purchased only 380 pairs of stockings for the state’s soldiers.

The distribution of donations that the Philadelphia women collected offers a revealing insight into perceptions of women’s supporting role. Writing to Washington, Reed explained that the women did not want the money to go into a general fund that would provide soldiers “an article to which they are entitled from the public.” Rather, the women hoped that their money — approximately $2 per soldier in hard currency — might be given directly to the soldiers. Washington demurred: the men might waste it on liquor, and having hard currency, when they were generally paid in paper money, might create discontent and exacerbate inflation. He declared that their “benevolent donation” should be used to provide men with shirts and requested further that the women make the shirts themselves. In the midst of the exchange, Reed died of dysentery, but Bache followed through with the project, eventually sending Washington 2,200 shirts. A French visitor to Bache’s home reported that “on each shirt was the name of the married or unmarried lady who made it.”25

Thus, however novel the Philadelphia women’s plan may have been, Washington’s response placed their efforts firmly in the realm of woman’s more traditional sphere — of sewing for her family. The Philadelphia women’s efforts may have been more overtly political than the service of poor women following the army, but in both cases women’s contributions were constrained by traditional notions of women’s roles. The link between women’s patriotism and the domestic sphere was to be one of the principal ideological legacies of the Revolution.

REVOLUTIONARY ERA LEGACIES

The patriots emerged victorious in 1781 when the British surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia. In that same year, the colonies, now states, ratified the Articles of Confederation, their first attempt at national governance. Weaknesses in that body led eventually to adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 and the inauguration of George Washington as the new nation’s first president in 1789. As a national government was being framed, the various states also wrote constitutions. The period was rich with debates about the nature of government and the rights of citizens, as Americans pondered the implications of their Revolution. What were the legacies of the Revolution for women? For many, war and revolution translated into hardship and poverty; for others, new opportunities emerged, but these were always constrained by prevailing assumptions about women’s marginal role in public life.

A Changing World for Native American Women

The American victory realigned European settler claims on the continent and brought changes to many Native women’s lives as their people encountered a new republic intent on western expansion. Indian groups that sided with Britain, in particular, suffered devastating losses in the war. American forces in New York invaded Iroquois territory in 1779, burning forty towns and destroying crops. The Cherokees in the Appalachian region to the south suffered a similar destruction. Native American men’s preoccupation with warfare and their role in diplomacy may have heightened their power within their own communities, but it also increased women’s responsibilities in maintaining their communities in the men’s prolonged absences, and in the face of destruction, disease, and starvation.

Redefining Gender Roles among the Creeks

This early nineteenth-century painting features Creek Indians as U.S. agent Benjamin Hawkins introduces them to plows as a first step in “Americanizing” them. Hawkins focuses his attention on the men, placing his back to a woman who stands amid the foodstuffs she has produced. This stance represents white officials’ and missionaries’ goal of redefining gender roles among the Creek so that men would abandon hunting in exchange for farming, while women would give up their traditional role of raising crops to undertake domestic roles in the home.

In the postwar period, as the weakened Native Americans started to come under the power of the new federal government, challenges to traditional gender roles arose. Men acted as primary mediators between their nations and the newly created American government. As men’s roles took on magnified importance, women may have correspondingly lost influence in their communities. The example of Cherokee leader Nancy Ward, however, diverges from this general trend. Since her participation in a battle against the Creek in the 1750s, Ward had been recognized as a “War Woman,” a position that garnered high esteem and broader authority over the fates of war captives. Along with Cherokee male leaders, Ward spoke to U.S. commissioners in treaty negotiations during and after the Revolutionary War. At the 1781 meeting at the Holston River in present-day Tennessee, Ward used a language of kinship and her symbolic maternal authority to call for peace between the United States and the Cherokee: “Let your women’s sons be ours; our sons be yours. Let your women hear our words.”26 Almost forty years later, at the age of eighty, Ward would still be invoking her authority as an elder “Beloved Woman” to protect her people’s land and sovereignty. (See Reading into the Past: “Beloved Children: Cherokee Women Petition the National Council,” pp. 178–79.) By that time, however, Cherokee women’s pathways to political authority had narrowed considerably.

The government’s efforts to encourage Native Americans to assimilate to white norms also disturbed traditional patterns of gender. American leaders insisted that men give up hunting to become farmers and that Native American women become farmers’ wives. In a letter to the Cherokees in 1796, President Washington was explicit about his expectations. “You will easily add flax and cotton which you may dispose of to the White people; or have it made up by your own women into clothing for yourselves. Your wives and daughters can soon learn to spin and weave.”27 But if white Americans envisioned a family order in which women were subordinate, Cherokee women adapted to the new expectations in ways that maintained their traditional roles in the community. They continued their customary farming work, tended livestock, and took on the responsibilities of spinning and weaving. In contrast, men found it far more difficult to adjust to their changed circumstances. Loss of land and depletion of fur-bearing animals deprived men of hunting, an important masculine activity with both economic and spiritual significance. Native Americans’ overuse of alcohol also contributed to their exploitation and to unhappy domestic situations in which women were abused.

After the Revolution, Native Americans with the most proximity to the expanding white population became the objects of Protestant missionary activity. Although white missionaries sought to convert the Natives, calls for change also came from within Indian nations. Handsome Lake, a Seneca religious prophet who had been influenced by the Quakers, called for major reforms for his people. He promoted a return to some of the old ways, especially in regard to religion. He condemned the abuse of alcohol and criticized men’s physical mistreatment of their wives. At the same time, however, Handsome Lake also urged that the Iroquois follow the family patterns of whites: men should take up farming and women should limit themselves to spinning and weaving. Privileging the nuclear family and the husband-wife relationship, he downplayed the older emphasis on kinship relations and was especially critical of Iroquois matrons. In the long run, assimilative pressures and a changed economic and political order undermined women’s position among many Native American peoples, especially where men took on economic roles of increased importance to the community and their families. But that process was neither immediate nor universal.

For Indian women farther to the west, however, the American Revolution paled in importance to other changes in economy, culture, and health. In 1776, for example, the Lakota Sioux expanded into the Black Hills and incorporated this mountainous region as a sacred site for their expanding horse- and bison-based society. California Indians attacked a San Diego mission in 1775, responding in part to the abuse of Native women by Spanish soldiers. Northwest Coast Indians found their economy and gendered labor transformed by the late eighteenth-century international rush for sea otter pelts. Similar to the earlier fur trade of the northeast, the otter skin trade introduced new textiles and metal goods into indigenous culture. In some cases, Northwest Coast groups offered Native women captives as sex workers to European, American, and Russian traders who appeared on their coast. Finally, between 1779 and 1784, a terrible smallpox pandemic decimated indigenous western communities — hitting pregnant women and children especially hard — as it spread along continental trade routes. Some Plains Indian bands lost up to 80 percent of their members, causing further migration and regrouping for survival.28

These were some of the transformed Indian societies that the young Shoshone woman Sacagawea observed as she joined Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on a transcontinental journey to the Pacific Ocean, in 1804–1806. Sacagawea first met Lewis and Clark in the Mandan-Hidatsu village in what is now North Dakota. As a young girl, she had been taken from her homeland in the Rocky Mountains and eventually sold to the man who would become her husband, a French Canadian trader named Toussaint Charbonneau. Sacagawea accompanied Charbonneau when he was hired by Lewis and Clark’s exploratory expedition of the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. Pregnant when she began this journey, Sacagawea gave birth to her son as the party traveled westward. Other Shoshone women also helped Lewis and Clark cross the Continental Divide, driving pack horses and carrying burdens, as women, especially captives, were expected to do in both Mandan and Shoshone society. Sacagawea proved invaluable to the expedition as someone who knew the Rocky Mountain terrain and Shoshone language. Although Lewis’s diary entries on Shoshone people emphasized the “drudgery” of the women, he also inadvertently recorded female skills of horse care, transportation, and gathering of “wild fruits and roots” necessary to cross-country travel.29 By focusing on Sacagawea, we can understand that Lewis and Clark’s much celebrated journey utilized the everyday knowledge, labor, and mobility of Native American women.

Sacagawea Monument, Portland, Oregon

The Shoshone woman known as Sacagawea left a powerful legacy, although differing versions of her biography, and even her name continue, to be debated. This statue of Sacagawea was commissioned in 1905 by the white women’s clubs of Portland, Oregon, in recognition of the Shoshone guide and translator to the Lewis and Clark expedition a hundred years before. The statue, by Denver sculptor Alice Cooper, was one of the first monuments to depict an actual historical woman in the United States. From this point on, Sacagawea’s role as national symbol, both of the contribution of Native people to American history and their tragic fate at the hands of white settlers, began to grow. She is almost always represented as she is here: with her baby on her back and her hand pointing the way west.

African American Women: Freedom and Slavery

For African American women, the Revolution also left a complex, but completely different, legacy. At the end of the war, many slaves, known as “Black Loyalists,” who had fled to the British to achieve their freedom, were evacuated by ship from New York, Charleston, and Savannah. Of those who left from New York and whose sex is known, 42.3 percent were women, and apparently many had their children with them. Some of these African Americans were sold again into slavery in the West Indies; others were shipped to Nova Scotia, where they eked out an existence in harsh conditions; and some ended up in another marginal environment, a new colony in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Mary Perth, born into slavery in Virginia, joined this migration along with her children and her husband, Caesar. The Perth family traveled in company with other devout black Methodists who had established a new meetinghouse in Sierra Leone. Perth supported her children by running a boardinghouse and restaurant near the Freetown wharves, where she had to interact with sailors from the British slave ships working close to the small West African colony of free migrants.30 For Mary Perth and other black loyalist women, the revolutionary conflict resulted in global migration and great risks taken to establish new lives in another part of the British Empire.

For some African Americans who had not joined the British, the most important legacy of the Revolution was freedom. Even before the conflict, a small movement had supported manumission (owners granting slaves their freedom), primarily the result of the Quakers’ growing revulsion against slavery. The ideological issues at the center of the Revolution, especially those concerning natural rights and liberty, encouraged some white Americans to examine the institution of slavery. Even for those with little humanitarian interest in slaves themselves, the incongruity of building a nation based on notions of liberty while maintaining chattel slavery was troublesome. More mundane concerns also promoted antislavery sentiment — white immigrant workers who were increasingly available and who were easily hired and fired became more attractive in the urban commercial culture of the North. Anxieties about slave insurrections during the war raised further questions about the slave system.

African Americans were active participants in the emancipation process, especially in Massachusetts. Mum Bett, later known as Elizabeth Freeman, was the slave of Colonel John Ashley in Sheffield, Massachusetts. In 1781, she petitioned a Massachusetts county court for her freedom. Freeman’s suit, Brom and Bett v. Ashley, combined with several others, led to the state court’s 1783 decision that “there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature.”31 In other northern states, manumission came through legislation. Only Vermont, in 1777, provided for immediate emancipation. Elsewhere, the process was protracted. In Pennsylvania, unborn children of slaves would be apprenticed until they were twenty-eight years old. Although each year more slaves became free in the North, one-fourth of northern blacks were still enslaved as late as 1810. This gradualism meant that slave women would continue to bear children who would not be fully free until they were adults, but they could take some comfort in their grandchildren’s future freedom.

Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick, Elizabeth Freeman (“Mum Bett”) (1811)

After her successful freedom suit that led to the end of slavery in Massachusetts, Mum Bett adopted the name Elizabeth Freeman. She lived the remainder of her life as a paid servant in the family of Theodor Sedgwick, who had served as her lawyer. Theodor’s daughter Catherine Sedgwick later wrote an account of her freedom suit and Catherine’s sister-in-law Susan Sedgwick painted the watercolor shown here. In the original portrait, Freeman’s dress is vivid blue, and she wears what is apparently a gold necklace around her neck. Why do you suppose the Sedgwick family members made the effort to document Freeman’s life in words and portrait? What is the artist hoping to convey about Freeman in this image?

The emancipation laws, as well as individual manumissions in the North and the Upper South and the migration of southern free blacks, created growing free black populations in the last years of the eighteenth century, especially in cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. Although a small number of these African Americans were able to carve out a modest success, constrained education and pervasive discrimination limited their opportunities. Most women worked at jobs similar to those that had occupied them when they were slaves — domestic work, washing, cooking, and child care. Some black women were proprietors, especially of boardinghouses, where they would have been important resources for the freed blacks migrating to the cities during this period. Others opened shops and restaurants that built upon their domestic skills. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Dinah Gibson, locally well known for her baking, established “Dinah’s Cottage.”

A handful of women were prominent enough to make a mark in the historical record. Lydia York, for example, petitioned the Philadelphia Abolition Society to assist her in indenturing her niece Hetty. Jane Coggeshall, who gained her freedom during the war when she and two other slaves gave information about British troops to Rhode Island patriots, later petitioned the state to confirm her freedom, lest her former owners attempt to reenslave her. Catherine Ferguson, an ex-slave who had purchased her own freedom, established a school for poor black and white children in New York in 1793. Another former slave, Eleanor Harris, became the first black teacher in Philadelphia. Ona Judge gained notoriety as the fugitive slave of Martha Washington who escaped the Executive Mansion in Philadelphia for a free home in New Hampshire. (See Reading into the Past: “Ona Judge’s Escape.”)

As they worked at their jobs and cared for their families, many free black women participated in building the network of black institutions, including churches and benevolent societies devoted to self-help efforts that had emerged by the turn of the century. Their role in these organizations, however, has remained largely obscured in the historical record. These free black institutions were a source of strength and pride for the community, but they also exemplified the segregated lives that African Americans lived in the North. Emancipation brought freedom for some black women and men, but within the constraints of a racial and economic hierarchy. The egalitarian promises implicit in revolutionary ideology were closed to African Americans.

In the South, these promises were even less in evidence. In the Upper South, there was a spate of individual manumissions, especially through the wills of slaveholders, and the free black population did expand significantly. But there was no widespread sentiment for dispensing with the institution altogether. Most slaveowners were not unduly troubled by the implications of a rhetoric of individual freedom and natural rights for their system of chattel labor. Indeed, slaveowners became more deeply entrenched in the institution after the war, especially in the Deep South, where the 1793 invention of the cotton gin, which mechanically removed the seed and hull from the cotton fiber, made the crop more productive and thus more profitable. This gave new impetus to the slave system, which was also reinforced by increased importation of African slaves, a trade explicitly permitted by the U.S. Constitution until 1808. The regional differences in patterns of slavery grew after the Revolution, with slaves in the Deep South more likely to maintain a more distinct African-based culture and to live in more isolation from whites.

In the Chesapeake region, tobacco declined in importance and the region’s economy diversified, creating more varied jobs for slave populations. While some women had developed textile skills during the revolutionary period, for the most part the skilled slaves in the Upper South were men, trained as wagon makers, mill workers, or builders. As some male slaves became artisans, women inherited more of the disagreeable labor such as breaking new ground and collecting manure. Slaves also became extremely important to the growing urban areas of the region, and women in particular were used in the tobacco factories of Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia. Women also served as domestic workers and participated in city markets, selling wares such as cakes, oysters, and garden produce, an occupation that gave them an unusual amount of liberty to move about the city.

Most slaves, however, enjoyed little personal freedom. This was particularly evident in the way in which slaveholders in the Upper South increasingly sought to reproduce the slave population, forcing some black women into sexual relations with men not of their own choosing. Others encouraged slaves to form families. Thomas Jefferson provided gifts for at least one couple on his Virginia plantation and explicitly commented on the value of a fertile female slave: “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm.”32

Despite their appreciation of female slaves as breeders, slaveowners throughout the South expected pregnant women to work well into their pregnancy and to return to their labors almost immediately after delivery. The hardships of being a mother under these conditions were magnified by the constant threat of separation. A white observer in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1778 described the trauma he witnessed: “A wench clung to a little daughter, and implored, with the most agonizing supplication, that they might not be separated.”33 Children could be sold from their parents, and husbands from their wives, even in the households of paternalistic owners. The effects of financial reversals or the death of the master often rippled through the slave quarters, undercutting slaves’ efforts to create a stable family life.

Women Slaves in the Tobacco Fields

In 1798, architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe produced this image labeled “An overseer doing his duty. Sketched from life near Fredericksburg.” Latrobe apparently recognized the irony presented by the overseer, a white male in the employ of the plantation owner, standing idly on a tree stump, his duty merely to watch the two women slaves hard at work hoeing in a tobacco field.

READING INTO THE PAST

Ona Judge’s Escape

Ona Maria Judge, listed as “Oney” in this runaway ad, was born in 1773 on the Mount Vernon estate of George and Martha Washington to her enslaved mother, Betty. At the age of sixteen, Judge traveled north to serve as the First Lady’s domestic slave in New York. When the U.S. capitol moved to Philadelphia in 1790, Judge was again moved with other enslaved men and women to work in the new Executive Mansion. But Philadelphia had passed a law that required all incoming slaveowners to free any enslaved adults who stayed in the state longer than six months. George Washington and his legal advisors worked out a plan to get around the manumission requirement by circulating the Washingtons’ slaves back and forth between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon every six months. These periodic visits between 1791 and 1796 to Mount Vernon allowed Judge to stay connected to friends and family she had left behind, but they also kept her in bondage. When Judge learned that she was to be sent back to Virginia permanently as a wedding present for Martha’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Parke Custis, the twenty-two-year-old Judge gathered her courage and escaped from Philadelphia to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Although the Washingtons tried repeatedly to recapture her and her life in New England was often hard, Ona Judge lived the rest of her days as a free woman until her death at age fifty-two.

The document below is a copy of the ad placed in several newspapers by Frederick Kitt, Executive Mansion steward. Runaway ads like this appeared frequently in the newspapers of the early republic.

Ten Dollars Reward.

ABSCONDED from the household of the President of the United States, on Saturday afternoon, ONEY JUDGE, a light Mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes, and bushy black hair — She is of middle stature, but slender and delicately made, about 20 years of age. She has many changes of very good clothes of all sorts, but they are not sufficiently recollected to describe.

As there was no suspicion of her going off, and it happened without the least provocation, it is not easy to conjecture whither she is gone — or fully, what her design is; but as she may attempt to escape by water, all masters of vessels and others are cautioned against receiving her on board, altho’ she may, and probably will endeavour to pass for a free woman, and it is said has, wherewithal to pay her passage.

Ten dollars will be paid to any person, (white or black) who will bring her home, if taken in the city, or on board any vessel in the harbor; and a further reasonable sum if apprehended and brought home, from a greater distance, and in proportion to the distance.

May 24

FRED. KITT, Steward

SOURCE: Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, May 25, 1796, in Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (New York: 37Ink/Atria, 2017), 99.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What language does the ad use to speculate about Judge’s motives for running away, and what assumptions does this wording reveal?

What evidence can such ads offer about the history of enslaved women during the postrevolutionary period? What silences do they contain?

White Women: An Ambiguous Legacy

Just as the Revolution had mixed results for black women, its meaning for white women eludes easy generalizations. Petitions from widows and soldiers’ wives provide eloquent evidence for the personal tragedies that came with war. Sarah Welsh’s husband had died in 1780, but “being a destress widow not knowing how to or whom aplication was to be made . . . untill it was too late,” she waited until 1791 to ask the government for his back pay.34 Many wives of Tory men, too, found themselves in dire straits. After the war, they waged lengthy, and only rarely successful, legal battles to regain property seized when their husbands left to fight with the British. Many impoverished women worked in the few avenues of employment offered to women, such as shopkeepers, teachers, innkeepers, servants, seamstresses, or milliners. By 1800, as the nation moved toward the first stages of industrialization and the “putting-out” industries (those industries focused on producing goods such as textiles, shoes, and straw bonnets) expanded, poorer women increasingly turned to doing piecework in their homes (see pp. 167–68). For more privileged educated women, war and revolution contributed to a changed conception of self, as many expanded their horizons beyond the narrow sphere of the hearth. Women whose husbands served in the army or in the new state or federal governments were left alone for extended periods. As women had been doing since the early colonial period, they became “deputy husbands,” managing farms and businesses and often rising impressively to the new challenges.35

In the extant correspondence and diaries from this period, primarily from the wives of officers and politicians, a distinct pattern concerning women’s roles as deputy husbands emerges. Men originally left detailed instructions, urging their wives to consult male kin or neighbors. Through time, many men began to trust their wives’ judgment; New Yorker James Clinton, for example, commented to his wife, Mary, “I Can’t give any Other Directions About Home more than what I have done but must Leave all to your good Management.”36 Women themselves often made pointed reference to their own competence, and some even asserted a new language of companionate marriage. When Lucy Flucker Knox in New York wrote to her husband, Henry Knox, she commented that she was “quite a woman of business,” adding, “[I hope that in the future] you will not consider yourself as commander in chief of your own house — but be convinced that there is such a thing as equal command.”37

Although few women challenged their subordinate position as overtly as Lucy Knox, the postwar years did see a significant questioning of white women’s status in the home and, to some extent, in politics. Early in the revolutionary crisis, women speaking about politics often made apologies, almost ritualistically accepting women’s inferiority. In a June 1776 letter to a female friend, Elizabeth Feilde followed her comments on contemporary politics with the following self-deprecating remark: “No; I assure you it’s a subject for which I have not either Talents or Inclination to enter upon.”38 But in the turmoil of rebellion and war, the apologies became less evident as astute women got caught up in the dramatic events unfolding before them. Eliza Wilkinson of South Carolina frankly resented men’s claim that women had no business with politics, writing to a friend in 1782, “I won’t have it thought that because we are the weaker sex as to bodily strength, my dear, we are capable of nothing more than minding the dairy, visiting the poultry-house, and all such domestic concerns. . . . They won’t even allow us the liberty of thought, and that is all I want.”39

John Singleton Copley, Mercy Otis Warren (1763)

The 1763 portrait by John Singleton Copley makes Mercy Otis Warren’s high status quite clear. The picture also emphasizes her femininity. Contemporaries understood the nasturtiums entwined in her hands as symbols of fertility, and indeed she had given birth the year before she sat for this portrait and would have another child the following year. Through her prolific writing and elite social networks, Warren carried on an active political and intellectual life. She wrote plays and poetry and commented astutely on political questions of the day, such as the debate over ratification of the Constitution. Her 1805 History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, a monumental three-volume work, reflected Warren’s deep commitment to the cause of the Revolution and her hope for America’s future as a repository of republican virtue. Consider Warren’s bearing and pose in this portrait. What sort of personality is suggested? How does Copley reveal Warren as a woman of many accomplishments?

As Wilkinson’s term “liberty of thought” suggests, some women made overt connections between the ideology of the Revolution concerning natural rights, liberty, and equality and the position of women. Abigail Adams’s admonition to her husband, John Adams, that the men drawing up the new government and its code of laws should “remember the ladies” is probably the most famous expression of the handful of elite women who hoped to see at least modest changes in women’s status. The issue attracted a significant amount of attention in the decade after the Revolution. Following publication in the United States in 1792 of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by the English activist Mary Wollstonecraft, American magazines debated women’s rights and roles. Some articles referred to marriage as a form of slavery. Others blamed women’s limited education for women’s vanity and superficiality.

Limited Citizenship: White Women’s Legal Status and Education

Did the flurry of attention to women’s rights in the postrevolutionary era lead to an improvement in white women’s status? The states in the new nation were now free of British legal statutes and could theoretically construct laws in keeping with the new emphasis on protecting individual rights. Divorce law was one area in which women did benefit. British common law did not allow divorce, but now all states except South Carolina permitted it. Still, the procedure was difficult. In most states, divorce petitions required action by the state assembly. Courts in Pennsylvania and the four New England states could decree divorce. Causes offered for divorce changed over time, hinting at a slight shift in marital expectations. During most of the colonial period, women were far more likely than men to seek a divorce, usually doing so on the grounds of desertion. After the Revolution, the grounds women used expanded to include adultery, and more men began to seek divorce, usually for desertion. The changes were subtle ones, as one historian concedes: “All one can say, and perhaps it is enough, is that after the war women were physically moving out of their unhappy households, an action that, judging from the divorce literature, had been relatively uncommon before the war.”40

In other legal matters, white women gained little. In many states, widows’ rights to their dower were, if anything, eroded in the years after the Revolution. In addition, states maintained the British system of coverture, a major impediment to married women’s autonomy. Women continued to be excluded from juries and from legal training and thus were excluded from the male political culture that centered at the courthouse.

Most significantly, women were denied the vote. Despite the revolutionary rhetoric of equality, the majority of the founding fathers believed that in a democratic republic only independent people should be permitted to vote, and independent people, by definition, owned property. Thus propertyless men and all women were excluded. In the case of women, however, exclusion was less a matter of property than of sex. Married or not, women were assumed to be dependent creatures by nature. The fleeting exception to this assumption was New Jersey, whose 1776 state constitution did not explicitly define the qualifications for voters, declaring only that “all inhabitants” who met certain property and residence requirements “shall be entitled to vote,” thus technically permitting both white women and blacks to vote. In the 1780s, some property-holding women seized the initiative and voted in local elections. A 1796 statute specifically excluded black people of both sexes but reaffirmed white women’s right to vote.

By 1800, however, criticism of women as voters in New Jersey had mounted. Some concern was voiced about occasional voting by wives and daughters who lived at home (and were thus not independent) and by men without property. When an 1807 referendum election revealed extensive fraud, the legislature moved to tighten suffrage requirements. All women were excluded on the grounds that they were easily manipulated by men. But at the same time, the state expanded suffrage to include propertyless white men and sons living at home, further emphasizing the different political stature of men and women.

The results in New Jersey lend credence to the conclusion that, while men gained as a result of the Revolution, white women actually lost ground. After 1800, as states granted universal white male suffrage, women’s exclusion from suffrage defined their political dependence and inequality more sharply than ever before. But to define women’s experience solely in terms of their formal political and legal roles obscures other significant factors that shaped their lives. For many women, the revolutionary years sparked a political consciousness, one that encouraged women to move outside their preoccupations of home and family. At the same time, improvements in white women’s education — the substantial number of revolutionary women’s diaries and letters indicate that more women had become fully literate — helped to broaden women’s vision and open some opportunities.

The move for improved education for both men and women accelerated after the war — for practical as well as ideological reasons. As the new nation began the long process of industrialization, its more complex economy required literacy and other skills. Formal education became more necessary as print replaced oral traditions. Americans also believed that the new republic required an educated, enlightened citizenry. For women, the interest in educational reform was linked to the civic good. Observers roundly criticized the type of education elite white women most often received. Beyond basic literacy, women were taught domestic skills and refinements meant to enhance their position in the marriage market. But what sort of wife and mother could such a poorly educated woman become? The image of flighty women concerned primarily with fashion and sentimental novels seemed especially out of step with the expectations of the new nation.

Critics who addressed the issue of women’s education at length included Mercy Otis Warren, Judith Sargent Murray, and Dr. Benjamin Rush. Although they challenged conventional assumptions that more fully educating women would make them less feminine and more discontented with their lot, these critics continued to recommend that women be educated primarily to remain within the domestic sphere. Most of the proponents of improved education for women articulated an ideology that historians have called Republican Motherhood, the idea that women had vital roles in educating their children for their duties as citizens. One notable advocate, Abigail Adams, wrote, “If we mean to have heroes, statesmen, and philosophers, we should have learned women. If as much depends as it is allowed upon the early education of youth and the first principles which are instilled take the deepest root great benefit must arise from the literary accomplishments in women.”41 In addition to this emphasis on children, the ideology of the postrevolutionary years stressed that women’s enlightened and virtuous influence on their husbands could contribute mightily to civic culture and order. (See Primary Sources: “Education and Republican Motherhood,” pp. 147–53.)

The new thinking about women’s education bore some fruit. Not only did some states, like Massachusetts in 1789, institute free elementary public schooling for all children, but academies and boarding schools specifically designed for middle-class and elite women proliferated in the North and eventually appeared in the South. Parents and educators expected that this enhanced education would, according to one historian, “allow women to instruct their sons in the principles of patriotism, to make their homes well-run havens of efficiency, to converse knowledgeably with their husbands on a variety of subjects, and to understand family finance.”42 Rather than discouraging women from domestic pursuits, education was expected to improve their chances for a suitable and happy marriage. But many of the women educated at the new academies apparently were inspired to move beyond the household sphere. Some became writers, missionaries, or reformers, and a substantial number became teachers themselves, pursuing jobs that offered the earliest form of professional opportunity for American women. The ideology of Republican Motherhood and the educational reforms it inspired began a long process of expanded opportunities for women. Eventually women would demand opportunities to learn as much as, and even alongside, men.

Women and Religion

In addition to the impact of new educational opportunities, religious communities and the continued influence of evangelical revivals offered important venues of expression for black and white women living in the early republic. Two radical religious groups centered around charismatic women who broke dramatically with traditional female piety and gender conventions. After recovering from a serious illness in 1776, Jemima Wilkinson, a former Quaker, believed that she had been resurrected for the sole purpose of preaching repentance before the final days of judgment. Wilkinson traveled the northeast, primarily in Rhode Island and Connecticut, attracting a host of devoted followers. Mother Ann Lee, a founder of the “Shaking Quakers,” or more simply “Shakers” (so named for the ecstatic dances that were part of their worship), styled herself as a preacher and prophet. In different ways, both of these remarkable women minimized their femaleness. Wilkinson dressed in male-style clothing and insisted on the gender-neutral title of Public Universal Friend. Followers consistently referred to the Friend with the pronouns “he” and “him.” Mother Ann Lee required celibacy not only for herself but also for her followers. Lee’s adamant denial of sexuality kept the issue of gender from undercutting her religious leadership.

Jemima Wilkinson (The Public Universal Friend), 1844

This lithograph of the self-styled Public Universal Friend was based on a painting made by John L. D. Mathies in 1816 near the end of Wilkinson’s life. The image conveys Wilkinson’s lifelong adoption of men’s clothing. After hearing the Friend preach in New Haven, Connecticut, one critical observer described Wilkinson in 1787 as wearing “a light cloth Cloke with a Cape like a Man’s — Purple Gown, long sleeves to Wristbands — Mans shirt down to the Hands with neckband — purple handkerchief or Neckcloth tied around the neck like a man’s — No Cap — Hair combed turned over & not long — wears a Watch — Man’s Hat.”43 How does the artist present the preacher’s gender in this portrait? Although Wilkinson’s style of dress may have stemmed from the religious belief that it was possible to transcend sex, why else might Wilkinson have preferred male attire?

In newer congregations, such as northern Baptist churches, white women, and some black women as well, could vote to elect deacons and even “exhort,” or act as a lay preacher. One of the more radical groups, the Separates, or Strict Congregationalists, explicitly affirmed women in their “just Right . . . to speak openly in the Church.”44 In the South, only one group, the Separate Baptists, permitted women official roles, appointing them as deaconnesses and eldresses. A Baptist minister traveling in Virginia and the Carolinas in the early 1770s described the duties of the eldresses as “praying, and teaching at their [women’s] separate assemblies; presiding there for maintenance of rules and government; consulting with sisters about matters of the church which concern them, and representing their sense thereof to the elders; attending at the unction of sick sisters; and at the baptism of women, that all may be done orderly.”45

But none of the larger denominations accepted women as preachers equal to male ministers. In backcountry regions, some women may have been traveling preachers, but generally their roles, even in evangelical churches, were unofficial. Typically, they served as counselors. Women created informal religious groups, encouraging friends and families along the road to conversion. Sarah Osborn, a white woman of Newport, Rhode Island (not the same Sarah Osborn who participated in the Revolutionary War), organized a young women’s religious society in 1737 that met more or less continuously for fifty years. In the 1760s, she expanded her focus and on Sunday evenings taught a group of African Americans in her home. Although Osborn was criticized for usurping the role of male ministers, throughout her life she continued to exert considerable influence within her congregation, an experience shared by many women in evangelical churches throughout the country.

By 1800, the ability of white women to be active in doctrinal disputes and matters of church discipline and procedures diminished. In northern Baptist churches, for example, women’s public voices were increasingly silenced after the Revolution. As the Baptists matured as a religious denomination, a growing bureaucracy and a new emphasis on an educated ministry eroded women’s position in favor of men. Establishing respectability for the church often meant controlling “disorderly” women. This shift in women’s influence was accomplished despite the fact that women outnumbered men in the congregation almost two to one, yet another indication that the egalitarian spirit of the postrevolutionary era did not encompass white women.

This suppression of women’s voices was not long-lived, however. Beginning around 1795, another series of revivals, loosely categorized as the Second Great Awakening, swept the nation in periodic waves, lasting through the 1830s. In the eighteenth century, women’s role in evangelical religion paralleled their course in the public sphere, where the ideas formulated around Republican Motherhood articulated a civic role for patriotic women that was only partially realized. Yet both evangelical religion and Republican Motherhood formed an important rationale for women’s expanding roles in a wide range of benevolent and reform associations, other areas of informal public space that white women claimed as their own in the nineteenth century.

The religious ferment that so powerfully affected white women also touched the lives of many African American women. A wide diversity of religious practices existed among the enslaved population of the early American republic. By the late eighteenth century, a minority of African-born elders lived alongside a younger American-born majority. In certain regions, such as the Lowcountry Sea Islands, some families continued to practice Islam, brought with them on the Middle Passage from West Africa. Although poorly documented, ritual practices of West African and Kongo-Angolan ancestors also persisted in areas with large slave populations. Women played significant roles in such religious expression, often serving as healers, mediums, or priestesses.

In addition, both free and enslaved African Americans continued to adopt Christianity by infusing their theology and worship practice with West African–influenced elements. Some scholars suggest that the evangelical emphasis on spontaneous conversion harmonized with West African beliefs that “the deity entered the body of the devotee and displaced his or her personality.”46 Southern slaves infused this new form of Protestantism with African religious elements to create a distinctive religious style. In turn, African influences — especially dances and shouts typical of West African religious rituals — influenced the shape of white evangelicalism. Black women were highly visible in their communities of worship. They consistently made up the majority of congregants in Baptist and Methodist churches of Virginia in the 1790s, for example. Barred from being ordained formally as preachers, black women made their voices heard in black and interracial evangelical meetings through personal testimony and a form of spiritual encouragement known as “exhortation.” In these ways, black women were able to create a sphere of influence and spiritual power for themselves, roles that would assume even greater importance in the nineteenth century, as independent black denominations emerged in the North and black Christianity spread in the slave quarters of the South.

CONCLUSION: To the Margins of Political Action

Whatever their social or racial group, women living on the eastern part of the continent in the late eighteenth century were affected by the imperial conflicts that eventually resulted in the founding of a new nation. Most women’s activities were filtered through traditional expectations about their female roles: slave women tried to protect their children; Native Americans maintained villages while men were at war; elite ladies sewed shirts for George Washington’s army; poor women cooked for soldiers. Yet despite these traditional trajectories — and despite the fundamentally male character of eighteenth-century diplomacy, politics, and warfare — women did exercise some choice in the revolutionary era. They acted politically when they decided to escape slavery by fleeing to the British, when they participated in their Native councils’ deliberations over alliances, or when they chose to be loyalists or patriots.

The revolutionary era’s dramatic events affected women in widely varying ways. Slave women in the North benefited from gradual emancipation, while many in the South suffered from their owners’ deepening commitment to the institution of slavery. Both free and enslaved black women confronted a deepening racial ideology that defined citizenship as a white inheritance of the Revolution. Many Native American women saw their traditional roles erode under the pressures of assimilation, yet most scholars marvel at their resilience and adaptability. White women’s positions became more limited in some respects, as white men’s political rights expanded.

But if the Revolution did not prompt a deep-seated questioning of women’s rights and roles, it did embody harbingers of change, especially for white women. The economic expansion of the new nation would lead to industrial development and an expanded presence of women in the paid workforce. The U.S. territorial expansion would not only promote western migration of white women and their families but also significantly affect Native Americans and slaves. In addition, revolutionary ideology, educational advancements, and the egalitarianism of the Great Awakening sowed the seeds for greater participation of middle-class and elite women in public life, not in politics per se, but in informal spheres of public spaces — churches, benevolent societies, and reform movements — which were to be such an important part of nineteenth-century American culture.

CHAPTER 3 REVIEW

KEY TERMS AND PEOPLE

Terms

First Great Awakening

“Liberty’s Daughters”

Ladies Association of Philadelphia

“deputy husbands”

Republican Motherhood

Second Great Awakening

People

Molly Brant

Deborah Sampson

Sacagawea

Mary Perth

Elizabeth Freeman (“Mum Bett”)

Abigail Adams

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mercy Otis Warren

Judith Sargent Murray

Benjamin Rush

Jemima Wilkinson

Phillis Wheatley

REVIEW QUESTIONS

What were some of the factors leading to open conflict between Britain and its North American colonies? What forms of colonial resistance particularly depended on women’s participation?

Discuss the various kinds of “profound disruptions and complex decisions” that the Revolutionary War brought to Anglo-American women colonists, enslaved and free black women, and Native American women. What did “taking sides” mean for each of these groups of women?

What changes in free women’s status during the late eighteenth century, if any, can be attributed to the legacy of the American Revolution? How was the shift from colony to nation significant for enslaved black women? For Native American women? How did the impact of the Revolution on white, black, and Native American women vary depending on geographic region?

Making Connections Between the 1750s and 1800s, how did women’s gendered labor and relationship to the family change? Was the American Revolution a “revolution” for America’s women? How did free versus slave status and settler versus indigenous identity matter in answering these questions?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Gendering Images of the Revolution

IN ADDITION TO THE REPRESENTATIONS OF American women contained in the portraits of the late eighteenth century are a variety of other images specifically connected to the American Revolution. Many of these — whether paintings or cartoons — had propagandistic purposes. Few portray actual women and instead render females as abstractions, often as icons of “Liberty.”

Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic often ridiculed women’s interest in fashion and represented them as weak-minded and frivolous. These negative stereotypes about women took on propagandistic value in Figure 3.1, a British cartoon, “A Society of Patriotic Ladies,” created as a response to the fifty-one women of Edenton, North Carolina, who signed a pledge in 1774 to uphold the boycotts against British goods. By depicting fashionable women neglecting their children (note the child on the floor being licked by a dog) and acting in unfeminine ways (note the grotesque woman with the gavel), the cartoon devalues the boycott and American women at the same time.

Consider the choices of the cartoonist. Why do you think he decided to include a black servant in his drawing? Why did he depict the woman in the center being fondled by a man?

Figure 3.1 “A Society of Patriotic Ladies” (1774)

A number of images of women holding muskets circulated during the revolutionary era. Scholars think that the 1770 drawing in Figure 3.2 was modeled after a 1750 woodcut of Hannah Snell, an Englishwoman who had joined the British navy in 1745. Though Miss Fanny’s Maid predates the outbreak of fighting, it coincides with the disruptive atmosphere of Boston in the 1770s. The American illustration was probably not intended to refer to a specific woman bearing arms; the story of cross-dressing Deborah Sampson (see pp. 112–13) was not made public until 1781, for example. What do you think might have been the purpose of this image for revolutionary propagandists?

Figure 3.2 Miss Fanny’s Maid (1770)

The tendency to depict women as abstractions was most evident in the widespread popularity of images of “Liberty.” The convention of using a stylized woman to represent political virtues such as liberty or justice was a long-standing one in Western European art, though, as one historian explains, “the female form [of liberty] does not refer to particular women, does not describe women as a group, and often does not even presume to evoke their natures.”47 Instead, this idealized image was intended to embody the principles for which men were fighting. During the 1770s, the American colonies were sometimes personified as a Native American woman, rather than as a classical European figure.

Figure 3.3, “The Female Combatants,” portrayed the conflict between Britain and the North American colonies as a lively fistfight between women. This hand-colored engraving by an unknown artist appeared in January 1776, the same month in which Thomas Paine published Common Sense. Decoding the image requires attention to both words and material objects. Begin with the speech bubbles. How does the artist use sexual insult and familial relations (“Rebellious Slut” and “Mother”) to comment on political resistance to Britain? Next, move to the visual symbolism. What is the meaning of the white Mother Britain’s aristocratic dress? Why is America portrayed as a bare-breasted Native American woman? Note the Phrygian liberty cap on America’s tree (look for this ancient icon elsewhere in this document set). The combatants’ shield and banner slogans also differ. The shield on the left holds a compass pointing north, while the one on the right depicts a Gallic rooster, symbol of France. The banners juxtapose British “Obedience” with American “Liberty.” A historian who has analyzed the image asks, “Does the artist believe Britain holds the moral right; does the cartoon display America’s winning ideology?”48 How would you answer this question using specific evidence from the image?

Figure 3.3 “The Female Combatants” (1776)

An alternative rendering of a female version of Liberty appeared in the well-known painter Edward Savage’s engraving “Liberty in the Form of the Goddess of Youth Giving Support to the Bald Eagle,” created in 1796. In Figure 3.4, the youthful Liberty, clad in white with a garland of flowers, nourishes an eagle, who symbolizes the Republic. In the background is the flag of the union with a liberty cap. At the bottom right, lightning surrounds the British fleet in the Boston harbor. Crushed under Liberty’s feet are symbols of the British monarchy: a key, a broken scepter, and the garter of a royal order. This version of Liberty was so popular that it was reproduced in many forms — including needlework — well into the nineteenth century. Why do you think Savage depicts Liberty as a “goddess of youth”? Why was the image so popular with Americans?

Figure 3.4 Edward Savage, Liberty in the Form of the Goddess of Youth Giving Support to the Bald Eagle (1796)

A somewhat unusual depiction of a female Liberty had more radical political meaning than most versions. Figure 3.5 suggests the way in which revolutionary ideology ignited questions about women’s and slaves’ freedom. Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, by Samuel Jennings (1792), was initially suggested by the artist himself to the Library Company of Philadelphia, an institution founded by Benjamin Franklin and others in 1731. The directors specifically asked Jennings to portray a tableau of “Liberty (with her Cap and proper Insignia) displaying the arts by some of the most striking Symbols of Painting, Architecture, Mechanics, Astronomy, &ca. whilst She appears in the attitude of placing on the top of a Pedestal, a pile of Books, lettered with, Agriculture, Commerce, Philosophy & Catalogue of Philadelphia Library.”49 The directors, many of whom were active antislavery advocates, also requested the inclusion of African Americans and the symbolic broken chains. In the image, Liberty is offering a book to the grateful African Americans.

Examine the images associated with Liberty. What do they suggest? What did the library directors hope to convey in combining a depiction of Liberty, books, and freed slaves?

Figure 3.5 Samuel Jennings Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences (1792)

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

How do these diverse images of women contribute to our understanding of how gender shaped the experience of the American Revolution?

The images presented here have propagandistic purposes. What do these images suggest about the role gender and sexuality play in conceptualizing both war aims and patriotic service?

How can historians analyze these propagandistic images in the effort to reconstruct the actual experiences of women in the revolutionary era?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Phillis Wheatley, Poet and Slave

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN WOMEN left behind far more written material than those in the seventeenth century; we have diaries, letters, essays, and books to help us flesh out the lives of many women, especially educated white women. The experiences of individual black women are far more obscure in the historical record, with the important exception of poet Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784). At age seven or eight, Wheatley made a terrifying passage from the Senegambia region of West Africa to Boston in the hold of her namesake, the slave ship Phillis; nearly a quarter of her fellow captives died along the way. Her owners, John and Susannah Wheatley, informed by their own expectations of African intellectual inferiority, were immediately impressed with her precociousness. “Without any Assistance from School Education, and by only what she was taught in the Family, she, in sixteen Months Times from her Arrival, attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any, the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings, to the great Astonishment of all who heard her.”50 The Wheatleys, especially Susannah and her daughter Mary, took pride in their slave’s learning but also in her quick and deeply felt conversion to Protestantism. Their own evangelical beliefs, reflecting the First Great Awakening sweeping through the colonies, made them open to the notion of blacks’ spiritual equality and led them to encourage Wheatley’s religious and intellectual gifts.

Phillis Wheatley began writing poetry as early as 1765 and apparently published her first poem in 1767 at age fourteen. By 1772, she had attempted, with the help of Susannah Wheatley and other sponsors, to publish a book of collected works in Boston. When that venture failed, she found a publisher in London and had the opportunity to accompany the son of her owner to London, where she was able to complete the arrangements for Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).

Figure 3.6, a portrait of Phillis Wheatley, was commissioned as the frontispiece for her book. John and Susannah had sent Phillis’s poems to the London bookseller Archibald Bell. He in turn had taken them to an antislavery noblewoman, the Countess of Huntington, to receive permission for Wheatley to dedicate the book to her, a common practice designed to enhance a book’s prestige. Huntington, enthusiastic about the poems, apparently asked for reassurance that the author was “real, without a deception.” Perhaps to offer proof to future readers that Wheatley was indeed of African descent, the countess requested a picture of Wheatley for the frontispiece. The painting was executed by an enslaved artist, Scipio Moorhead, owned by a Boston minister, and sent to England for engraving. Wheatley appreciated Moorhead’s talents and wrote the following poem to “SM. a young African painter”:

To show the lab’ring bosom’s deep intent,

and thought in living characters to paint,

When first thy pencil did those beauties give,

And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,

How did those prospects give my soul delight,

A new creation rushing on my sight?

Still, wond’rous youth! each noble path pursue,

On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:

Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fire

To aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire!51

Why do you think Wheatley was so pleased by the portrait? What details in the image convey Wheatley’s literacy and authorship? Why do you suppose the painting includes the information that Wheatley was “servant to Mr. John Wheatley”?

Figure 3.6 Scipio Moorhead Phillis Wheatley (1773)

Shortly after Wheatley became a published author, her owners granted her freedom. Wheatley continued to write, undeterred by such life-changing events as the deaths of her former owners, Susannah Wheatley in 1774 and John Wheatley in 1778, and her own marriage in 1778 to a free black, John Peters. Her poems, such as one in honor of General George Washington, were published individually, but she failed to gain backing for her proposal, printed in the Evening Post & General Advertiser (1779), in which she described herself as a “female African” who sought subscriptions to print a second book of poems and letters to be dedicated to Benjamin Franklin. Other disappointments followed. Toward the end of her life, she worked as a scrubwoman in a boardinghouse. Two of her children died, and she and her third baby died of complications in childbirth on December 8, 1784.

Because of the profoundly religious content of much of her work, Wheatley’s poetry was warmly received by evangelical Protestants, both in England and in America. Apparently some slaveowners read Wheatley’s poems to their slaves to encourage their conversion. Opponents of slavery also welcomed the poet’s work, viewing her as proof of the humanity and capabilities of Africans and therefore useful evidence in their campaigns against both slavery and the slave trade.

LETTERS

TWENTY-TWO OF WHEATLEY’S LETTERS have survived. The first one, printed below, is to a black friend, Arbour Tanner, a servant to James Tanner in Newport, Rhode Island, who shared Wheatley’s religious ardor. The letter refers to a frequent theme in the poet’s work: the conversion of her fellow Africans. What is the purpose of Wheatley’s letter to Tanner? How might her abduction from Africa as a child have informed her views of her land of birth as a place of “darkness”?

To Arbour Tanner

BOSTON MAY 19TH 1772

Dear Sister

I rec’d your favour of February 6th for which I give you my sincere thanks, I greatly rejoice with you in that realizing view, and I hope experience, of the Saving change which you So emphatically describe. Happy were it for us if we could arrive to that evangelical Repentance, and the true holiness of heart which you mention. Inexpressibly happy Should we be could we have a due Sense of the Beauties and excellence of the Crucified Saviour. In his Crucifixion may be seen marvellous displays of Grace and Love, Sufficient to draw and invite us to the rich and endless treasures of his mercy, let us rejoice in and adore the wonders of God’s infinite Love in bringing us from a land Semblant of darkness itself, and where the divine light of revelation (being obscur’d) is as darkness. Here, the knowledge of the true God and eternal life are made manifest; But there, profound ignorance overshadows the Land, Your observation is true, namely that there was nothing in us to recommend us to God. Many of our fellow creatures are pass’d by, when the bowels of divine love expanded towards us. May this goodness & long Suffering of God lead us to unfeign’d repentance.

It gives me very great pleasure to hear of so many of my Nation, Seeking with eagerness the way to true felicity, O may we all meet at length in that happy mansion. I hope the correspondence between us will continue, (my being much indispos’d this winter past was the reason of my not answering yours before now) which correspondence I hope may have the happy effect of improving our mutual friendship. Till we meet in the regions of consummate blessedness, let us endeavor by the assistance of divine grace, to live the life, and we Shall die the death of the Righteous. May this be our happy case and of those who are travelling to the region of Felicity is the earnest request of your affectionate

Friend & hum. Sert. Phillis Wheatley

SOURCE: Julian D. Mason Jr., ed., The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1989), 190.

THE FOLLOWING LETTER, to Rev. Samson Occom, a Mohegan Indian and Presbyterian minister, was published in the Connecticut Gazette; and the Universal Intelligencer on March 11, 1774, and widely reprinted. Written after Wheatley had gained freedom, it is her most critical statement about slavery. What is the essence of her criticism? To whom is she referring in the phrase “our modern Egyptians”?

To Rev. Samson Occom

Rev’d and honor’d Sir,

I have this Day received your obliging kind Epistle, and am greatly satisfied with your Reasons respecting the Negroes, and think highly reasonable what you offer in Vindication of their natural Rights: Those that invade them cannot be insensible that the divine Light is chasing away the thick Darkness which broods over the Land of Africa; and the Chaos which has reign’d long, is converting into beautiful Order, and [r]eveals more and more clearly the glorious Dispensation of civil and religious Liberty, which are so insep[a]rably united, that there is little or no Enjoyment of one without the other. Otherwise, perhaps, the Israelites had been less solicitous for their Freedom from Egyptian slavery; I do not say they would have been contented without it, by no means, for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us. God grant Deliverance in his own Way and Time and get him honour upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their fellow Creatures. This desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree, — I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.

SOURCE: Mason, Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 203–4.

POEMS

OVER FIFTY OF WHEATLEY’S POEMS have survived. They encompass a wide range of topics, from elegies to thoughts “On Virtue,” from religious commentaries to a patriotic ode to George Washington. Her references to Africa, Africans, and slavery are particularly interesting for the ways in which her poetry insists on the humanity of Africans and makes criticisms — sometimes veiled — of slavery.

On the surface, this 1772 poem seems to adopt white Christians’ condescension toward pagan Africans, but what does the final line suggest? Is it possible to read this troubling poem as Wheatley’s challenge to biological theories of white superiority?

On Being Brought from Africa to America

’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their colour is a diabolic die.”

Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,

May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

SOURCE: Mason, Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 53.

THE FOLLOWING POEM, addressed to the British secretary of state for North America, was written in a period when tensions had eased — temporarily — between the colonies and the mother country, hence Wheatley’s statement in the second stanza about grievances being addressed. The poem reveals not only her sensitivity to the political turmoil of the period but also her understanding of the parallels between the colonists’ desire to resist British “enslavement” and her own people’s experience of slavery. What does she seem to be asking Lord Dartmouth for in the final stanza?

To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North America

HAIL, happy day when, smiling like the morn,

Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:

The northern clime beneath her genial ray,

Dartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway:

Elate with hope her race no longer mourns,

Each soul expands, each grateful bosom burns,

While in thine hand with pleasure we behold

The silken reins, and Freedom’s charms unfold.

Long lost to realms beneath the northern skies

She shines supreme, while hated faction dies:

Soon as appear’d the Goddess long desir’d,

Sick at the view, she languish’d and expir’d;

Thus from the splendors of the morning light

The owl in sadness seeks the caves of night.

No more, America, in mournful strain

Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain,

No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,

Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand

Had made, and with it meant t’ enslave the land.

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,

Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,

Whence flow these wishes for the common good,

By feeling hearts alone best understood,

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate

Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:

What pangs excruciating must molest,

What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?

Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d

That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:

Such, such my case. And can I then but pray

Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

For favours past, great Sir, our thanks are due,

And thee we ask thy favours to renew,

Since in thy pow’r, as in thy will before,

To sooth the griefs, which thou did’st once deplore.

May heav’nly grace the sacred sanction give

To all thy works, and thou for ever live

Not only on the wings of fleeting Fame,

Though praise immortal crowns the patriot’s name,

But to conduct to heav’ns refulgent fane,

May fiery coursers sweep th’ ethereal plain,

And bear thee upwards to that blest abode,

Where, like the prophet, thou shalt find thy God.

SOURCE: Mason, Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 82–83.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What do these selections of Wheatley’s poems and letters reveal about the importance and role of religion in her life?

What are the grounds for her criticism of slavery?

How might opponents of slavery have used her poetry to criticize the institution?

How did Wheatley use both her image and her writing to challenge prevailing ideas about racial difference and African intellect?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Education and Republican Motherhood

FOR MUCH OF THE COLONIAL PERIOD, women’s opportunities for education were quite limited. A small number of slave women were instructed by benevolent owners, and some Native American women had access to missionary schools where the emphasis was on assimilation rather than education. White women had little formal schooling, and their training usually emphasized domestic skills with a smattering of reading and sums. By the time of the Revolution in New England, 90 percent of white men could write, while fewer than half of white women could.

The Revolution and its aftermath ushered in significant changes. Outside the South, where public schools were rare, primary public education for white women and men became more common. Women’s opportunities for higher education — while not universally endorsed — also expanded. While some of the most famous schools, like Philadelphia’s Young Ladies Academy, were in urban areas, educational entrepreneurs also established them in small towns such as Litchfield, Connecticut, where Sarah Pierce’s school attracted young women from throughout the region, as well as from other states. The Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Moravian Seminary had special appeal for parents eager to give their daughters a rigorous education; in addition to academic subjects, the school encouraged its students’ industry and moral development. While the new schools still offered ornamental skills such as needlework and dancing, they emphasized academic subjects such as history, grammar, geography, logic, and philosophy.

The post-Revolution improvement in white women’s education was in part a product of the efforts of reformers, who eagerly promoted the idea that in a republic, all citizens needed education to contribute to the general public good. In keeping with the ideas associated with Republican Motherhood (see pp. 125–27), supporters of women’s education argued that mothers needed to be well educated to prepare their children, especially their sons, for their duties as citizens. Advocates also emphasized the importance of women’s influence on their husbands. While a number of people participated in the call for expanded opportunities, including Mercy Otis Warren and Sarah Pierce, two of the most significant, whose writings are reproduced here, were Dr. Benjamin Rush and Judith Sargent Murray.

“A PECULIAR MODE OF EDUCATION”

BENJAMIN RUSH SIGNED the Declaration of Independence and was the preeminent physician and medical teacher of the revolutionary era. His essay Thoughts upon Female Education reflects both increased expectations as well as the limits to new ideas about women’s education. The curriculum he promoted included geography, bookkeeping, reading, and arithmetic and omitted the traditional female accomplishment of needlework. But he did not recommend that women study advanced mathematics, natural philosophy, or Latin or Greek, subjects that remained hallmarks of educated men. Rush and most other reformers emphasized the utilitarian potential of an academic curriculum for women. Although Rush lectured to both men at the College of Philadelphia and women at the Young Ladies Academy on natural philosophy, his presentation for the latter — “Lectures, Containing the Application of the Principles of Natural Philosophy, and Chemistry to Domestic and Culinary Purposes” — was tailored to their perceived future roles. Still, Rush’s views were progressive for his time, when many people felt that too much learning might “unsex” a woman and make her unfeminine.

The following selection is from an essay based on a speech Rush gave to the Board of Visitors of the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia in 1787. As you read, take note of Rush’s major justifications for educating women.

BENJAMIN RUSH

Thoughts upon Female Education (1787)

There are several circumstances in the situation, employments and duties of women in America which require a peculiar mode of education.

I. The early marriages of our women, by contracting the time allowed for education, renders it necessary to contract its plan and to confine it chiefly to the more useful branches of literature.

II. The state of property in America renders it necessary for the greatest part of our citizens to employ themselves in different occupations for the advancement of their fortunes. This cannot be done without the assistance of the female members of the community. They must be the stewards and guardians of their husbands’ property. That education, therefore, will be most proper for our women which teaches them to discharge the duties of those offices with the most success and reputation.

III. From the numerous avocations to which a professional life exposes gentlemen in America from their families, a principal share of the instruction of children naturally devolves upon the women. It becomes us therefore to prepare them, by a suitable education, for the discharge of this most important duty of mothers.

IV. The equal share that every citizen has in the liberty and the possible share he may have in the government of our country make it necessary that our ladies should be qualified to a certain degree, by a peculiar and suitable education, to concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government.

V. In Great Britain the business of servants is a regular occupation, but in America this humble station is the usual retreat of unexpected indigence; hence the servants in this country possess less knowledge and subordination than are required from them; and hence our ladies are obliged to attend more to the private affairs of their families than ladies generally do of the same rank in Great Britain. “They are good servants,” said an American lady of distinguished merit . . . in a letter to a favorite daughter, “who will do well with good looking after.” This circumstance should have great influence upon the nature and extent of female education in America.

[Rush proceeds to discuss the most important “branches of literature most essential for a young lady in this country,” in which he emphasizes “a knowledge of the English language,” “the writing of a fair and legible hand,” “some knowledge of figures and bookkeeping,” so that she “may assist her husband with this knowledge,” “an acquaintance with geography and some instruction in chronology [history],” vocal music and dancing, “the reading of history, travels, poetry, and moral essays,” and the “regular instruction in the Christian religion.”]

A philosopher once said, “let me make all the ballads of a country and I care not who makes its laws.” He might with more propriety have said, let the ladies of a country be educated properly, and they will not only make and administer its laws, but form its manners and character. It would require a lively imagination to describe, or even to comprehend the happiness of a country where knowledge and virtue were generally diffused among the female sex. . . .

The influence of female education would be still more extensive and useful in domestic life. The obligations of gentlemen to qualify themselves by knowledge and industry to discharge the duties of benevolence would be increased by marriage; and the patriot — the hero — and the legislator would find the sweetest reward of their toils in the approbation and applause of their wives. Children would discover the marks of maternal prudence and wisdom in every station of life, for it has been remarked that there have been few great or good men who have not been blessed with wife and prudent mothers.

SOURCE: Frederick Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 27–40.

“ALL THAT INDEPENDENCE WHICH IS PROPER TO HUMANITY”

ALTHOUGH JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY (1751–1820), the daughter of a distinguished and wealthy Gloucester, Massachusetts, family, also believed in the tenets of Republican Motherhood, she was far more radical than Rush in her approach to women’s capabilities and needs. Murray’s parents denied her the opportunity for the extensive education that they provided for her brother, but she was a voracious reader of both American and European writers. A contemporary of the English historian Catharine Macaulay and the English women’s rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft, Murray was an early American proponent of women’s rights and an accomplished writer. Intensely religious, she had left the Puritan fold for Universalism, a far more egalitarian faith that encouraged her to challenge traditional authority. Already influenced by her religion, as well as her frustration over her limited schooling, Murray was further energized by the ideas swirling around the American Revolution that led her to articulate her belief in men’s and women’s mental and spiritual equality. As she contemplated the themes of liberty, equality, and independence, she struggled with her own dependence.

After she was widowed in 1787, her second marriage in 1788, like her first, provided little financial security, and she was highly conscious of the legal and financial constraints on women. It is not surprising, then, that many of her essays call for an education that would help women to be self-reliant and even self-supporting. She pointed out that she would want her daughters to be taught “industry and order.” They “should be enabled to procure for themselves the necessaries of life; independence should be placed within their grasp.”52 Unlike reformers such as Rush, who saw women’s education primarily as a tool for promoting the family and the public good, Murray understood it as something contributing to women’s independence, to a reverence of self. But she shared with more conventional reformers the assumption that most women would marry and have children and that women’s improved education would make them better wives and virtuous Republican Mothers.

In 1782, Murray anonymously published her first work, a religious piece titled Catechism. By that time, however, she had already drafted a much more radical piece, “On the Equality of the Sexes,” which appeared finally in the Massachusetts Magazine in 1790, under the pseudonym “Constantia.” Although writing under pen names was a common eighteenth-century practice, Murray probably did so with a knowledge of how subversive it was for women to write publicly at all, let alone on political matters. In addition, her biographer suggests, she enjoyed the game of hiding her identity under multiple names and may have thought that the pseudonym helped readers to focus on the content of the piece rather than on the identity of the writer.53 Murray began this essay with a poetic question for “the lordly sex.” Why, she queried, do “[t]hey rob us of the power t’ improve / And then declare we only trifles love”? She then went on to argue that if women’s intellect was deficient, it was because of men’s advantage in education, rather than birth. A good part of her essay, excerpted here, focuses on reason — a prominent theme in Enlightenment ideas about human intellectual abilities. What curriculum does Murray favor for girls’ education? What consequences does she see for the inferior education women receive? In what sense is she arguing that women and men are equal? In what ways does this piece reflect Murray’s upper-class identity?

JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY

On the Equality of the Sexes (1790)

Is it upon mature consideration we adopt the idea, that nature is thus partial in her distributions? Is it indeed a fact, that she hath yielded to one half of the human species so unquestionable a mental superiority? I know that to both sexes elevated understandings, and the reverse, are common. But, suffer me to ask, in what the minds of females are so notoriously deficient, or unequal. . . .

Are we [women] deficient in reason? we can only reason from what we know, and if an opportunity of acquiring knowledge hath been denied us, the inferiority of our sex, cannot fairly be deduced from thence. . . . Yet it may be questioned, from what doth this superiority in this determining faculty of the soul, proceed. May we not trace its source in the difference of education, and continued advantages? Will it be said that the judgment of a male of two years old, is more sage than that of a female’s of the same age? I believe the reverse is generally observed to be true. But from that period what partiality! how is the one exalted, and the other depressed, by the contrary modes of education which are adopted! the one is taught to aspire, and the other is early confined and limitted. As their years increase, the sister must be wholly domesticated, while the brother is led by the hand through all the flowery paths of science. Grant that their minds are by nature equal, yet who shall wonder at the apparent superiority, if indeed custom becomes second nature; nay if it taketh place of nature, and that it doth the experience of each day will evince. At length arrived at womanhood, the uncultivated fair one feels a void, which the employments allotted her are by no means capable of filling. What can she do? to books she may not apply; or if she doth, to those only of the novel kind, lest she merit the appellation of a learned lady; and what ideas have been affixed to this term, the observation of many can testify. Fashion, scandal, and sometimes what is still more reprehensible, are then called in to her relief; and who can say to what lengths the liberties she takes may proceed. Meantime she herself is most unhappy; she feels the want of a cultivated mind. Is she single, she in vain seeks to fill up time from sexual employments or amusements. Is she united to a person whose soul nature made equal to her own, education hath set him so far above her, that in those entertainments which are productive of such rational felicity, she is not qualified to accompany him. She experiences a mortifying consciousness of inferiority, which embitters every enjoyment. Doth the person to whom her adverse fate hath consigned her, possess a mind incapable of improvement, she is equally wretched, in being so closely connected with an individual whom she cannot but despise. Now, was she permitted the same instructors as her brother, (with an eye however to their particular departments) for the employment of a rational mind an ample field would be opened. In astronomy she might catch a glimpse of the immensity of the Deity, and thence she would form amazing conceptions of the august and supreme Intelligence. In geography she would admire Jehovah in the midst of his benevolence; thus adapting this globe to the various wants and amusements of its inhabitants. In natural philosophy she would adore the infinite majesty of heaven, clothed in condescension; and as she traversed the reptile world, she would hail the goodness of a creating God. A mind, thus filled, would have little room for the trifles with which our sex are, with too much justice, accused of amusing themselves, and they would thus be rendered fit companions for those, who should one day wear them as their crown. Fashions, in their variety, would then give place to conjectures, which might perhaps conduce to the improvement of the literary world; and there would be no leisure for slander or detraction. Reputation would not then be blasted, but serious speculations would occupy the lively imaginations of the sex. Unnecessary visits would be precluded, and that custom would only be indulged by way of relaxation, or to answer the demands of consanguinity and friendship. Females would become discreet, their judgments would be invigorated, and their partners for life being circumspectly chosen, an unhappy Hymen would then be as rare, as is now the reverse.i

Will it be urged that those acquirements would supersede our domestick duties. I answer that every requisite in female economy is easily attained; and, with truth I can add, that when once attained, they require no further mental attention. Nay, while we are pursuing the needle, or the superintendency of the family, I repeat, that our minds are at full liberty for reflection; that imagination may exert itself in full vigor; and that if a just foundation is early laid, our ideas will then be worthy of rational beings. If we were industrious we might easily find time to arrange them upon paper, or should avocations press too hard for such an indulgence, the hours allotted for conversation would at least become more refined and rational. Should it still be vociferated, “Your domestick employments are sufficient”—I would calmly ask, is it reasonable, that a candidate for immortality, for the joys of heaven, an intelligent being, who is to spend an eternity in contemplating the works of Deity, should at present be so degraded, as to be allowed no other ideas, than those which are suggested by the mechanism of a pudding, or the sewing the seams of a garment? Pity that all such censurers of female improvement do not go one step further, and deny their future existence; to be consistent they surely ought.

Yes, ye lordly, ye haughty sex, our souls are by nature equal to yours; the same breath of God animates, enlivens, and invigorates us; and that we are not fallen lower than yourselves, let those witness who have greatly towered above the various discouragements by which they have been so heavily oppressed; and though I am unacquainted with the list of celebrated characters on either side, yet from the observations I have made in the contracted circle in which I have moved, I dare confidently believe, that from the commencement of time to the present day, there hath been as many females, as males, who, by the mere force of natural powers, have merited the crown of applause; who, thus unassisted, have seized the wreath of fame. I know there are who assert, that as the animal powers of the one sex are superiour, of course their mental faculties also must be stronger; thus attributing strength of mind to the transient organization of this earth born tenement. But if this reasoning is just, man must be content to yield the palm to many of the brute creation, since by not a few of his brethren of the field, he is far surpassed in bodily strength. Moreover, was this argument admitted, it would prove too much, for occular demonstration evinceth, that there are many robust masculine ladies, and effeminate gentlemen. Yet I fancy that Mr. Pope,ii though clogged with an enervated body, and distinguished by a diminutive stature, could nevertheless lay claim to greatness of soul; and perhaps there are many other instances which might be adduced to combat so unphilosophical an opinion. Do we not often see, that when the clay built tabernacle is well nigh dissolved, when it is just ready to mingle with the parent soil, the immortal inhabitant aspires to, and even attaineth heights the most sublime, and which were before wholly unexplored. Besides, were we to grant that animal strength proved any thing, taking into consideration the accustomed impartiality of nature, we should be induced to imagine, that she had invested the female mind with superiour strength as an equivalent for the bodily powers of man. But waving this however palpable advantage, for equality only, we wish to contend.

SOURCE: Constantia [Judith Sargent Murray], “On the Equality of the Sexes,” Massachusetts Magazine; or Monthly Museum Containing the Literature, History, Politics, Arts, Manners and Amusements of the Age 2 (March 1790): 132–35 and (April 1790): 223–24.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What do Rush and Murray see as the benefits of female education? How does the proper education of females differ from that of males? Are there any differences between Rush’s and Murray’s arguments?

What do Rush and Murray assume about the abilities of females?

How do Rush’s and Murray’s ideas accord with the ideas associated with Republican Motherhood?

SUGGESTED REFERENCES

General Works

Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for American Independence (2005).

Edward Countryman, Enjoy the Same Liberty: Black Americans and the Revolutionary Era (2012).

Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980).

Susan E. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (2010).

Mary Beth Norton, Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (2011).

Marylynn Salmon, The Limits of Independence: American Women, 1760–1800 (1994).

Women and the American Revolution

Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (2010).

Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (2014).

Patricia Cleary, Elizabeth Murray: A Woman’s Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America (2000).

Linda Grant De Pauw, Four Traditions: Women of New York during the American Revolution (1974).

Joan R. Gunderson, To Be Useful to the World: Women in Revolutionary America, 1740–1790, revised edition (2006).

Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (2011).

Cynthia Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700–1835 (1998).

Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (1980).

Alfred F. Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (2004).

Revolutionary Legacies for Women

Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (1999).

Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (1998).

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (2017).

Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (2016).

Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African-American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (1998).

Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (1994).

Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligation of Citizenship (1998).

Lucia McMahon, Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic (2012).

Jessica Millward, Finding Charity’s Folks: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland (2015).

Paul B. Moyer, The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America (2015).

Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (1998).

CHAPTER 4

Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block

1800–1860

LUCY LARCOM SPENT HER TEENAGE YEARS AS A MILL worker in the new factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts, on the Merrimack River. In 1835, at the age of eleven, she had moved to Lowell with her widowed mother, who had taken a job as manager of one of the company-owned boardinghouses to support herself and her children. For Lucy, working in the textile factory, a “rather select industrial school for young people,” was the formative experience of her life, and she carried the memory into her future career as a poet and writer.1 She loved doing work that was significant to the larger society and wrote of “the pleasure we found in making new acquaintances among our workmates.” But in later years, she became uneasy with the condescension toward her humble past as a factory girl. “It is the first duty of every woman to recognize the mutual bond of universal womanhood,” Larcom wrote in her memoirs. “Let her ask herself whether she would like to hear herself or her sister spoken of as a shopgirl or a factory-girl or a servant-girl, if necessity had compelled her for a time to be employed.”2

Larcom’s experiences embodied two of the three crucial elements shaping the lives of women in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. First, she subscribed to the influential ideology of womanhood, home life, and gender relations that treated women as fundamentally different from men; this ideology placed women on a pedestal, simultaneously elevated and isolated by their special domestic role. Second, Larcom was participating in the first wave of American industrialization, a process that dramatically redirected the young nation’s economy and created new dimensions of wealth and poverty, new levels of production and consumption, and new ways of life. Historians tend to identify these two elements with two different and emerging classes — domestic ideology with the middle class, industrialization with the working class — but through the eyes of women like Lucy Larcom, it is possible to see that they were mutually influential.

The very cotton fibers that mill girls like Larcom spun and wove symbolize the third major element considered in this chapter: slavery. By the nineteenth century, slavery was a southern social and economic system but one with profound national implications. Slavery was of incomparable importance to American women in the antebellum (pre–Civil War) years, not only to slaves and those who lived by or profited from unfree labor but also to those who dedicated themselves to ending slavery and, ultimately, to all who would endure the devastating conflict fought over it.

1790s

Second Great Awakening begins

1800

Thomas Jefferson elected president

1807

Robert Fulton launches the Clermont, the first American steamboat

1808

Congress ends the African slave trade

1810s–1820s

States abolish property requirements among white men for voting and officeholding

1812–1814

War of 1812 against England interrupts transatlantic trade

1816

African Methodist Episcopal Church established in Philadelphia

1819

Panic causes economic collapse and hardships for debtors

1819–1820

Conflict over admission of Missouri as a slave state ends with the Missouri Compromise

1823

First textile mill opens in new city of Lowell, Massachusetts

1824

Erie Canal completed, accelerating commerce

1828

Andrew Jackson elected president, initiating era known as Jacksonian democracy

1830

Godey’s Lady’s Book begins publication

1830

Baltimore and Ohio Railroad opens the first passenger line

1830

Indian Removal Act passed by Congress

1830s

Growth of first commercial cities

1830s

Labor movement gains strength

1830s

Temperance movement expands

1833–1842

Lucy Larcom works in Lowell textile mills

1834

Female operatives at Lowell first go on strike

1834

First Female Moral Reform Society formed

1835–1842

Runaway slave Harriet Jacobs hides in her grandmother’s attic

1837

Panic touches off major industrial depression

1837

Sarah Josepha Hale becomes editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book

1837

Samuel Morse patents the Morse code for the telegraph

1838–1839

Cherokee Trail of Tears

1839

Mississippi changes laws to protect married women’s title to inherited property

1841

Catharine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy published

1845–1849

J. Marion Sims performs experimental gynecological surgery on enslaved women in Alabama

1845–1849

Potato blight in Ireland prompts a huge wave of immigration to the United States

1845

Lowell Female Labor Reform Association formed

1845

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass published

1848

Ellen and William Craft escape from South Carolina slavery

1848

New York State passes Married Women’s Property Act

1848

Seneca Falls women’s rights convention held

1850

Compromise of 1850 includes an oppressive federal Fugitive Slave Law

1850s

Commercial sewing machine developed

1851–1852

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin published

1860

Republican Abraham Lincoln elected president

1860

Southern states begin to secede from the Union

1861

Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl published

THE IDEOLOGY OF TRUE WOMANHOOD

Lucy Larcom’s concern with the implications of her factory years for her character as a woman reflects a powerful ideology of gender roles that historians have variously labeled “the cult of true womanhood,” “the ideology of separate spheres,” or simply “domesticity.” This system of ideas, which took hold in the early years of the nineteenth century just as the United States was coming into its own as an independent nation, treated men and women as complete and absolute opposites, with almost no common human traits that transcended the differences of gender. The ideology of true womanhood also saw the larger society as carved into complementary but mutually exclusive “spheres” of public and private concerns, work and home life, politics and family. “In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes,” declared Alexis de Tocqueville, the French observer of American culture in the 1830s. “American women never manage the outward concerns of the family, or conduct a business, or take a part in political life; nor are they, on the other hand, ever compelled to perform the rough labor of the fields, or to make any of those laborious exertions, which demand the exertion of physical strength. No families are so poor, as to form an exception to this rule.”3

The experience of innumerable women in antebellum America — the slave women of the South, the mill girls of the North, the impoverished widows of the new cities, the rising number of female immigrants, even the hardworking farm wives — contradicted these assertions. Yet no aspect of this complex reality seemed to interfere with the widespread conviction that this gender ideology was “true.” The challenge of understanding American women’s history in the first half of the nineteenth century is to reconcile the extraordinary hegemony — that is, breadth and power — of the ideology of separate spheres with the wide variety of American women’s lives in these years, many of which tell a very different story.

Christian Motherhood

An ideology as culturally widespread as that of true womanhood is difficult to reduce to a set of beliefs, but several basic concepts do stand out. First and foremost, proponents situated true women in an exclusively domestic realm of home, family, and childrearing. They considered housewifery and childrearing not as work but as an effortless expression of women’s feminine natures. Action and leadership were reserved for man; inspiration and assistance were woman’s province. The home over which women presided was not merely a residence or a collection of people but, to use a popular phrase, “a haven in a heartless world,” where men could find solace from a grueling public existence. “The perfection of womanhood . . . is the wife and mother, the center of the family, that magnet that draws man to the domestic altar, that makes him a civilized being, a social Christian,” proclaimed the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1860. “The wife is truly the light of the home.”4

Teaching the Scriptures, The Religious Souvenir (1839)

Edited by Lydia H. Sigourney, The Religious Souvenir collected devotional poems and stories for Christian readers. This engraving of a mother and daughter studying the Bible vividly conveys the ideals of domesticity and piety at the heart of white women’s true womanhood. Fine furniture, clothing, and decorative objects also reflect the increased consumer activity of the middle-class home. A Romantic landscape fills the background, while abundant foliage inside and out suggests the woman’s fertility and the child’s growth under her tutelage.

At the core of the idea of woman’s sphere was motherhood. This basic contention was present in late eighteenth-century rhetoric about the importance of Republican Motherhood to the success of the American democratic experiment (see pp. 127–30). In stark contrast to the self-serving individualism expected of men and rewarded by economic advancement in the larger world, proponents of true womanhood described motherhood as a wholly selfless activity built around service to others. Oddly enough, given the importance that American political culture placed on independence of character, maternal selflessness was seen as the very source of national well-being, training citizens of the new nation to be virtuous, concerned with the larger good, and yet industrious and self-disciplined. Even women without children could bestow their motherly instincts on society’s unloved and ignored unfortunates. “Woman’s great mission is to train immature, weak and ignorant creatures, to obey the laws of God,” preached author and domestic ideologue Catharine Beecher in one of her many treatises on true womanhood, “first in the family, then in the school, then in the neighborhood, then in the nation, then in the world.”5 Beecher herself was unmarried and childless (see Reading into the Past: “The Peculiar Responsibilities of the American Woman”).

Women’s expansive maternity was thought to make them natural teachers and underlay the feminization of this profession in the early nineteenth century. Whereas in the eighteenth century, teaching was seen as a fundamentally male vocation, by the nineteenth century women were increasingly regarded as best suited to instruct the young, and primary school teaching became an overwhelmingly female occupation. Especially in New England, public education was becoming widespread, and classrooms were staffed by young Yankee women, literate but less expensive to hire than men. By one estimate, one-quarter of all women born in New England between 1825 and 1860 were schoolteachers at some point in their lives.6

Women’s motherly vocation had a deeply religious dimension. True womanhood was a fervently Protestant notion, which gave a redemptive power to female devotion and selfless sacrifice. The true woman functioned as Christ’s representative in daily life, and the domestic environment over which she presided served as a sort of sacred territory, where evil and worldly influences could be cleansed away. Beecher insisted that “the preparation of young ministers for the duties of the church does not surpass in importance the training of the minister of the nursery and school-room.”7

The special identification of women with Christian piety was firmly established by a new wave of religious revivals that swept through American society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beginning in the frontier communities of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, the Second Great Awakening moved east by the 1810s and 1820s. Western New York was known as the “burned-over district” because of the zealous religiosity that swept through it in these years. Conveyed by preachers inspired by personal spiritual conviction rather than theological training, religious fervor especially thrived outside large cities. In the South, blacks and whites were drawn together in similar extended revivals. A cultural phenomenon with many different sources, the Second Great Awakening was a reaction both to the political preoccupations of the revolutionary period and to swift changes in the American economic system. This religious revivalism also had a populist element, as it bypassed established clerical authority in favor of more direct spiritual experience among the broad mass of the American people. New evangelical forms of Protestant worship, especially in Baptist and Methodist congregations, stressed personal conversion and commitment to rooting out sin in this world.

Religious enthusiasm and activism gave women, who were the majority of converts in these revivals, an arena for individual expression and social recognition that they were denied in secular politics. To establish their reputations as effective religious leaders, popular evangelical preachers relied on their female followers. Catharine Beecher’s father, Lyman, and her brother, Henry Ward, were two such evangelical ministers. As for Catharine herself, she was never able to experience a full personal conversion and always doubted the depth of her religious conviction. Nonetheless, the career she was able to build for herself as an authority on proper Christian womanhood was much assisted by the association of the Beecher name with evangelical piety.

Women’s reputation for deeper religious sentiment was closely related to the assumption that the true woman was inherently uninterested in sexual expression, that she was “pure.” The notion of woman’s natural sexual innocence was a relatively modern concept. In traditional European Christian culture, women had been considered more dangerously sexual than men. The belief in women’s basic “passionlessness,” as one historian has named it, was a new idea that, in the context of the time, served to raise women’s stature.8 In the hierarchical nineteenth-century Protestant worldview, woman was less tied to humanity’s animal nature than man was, and this lifted her closer to the divine. Sexual appetite in the white, middle-class female was virtually unimaginable.9 However, poor women, and especially women of African and Native American descent, continued to be viewed by white Americans as excessively sexual beings. These class- and race-based assumptions about female sexuality made the presence of prostitutes profoundly disturbing to nineteenth-century moralists. If women were as lustful as men, there would be no one to control and contain sexual desire. As Dr. William Sanger wrote in his pathbreaking 1858 study of prostitution in New York City, “Were it otherwise, and the passions in both sexes equal, illegitimacy and prostitution would be far more rife in our midst than at present.”10 (See Primary Sources: “Prostitution in New York City, 1858,” pp. 191–95.)

New York City Prostitutes

Whether the number of prostitutes rose dramatically in the mid-nineteenth century, as many observers charged, in large cities they were certainly more visible and thus more disturbing to the middle-class public. Prostitutes and their clients commonly frequented the “third tier” of theaters, which was informally reserved for them. As this contemporary cartoon indicates, they could even be found at the most elegant theaters. The joke in this cartoon refers to the difficulty of distinguishing between prostitutes and reputable women of fashion. The term “gay” referred to prostitution, not homosexuality, in the nineteenth century.

Starting in the 1820s, pious women expanded their religious expression beyond churchgoing to participation in a wide variety of voluntary organizations that promoted the spiritual and moral uplift of the poor and unsaved. Some of these female benevolent associations sponsored missionary efforts to bring the blessings of Christianity to unbelievers at home and abroad. By the 1830s, an extensive network of Protestant women’s organizations was sending money to church missions throughout Asia and Africa. A handful of adventuresome women went to preach the gospel abroad, mostly as wives of male missionaries. Ann Hasseltine Judson, who served with her husband in the 1820s in Rangoon, Burma, was the first American woman missionary in Asia. Closer to home, female missionaries brought Christian solace to the American urban poor. Pious middle-class women joined their ministers in “friendly visiting” to preach the word of Christ to society’s downtrodden and outcast.

Many free black women in the northern states embraced the culture of middle-class female Christian piety, yet entrenched racial and economic inequality created tensions between the ideals of true womanhood and the realities of free black life. By 1840, almost 171,000 free African Americans resided in the northern states, especially in the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Hundreds of mutual aid societies, churches, and schools sprung up in these black communities. The first independent black Protestant denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, founded in Philadelphia in 1816, had a large membership of free black women. Most free black women worked as domestics or laundresses, and others became accomplished seamstresses and milliners. Even when economic reality did not match the domestic ideal, free black women asserted their dignity and personhood through a culture of respectability based on moral conduct and self-improvement.

Edward Clay, “Is Miss Dina at home?” Life in Philadelphia series (1828)

Edward Clay, a white engraver and printmaker of Philadelphia, created a series of popular prints mocking antebellum social pretensions. Reflecting the racial animosity of many northern whites, Clay often caricatured free black life in his series Life in Philadelphia. The caption in this print mocks a black man’s use of a calling card, common to nineteenth-century middle-class social etiquette, in his visit to “Dina.” (“Dina” was a common generic name used for black domestic workers in nineteenth-century racist humor.) The exchange between the woman and man reads: “Is Miss Dina at home? Yes Sir but she potickly engaged in washing de dishes. Ah! I am sorry I cant have the honour to pay my devours to her. Give her my card.” How does Clay combine speech and image to ridicule free African American claims to citizenship and equality?

READING INTO THE PAST

CATHARINE BEECHER

The Peculiar Responsibilities of the American Woman

In the first chapter of A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), a book devoted to the details of childrearing and homemaking, author and domestic ideologue Catharine Beecher (1800–1878) elaborates her theory of American democracy and women’s place in it. She insists that women’s inclusion in the American promise of equality is completely compatible with the subordination that she believed was divinely ordained in wives’ relations to their husbands.

In this Country, it is established, both by opinion and by practice, that woman has an equal interest in all social and civil concerns; and that no domestic, civil, or political, institution, is right, which sacrifices her interest to promote that of the other sex. But in order to secure her the more firmly in all these privileges, it is decided, that, in the domestic relation, she take a subordinate station, and that, in civil and political concerns, her interests be intrusted to the other sex, without her taking any part in voting, or in making and administering laws. . . . In matters pertaining to the education of their children, in the selection and support of a clergy-man, in all benevolent enterprises, and in all questions relating to morals or manners, [women] have a superior influence. In such concerns, it would be impossible to carry a point, contrary to their judgement and feelings; while an enterprise, sustained by them, will seldom fail of success.

If those who are bewailing themselves over the fancied wrongs and injuries of women in this Nation, could only see things as they are, they would know, that . . . there is nothing reasonable, which American women would unite in asking, that would not readily be bestowed. . . . To us [Americans] is committed the grand, the responsible privilege, of exhibiting to the world, the beneficent influences of Christianity. . . . But the part to be enacted by American women, in this great moral enterprise, is the point to which special attention should here be directed. . . . The proper education of a man decides the welfare of an individual; but educate a woman, and the interests of the whole family are secured. . . .

The woman, who is rearing a family of children; the woman, who labors in the schoolroom; the woman, who, in her retired chamber, earns, with her needle, the mite, which contributes to the intellectual and moral elevation of her Country; even the humble domestic, whose example and influence may be moulding and forming young minds, while her faithful services sustain a prosperous domestic state; — each and all may be animated by the consciousness, that they are agents in accomplishing the greatest work that ever was committed to human responsibility.

SOURCE: Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (New York: Marsh, Capen, Lyon, and Webb, 1841), ch. 1.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What does this passage, written more than a half century after the American Revolution, indicate about Beecher’s vision of the grand political purposes served by women’s special domestic role, for both the United States and the rest of the world?

How do Beecher’s ideas compare to the Republican Motherhood concept of the earlier revolutionary years?

A Middle-Class Ideology

Despite the wide range of those who subscribed to its tenets, the ideology of true womanhood was a thoroughly middle-class social ethic. Certainly, the assumption that a woman should be insulated from economic demands to concentrate on creating a stable and peaceful home environment presumed she was married to a man able to support her as a dependent wife. The middle-class wife in turn was responsible for what Beecher characterized as “the regular and correct apportionment of expenses that makes a family truly comfortable.”11 The idealized true woman, presiding over a virtuous family life, was a crucial staple of the way Americans contrasted themselves with European aristocratic society. Adherence to the ideology of true womanhood also helped people of the middle classes to distinguish themselves from those they regarded as their social and economic inferiors. In their charitable activities among the poor, true women preached the gospel of separate sexual spheres and female domesticity, convinced that the absence of these family values, rather than economic forces, was what made poor people poor.

These ideas reflected changing conditions in middle-class American women’s lives. The birthrate for the average American-born white woman fell from 6 in 1800 to 4.9 in 1850, in part because economic modernization meant that children were less important as extra hands to help support the family and more likely to be a financial drain. Also, technological developments — for example, the new cast-iron stove, which was easier and safer than open-hearth cooking — were just beginning to ease women’s household burdens. As the industrial production of cloth accelerated, women no longer had to spin and weave at home, although they still cut and sewed their family’s clothes. Depending on their husbands’ incomes, middle-class women might be able to hire servants to help with their labors. Even so, the middle-class housewife did plenty of work herself. Despite technological developments, leisure time was a privilege for only the very richest women. Laundry, the most burdensome of domestic obligations, remained a difficult weekly chore.

The doctrine of domesticity was elaborated by ministers in sermons and physicians in popular health books. But women themselves did much of the work of spreading these ideas. The half century in which this rigid ideology of gender first flourished was also the period in which writing by women first found a mass audience among middle-class women. Lydia Sigourney, a beloved woman’s poet; Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, popular author of numerous sentimental novels; and Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the influential women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book (with 150,000 subscribers in 1860), all built successful careers elaborating the ideology of true womanhood. (See Primary Sources: “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” pp. 204–10.) In her influential and much reprinted Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), Catharine Beecher taught that woman’s sphere was a noble “profession,” equal in importance and challenge to any of the tasks assigned to men. Her younger half sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, relied heavily on the ideas of woman’s sphere in her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851), which became the most widely read American novel ever written.

In the judgment of such women, the tremendous respect paid to woman’s lofty state was one of the distinguishing glories of nineteenth-century America. While proponents of true womanhood insisted that woman’s sphere differed from man’s, they regarded it as of equal importance to society and worthy of respect. Lucy Larcom put it this way: “God made no mistake in her [woman’s] creation. He sent her into the world full of power and will to be a helper. . . . She is here to make this great house of humanity a habitable and a beautiful place, without and within, a true home for every one of his children.”12

The many women of the nineteenth century who energetically subscribed to the ideas of true womanhood were not brainwashed victims of a male ideological conspiracy. Private writings of middle-class women from this period, letters and diaries notably, show women embracing these ideas and using them to give purpose to their lives. Not only could the true woman claim authority over the household and childrearing, but the widespread belief in her special moral vocation legitimated certain kinds of activity outside the domestic sphere. Despite its middle-class character, the doctrine of true womanhood was strikingly widespread throughout antebellum American society. Almost the only women during this period who openly challenged its tenets were the women’s rights radicals (see pp. 243–48).

Domesticity in a Market Age

By fervently insisting that women had to be insulated from the striving and bustle of the outside world, the advocates of true womanhood were implicitly responding to the impact of larger economic pressures on women’s lives. The ideology of separate spheres and women’s sheltered domesticity notwithstanding, women’s history during this period can be understood only in the context of the burgeoning market economy. The development and growth of a cash-based market-oriented economy — as opposed to one in which people mostly produced goods for their own immediate use — reaches back to the very beginnings of American history and forward into the twentieth century. But early nineteenth-century America is rightly seen as the time in which the fundamental shift toward market-oriented production took place.

The spread of market relations had particular implications for women. In preindustrial society, men’s work as well as women’s was considered fundamentally domestic. Both sexes worked within and for the household, not for trade on the open market. By the eighteenth century, this was already changing as commercial transactions were growing in significance. Especially within urban areas, various household goods — soap and candles, for example, or processed foods like flour and spices — were available for purchase. By the early nineteenth century, households needed to acquire more and more cash to buy consumer goods to fill the needs of daily life. Acquiring this money became men’s obligation.

With the rise of the market economy, much of men’s work moved outside the home, and women alone did work in the domestic realm for direct use. Because work was increasingly regarded as what happened outside the home, done by men and compensated for by money, what women did in the home was becoming invisible as productive labor. From this perspective, the lavish attention the proponents of true womanhood paid to the moral significance of woman’s domestic sphere might be seen as ideological compensation for the decline in its economic value.

Industrial depressions, which affected the entire society and not just the lower rungs of wage earners, were becoming a regular, seemingly inescapable characteristic of industrial society, the bust that inevitably followed the boom. In 1837, the U.S. economy, which had been growing by leaps and bounds, violently contracted, and prices dropped precipitously, banks collapsed, and wages fell by as much as a third. The Panic of 1837, as it was called for the response of investor and wage earner alike, was an early and formative experience in the lives of many women, among them the future women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony, whose father lost his grain mill business in that year.

Despite waning recognition of women’s role in economic production, popular nineteenth-century ideology assumed that in the household, women could counteract some of the more disturbing aspects of economic expansion. A woman’s household management skills and emotional steadiness were supposed to be crucial in helping her family weather the shifting financial winds that were such an unnerving aspect of the new economy. “When we observe the frequent revolutions from poverty to affluence and then from extravagance to ruin, that are continually taking place around us,” wrote Mrs. A. J. Graves in her popular handbook Woman in America (1841), “and their calamitous effects upon families brought up in luxury and idleness, have we not reason to fear that our ‘homes of order and peace’ are rapidly disappearing?”13 Seen this way, the proper conduct of woman’s sphere virtually became a matter of economic survival.

WOMEN AND WAGE EARNING

As Mrs. Graves’s admonition indicates, the depiction of woman’s sphere as unconnected to the striving and bustle of the outside world is misleading. Indeed, women felt the pressures of a consumer-based (or cash-based) market economy in many ways. Some women found ways to make money from within their households — for instance, by selling extra butter or eggs. Barely visible to a society focused on its own capacity for productive prosperity, impoverished urban women, widowed or deserted by men, scrounged or begged for pennies to buy shelter, food, and warmth.

Of all women’s intersections with the cash economy and the forces of the market revolution, none was more important for women’s history than the employment of young New England women like Lucy Larcom as factory operatives at the power-driven spindles and looms of the newly established American textile industry. Though their numbers were small, these young women constituted the first emergence of the female wage labor force (see the Appendix, p. A-18).

From Market Revolution to Industrial Revolution

To understand the experiences of early nineteenth-century women factory workers, we must place them in the setting of the era’s industrial transformations. The growth of a market economy encouraged the centralization and acceleration of the production of goods. This industrializing process was gradual and uneven, a fact that becomes especially clear when we focus on the distinct contribution of women workers. For a long time after industrialization began, people continued to produce goods at home, even as their control over what they made and their share of its value were seriously eroded. In this transitional form of manufacture for sale, male entrepreneurs, or “factors,” purchased the raw materials for production and distributed them to workers in their homes, then paid for the finished goods and sold them to customers. Workers no longer received the full cash value of what they had produced since the factor also made money from the process. In essence, the workers were receiving a wage for their labor instead of being paid for their products, which were no longer theirs to sell. Their labor was increasingly considered only a part, not the entirety, of the production process.

Shoemaking is a particularly interesting example, both because its transition to full industrialization was prolonged and because women and men underwent this transition at different rates. Making shoes for sale was already an established activity by the early nineteenth century, especially in cities north of Boston, notably Lynn, Massachusetts. At first, shoes were manufactured in home-based workshops in which the male head of the household was the master artisan and his wife, children, and apprentices worked under his direction. Starting in the 1820s and 1830s, a new class of shoemaking entrepreneurs brought male shoemakers, who specialized in cutting and sewing soles, to a centralized site, while women continued to sew the shoes’ uppers and linings at home. By the 1840s and 1850s, women’s labor was being directed and paid for by the entrepreneurs. It was not until later in the nineteenth century, after the Civil War, that women’s part in shoe production moved into factories.

Clothing manufacture remained in a similar “outwork” phase for a long time. Women working at home produced most of the clothing manufactured for sale in the antebellum period. By 1860, there were sixteen thousand seamstresses in New York City alone.14 Industrialization ravaged many of these mid-nineteenth-century poor women and their families. Other than for slaves, manufacture of clothing did not begin to shift into factories until after the Civil War — and well into the twentieth century the workshop form of production continued to thrive, in sweatshops. Other industries that relied on women outworkers included straw-hat making and bookbinding. Limited to their homes by childrearing responsibilities, married women remained home-based industrial outworkers much longer than did men or unmarried women. The more exclusively female that outwork was, the more poorly it paid.

Manufacturing could be said to be fully industrialized only when it shifted to a separate, centralized location, the factory, at which point home and work were fully separated. In factories, entrepreneurs could introduce more expensive machinery and supervise labor more closely, both intended to maximize their profits. Factories and the machines within them were the manufacturers’ contribution to the process, the “capital” that gave them control and ownership over the product of the workers.

Male artisans, no longer the masters of their family workshops, experienced the shift to the factory as absolute decline; for women the shift of manufacturing to outside the home offered a more mixed experience. Factory ownership was entirely in the hands of men, and women, whose secondary status had already been established in home manufacturing, earned a much lower wage than men for tasks that were inevitably considered less skilled. Yet women’s turn to factory labor also gave them the chance to earn wages as individuals, and at times to experience a taste of personal freedom. As Lucy Larcom explained, young women like herself “were clearing away a few weeds from the overgrown track of independent labor for other women.”15

The Mill Girls of Lowell

By the 1820s, textile production, one of the most important of America’s early industries — and certainly the most female dominated — was decisively shifting in the direction of factory labor. If the impoverished “tailoresses” working out of their dark urban garrets stood for the depredation of women by industrial capitalists, the factory girls of the textile industry came to represent the better possibilities that wage labor might offer women. And “girls” they were — unmarried, many in their teens. (See Primary Sources: “Early Photographs of Factory Operatives and Slave Women,” pp. 211–18.) Though they were only a tiny percentage of women — as of 1840, only 2.25 percent16 — these first female factory workers understood themselves, and were understood by others in their society, as opening up new vistas of personal independence and economic contribution for their sex.

The story of the first women factory workers began in the American textile industry during and immediately after the War of 1812. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Americans bought wool, linen, and cotton cloth manufactured in the textile factories of Great Britain. The war with England interrupted the transatlantic trade in factory-made cloth, creating an irresistible opportunity for wealthy New England merchants, who had heretofore made their money by importing British textiles, to invest in American-based industry. In 1814 in Waltham, Massachusetts, a group of local merchants opened the first American factory to house all aspects of textile production under one roof. In an early and daring example of industrial espionage, they had spirited out of England designs for water-driven machinery for both spinning and weaving. The investors enjoyed quick and substantial profits, and in 1823 the same group of venture capitalists opened a much larger operation twenty-three miles away, on Merrimack River farmland north of Boston. The new factory town, named after the leading figure in the merchant capital group, Francis Cabot Lowell, soon became synonymous with the energetic American textile industry and with the young women who provided its labor force.

Previously, in England and in earlier, unsuccessful efforts at factory textile production in the United States, whole families who would otherwise be destitute were the workers: children worked the spinning machines and looms. This impoverished working population gave factory production a bad name, best captured by British poet William Blake’s terrifying 1804 image of the “dark satanic mills” soiling “England’s green and pleasant land.”17 Textile factories were regarded as poorhouses designed for keeping indigent people from disrupting society. Given the availability of land for farms in the United States, this type of labor force was not as obtainable for aspiring American textile industrialists. But an alternative had been identified as early as the 1790s by President George Washington’s secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, an early promoter of American industrial production. Hamilton advocated hiring the unmarried daughters of farming families, who could move in and out of industrial production without becoming a permanent and impoverished wage labor force like that which haunted England. By laboring for wages in textile factories, these young women could for a time help provide their families with the cash that they increasingly required. The fact that the spinning of fiber for cloth had been the traditional work of women in the preindustrial household (especially unmarried women, hence the term “spinster”) provided an additional argument for turning to a female labor force.

To the delight of New England textile capitalists, girls from Yankee farm families took to factory labor in the 1820s and early 1830s with great enthusiasm. Earning an individual wage offered them a degree of personal independence that was very attractive to these young women. Many were eager to work in the factories, despite thirteen-hour days, six-day workweeks, and wages of $1 to $2 per week.18 “I regard it as one of the privileges of my youth that I was permitted to grow up among these active, interesting girls,” Lucy Larcom wrote in her memoirs, “whose lives were not mere echoes of other lives, but had principles and purposes distinctly their own.”19 Even though they saved their wages and sent as much as possible to their families, the mill girls occasionally spent some of their earnings on themselves; for this they were regarded by contemporaries as spoiled and self-indulgent. And although their workdays were extraordinarily long and the labor much more unrelenting than that to which they were accustomed, they reveled in the small amounts of time they had for themselves in the evenings. Larcom’s reminiscences detail the classes she and her sister attended, the writing they did, and the friendships they made. Factory girls at Lowell and elsewhere even formed female benevolent societies, as did their more middle-class counterparts.

One problem, however, stood in the way of the success of this solution to the problem of factory labor: Where were the young women workers to live? Given the scale of the labor force required by the large new factories and the decentralized character of the New England population, young women would have to be brought from their homes to distant factories. Parents were reluctant to allow their daughters to be so far from home and away from family supervision. Factory work for women, probably because it had been so dreadfully underpaid in England, was suspected of being an avenue to prostitution. The manufacturers’ solution to both the housing and moral supervision dilemmas was to build boardinghouses for their young workers and to link work and living arrangements in a paternalistic approach to industrial production. Four to six young women shared each bedroom, and their behavior was closely supervised. The boardinghouses, and the camaraderie among young women that flourished there, added to the allure of factory labor. To the farm girls of New England, this was greater cosmopolitanism than they had ever known.

For about a decade, the city of Lowell and the Lowell system (as the employment of young farm girls as factory workers was called) were among the glories of the new American nation. Visitors came from Europe to see and sing the praises of the moral rectitude and industry of the women workers in this new type of factory production, free of the corruptions of the old world. “They were healthy in appearance, many of them remarkably so,” Charles Dickens wrote after a visit in 1842, “and had the manners and deportment of young women; not of degraded brutes of burden.”20 The dignity and probity of the Lowell girls were crucial elements in the optimism that temporarily thrived regarding the possibilities of a genuinely democratic American version of industrial factory production, in which all could profit from the new levels of wealth. “The experiment at Lowell had shown that independent and intelligent workers invariably give their own character to their occupation,” Larcom proudly wrote.21 Young women workers wrote stories, essays, and poems about their experience at the factories for their own literary journal, the Lowell Offering, to put their uprightness and their intelligence on display. Larcom began a long career as a writer this way. Factory owners, not insensitive to the propaganda value of such efforts, underwrote the magazine, paid the editor’s salary, and distributed issues widely.

The Lowell Offering

The Lowell Offering was the mill owner–sponsored publication of original writings by women workers known as “factory girls.” Conditions in the mills had already begun to deteriorate by 1845, the date of this publication. Nonetheless, the image’s foreground shows a confident, literate, individual woman stepping out into the larger world. In the background are the mills and boardinghouses in which the working girls lived and worked. Note the idealized pastoral frame, so different from the actual reality of the industrial process and its impact on the city, factories, and workers of Lowell.

The End of the Lowell Idyll

Eventually, however, economic pressures took their toll on Lowell’s great promise, at least for the workers. Declining prices for cotton and wool and investors’ expectations of high returns led factory owners to slash wages. Within the first decade, wages were cut twice. The factory owners counted on the womanly demeanor of their employees to get them to accept the cuts. But they were wrong. In 1834 and 1836, in response to lower wages, Lowell girls “turned out” — conducted spontaneous strikes — and in the process began to question notions of womanhood that forbade such demonstrations of individual and group assertion. They repudiated the deference and subordination expected of them on the grounds of their sex and championed, instead, their dignity and independence as proud “daughters of freemen.” One young striker, Harriet Hanson, who went on to become a leader in the woman suffrage movement, remembered that the strike “was the first time a woman had spoken in public in Lowell, and the event caused surprise and consternation among her audience.”22 But the Panic of 1837, which triggered contraction of the entire industrial economy, doomed the efforts of the women operatives to act collectively, defend their jobs, and preserve the level of their wages. Workers were laid off and mills shut down. Young girls went back to their farm families to wait out the economic downturn.

When the economy revived and the mills resumed full production, workers were expected to increase their pace, tend more machines, and produce more cloth. Production levels rose, but wages did not. Moral concerns were giving way to the bottom line. In 1845, Lowell’s women workers formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association and joined with male workers in other Massachusetts factories in petitioning the state legislature to establish a ten-hour legal limit to their workdays as a way to resist work pressure and keep up levels of employment. This turn to the political system to redress group grievance was part of the larger democratic spirit of the period. It is especially striking to find women engaged in these methods at a time when politics was regarded as thoroughly outside of woman’s sphere. Indeed, the legislative petitions of the women textile workers of the 1840s are an important indicator that women were beginning to imagine themselves as part of the political process. But for precisely this reason, because women still lacked whatever voting power male workers could muster, they were unable to secure any gains by their legislative petitions.

Conditions of factory labor were changing in other ways as well, most notably in the composition of the labor force. The Lowell system had been devised in the context of a shortage of workers willing to take factory jobs. By the 1840s, however, immigrants were providing an ever-growing labor pool for industrial employment. Coming to the United States in large numbers, they poured into the wage labor force. The Irish were both the largest and the most economically desperate of all the new arrivals. Starting in 1845, a terrible blight on the potato crop that was the staple of the Irish diet, exacerbated by the harsh policies of England toward its oldest colony, threw the population into starvation conditions and compelled well over a million Irish men and women to emigrate to the United States. The textile capitalists, no longer pressured by labor shortages to make factory employment seem morally uplifting, paid low wages to and enforced harsh working conditions on these new immigrant workers, who soon constituted the majority of mill laborers.

Part of the initial attraction that native-born farm girls had for capitalists was the knowledge that they would eventually marry and return to their families and farms, and therefore their factory labor would be only a brief episode in their lives. The dreaded old world fate of becoming a permanently degraded and dependent wage labor class went instead to the Irish Catholic immigrants, who by 1860 were well over half of the workers in the industry. Immigrant men now worked the looms and immigrant women the spindles. Public celebrations of the high moral character of the factory operatives — the womanly demeanor and hunger for self-improvement that were once the boast of the industry — disappeared. Wage earning was increasingly seen as undermining respectable femininity. Working women and true women were going their separate ways.

Irish Immigration

Mary Anne Madden Sadlier, the author of the first American-written novel about an Irish immigrant woman, herself left Ireland in 1844. Living first in Montreal, she and her husband, James Sadlier, a book and magazine publisher, moved to New York City in 1860. Her novel Bessy Conway, or The Irish Girl in America (1861) modified the domestic focus of true womanhood ideology for a Catholic audience and blamed Protestant values and prejudices for the poverty and social ills that the Irish experienced in the United States.

At the Bottom of the Wage Economy

Tremendous prejudice was directed at the Irish in the early years of industrialization, in no small part because they were becoming so thoroughly identified with wage labor. The Irish were one of the very few immigrant groups in nineteenth-century American history in which the number of women roughly equaled that of men. Those who did not work in factories labored as domestic servants. In preindustrial America, the housewife had turned to young neighbors or relatives as “helps” in her domestic obligations. Lucy Larcom worked for her sister in this traditional capacity whenever the downturns in factory conditions were too much for her. But in industrializing America, especially as the numbers of Irish immigrants grew, mistress and maid were becoming separated by a much greater cultural and economic gap and losing their sense of common task and purpose. In 1852, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founding mother of the American women’s rights movement (see pp. 243–48), complained of the “two undeveloped Hibernians in my kitchen” whose ignorance of modern household procedures she felt powerless to remedy.23 The industrious, Protestant, Yankee middle-class housewife saw the Catholic Irish “girls” she hired to cook and clean and do laundry as dirty, ignorant, and immoral.

The divide between native-born middle-class mistress and immigrant wage-earning maid could almost be said to define class distinctions among free women. Complaints about the difficulty of finding or keeping “good help” were a staple of middle-class female culture (see Figure 4.6, p. 208). Some women organized societies to place needy girls as workers in suitable homes. However, the objects of their charity rarely regarded domestic service as a privilege. Domestic servants’ habits of working erratically, changing employers often, and presenting a sullen demeanor were means of protesting a form of employment they did not like and that was not respected in democratic America, where the deference expected in personal service already had given it a bad name. Their female employers could never understand why, even when wages were competitive, their domestic servants did their best to switch to factory employment. There, though the workday was long and the labor hard, a factory job ended with the dismissal bell after which a young woman’s time became her own.

At the very bottom of the economic ladder, beneath even the lower rungs of domestic service, were the urban poor. America had always had its poor people, but this destitute class was new, as it included able-bodied people willing to work but unable to find jobs that would support themselves and their families. The most desperate of the urban poor were the women with children but without men (or, more precisely, without access to the higher wages a man could earn). These poor urban women were the absolute antithesis of true womanhood. The rooms in which they lived could hardly be called homes: they were not furnished, clean, or private. Unschooled and unsupervised, their children went into the streets or worked for a pittance to help support their families. Housework was especially difficult for poor urban women: they carried water for laundry or coal for warmth or small amounts of food for dinner up steps into tiny tenement apartments or down into cellar spaces (where twenty-nine thousand lived in New York City as of 1850).24 After each downturn of the industrial economy, the numbers of urban poor swelled.

The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows, formed in New York City in 1799, was the first American charity organized by women for women.25 The charitable ladies did not provide outright cash or employment, instead dispensing spiritual and moral ministrations along with occasional food, coal, and clothing. In such exchanges, just as in the relationship between mistress and maid, middle-class and poor women met each other across the class divide, probably struck more with what separated them than with what they allegedly shared by virtue of their common gender.

William Henry Burr, The Intelligence Office

This 1849 painting of an employment office dramatically portrays the harsh reality of poor working women in search of employment, as two young women are displayed before a potential employer by the male proprietor. The sign at the back reads “Agents for Domestics. Warranted Honest.”

WOMEN, SLAVERY, AND THE SOUTH

Perhaps the greatest irony embedded in the dynamic beginnings of industrial capitalism is the degree to which it rested on a very different social and economic system that also thrived in early nineteenth-century America: chattel slavery. As northern states gradually abolished slavery, the institution became identified exclusively with the South. At the same time, the North and the South were linked in important ways. Both regions added new states to the west that displaced Native Americans through various wars and treaties. In the South, the gigantic cotton crop grown by slave labor was the raw material of New England’s textile industry. Among the greatest advocates of American democracy were numerous southern slaveholders, including four of this country’s first five presidents. And at many levels, the North and South shared a national culture. Their citizens read the same books and magazines, worshipped in the same Protestant denominations, voted for the same political parties, and embraced a doctrine of manifest destiny. Southern white women followed many essentials of the cult of domesticity. But underlying these similarities were fundamental differences, signifying a conflict that eventually led to civil war.

The absence in the South of the wage relationship between producer and capitalist lay at the heart of these sectional differences. Property owners accumulated great profits in the South, and much of what was produced there was intended for sale. But the workers of the system were not paid any wages for their labor. They were chattel slaves, human property, the value of whose current and future labor, along with the land they worked, constituted the wealth of their owners. Like the factory buildings and machines that produced wealth in the Northeast, they were capital; but they were also human beings. While the southern states expanded their system of human property, white southern politicians also set their sights on the extensive territory of southeastern Native Americans. Paired with aggressive state legislation, a new U.S. Indian removal law remade the map of Indian America.

Southern Native Americans and U.S. Removal Policy

While planters owned their growing captive labor force, Native American societies still claimed much of the land in the trans-Appalachian South. In the early nineteenth century, slavery and cotton began to expand into what was called the “new” or “lower” South (western Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas). This move was greatly facilitated by a sustained, concerted effort of land-hungry whites, aided by the state governments of Georgia and the Carolinas and legal manipulation by the U.S. government under President Andrew Jackson. Together, white settler violence backed by new state and federal laws as well as military force worked to push the Indian peoples of the Southeast — the Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Cherokees — off their extensive lands. The Cherokees in particular had tried to adapt to American society and resist land sales (see Reading into the Past: “Cherokee Women Petition the National Council”), and Cherokee women had learned the domestic tasks of housewifery. The Cherokee leader Sequoyah had devised a written language, enabling the translation of the Christian Bible and the drafting of a political constitution. Some Cherokee families — as well as those in other southeastern Indian tribes — grew wealthy as owners of large cotton plantations and enslaved African-descended workers. Although Native American societies already had long-standing practices of captivity and servitude, this new market-oriented form of chattel slavery supplanted the tradition of Indian women’s agricultural labor and introduced racialized notions of black inferiority.

All of these efforts to maintain sovereign Indian lands through assimilation proved ineffective, however, once Andrew Jackson was elected president. Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 through Congress and then, ignoring Supreme Court decisions partially favoring Cherokee sovereignty, sent federal troops to Georgia to enforce a treaty that had been signed by only a small faction of the Cherokee nation. In 1838, the Cherokees were forcibly driven into the newly established Indian Territory west of the Mississippi, across what the Cherokees called the “Trail of Tears.” The lands taken from them became the center of slave-grown cotton and tobacco productivity. Meanwhile, in the older southern states of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, where soil had become exhausted and productivity slumped, slaves themselves became a kind of crop, a surplus to be sold.

READING INTO THE PAST

Beloved Children: Cherokee Women Petition the National Council

The expansion of chattel slavery and plantation agriculture into the lower South required the United States to assist its property-hungry citizens to take over the lands of the Native peoples living there. In the early nineteenth century, the federal government negotiated a number of land cessions in treaties with southern tribes, including the Cherokee. In 1817, thirteen Cherokee women sent this petition to their own National Council to warn against the transfer of any more lands to white ownership. Among the signers was eighty-year-old Nancy Ward (see p. 116), whose high standing among her people harked back to an earlier age in which women shared political and social authority with men. The signers spoke for those women who had given up their traditional agricultural responsibilities in favor of American domestic tasks, such as making clothing. Nonetheless, their words indicate a continuing identification through their gender with the land.

May 2, 1817: The Cherokee ladys now being present at the meeting of the chiefs and warriors in council have thought it their duty as mothers to address their beloved chiefs and warriors now assembled.

Our beloved children and head men of the Cherokee Nation, we address you warriors in council. We have raised all of you on the land which we now have, which God gave us to inhabit and raise provisions. We know that our country has once been extensive, but by repeated sales [it] has become circumscribed to a small track, and [we] never have thought it our duty to interfere in the disposition of it till now. If a father or mother was to sell all their lands which they had to depend on, which their children had to raise their living on, [it] would be indeed bad & [so would it to] be removed to another country. We do not wish to go to an unknown country to which we have understood some of our children wish to go over the Mississippi, but this act of our children would be like destroying your mothers.

Your mothers, your sisters ask and beg of you not to part with any more of our land. We say ours. You are our descendants; take pity on our request. But keep it for our growing children, for it was the good will of our creator to place us here, and you know our father, the great president, will not allow his white children to take our country away. Only keep your hands off of paper talks for it’s our own country. For [if] it was not, they would not ask you to put your hands to paper, for it would be impossible to remove us all. For as soon as one child is raised, we have others in our arms, for such is our situation & [they] will consider our circumstance.

Therefore, children, don’t part with any more of our lands but continue on it & enlarge your farms. Cultivate and raise corn & cotton and your mothers and sisters will make clothing for you which our father the president has recommended to us all. . . . Nancy Ward to her children: Warriors to take pity and listen to the talks of your sisters. Although I am very old yet [I] cannot but pity the situation in which you will here [sic] of their minds. I have great many grand children which [I] wish them to do well on our land.

SOURCE: Presidential Papers Microfilm: Andrew Jackson (Washington, D.C., 1961, series 1, reel 22).

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

How is Cherokee women’s identification with the land reflected in their petition?

What sources of authority do Cherokee women invoke to validate their petition to “their beloved chiefs and warriors”?

Plantation Patriarchy

Over the first half of the nineteenth century, slaveownership became increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer whites. By 1860 only an estimated 25 percent of southern white families owned any slaves; of these, only a small minority owned enough to qualify for elite status and significant political and economic power. Planters owning anywhere from twenty to over one thousand slaves controlled the large concentrations of land and labor that formed the power basis of southern slave society (see Map 4.1). On large market-oriented agricultural estates slaves were organized into large work gangs in which they raised the cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco that made the South wealthy. These plantations were not only the economic core but the social, political, and cultural centers of slave society. In general, the nineteenth-century slave South did not develop the dynamic civil society that flourished in the North. The growth of an industrial economy and of a wage labor class was limited in the South to a few urban centers, such as Richmond and Atlanta. With the sole exception of party politics, which wealthy men dominated, public life did not thrive. As a result, plantation women’s lives varied significantly from those of northern women.

Map 4.1 Number of Slaves per Slaveholder, per County, 1860

The cotton boom shifted enslaved African Americans to the lower and western South. In 1790, most slaves lived and worked on the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake and in the rice and indigo areas of South Carolina. By 1860, the centers of slavery lay along the Mississippi River and in an arc of fertile cotton land sweeping from Mississippi through Georgia.

To begin with, family life was different. The ideological distinction between public and private, work and family — much touted in the North — did not really exist on the great southern plantations. The plantation was residence and workplace simultaneously, and the white male head of household presided over both. Instead of the mutually exclusive but allegedly equal gender roles dictated by the northern culture of domesticity, slave society was proudly patriarchal, with men’s social and political power derived from their leadership in the home. Wealthy white southern men were fiercely jealous of the honor of their women and their families, and they were notorious for their willingness to resort to violence to avenge any perceived slights against them. Female deference to male authority was considered a virtue, and any moral superiority granted to women gave them no social or political authority. Inasmuch as wealthy women left the daily tasks of childrearing to their slaves, maternity was neither revered nor sentimentalized.

Owners regarded slave men and women not just as workers but as permanently childlike dependents — at best amusing, guileless, but lacking in judgment and authority. By this obfuscating ideology, the plantation community was treated as a single large family, with master-parents and slave-children, bound by devotion and reciprocal obligations of service and protection. One white woman, writing about her father’s plantation, truly believed that “the family servants, inherited for generations, had come to be regarded with great affection. . . . The bond between master and servant was, in many cases, felt to be as sacred and close as the tie of blood.”26 When slavery was abolished, masters and mistresses were often astounded to discover the degree of hostility their former slaves felt toward them.

Plantation patriarchy was a gender and family system, but one organized around racial difference and inequality. The structures and inequalities of race, much like those of gender, were so omnipresent as to seem natural and God-given. “Black” equaled “slave” and was understood as the opposite not only of “white” but of “free.” In contrast to this belief, it is important to recognize that by 1830 there were a third of a million black people in the United States who were not slaves, half of them living in the South. The lives of these people and their claims to free status were deeply compromised by the power of slavery and racial inequality. In the South, they were kept out of certain occupations, forbidden to carry firearms, denied the right to assembly, made to carry passes when traveling, and often legally required to register in court with a white guardian. Free black women in the South shared many of the same occupations with their counterparts in the North. In Augusta County, Virginia, for example, the 1860 census revealed sixty-seven females of color, ranging from age fourteen to seventy-two, who listed their occupations. Domestic work was most common, followed by laundering, whereas only five of these women listed themselves as seamstresses.27

Despite slave society’s insistence that the racial divide was absolute, the line that separated “black” from “white” was constantly being breached. Masters could — and certainly did — compel slave women to have sexual relations with them. When a slave woman gave birth to her master’s child, how was the racial divide on which slave patriarchy was premised to be maintained? The legal answer was that the child followed the status of the mother: the child was a slave because her female parent was a slave. This simple legal answer to a complex set of social relations hidden within slave society had enormous implications for the lives of southern women, black and white. While slavery is usually considered a system for organizing labor and producing profit, it was also a way of organizing and restraining sexual and reproductive relations, of controlling which sexual encounters produced legitimate children. In other words, managing race necessitated managing gender and sexuality.

Plantation Mistresses

The link between racial inequality and gender ideals is evident in the effusive literary and rhetorical praise devoted to the southern white feminine ideal. Elite white women in plantation society were elevated to a lofty pedestal that was the ideological inverse of the auction block on which enslaved women’s fate was sealed. As in the North, white women were supposed to be selfless, pure, pious, and possessed of great, if subtle, influence over husbands and sons. But the difference in the South was that white women’s purity was defined in contrast not to the condition of men but to the condition of black slave women.

As slavery came under more and more open criticism from northern opponents during the nineteenth century, rhetorical devotion to elite white women’s leisure and culture, to the preservation of their beauty and their sexual innocence, and to their protection from all distress and labor intensified. The message seemed to be that the purity of elite white womanhood, rather than the enslavement of black people, was the core value of southern society. “We behold,” proclaimed southern writer Thomas Dew, “the marked efficiency of slavery on the conditions of woman — we find her at once elevated, clothed with all her charms, mingling with and directing the society to which she belongs, no longer the slave, but the equal and the idol of man.”28 For the most part, women of the slaveholding class also held to the opinion that a lady’s life on a southern plantation was a great privilege. Any greater political and economic rights for white women were “but a piece of negro emancipation,” declared Louisa McCord, daughter of an important South Carolina slaveholder and politician, in 1852.29 She was sure that women like herself wanted no part of such a movement.

Whereas in the North, womanly virtues were meant to be universal, in the South, they were proudly exclusionary, applicable only to the few, a mark of the natural superiority of the elite and their right to own and command the labor of others. While the northern true woman was praised for her industrious domesticity, in the South a real lady was not allowed to sully herself or risk her charms with any actual labor, which was the mark of the slave. Leisure was especially the privilege of the unmarried young woman of the slaveholding class, who was not only spared any household obligations but also relieved of even the most intimate of responsibilities — dressing herself, for instance — by the presence of personal slaves. “Surrounded with them from infancy, they form a part of the landscape of a Southern woman’s life,” one woman recalled of her servants long after slavery had ended. “They watch our cradles; they are the companions of our sports; it is they who aid our bridal decorations; and they wrap us in our shrouds.”30

Once a woman married, however, she took on managerial responsibility for the household. Unlike their husbands, who hired overseers to manage slaves in the fields, plantation mistresses themselves oversaw the labor of the household slaves and the feeding, clothing, and doctoring of the entire labor force. One admittedly unusual plantation mistress, who insisted that she was more put upon than privileged by the ownership of slaves, recalled that when she heard the news of the Emancipation Proclamation, she exclaimed, “Thank heaven! I too shall be free at last!”31

Because slavery was a labor system in which there were no positive incentives for hard work, the management of workers relied almost entirely on threats and punishments, including beatings. Within the household, the discipline of slaves was the responsibility of the mistress. The association of allegedly delicate womanhood with brutal violence was a disturbing aspect of the slave system, even to its most passionate adherents. Opponents of slavery played endlessly on this theme to indicate the fundamental corruption of the system, which reached even to the women of slaveholding families. “There are female tyrants too, who are prompt to lay their complaints of misconduct before their husbands, brothers, and sons, and to urge them to commit acts of violence against their helpless slaves,” wrote Angelina Grimké, daughter of a powerful southern slaveowner, who left the South in 1829 to fight against the system (see p. 242).32 Fannie Moore, who came of age on a North Carolina plantation, agreed with Grimké. Speaking of her former mistress, Moore said, “She shore was a rip-jack.” This particular woman viewed slaves as animals, who were “not like other folks.” Moore recalled, “She whip me, many time wif a cow hide, til I was black and blue.”33 (See Primary Sources: “Mothering under Slavery” pp. 196–203.)

How Slavery Improves the Condition of Women

This illustration was published in The Anti-Slavery Almanac in 1838, just as women in abolitionism were becoming more assertive. The title ironically juxtaposes the evils of slavery and the ideology of female purity and protection. Not only does it show slave women being whipped and beaten, but it suggests that the white mistress herself has become brutalized by joining in the violence.

In the South, as in the North, marriage for free women legally prohibited them from the privileges of property ownership. Changing this practice was one of the initial goals of the American women’s rights movement (see pp. 243–48), within which southern white women, committed to the plantation patriarchy, were notoriously absent. Thus it is ironic that the first states to liberalize property laws for married women were southern — Mississippi (in 1839) and Arkansas (in 1840). They did so in order to protect the inheritance of slaveownership. Far more than middle-class northern women, elite southern women were expected to bring dowries — wealth packages — into their marriages, and it was not uncommon for a young woman to bring into her new home slaves from her parents’ plantation. This was one of the many ways in which slaves were separated from their own families. To protect their daughters — and the family property that had been transferred with them — against spendthrift husbands, southern patriarchs modified married women’s property laws to allow wives to retain title to inherited property. By contrast, the first married women’s property law to be reformed in the North in response to pressure from women’s rights activists was not until 1848 in New York State.

In all other ways, however, the slave system made for more severe constraints on free women than in the North. The rhetorical weight that rested on elite white women’s purity meant that women’s public activities were extremely limited. Unlike northern women, respectable southern white women had no means of earning money. Women who remained unmarried faced futures as marginal members in the households of their married kin. Whatever education existed for young women was oriented to the ornamental graces rather than more serious subjects. The sorts of charitable societies that northern middle-class women formed to care for the indigent and poor did not exist in the South, although plantation mistresses, defensive about whether they were sufficiently benevolent, frequently claimed that the care and feeding of their own slaves constituted an equivalent moral responsibility.

For the most part, slaveholding women and men did not regard themselves as heading up a brutal and inhumane system. On the contrary, they were convinced that the society over which they presided, which elevated them to lives of such enviable grace and culture, was the best of all possible worlds, certainly better than the lives led by money-grubbing capitalists and degraded wage workers in the North. They regarded their slaves as well treated compared to the northern wage earners, whom they believed were ignored and eventually abandoned, their welfare of no concern to bosses who wanted only to exploit their labor and then dispose of them. “How enviable were our solidarity as a people, our prosperity and the moral qualities that are characteristic of the South,” one southern matron mourned many years after the Civil War. Even in retrospect, she believed that white southerners’ “love of home, their chivalrous respect for women, their courage, their delicate sense of honour, their constancy . . . [all] are things by which the more mercurial people of the North may take a lesson.”34

Non-elite White Women

While the power of southern society lay in the hands of the plantation elite, the majority of whites were not large slaveholders. Indeed, close to three-quarters of all white families owned no slaves and relied on their own labor, occasionally hiring a slave or two from a neighbor. Even the great majority of those who did own slaves were working farmers themselves, living and laboring alongside the few slaves they owned. These small farmers are often called yeomen, a British term signifying the non-noble agricultural classes. The slave system would not have worked without the active support of the many white people who did not profit personally from it. Non-elite white men patrolled the roads for runaway slaves, voted in favor of aggressively proslavery state governments, and served as overseers and skilled craftsmen on the great plantations.

Women on the small farms and modest households of the South had much less interaction with planter culture than did their husbands. There was no common women’s culture that linked them to plantation mistresses — another difference with the North. Indeed, the class gap between elite and non-elite whites was clearest when it came to women’s roles. While elite women lived lives of leisure in their grand plantation houses, women of the yeoman class worked very hard both outside and inside their small homes. They continued to produce goods mainly for their own family’s consumption, for instance, spinning and wearing homespun long after northern farm women were purchasing factory-made cloth. They sold a smaller portion of their produce for cash than those in the North. About the only thing that took such non-elite southern women away from their homes and farms was church. And even there, they lacked the numerous voluntary activities and associations that Protestant women formed in the North in pursuit of moral uplift.

Although southern yeomen had few or no slaves over whom to establish their patriarchal authority, they did have wives. Thus female subordination was prized in this sector of southern society. If the difference between the lives of non-elite and elite women was one of the most pronounced distinctions among southern whites, the ethic of male headship bonded white men across class boundaries. “As masters of dependents, even if only, or perhaps if especially, of wives and children,” one historian observes, “every freeman was bound to defend his household, his property, against invasion.”35

Enslaved Women

Far more than even the most impoverished, degraded wage worker in the North, bondmen and bondwomen enslaved to southern masters were forbidden the basic elements of personal freedom — to live with their own families, to move about, to be educated, to marry and raise children — not to mention the loftier rights of citizenship. The legal definition of enslaved people as property was recognized by the laws of all the southern states and protected by the careful wording of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, the Constitution, in permitting legislation ending the transatlantic slave trade after 1808 and relegating control over the institution of slavery entirely to the states, laid the foundation for an enormous commerce in slaves within the United States that depended on enslaved women’s reproduction. The profitable, vigorous internal market in slaves touched the lives of virtually all African Americans, for each man, woman, and child experienced either the horror of being sold, the fear of being sold, or the heartrending knowledge of a loved one being sold. The auction block loomed over all.

When we recall Tocqueville’s confident assertion in 1830 that American women were so privileged and honored that they “never labor in the fields,” we begin to see the degree to which the slave women of the South were not only ignored in all the sweeping generalizations of true womanhood but also excluded from the category of “woman” altogether. Ninety percent of the slave women of the South labored in the cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice fields that generated the expanding region’s wealth. Plantation patriarchy extolled an image of slaves who provided personal and domestic service in planter households (see Figures 4.11 and 4.12, pp. 215 and 216), but these were a small minority. It was the giant mass of agricultural slaves on whom the power of the planter class rested.

Nowhere in early nineteenth-century America was labor less divided by gender than in the fields of the plantation South. To be clear, some farming tasks, such as enslaved women’s sowing of rice fields, still relied on gendered divisions of labor. On many plantations, enslaved women spent some of their days in all-female work gangs. However, a great deal of agricultural labor was assigned according to skill and strength, rather than gender. Enslaved women and men hoed and planted and reaped alongside each other in gangs that worked from sunup to sundown under the threat of the overseer’s whip. In coastal plantations in Georgia and South Carolina, in fact, enslaved women frequently made up the majority of field workers. African American oral histories are full of stories of individual women famous for their strength and ability to work as hard as any man. Cornelia, enslaved on a small Tennessee farm, proudly remembered her mother’s speed and strength: “She cooked, washed, ironed, spun, nursed, and labored in the field. She made as good a field hand as she did a cook . . . I tell you, she was a captain.”36 Even among household slaves, estimated at about 10 percent of the labor force of the South, men served as personal valets, as butlers, and occasionally even as nursemaids for their owners’ young sons.

Ellen Craft, The Fugitive Slave (1860)

This engraving of Ellen Craft (1826–1891) serves as the frontispiece for her husband William Craft’s slave narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, published in London in 1860. As the daughter of an enslaved woman and her white owner, Ellen was able to use her light skin to masquerade as a young invalid white man traveling North with his enslaved valet (William). William stealthily procured an extra man’s hat, shirt, and coat, while Ellen sewed a set of men’s trousers for her escape. During their long journey, Ellen pretended to be deaf to avoid having to speak to fellow travelers. Her race- and gender-crossing ruse successfully fooled even a white acquaintance they encountered along the route from Georgia to Boston. William’s dramatic narrative, self-authored after he learned to read and write, conveyed the perils braved by both Ellen and William Craft to reach a free community where their future children would not be born into slavery.

In addition to their skilled agricultural work, enslaved women supplied knowledge and labor that sustained enslaved communities and supported the privileges of the slaveholding class. On the larger plantations, where some specialization of labor was possible, slave men had more access to trades such as blacksmithing and carpentering while individual women might gain reputations as expert midwives, seamstresses, and cooks. Large slaveholding estates often relied on enslaved women’s knowledge of medicine and long hours of caregiving in plantation “hospitals” as well as white households. One Georgia planter in 1832 directed his overseer never to call a white doctor unless Elsey, “the Doctress of the Plantation” — also the neighborhood midwife — had first tried her hand at a cure.37

Although often made to “work like a man,” bondwomen also became targets of gendered violence. The particular vulnerabilities of their sex were exploited when they were beaten. Numerous stories record that enslaved women’s skirts were raised over their heads before whippings, to humiliate them and perhaps to make their physical sufferings greater. Only a woman in the late stages of pregnancy might be spared the worst whippings, and only then to protect her baby, who, when born, would be worth a great deal to the slaveowner. Similarly, after giving birth, women were suspended from field labor just briefly. Northern visitors commented frequently on the sight of an old slave woman bringing infants to the fields so that their young mothers could nurse them quickly and return to work. When beatings failed to discipline female slaves who resisted their masters’ control, sale was an even greater threat, especially if it meant separating a woman from her child. A runaway slave named Mrs. James Seward told the story of her sister in Maryland who was punished for resisting her master in all these ways: after beating her, the master controlled her by “taking away her clothes and locking them up. . . . He kept her at work with only what she could pick up to tie on her for decency. He took away her child which had just begun to walk.” Fearing the woman’s physical strength, this slaveholder waited to whip her until she had just given birth. “Now I can handle you,” he exclaimed, “now you are weak.”38

As chattels rather than persons with rights, slaves were not permitted legally binding marriage contracts, which might interfere with the master’s right to buy and sell them away from their husbands or wives. Nonetheless, men and women under slavery went to great lengths to sustain conjugal and parental relationships. Slaves had their own ritual for solemnizing their marriages, by together “jumping the broom.” Frequently, such unions linked women and men who belonged to different masters. In these “abroad marriages,” it usually fell to the man to visit his wife and children. Often traveling at night to visit his family, without his master’s knowledge or permission, the abroad husband risked being whipped or even sold away. To some extent, what enslaved husbands and wives expected of each other bore similarities to the gender roles of free couples. Yet, as one historian who studies the institution of slave marriage argues, “The daily realities of the slave system, bent on maximizing profits, meant that neither women nor men could strictly adhere to the gender assignments of the dominant society.”39 The daily aspirations of both enslaved wives and their husbands continually ran up against slaveholder attempts to control their time, labor, and mobility.

Motherhood also distinguished the lives of slave women from those of slave men. For slave women, childbearing was simultaneously the source of their greatest personal satisfaction and their greatest misery, because their children ultimately belonged to the master. (See Primary Sources: “Mothering under Slavery,” pp. 196–203.) Slave mothers had the immensely difficult task of teaching their children to survive their owners’ power and at the same time to know their own worth as human beings. The woman Cornelia, quoted above, remembered her spirited mother’s lessons in self-defense: “I’ll kill you, gal, if you don’t stand up for yourself. . . . Fight, and if you can’t fight, kick; if you can’t kick, then bite.”40 Not all bondwomen chose the dangerous route of open resistance. Many worked collectively with other enslaved women to impart lessons of survival and care for each other’s children in the face of sale and high mortality.

Sexual relations between masters and enslaved women were an open secret in the South, heartily denied by slaveowners and yet virtually endemic to the society. The light complexions and white features of numerous nineteenth-century slaves were eloquent testimony to this intimate connection between slave and master. Mary Boykin Chesnut, a member of South Carolina’s slaveholding aristocracy, knew of this hidden reality. Her diaries are much quoted by historians for what they reveal about slave society’s contradictions (see Reading into the Past: “Slavery a Curse to Any Land”).

While running afoul of Christian morality, masters’ sexual exploitation of enslaved women was encouraged by everything else about the slave system, from the master’s control of bondwomen’s bodies to their legal ownership of any resulting children. Slaveholders certainly did not limit their sexual abuse to females, but black women and girls in the South bore the brunt of sexual coercion, ranging from gang-rape to concubinage that extended over many decades. Southern rape laws specifically named only white women as capable of being raped, so free black women also experienced considerable sexual violence. In one of the best-known accounts of a master’s sexual aggression toward a female slave, Harriet Jacobs described how, when she was only fifteen, her master began to insist that she have sex with him. Some slave mothers attempted to prepare their daughters for the dangers ahead. Later in her life, Minnie Folkes recalled how her mother told her, “Don’t let nobody bother yo’ principle; cause dat wuz all yo’ had.”41 Many who were unable to avoid abuse lived with deep trauma. Others erupted in rage. In 1856, nineteen-year-old Celia was executed by the state of Missouri for killing her master Robert Newsome after five years of enduring his repeated sexual assaults. As Celia’s case reminds us, the sexual exploitation of enslaved women cannot be understood solely in property terms but must also be seen as reflecting dynamics of social and psychological domination under the racialized system of southern slavery.

The issue of deliberate breeding was an explosive one in the slave South. Opponents of slavery accused owners of encouraging and arranging pregnancies among their female slaves to produce more slaves to sell on the lucrative internal slave market. Evidence suggests that they were right. “Marsa used to sometimes pick our wives fo’ us,” former slave Charles Grandy recalled. “Marsa would stop de old niggertrader and buy you a woman. . . . All he wanted was a young healthy one who looked like she could have children, whether she was purty or ugly as sin.”42 Women of childbearing age who were described as “good breeders” brought a higher price on the auction block. The painful imprint of these practices stayed with black women for decades. Faced with the threat of being sold away from her family, for example, the sixteen-year-old Rose Williams “yielded” to forced breeding. Yet, as she told Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) interviewers in the 1930s, the scarring experience left her unable or unwilling to have anything more to do with marriage or childbearing.43

Any hope that the solidarities of gender might have crossed the boundaries of race and class was crushed by the tensions that the unacknowledged sexual exploitation of enslaved women spread throughout southern society. Jealous or suspicious mistresses vented on their slaves the anger and rage they dared not express to their husbands. Harriet Jacobs feared her mistress every bit as much as she did her master. Female slaves who worked in the plantation house were at greatest risk, exposed day in and day out to the mistress’s moods. Slave narratives frequently describe an impatient or intolerant mistress striking out at a cook or a nursemaid or even a slave child unable to handle an assigned task. In their diaries and letters, slaveowning white women recorded their secret fears of violent retribution from slaves. As Civil War was breaking out, Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote anxiously about the death of a cousin who, it was suspected, had been “murdered by her own people.”44 Although both black and white women suffered in the slave system, only white women also benefited from it. Slave women knew they could expect no sympathy from their mistresses. The luxury and culture of the white southern woman were premised on the forced labor and sexual oppression of her slaves. Violence against and violations of slave women mocked southern deference to womanhood and female sexual purity. With only the rarest of exceptions, slavery turned black and white women against each other and set their interests and their perspectives in direct opposition.

READING INTO THE PAST

MARY BOYKIN CHESNUT

Slavery a Curse to Any Land

The diary kept by the South Carolinav slave mistress Mary Boykin Chesnut (1823–1886) has long been regarded as a major source for insights into the minds of southern slaveholders. More recently, historians have explored Chesnut’s views on the position of the women of this class.

March 14, 1861: I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. . . . [W]e live surrounded by prostitutes. An abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house elsewhere. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or Mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t name. God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system & wrong & iniquity. Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad. This is only what I see: like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives & their concubines, & the Mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children — & every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think — . . . . My disgust sometimes is boiling over — . . . . Thank God for my countrywomen — alas for the men! No worse than men everywhere, but the lower their mistresses, the more degraded they must be.

SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie (1905; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 21.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

In her writings about the hidden but extensive sexual relations between slaveholding men and their female slaves, why does she seem so resentful of rather than sympathetic to slave women?

What assumptions is Chesnut making when she calls enslaved women who have had sexual relations with white slaveholding men “prostitutes”?

CONCLUSION: True Womanhood and the Reality of Women’s Lives

Perhaps at no other time in American history were the prescriptions for a proper domestic role for women more precise and widely agreed on than in antebellum America. Much of the young country’s hope for stability and prosperity rested on the belief in a universally achievable middle-class family order, with the devoted, selfless wife and mother at the center.

As we shall see in the next chapter, some women were able to use the ideology of true womanhood to expand their sphere in subtle ways, but even so, this ideology was exceedingly rigid and limiting, ignoring the reality of women who led very different sorts of lives. Factory operatives were outside the boundaries of acceptable womanhood because they lived and worked in what Godey’s Lady’s Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale called “the accursed bank note world” that only men were supposed to occupy.45 And slave women were deprived — absolutely — of the protection and privileges that were meant to compensate true women for their limited sphere. While the rhetoric of true womanhood seemed to place domestic women at the heart of American society, in reality the giant processes in which these other women were caught up — industrialization and slavery — were the dynamic forces shaping the young American nation and foreshadowing the trends and crises of its future.

CHAPTER 4 REVIEW

KEY TERMS AND PEOPLE

Terms

“true womanhood”

Godey’s Lady’s Book

Second Great Awakening

Lowell Offering

Lowell Female Labor Reform Association

African Methodist Episcopal Church

Indian Removal Act

People

Lucy Larcom

Catharine Beecher

Sarah Josepha Hale

Fannie Moore

Mary Boykin Chesnut

Harriet Jacobs

REVIEW QUESTIONS

How did the “hegemonic” ideology of true womanhood shape northern women’s lives, even when their economic and social realities didn’t match the ideal? How does the answer to this question change when discussing working-class women as opposed to middle-class women?

What made Lowell millwork so liberating for young white women from New England? When and why did millwork become more exploitive of its laborers?

The text notes that “slavery turned black and white women against each other and set their interests and their perspectives in direct opposition.” Explain this statement by explaining how the system of slavery both connected and divided black and white women. Be sure to include nonslaveholding white women in this discussion.

Making Connections One of the most important developments of the first half of the nineteenth century was the emergence of commercial capitalism and a market economy. How was women’s labor (black and white, slave and free, northern and southern) central to this development? Consider both domestic and public labor in your answer.

PRIMARY SOURCES

Prostitution in New York City, 1858

AS CHIEF PHYSICIAN IN THE 1850s for the New York City “lock hospital” (where prostitutes suspected of venereal diseases were both incarcerated and treated), Dr. William Sanger had both knowledge of and compassion for the women he attended. Hopeful that more accurate information would help to eradicate prostitution, he interviewed two thousand prostitutes, using a carefully drawn-up set of questions. He was determined to bring the facts of prostitution to light and to convey the prostitutes’ experiences and thoughts more realistically. The originals of Sanger’s interviews were destroyed in a fire the year after he gathered them, so his published report to the trustees of the New York Alms House brings us as close as we can get to the prostitutes themselves. Interestingly, Sanger did no research into the men who were the prostitutes’ clientele.

Sanger’s sample, although not randomly selected, was large enough to allow for useful generalizations: most prostitutes were from fifteen to twenty years old; three-fifths were native-born; among the immigrants, 60 percent were Irish; one-fifth were married; half had children; half were or had been domestic servants; half were afflicted with syphilis; the average length of life after entering prostitution was four years.

Sanger estimated that six thousand women were engaged in commercial sex in New York City, a number based on his careful survey of police records, lock hospitals, and known brothels. Others estimated much higher numbers. Even so, Sanger’s estimates were distressing. As Sanger repeatedly insisted, they reflected not the inherent lack of virtue of the prostitutes but rather the relentless financial pressure on poor urban women. The effects of a sharp economic depression in 1857 are detected everywhere in the prostitutes’ descriptions of their situations.

Sanger believed that women were too often blamed for prostitution; he wanted to show that they were the victims, both of men’s callousness and their own lack of economic opportunity. Despite these reformist sentiments, however, Sanger held conventional notions of femininity. Indeed, he championed prostitutes because he was certain that most women would never of their own accord undertake a life of casual sex. Rather, he believed, they must have been deserted, seduced, driven by destitution, or forced into prostitution by some other extraordinary event over which they had no control. Underlying his compassion for those who were remorseful, the traces of a harsher set of judgments can be found. Thus Sanger’s report can be read as evidence of middle-class attitudes toward female sexuality, as well as of prostitutes’ own experience.

What follows is Sanger’s summary and analysis of the two thousand answers given to one of his most revealing questions: “What are the causes of your becoming a prostitute?” As you read, think about how the personal stories that Sanger relates allow us to imagine a more complicated set of explanations for individual women’s entry into prostitution than the categories he uses.

WILLIAM W. SANGER

The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects throughout the World (1858)

[Question:] What are the causes of your becoming a prostitute? . . .

Causes

Numbers

Inclination

  513

Destitution

  525

Seduced and abandoned

  258

Drink, and the desire to drink

  181

Ill-treatment of parents, relatives, or husbands

  164

As an easy life

  124

Bad company

    84

Persuaded by prostitutes

    71

Too idle to work

    29

Violated

    27

Seduced on board emigrant ships

    16

Seduced in emigrant boarding houses

      8

Total

2000

This question is probably the most important of the series, as the replies lay open to a considerable extent those hidden springs of evil which have hitherto been known only from their results. First in order stands the reply [which 513 respondents chose], “Inclination,” which can only be understood as meaning a voluntary resort to prostitution in order to gratify the sexual passions. . . .

The force of desire can neither be denied nor disputed, but still in the bosoms of most females that force exists in a slumbering state until aroused by some outside influences. . . . In the male sex nature has provided a more susceptible organization than in females, apparently with the beneficent design of repressing those evils which must result from mutual appetite equally felt by both. In other words, man is the aggressive animal, so far as sexual desire is involved. Were it otherwise, and the passions in both sexes equal, illegitimacy and prostitution would be far more rife in our midst than at present.

Some few of the cases in which the reply “Inclination” was given are herewith submitted, with the explanation which accompanied each return. C. M.: while virtuous, this girl had visited dancehouses, where she became acquainted with prostitutes, who persuaded her that they led an easy, merry life; her inclination was the result of female persuasion. E. C. left her husband, and became a prostitute willingly, in order to obtain intoxicating liquors which had been refused her at home. E. R. was deserted by her husband because she drank to excess and became a prostitute in order to obtain liquor. . . . Enough has been quoted to prove that, in many of the cases, what is called willing prostitution is the sequel of some communication or circumstances which undermine the principles of virtue and arouse the latent passions.

Destitution is assigned as a reason in five hundred and twenty-five cases. In many of these it is unquestionably true that positive, actual want, the apparent and dreaded approach of starvation, was the real cause of degradation. . . .

During the progress of this investigation in one of the lower wards of the city, attention was drawn to a pale but interesting-looking girl, about seventeen years of age, from whose replies the following narrative is condensed, retaining her own words as nearly as possible.

“I have been leading this life from about the middle of last January (1856). It was absolute want that drove me to it. My sister, who was about three years older than I am, lived with me. She was deformed and crippled from a fall she had while a child, and could not do any hard work. . . . One very cold morning, just after I had been to the store, the landlord’s agent called for some rent we owed, and told us that, if we could not pay it, we should have to move. The agent was a kind man, and gave us a little money to buy some coals. We did not know what we were to do, and were both crying about it, when the woman who keeps this house (where she was then living) came in and brought some sewing for us to do that day. She said that she had been recommended to us by a woman who lived in the same house, but I found out since that she had watched me, and only said this for an excuse. When the work was done I brought it home here. I had heard of such places before, but had never been inside one. I was very cold, and she made me sit down by the fire, and began to talk to me, saying how much better off I should be if I would come and live with her. . . . When I got home and saw my sister so sick as she was and wanting many little things that we had no money to buy, and no friends to help us to, my heart almost broke. However, I said nothing to her then. I laid awake all night thinking, and in the morning I made up my mind to come here. . . . I thought that, if I had been alone, I would sooner have starved, but I could not bear to see her suffering. She only lived a few weeks after I came here. I broke her heart. I do not like the life. I would do almost any thing to get out of it; but, now that I have once done wrong, I can not get any one to give me work, and I must stop here unless I wish to be starved to death.”

These details give some insight into the under-current of city life. The most prominent fact is that a large number of females, both operatives and domestics, earn so small wages that a temporary cessation of their business, or being a short time out of a situation, is sufficient to reduce them to absolute distress. Provident habits are useless in their cases; for, much as they may feel the necessity, they have nothing to save, and the very day that they encounter a reverse sees them penniless. The struggle a virtuous girl will wage against fate in such circumstances may be conceived: it is a literal battle for life, and in the result life is too often preserved only by the sacrifice of virtue. . . .

Moralists say that all human passions should be held in check by reason and virtue, and none can deny the truthfulness of the assertion. But while they apply the sentiment to the weaker party, who is the sufferer, would it not be advisable to recommend the same restraining influences to him who is the inflictor? No woman possessed of the smallest share of decency or the slightest appreciation of virtue would voluntarily surrender herself without some powerful motive, not pre-existent in herself, but imparted by her destroyer. Well aware of the world’s opinion, she would not recklessly defy it, and precipitate herself into an abyss of degradation and shame unless some overruling influence had urged her forward. This motive and this influence, it is believed, may be uniformly traced to her weak but truly feminine dependence upon another’s vows. . . . Thus there can be little doubt that, in most cases of seduction, female virtue is trustingly surrendered to the specious arguments and false promises of dishonorable men.

Men who, in the ordinary relations of life, would scruple to defraud their neighbors of a dollar, do not hesitate to rob a confiding woman of her chastity. They who, in a business point of view, would regard obtaining goods under false pretenses as an act to be visited with all the severity of the law, hesitate not to obtain by even viler fraud the surrender of woman’s virtue to their fiendish lust. Is there no inconsistency in the social laws which condemn a swindler to the state prison for his offenses, and condemn a woman to perpetual infamy for her wrongs? Undoubtedly there are cases where the woman is the seducer, but these are so rare as to be hardly worth mentioning.

Seduction is a social wrong. Its entire consequences are not comprised in the injury inflicted on the woman, or the sense of perfidy oppressing the conscience of the man. Beyond the fact that she is, in the ordinary language of the day, ruined, the victim has endured an attack upon her principles which must materially affect her future life. The world may not know of her transgression, and, in consequence, public obloquy may not be added to her burden; but she is too painfully conscious of her fall, and every thought of her lacerated and bleeding heart is embittered with a sense of man’s wrong and outrage. . . . It can not be a matter of surprise that, with this feeling of injustice and insult burning at her heart, her career should be one in which she becomes the aggressor, and man the victim; for it is certain that in this desire of revenge upon the sex for the falsehood of one will be found a cause of the increase of prostitution. . . .

In one of the most aristocratic houses of prostitution in New York was found the daughter of a merchant, a man of large property, residing in one of the Southern states. She was a beautiful girl, had received a superior education, spoke several languages fluently, and seemed keenly sensible of her degradation. Two years before this time she had been on a visit to some relations in Europe, and on her return voyage in one of her father’s vessels, she was seduced by the captain, and became pregnant. He solemnly asserted that he would marry her as soon as they reached their port, but the ship had no sooner arrived than he left her. The poor girl’s parents would not receive her back into their family, and she came to New York and prostituted herself for support. . . .

“Ill-treatment of parents, husbands, or relatives” is a prolific cause of prostitution, one hundred and sixty-four women assigning it as a reason for their fall. . . .

J. C.: “My father accused me of being a Prostitute when I was innocent. He would give me no clothes to wear. My mother was a confirmed drunkard and used to be away from home most of the time.” Here we have a combination of horrors scarcely equaled in the field of romance. The unjust accusations of the father, and his conduct in not supplying his child with the actual necessaries of life, joined with the drunkenness of the mother, present such an accumulation of cruelty and vice that it would have been a miracle had the girl remained virtuous. It is to be presumed that no one will claim for this couple the performance of any one of the duties enjoined by their position. . . .

Great as are the duties and responsibilities of a father, they are equaled by those devolving upon a husband. He has to provide for the welfare of his wife besides caring for the interests of his children. . . . All married prostitutes can not be exonerated from the charge of guilt, yet the facts which will be hereafter quoted prove that many were driven to a life of shame by those who had solemnly sworn to protect and cherish them. . . .

C. H.: “I was married when I was seventeen years old, and have had three children. The two boys are living now; the girl is dead. My oldest boy is nearly five years old, and the other one is eighteen months. My husband is a sailor. We lived very comfortably till my last child was born, and then he began to drink very hard, and did not support me and I have not seen him or heard any thing about him for six months. After he left me I tried to keep my children by washing or going out to day’s work, but I could not earn enough. I never could earn more than two or three dollars a week when I had work, which was not always. My father and mother died when I was a child. I had nobody to help me, and could not support my children, so I came to this place. My boys are now living in the city, and I support them with what I earn by prostitution. It was only to keep them that I came here.” . . . In order to feed her helpless offspring she was forced to yield her honor; to prevent them suffering from the pains of hunger, she voluntarily chose to endure the pangs of a guilty conscience; to prolong their lives she periled her own. And at the time when this alternative was forced upon her, the husband was lavishing his money for intoxicating liquor. If she sinned — and this fact can not be denied, however charity may view it — it was the non-performance of his duty that urged, nay, positively forced her to sin. She must endure the punishment of her offenses, but, after reading her simple, heart-rending statement, let casuistsi decide what amount of condemnation will rest upon the man whose desertion compelled her to violate the law of chastity in order to support his children. . . .

Seventy-one women were persuaded by prostitutes to embrace a life of depravity. One of the most common modes by which this end is accomplished is to inveigle a girl into some house of prostitution as a servant, and this is frequently done through the medium of an intelligence office. . . . [At such establishments] servants who wish to obtain situations register their wants and pay a fee. . . .

Keepers of houses sometimes visit these offices themselves, but generally some unknown agent is employed, or, at times, one of the prostitutes is plainly dressed, and sent to register her name as wishing a situation, so as to be able to obtain admission into the waiting-room. There she enters into conversation with the other women, whom she uses all the art she possesses to induce to visit her employer. . . .

Some of the sources of prostitution have been thus examined. To expose them all would require a volume; but it is hoped that sufficient has been developed to induce observation and inquiry, and prompt action in the premises.

SOURCE: William W. Sanger, The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects throughout the World (New York: Harper & Brothers 1858, 1921), 488–522.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Why does Sanger think it highly unlikely that women ever are responsible for their entry into prostitution? Do you agree with him on this?

How does Sanger distinguish his approach to and opinions about prostitution from the views of those he calls “moralists”?

Where do economic conditions show up in Sanger’s account of the causes of prostitution?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Mothering under Slavery

MOTHERHOOD, SO ELEVATED IN THE IDEOLOGY OF TRUE WOMANHOOD, presented enslaved women with dilemmas that free women simply did not have to face. Nineteenth-century slave states still followed the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, instituted during the colonial period, which imposed a property claim on each and every slave woman’s child (see pp. 56–59). Once the United States outlawed the transatlantic slave in 1808, slaveowners and their physicians placed greater emphasis on enslaved women’s fertility to ensure the future of the plantation economy. Southern doctors like the well-known J. Marion Sims even targeted some bondwomen for experimental surgeries that contributed to the emergence of obstetrics and gynecology as a medical specialty. The public and derogatory way in which whites discussed black women’s sexuality and childbearing led an older woman in the 1930s to describe slavery as a time when “women wasn’t nothing but cattle.”46 Added to their reproductive labor of childbearing and child care, bondwomen also shouldered the burden of agricultural labor in the fields. Motherhood thus pulled enslaved women in conflicting directions while the wider society denied them any of the respect or status accorded to free white middle-class mothers.

One way to think about the multiple meanings of motherhood for enslaved women is through the history of black women’s bodies. In theory, suggests one historian, enslaved women “possessed at least three bodies.”47 The first body was the body dominated by slaveowners and subjected to commodification, coerced labor, and sexual violence. Motherhood from this perspective was strictly an exploitive institution, reinforced by both the law and the customs of white society. The second body was the site of sorrow and pain that resulted from this process of domination. Viewed through the second body, enslaved motherhood primarily entailed suffering, as women mourned the sale, mistreatment, and neglected deaths of their sons and daughters. Yet enslaved people were never defined solely by slaveholders’ domination or by their own suffering. For this reason, an exploration of slave motherhood would not be complete without the inclusion of a third body: “a thing to be claimed and enjoyed, a site of pleasure and resistance.” For slave mothers, the third body could be expressed in moments of stolen enjoyment, acts of fierce protection, and even in the rejection of motherhood under the master’s terms.

The many facets of mothering under slavery can best be grasped by reading several different types of sources. Due to the emphasis on oral culture within enslaved communities and white society’s devaluation of enslaved people’s history, much first-person testimony from enslaved women has been lost. Yet the historical record is still plentiful. Antebellum narratives, retrospective oral histories, plantation records, newspaper ads, and photographs, just to name a few of the extant sources, all carry important evidence of enslaved women’s mothering histories. As you examine these sources, carefully consider the perspective, audience, assumptions, and insights of each document or image.

A SOUTH CAROLINA DOMESTIC MEDICINE MANUAL

DURING A PERIOD WHEN MOST MEDICAL CARE still occurred at home, antebellum domestic medicine manuals dispensed advice about treating common ailments. Physician J. Hume Simons’s guide, aimed at the households of southern planters, included a section titled “General Directions for Raising Negroes.” At the time of this manual’s publication, deepening racial ideology painted black mothers as inept and uncaring. Georgia lawyer Thomas R. R. Cobb, for example, wrote that African Americans’ “natural affections are not strong, and consequently he is cruel to his offspring, and suffers little by separation from them.”48 Where do you see racialized ideas about black mothering and inept child care reflected in the passage below? What consequences for enslaved mothers might have resulted from the author’s assumption that white planters should be the provider and protector of slave health?

The Planter’s Guide and Family Book of Medicine (1848)

On every plantation . . . there should be a capable and trusty nurse, to attend the sick and to report all new cases. A faithful and trusty woman (not as is commonly the case, a decrepit old woman), but a strong, able, and healthy woman to attend the negro children; for mothers who have infants at the breast will frequently obtain leave of absence from the field to nurse their infants and employ the time given them in sleeping [instead].

The person selected for the little negroes should also be made to cook for them, and to see that they are fed regularly with victuals well cooked. For it is a common practice among negroes to eat victuals half raw, and of course to give the same to their children. Some do it from laziness, others from ignorance of cooking, and some leave the feeding of their children entirely to their little nurses. I have several times been called to attend little children on plantations, who were poor and emaciated, and as the planter or overseer termed it, not thriving, but who were evidently suffering actually from starvation and want of water, owing to the negligence of their parents and little nurses.

SOURCE: J. Hume Simons, M.D., The Planter’s Guide and Family Book of Medicine (Charleston, SC, 1848), 208.

FWP INTERVIEW

IN THE 1930S, AS PART OF THE NEW DEAL works project administration (see pp. 498–508), federally funded interviewers from the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) were sent throughout the South to record the memories of the last generation of black people to have lived under slavery, all of whom had been children or young adults at the time and were now almost eighty or older. Preserved only as typescripts (and in a few cases, as primitive tape recordings), the FWP oral histories were finally made available in published form in the 1960s. Despite their valuable content, these twentieth-century sources also have many limitations. Most of the interviewers were white and many of the interviewees were probably deferential to or intimidated by them. In most cases, interviewers wrote down the words of their informants after the interview was concluded, a process that introduced many errors and omissions. Furthermore, interviewers were expected to render the testimony in dialect. Readers today need to be aware that the appearance of the printed interviews reflects FWP editors’ assumptions about black southerners as poor and uneducated as much as it reflects the actual speech of the narrators.

Nevertheless, Fannie Moore provided an unvarnished portrait of her girlhood in bondage on a South Carolina plantation. What does Moore remember most about her mother and grandmother? Many FWP interviewees spoke of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ knowledge of herbal medicines. A Texas woman named Harriet Collins, for example, began her lengthy account of plant-based remedies with this assertion: “My mammy larned me a lots of doctorin’, what she larnt from old folkses from Africy, and some de Indians larnt her.”49 In Fannie Moore’s account below, who was responsible for the care of sick children? How might memory and the conditions of the FWP interviews have shaped the way that Moore told her life story?

Fannie Moore Remembers Her Mother and Grandmother (1937)

My granny she cook for us chillens while our mammy away in de fiel. Dey wasn’t much cookin to do. Jes make co’n pone and bring in de milk. She hab a big wooden bowl wif enough wooden spoons to go ’roun’. She put de milk in de bowl and break it up. Den she put de bowl in de middle of de flo’ an’ all de chillum grab a spoon.

My mammy she work in de fiel’ all day and piece and quilt all night. Den she hab to spin enough thread to make four cuts for de white folks ebber night. Why sometime I nebber go to bed. Hab to hold de light for her to see by. She hab to piece quilts for de white folks too. . . .

I never see how my mammy stan’ sech ha’d work. She stand’ up fo’ her chillum tho’. De ol’ overseeah he hate my mammy, case she fight him for beatin’ her chillun. Why she git more whuppins for dat den anythin’ else. She hab twelve chillun. . . . My mammy she trouble in her heart ’bout de way they treated. Ever night she pray for de Lawd to git her an’ her chillum out ob de place. . . .

My mammy grieve lots over brothah George, who die wif de fever. Granny she doctah him as bes’ she could, evah time she git way from de white folks kitchen. My mammy nevah git chance to see him, ’cept when she git home in de evenin’. George he jes lie. One day I look at him an’ he had sech a peaceful look on his face, I think he sleep and jes let him lone. Long in de evenin I think I try to wake him. I touch him on de face, but he was dead. Mammy nebber know til she come at night. Pore mammy she kneel by de bed an’ cry her heart out’. Ol’ uncle Allen, he make pine box for him an’ carry him to de graveyard over on de hill. My mammy jes plow and cry as she watch em’ put George in de groun’. . . .

Folks back den never heah tell of all de ailments de folks hab now. Dey war no doctahs. Jes use roots and bark for teas of all kinds. My ole granny uster make tea out o’ dogwood bark an’ give it to us chillum when we have a cold, else she make a tea outen wild cherry bark, pennyroil, or hoarhound. My goodness but dey was bitter. We do mos’ enythin’ to git out a takin’ de tea, but twarnt no use granny jes git you by de collar hol’ yo’ nose and you jes swallow it or get strangled. When de baby hab de colic she git rats vein [a local medicinal plant] and make a syrup an’ put a little sugar in it an’ boil it. Den soon as it cold she give it to de baby. For stomach ache she give us snake root. Sometime she make tea, other time she jes cut it up in little pieces an’ make you eat one or two ob dem. When you hab fever she wrap you up in cabbage leaves or ginseng leaves, dis made de fever go.”

SOURCE: Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 2, Jackson-Yellerday, 1936. 128–135. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn112.

PHOTOGRAPHS

WHILE SLAVEHOLDERS OCCASIONALLY posed white family members with enslaved women as tokens of status, few photographers took portraits of enslaved (or previously enslaved) women as the primary subjects of interest. (See Primary Sources: “Early Photographs of Factory Operatives and Slave Women,” pp. 211–18.) The two photographs on page 200 are exceptions to this rule, although they too have complicated backstories laden with postemancipation racial politics.

In addition to the collection of life stories, the Federal Writers’ Project also photographed almost two hundred African American elders who had been born during slavery, emancipated under the Thirteenth Amendment, and grown into old age in the segregated South. What overall impression does Figure 4.1 of Fannie Moore make? Based on your reading of Moore’s interview above, how do you think she might have wanted to be represented in this image? What clues can you gather from her clothing, facial expression, and direction of her gaze?

Figure 4.1 Fannie Moore, Age 88 (c. 1937)

The unusual photograph in Figure 4.2 depicts an intimate moment in which an older woman peacefully works on a young girl’s hair. However, the image is part of a Jim Crow–era photo album titled “Rosemary: A Plantation Home,” most likely assembled by a white planter family in Alabama as a gift for Tennessee statesman Edward Ward Carmack around the turn of the twentieth century. The album and its racially derogatory captions convey a nostalgic portrait of harmonious relations between white paternalistic plantation owners and their black laborers. How is black women’s maternal care depicted in this photo? White southern memoirists of the period often romanticized the figure of the slave “Mammy.” Does the rise of the Mammy stereotype lend insight into the photo’s caption — “The Givers”? Despite the intentions of the album maker, is it possible to read this photograph as a reminder of moments enslaved women and girls may have shared while finding temporary respite from plantation labor demands (historians call this “reading against the grain”)? Try to argue both sides of this question.

Figure 4.2 “Rosemary” Plantation Photo Album (c. 1890s–1910s)

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR WET NURSES

EVEN INTIMATE MOMENTS OF NURTURE could be given a price in the market economy of chattel slavery. Evidence from newspaper ads and white women’s diaries and letters suggest an “informal market in enslaved wet nurses, in which white women were the primary arbiters and beneficiaries.”50 Enslaved mothers were both hired and sold in the American South for the primary purpose of breastfeeding white infants. What words do advertisers use to promote enslaved wet nurses? What is the significance of the first advertisement’s use of the phrase “without a child” as an attractive feature of this particular wet nurse? What other kinds of labor might wet nurses also be expected to do? How do these ads hint at white expectations for black women’s relationships to their own children?

City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, Charleston, South Carolina (October 28, 1795)

TO BE HIRED,

A Healthy Black WET NURSE, without a child, with a good breast of milk. Enquire of Mrs. Dawson, at Mr. Patrick Hind’s, in Beausain-Street. October 24

The Southern Patriot, Charleston, South Carolina (May 10, 1842)

WET NURSE, SEAMSTRESS, WASHER, IRONER, AND HOUSE SERVANT TO HIRE — A young healthy Woman with her child about 6 weeks old, and a Boy to attend to it. She will be hired either as a Wet Nurse, or either of the above capacities. She is a complete Seamstress, Washer and Ironer, and House Servant; to be seen at my house until hired. Apply to

THEODORE A. WHITENEY,

Broke and Auctioneer,

24 Holrlbeck’s Alley, next to King St., May 10

The Charleston Mercury (June 7, 1856)

Private Sales.

Healthy Young Wet Nurse.

Capers & Heyward

Offer at private sale, a young and healthy WET NURSE. For further particulars, apply at our office, SOUTH SIDE ADGERS’ WHARF, June 7

SOURCE: Stephanie Jones-Rogers, “ ‘[S]he Could . . . Spare One Ample Breast for the Profit of Her Owner’: White Mothers and Enslaved Wet Nurses’ Invisible Labor in American Slave Markets,” Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 337–55.

ANTEBELLUM SLAVE NARRATIVE

SLAVE NARRATIVES PUBLISHED by women who managed to escape to the North in the antebellum period provide valuable first-person accounts. Harriet Jacobs’s (1813–1897) narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is the most well-known of the female-authored accounts. Jacobs was born into bondage in Edenton, North Carolina. From the age of fifteen, she was sexually harassed and abused by her master, the white physician James Norcom (whose young daughter was Jacobs’s legal owner). To escape the constant predation of her master, Jacobs sought the protection of another white man by whom she had two children. In the midst of fear and sexual abuse, Jacobs described each of her beloved children as a “tie to life” that motivated her survival. After a decade, she escaped from Norcom, but because of her attachment to her children, she stayed nearby, hidden in the cramped attic room of her free grandmother. There she remained for seven years until she and her two children finally escaped the South.

In the excerpt below, Jacobs describes the atmosphere of violence and tension surrounding the birth of her second child, a daughter. Note that Jacobs uses pseudonyms in her narrative — Linda Brent for herself and Dr. Flint for Norcom. With a northern audience in mind, Jacobs was well aware of her readers’ assumptions about Christian women’s piety and sexual purity. What does she mean when she says that there was “no chance for me to be respectable”? How does Jacobs’s grandmother attempt to provide maternal protection, and what are the limits to her efforts? What are Jacobs’s feelings about giving birth to a daughter?

HARRIET JACOBS

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

CHAPTER 14: ANOTHER LINK TO LIFE

I had not returned to my master’s house since the birth of my child. The old man raved to have me thus removed from his immediate power; but his wife vowed, by all that was good and great, she would kill me if I came back; and he did not doubt her word. Sometimes he would stay away for a season. Then he would come and renew the old threadbare discourse about his forbearance and my ingratitude. He labored, most unnecessarily, to convince me that I had lowered myself. The venomous old reprobate had no need of descanting on that theme. I felt humiliated enough. My unconscious babe was the ever-present witness of my shame. I listened with silent contempt when he talked about my having forfeited his good opinion; but I shed bitter tears that I was no longer worthy of being respected by the good and pure. Alas! slavery still held me in its poisonous grasp. There was no chance for me to be respectable. There was no prospect of being able to lead a better life.

Sometimes, when my master found that I still refused to accept what he called his kind offers, he would threaten to sell my child. “Perhaps that will humble you,” said he.

Humble me! Was I not already in the dust? But his threat lacerated my heart. I knew the law gave him power to fulfil it; for slaveholders have been cunning enough to enact that “the child shall follow the condition of the mother,” not of the father; thus taking care that licentiousness shall not interfere with avarice. This reflection made me clasp my innocent babe all the more firmly to my heart. Horrid visions passed through my mind when I thought of his liability to fall into the slave trader’s hands. I wept over him, and said, “O my child! perhaps they will leave you in some cold cabin to die, and then throw you into a hole, as if you were a dog.”

When Dr. Flint learned that I was again to be a mother, he was exasperated beyond measure. He rushed from the house, and returned with a pair of shears. I had a fine head of hair; and he often railed about my pride of arranging it nicely. He cut every hair close to my head, storming and swearing all the time. I replied to some of his abuse, and he struck me. Some months before, he had pitched me down stairs in a fit of passion; and the injury I received was so serious that I was unable to turn myself in bed for many days. He then said, “Linda, I swear by God I will never raise my hand against you again”; but I knew that he would forget his promise.

After he discovered my situation, he was like a restless spirit from the pit. He came every day; and I was subjected to such insults as no pen can describe. I would not describe them if I could; they were too low, too revolting. I tried to keep them from my grandmother’s knowledge as much as I could. I knew she had enough to sadden her life, without having my troubles to bear. When she saw the doctor treat me with violence, and heard him utter oaths terrible enough to palsy a man’s tongue, she could not always hold her peace. It was natural and motherlike that she should try to defend me; but it only made matters worse.

When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What claims about slave mothering does each primary source make, and what contradictions can you see between various sources?

What ideals of motherhood did enslaved women develop out of their daily experiences? How did these ideals compare to those of various groups of free women?

Interpret the sources here using the model of the three different “bodies” discussed in the introduction. Which sources best reveal the agency of enslaved mothers’ “third body”?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Godey’s Lady’s Book

BY 1850 GODEY’S LADY’S BOOK, with forty thousand subscribers, was the most widely circulated “ladies’ magazine” in the United States. For $3 a year, readers from all over the country enjoyed a rich monthly collection of fiction, history (specializing in heroes and heroines of the American Revolution), poetry, and illustrations. Contributors to the magazine included well-known writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who elsewhere bitterly castigated women writers as “that damned mob of scribbling women.”51 Lavish pictorial “embellishments,” printed from full-page, specially commissioned steel engravings and hand-colored by the magazine’s special staff of 150 female colorists (wage laborers, unlike most of the magazine’s readers), lifted Godey’s above the run-of-the-mill periodicals published for the literate female public. Subscribers treasured their issues, circulated them among friends, and preserved them in leather bindings. The magazine’s large readership was testimony to the degree to which Godey’s both reflected and affected the sympathies and values of its subscribers.

Godey’s Lady’s Book was edited by a woman and published by a man. Sarah Josepha Hale, a schoolteacher, mother, and widow from Boston, had turned to magazine editing to support herself and her children after the death of her husband in 1828. Like Catharine Beecher, she had pronounced views on the dignity and power of woman’s distinct domestic sphere. In the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, she joined forces with a commercially minded publisher, Louis Godey, to become the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which he had founded in 1830. Her concerns for feminine values were now combined with his eye for women’s possibilities as consumers. The magazine’s illustrations thus combined advertisements for the latest fashions (which readers took to their seamstresses to duplicate) with illustrations promoting the feminine ideal of selflessness, purity, and subtle maternal influence. Although as the editor Hale was consistent in preaching this notion of women’s redemptive, domestic influence throughout her career, her position became more defensive in the 1840s in reaction to the rising tide of the women’s rights movement, which she thought dangerous both to women and to the nation (see pp. 243–48): “The elevation of the [female] sex will not consist in becoming like man, in doing man’s work, or striving for the dominion of the world. The true woman . . . has a higher and holier vocation. She works in the elements of human nature.”52

Through stories and images, Godey’s Lady’s Book preached a compelling if conservative doctrine of women’s importance to the nation. In a society rapidly being transformed by economic growth and political upheaval, domestic women were expected to provide emotional and spiritual stability. They were to function, as Figure 4.3 advocates, as “the constant” to middle-class American family life. This drawing illustrated a story of a young wife whose quiet, steady love wordlessly convinced her wandering husband to join with her in embracing the healing “close communion of home life.”53 Note the woman’s pose, at once submissive to her husband and protective of her child. This image was juxtaposed against another illustration warning women against being a flirtatious “coquette.”

Figure 4.3 The Constant, or the Anniversary Present (1851)

The ideology of true womanhood imbued motherhood with both secular and spiritual roles. Godey’s Lady’s Book considered mothers as crucial to preserving the memory of the American Revolution and to securing its legacy within a stable, peaceful, and permanent American nation. Mothers accomplished this task by raising the next generation of citizens. The citizen-child was usually figured as male. “How Can an American Woman Serve Her Country?” Godey’s asked. The answer: “By early teaching her sons to consider a republic as the best form of government in the world.”54

While preaching the virtues of motherhood and domesticity, female ideologues of middle-class femininity portrayed teaching as a natural profession for women, drawing as it did on maternal virtues and emotions. Hale wrote that “the reports of common school education show that women are the best teachers,” in response to which she sponsored a petition to Congress urging public support for women’s teacher training.55 Teaching had previously been the province of men and began changing into a woman’s occupation only during the 1820s and 1830s. Outside of the South, public education, considered essential to a virtuous citizenry, was expanding at a rapid rate. Inasmuch as female teachers were usually paid a third or less of what men were paid, the reasons for the shift were economic as well as ideological. How does the image in Figure 4.4 reconcile a woman working for wages with the ideology of true womanhood?

Figure 4.4 The Teacher (1844)

Barbara Welter, the first modern historian to examine the ideology of true womanhood, identified its four basic elements as domesticity, piety, submission, and purity.56 Purity of course referred to sexuality (not just experience but also desire), of which the true woman was expected to be innocent. In Figure 4.5, the feminine virtue of purity is illustrated at the same time as it is used to advertise designs for fashionable wedding dresses. How do ideological and economic concerns come together in this image?

Figure 4.5 Purity (1850)

The middle-class character of the doctrine of domesticity was revealed in the frequent illustrations of the difficulties that the true woman had in hiring and supervising household servants. Although — or because — the relation between mistress and maid was one of the more distressing of the middle-class housewife’s domestic obligations, the stories and drawings about this dilemma were invariably humorous, with the incompetent and stupid housemaid or cook as the butt of the joke. The very face and figure of the cook in Figure 4.6 indicate a female quite different from the mistress. How is the mistress designated as a true woman while the cook is not? What does the illustration suggest about the relationship of husband and wife, as well as that of mistress and maid?

Figure 4.6 Cooks (1852)

Although Godey’s Lady’s Book insisted on the distinction between woman’s domestic sphere and man’s worldly obligations, it hinted at the ways that economic realities and the larger society impinged on middle-class women’s efforts to practice their home-based ideals. Hale preached women’s special virtues as an antidote to the distressingly materialistic world outside the home, but Godey’s itself purveyed those same worldly values. The true woman was a frequent shopper, and in 1852 the magazine instituted a shopping service to assist its readers in the purchase of accessories and jewelry. Figure 4.7 portrays middle-class women leaving their cloistered homes for the pleasures and luxury of an elegant shoe emporium, presided over by a male clerk. Looking at this mid-nineteenth-century illustration, keep in mind the women workers who manufactured these shoes. Note also how shopping is portrayed as a recreational activity already at this early stage in market society.

Figure 4.7 Shoe Shopping (1848)

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Examine the expressions, demeanor, and dress of the women from the Godey’s illustrations shown here. What do they have in common? Why do they show so little variety? How might women readers have regarded these images and tried to imitate them?

Look at the profiles of the true women from Godey’s. Notice their tiny waists, the composure of their hands, the elegance of their bearing. How do these and other details reinforce the message that women are unfit for the public sphere?

Consider Godey’s in light of fashion magazines you are familiar with today. What is the appeal of fashion magazines for women? How seriously do you take the lifestyle and the profiles modeled in the magazines you read? How can such sources be read critically to reveal something about contemporary times?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Early Photographs of Factory Operatives and Slave Women

PHOTOGRAPHY, INVENTED IN FRANCE in the 1830s, came to the United States in the 1840s. By 1850, commercial photographers were working in all the major cities. Compared to portrait painting, photography was quick and relatively inexpensive, exactly the modern form of artistic representation appropriate to a young, democratic nation. Perhaps also because so many Americans were on the move, they wanted these small, portable pictures of themselves to send to loved ones. In Massachusetts alone, there were four hundred photographic studios by 1855.57 Nationwide the estimate is three thousand by 1860.58 Pocket-size portraits could be had for a few dollars, and common folks, not just the well-to-do, were eager to purchase their likenesses. In 1853, the New York Tribune estimated that 3 million photographs were being made annually. Unfortunately, only a very few have survived.59

The earliest of these photographs are known as daguerreotypes, named for Louis Jacques Daguerre, the Frenchman who invented the technology in 1837. The daguerreotypist created a positive image on a metal plate treated with mercury and exposed to light. The finished product was enclosed in a case to protect it from light over time. In the United States, the technology gave way in the mid-1850s to simpler and less expensive processes: the tintype (which shortened the sitting time and reduced the cost) and the ambrotype (which used glass instead of metal for the photographic plate and produced a negative rather than a positive image).60 By the early 1860s, photographers were learning how to make multiple positive prints on paper from negative glass plates. In the early studio photographs, sitters had to remain still for minutes, sometimes with their heads in braces to keep them still; not surprisingly, few smiled. The images that resulted were extremely fragile but also often stunning in their intimacy and delicacy. The sitters seem to look out at us across time, inviting us to study them and detect their sentiments.

For modern students of history, who rely on images for a great deal of information, photographs are particularly satisfying as a source of historical documentation. In our eagerness to see precise, seemingly objective images of the past, however, it is important to realize that the objects of these early historical photographs are selective: some things — and people — were photographed relatively frequently and others not at all. To put it another way, we cannot see photos of everything about which we are curious, only of what previous generations wanted to be seen. Thus, in addition to the obvious visible information that these early photographs convey about the American past, they also document what versions and aspects of themselves nineteenth-century Americans wanted to preserve.

The images that follow — of female factory workers and of slaves — represent women living and working outside the dominant, middle-class ethic of mid-nineteenth-century true womanhood. Their existence prompts us to ask: who took care to purchase and preserve these images and why?

FACTORY OPERATIVES

Female textile factory operatives arranged to have their own photographs taken. They posed in their work clothes and held shuttles as symbols of their work as spinners and weavers of cloth. The tools signified that the sitter was a skilled worker, with valuable knowledge, experience, and ability. As these images indicate, the women were proud of their presence in and contribution to the burgeoning industrial economy of those years.

Workers often posed for these portraits in groups, which suggests that they thought of their labor as collective and of their coworkers as friends. For women, coworkers were often relatives as well; sisters and cousins followed their kin into the mills, took jobs that had been secured for them, and worked in the same room at the same task. Factory work was a new experience for most of these young women, and the presence of familiar faces may have eased their transition into a strange environment. Family relations were still crucial elements of their lives, even in the impersonal environment of the textile factory.

By 1860, textile factories and the women who worked in them were found throughout much of New England. The four young women shown in Figure 4.8 were photographed near Winthrop, Maine. The two Lowell weavers pictured in Figure 4.9 look enough alike to be sisters. By 1860, when both of these tintypes were taken, Irish newcomers were beginning to take over from Yankee workers in the textile industry, and these women may have been Irish-born. As you study the photographs presented in Figures 4.8 and 4.9 examine the poses, settings, and props. What do they suggest about these women’s identities and perhaps even their thoughts? What do the photographs capture about these women’s relationships?

Figure 4.8 Four Women Mill Workers (1860)

Figure 4.9 Two Women Mill Workers (1860)

The unusual collection of ambrotypes in Figure 4.10 was taken in 1854 in Manchester, New Hampshire, by a group of male and female employees of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company and presented to the foreman who oversaw their labor. Although the men and women worked together in the carding room, preparing the raw cotton for the spinning process, they did different work. The men worked the carding machines, which began the process, while the women tended the drawing frames and double-speeders, which turned the raw fibers into crude strands in preparation for spinning. Despite earning lower wages than the men, women who worked in the carding room were among the best paid of their sex. These subjects posed themselves as dignified, upstanding individuals, dressed in their best clothes for the camera’s eye. What does the fact that men and women allowed themselves to be photographed together suggest about gender relations in factories? How do Figures 4.8, 4.9, and 4.10 represent the pride that early factory workers took in their position?

Figure 4.10 Amoskeag Manufacturing Company Workers (1854)

ENSLAVED WOMEN

Unlike factory operatives, slaves did not choose to have their photographs taken. The following photographs of slave women come from two different sources. The first group is that of slave baby nurses, portrayed with their white charges or as part of a larger family group. The white slaveholders who arranged for these photographs meant to convey that these black women, the “mammies” of southern nostalgic memory, were beloved, trusted servants to their families. Dissenting from opponents’ portrayal of slaveholders as a violent, inhumane class, many regarded themselves as benevolent masters and mistresses who lived in harmony and intimacy with the slaves entrusted to their care.

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, nearly 150 years after the abolition of slavery, such photographs can tell a different story. These nineteenth-century black women look out at us with a humanity and individuality that slavery denied they had. Their expressions and poses suggest the complex, if controlled, meanings that their responsibilities to care for white children may have had for them. What appeared to be maternal love was actually unpaid labor. These photographs belonged not to them but to their masters. Where were their own children as they attended to those of their owners?

Of the numerous photographs of enslaved “mammies,” we know more about the individuals in Figure 4.11 than we do about most. At a slave auction in New Orleans in 1858, the Hayward family bought the slave woman Louisa, age twenty-two, to serve as nursemaid. The tiny child in the photograph was her legal owner. Many decades later, after he had grown up, he gave the ambrotype to the Missouri Historical Society.61 What does the fact that he so treasured this photograph tell you about the relations between slaves and masters? As you look into Louisa’s eyes, try to recover what she was feeling when the photograph was taken.

Figure 4.11 The Hayward Family’s Slave Louisa with Her Legal Owner (c. 1858)

By contrast, nothing is known about the family portrayed in Figure 4.12, although the photographer, Thomas Easterly of St. Louis, was well known. What is most striking about this 1850 family photograph is the absence of a white woman. We have to wonder what happened to her and what her absence means for the black woman who is included. The slave mistress may have died, leaving the black woman to take over her domestic and childrearing duties. Could the man, like so many slave masters, have had his own sort of intimate relationship with the unnamed black woman whom he includes in his family portrait? Consider the affectionate grouping of the father and daughters and the physical isolation of the black woman. What does this composition suggest about this family? Again, what do you see in the face of the slave nurse?

Figure 4.12 Thomas Easterly, Family with Their Slave Nurse (c. 1850)

In a different category from the photographs of domestic slaves are the images of freed slave women that northern photographers made in the context of the Civil War. Like the famous photographs that Mathew Brady took of battlefields and male soldiers, these images were meant to document the North’s purposes in the war and the Union army’s military conduct. Figure 4.13 shows a photograph taken in 1862 by Timothy O’Sullivan, a colleague of Brady, on a plantation in Beaufort, South Carolina.

O’Sullivan was traveling with the Union army, which had seized and occupied the coastal Sea Islands of eastern Georgia and South Carolina early in the war. Their masters and overseers having fled, these black people continued to work the plantations where they lived but now under the supervision of northern officers, in anticipation of the relationship later formalized within the U.S. Army’s Freedmen’s Bureau (p. 297). O’Sullivan posed this picture of an entirely black, multigenerational family just freed from slavery. Contrast this image with Figures 4.11 and 4.12, the photographs taken by slaveholders to document their notions of the sentiments that bound slaves to white families. How does O’Sullivan’s photograph give evidence to the bonds of love and kinship among black people that the cruelties of the plantation system ignored and threatened? Do you see anything different in the faces and postures of these people?

Figure 4.13 Timothy O’Sullivan, Plantation in Beaufort, South Carolina (1862)

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Compare the attitudes and expressions of the factory operatives and the slave women, especially the slave “mammies.” How does the fact that one group chose to photograph themselves while the others were photographed by their masters change the meaning of the photographs?

All of these early photographs show women defined by their labor. Does work, in any way, offer common ground between factory operatives and slaves? How are the women in these photographs different from the images in Godey’s Lady’s Book (Primary Sources, pp. 204–10) of middle-class “true women”? What do you think of the fact that the former were more likely to come down to us in photographs, while the images of the latter were preserved in illustrations and paintings?

Consider what photographs add to historical documentation. What can photographs, even at this early stage, tell us about women’s history that other sorts of images cannot? Conversely, how should we analyze photographs to avoid the temptation of regarding them simply as mirrors of a lost historical reality?

SUGGESTED REFERENCES

True Womanhood

Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835, 2nd ed. (1997).

Barbara Cutter, Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels: The Radicalism of American Womanhood, 1830–1865 (2003).

Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds., No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader (2002).

Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (2005).

Shawn Johansen, Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Industrializing America (2001).

Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, 1780–1835 (1983).

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (1976).

Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1976).

Early Industrial Women Workers

Mary Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910 (1988).

———, We Will Rise in Our Might: Workingwomen’s Voices from Nineteenth-Century New England (1991).

Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (1990).

Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South (2002).

Thomas Dublin, ed., Farm to Factory: Women’s Letters, 1830–1860, 2nd ed. (1993).

———, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (1981).

Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race and War in the Nineteenth Century (2006).

Bernice Selden, The Mill Girls: Lucy Larcom, Harriet Hansen Robinson, Sarah G. Bagley (1983).

Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (1986).

Carole Turbin, Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, New York, 1864–1886 (1992).

Prostitution

Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, eds., The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (2008).

Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (1987).

Women in Slave Society

Daina Ramey Berry, “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe”: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (2007).

———, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation (2017).

Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004).

Christie Anne Farnham, ed., Women of the American South: A Multicultural Reader (1997).

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (1998).

Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (2002).

Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008).

Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (2017).

Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985).

Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (2013).

Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (1984).

Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (1995).

Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, A Slave: A True Story (1999).

Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (2010).

Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017).

Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (2006).

Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (1996).

Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, rev. ed. (1999).

CHAPTER 5

Shifting Boundaries

EXPANSION, REFORM, AND CIVIL WAR 1840–1865

THE YEAR 1848 WAS A DECISIVE ONE IN THE HISTORY of the nation and its women. Mexico, on the losing side of a grueling war with the United States, had just signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and transferred 1.5 million square miles of land and thousands of human beings to U.S. sovereignty. The term “Manifest Destiny,” coined a few years before, described the young nation’s ambition to wrest much of the continent from its resident peoples, who, U.S. expansionists claimed, could not be trusted to exploit its potential riches. Responding to this crusade, tens of thousands of land-hungry American women and men crossed the central plains to settle on the Pacific Coast. Less than a year after the end of the Mexican War, the discovery of gold in California dramatically accelerated this migration.

The beginning of the American women’s rights movement also dates from 1848. Female reformers had been engaged for several decades in efforts to reshape and perfect American society. As proponents of temperance and opponents of slavery, women had pushed at the boundaries of the so-called woman’s sphere and moved into more public roles in these years. With the inauguration of the women’s rights movement at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, they openly breached these boundaries, directing their utopian hopes and activist energies toward the freedom of women themselves.

Finally in 1848, the issue of slavery began to move into American party politics. Although Congress had been evading the issue of slavery for decades, in that year the first political party to oppose the expansion of slavery, the Free Soil Party, was established, followed by the formation of the Republican Party six years later. On the basis of its antislavery platform, the Republican Party captured the presidency in 1860, prompting eleven southern slave states to secede and fracturing the nation. The resulting Civil War threw the lives of all women, Union and Confederate, white, black, and Native American, into upheaval for four deadly years.

In different ways, each of these historical processes was a kind of “movement.” In this dynamic period in American history, when traditional social arrangements were being challenged and reformulated, when politics were confronting fundamental questions about the nature of American democracy and the future of the American nation, when the physical nation itself was breaking and remaking its borders, and when these vital sources of growth gave way to war and destruction and death, American women were on the move as well. Despite cultural conventions about their rootedness at home, American women struck out in all sorts of directions, playing a distinctive part in the nation’s history and transforming themselves in the process.

1831

William Lloyd Garrison begins publication of the Liberator

1833

American Anti-Slavery Society formed

1833

Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society formed

1834

Female moral reform societies begin

1836–1838

Grimké sisters speak and write against slavery

1836

Ernestine Rose arrives in United States, begins agitation for married women’s property reform

1836

Congress passes “gag rule” against women’s antislavery petitions

1837

Ladies Physiological Society of Boston founded

1838

National Female Anti-Slavery Convention mobbed and Pennsylvania Hall burned

1840s

Emigrants encroach upon Native lands in the West

1840

American Anti-Slavery Society splits, in part over women’s rights

1840

Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton meet at World’s Antislavery Convention in London

1843

Oregon Trail passage through the Rockies mapped

1844

Margaret Fuller publishes Woman in the Nineteenth Century

1845

“Manifest Destiny” coined to describe U.S. transcontinental ambitions

1846

Rosalía Vallejo de Leese’s Sonoma home invaded by “Bear Flag mob”

1847

Beginning of Mormon trek to Utah

1848

Gold discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California

1848

Oneida, New York, utopian community formed

1848

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transfers much of northern Mexico to the United States

1848

First New York State Married Women’s Property Act passed

1848

Seneca Falls Convention initiates women’s rights movement

1848

Free Soil Party founded

1850

Compromise of 1850, including Fugitive Slave Law, passed

1850

California becomes a state

1850

First National Women’s Rights Convention held in Worcester, Massachusetts

1851

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s partnership begins

1852

New York Women’s Temperance Society formed

1852

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin published

1854

Republican Party formed

1854

Elizabeth Cady Stanton addresses New York legislature on women’s rights

1856

Margaret Garner tried in Cincinnati

1857

Supreme Court decides Dred Scott v. Sandford, rejecting possibility of black citizenship

1860

Second New York State Married Women’s Property Act passed

1860

Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln elected president

1860–1861

Southern states secede

1861

Civil War begins

1863

Emancipation Proclamation declares slaves in rebel territory free

1863

Women’s National Loyal League established

1863

Battle of Gettysburg proves turning point in war

1863

Food riots in Richmond, Virginia, and draft riots in New York City erupt

1865

Robert E. Lee surrenders

1865

Lincoln assassinated

1865

Thirteenth Amendment ratified

AN EXPANDING NATION, 1843–1861

For a century before and a half century after 1848, continental expansion was a defining aspect of the American experience. Starting in the 1840s, however, the westward movement of American settlers entered a distinctive phase. The Oregon Trail was mapped in 1843 — the first of the overland routes across the Rocky Mountains — and over the next two decades approximately 350,000 Americans crossed the continent, moving through the Indian lands of mid-America to reach the Pacific Coast. The migrants were mostly young American families: men charged with economic obligation and women with childbearing and childrearing responsibilities. Except for slaves brought by southerners, they were for the most part white and, given the costs of the trek, from the middle ranks of society. When gold was discovered in California in 1848, the character and purposes of American migration changed. Hordes of eager, ambitious men — and a few intrepid women — rushed to California to realize their dreams of quick wealth rather than permanent settlement. The outbreak of the Civil War effectively curtailed the overland migration, and when expansion resumed, it took a different form, following the nation’s new railroad system to concentrate on the great expanse of the trans-Mississippi plains (see pp. 363–66 and the map at the end of the book).

Throughout the period of migration along the overland trails, women from the diverse cultures that met in the West came into conflict. Mexican women who lived in the Southwest were pushed aside as American women moved into their lands. Self-identified “respectable” women shunned prostitutes and female adventurers. Through it all, Indian women and girls were hired or captured by newcomers for domestic labor, and by the outbreak of the Civil War, Mexican women were beginning to labor for American women in the same capacity. The conflicts between different groups of women were sometimes overt, sometimes implicit, but always more significant than the commonalities that the ideology of true womanhood claimed they shared.

Overland by Trail

Historians and American popular culture have long celebrated the selfless wives and pioneer mothers for their role on the overland crossing, and it is undoubtedly true that men alone could not have made the new claims of continental nationhood a reality. But what of the actual experience of the individual women who pulled up stakes, cooked and laundered out of their primitive wagons for half a year or longer, gave birth and tended children across more than two thousand miles? Men usually made the decision to move. In 1852, Martha Read wrote to her sister of her reluctance to emigrate from New York with her husband: “It looks like a great undertaking to me but Clifton was bound to go and I thought I would go rather than stay here alone with the children.”1 Other women undertook the crossing with the same eagerness as did their men. Looking west from the banks of the Missouri River that same year, Lydia Rudd wrote in her diary, “With good courage and not one sign of regret . . . [I] mounted my pony.”2 Individual families joined together in long lines (“trains”) of thirty to two hundred covered wagons to share the effort and the danger of the trip. Many single men made the overland crossing, but few unmarried women did. Enslaved women had no choice in the matter when southern slaveholders decided to take their households westward.

Occasionally, documents left by the migrants provide glimpses into the domestic tension that accompanied the difficult decision to uproot and migrate. A month into her 1848 trip to Oregon Territory, Keturah Belknap recorded a quarrel she overheard in a nearby wagon between a husband and wife: “She wants to turn back and he won’t, so she says she will go and leave him . . . with that crying baby.” Then Belknap heard a “muffled cry and a heavy thud as if something was thrown against the wagon box.” She heard the wife say, “Oh you’ve killed it,” to which the husband responded that “he would give her more of the same.”3 In another of these rarely recorded incidents of desperate female resistance, one woman on the trail was so determined to turn back that she set the family’s wagon on fire.4

Madonna of the Trail Monument

Twelve exact replicas of this 10-foot-tall statue, located from Maryland to California, trace the westward, transcontinental movement of nineteenth-century American settlers. The Daughters of the American Revolution initiated and funded the project in the late 1920s, after the organization had become radically conservative and fervently nationalistic. The statue commemorates the era of Manifest Destiny as the backbone of American nationalism and honors motherhood as women’s highest form of patriotic service. However, the monumentality of the figure also evokes masculine characteristics.

Throughout the crossing, men and women had distinctive responsibilities. Men drove the wagons and tended the animals. Women fed their families, cared for their children, and did their best to “keep house” in a cramped wagon bumping its way across the country. As the months wore on and the horses and oxen weakened, women walked more often than they rode. Men’s tasks were concentrated during the day; after the wagons stopped and the animals were tended, they could snatch a bit of time to relax. If decisions about direction or pace had to be made, the men met alone and made them. The women’s workdays were effectively the reverse. They woke up earlier to prepare breakfast, cared for children as the train moved forward, and worked for many hours after the wagons stopped to prepare for the next day. On an overland trail, everyone worked to the full limit of her or his capacities. Even so, the average woman’s workday was several hours longer than that of a man.

Overlanders took care to bring with them some of the few household improvements American women had gained in settled areas by the mid-nineteenth century, such as industrially spun cloth, prepared flour, and soap. Other modern inventions — iron stoves, for example — could not be carried easily, returning women to the domestic conditions of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations. On the rare days when the wagon train stopped, many women did laundry, pounding the dirt out of clothes in cold running streams. Often women convinced men to stop the train to observe the Sabbath, but instead of resting, women caught up on their work.

In certain situations, women had to help the men drive the wagons or tend the stock. Rather than seize the chance to show that they could do a man’s job, white women were frequently reluctant to undertake new and difficult obligations on top of their regular work, clinging to the ideas of true womanhood as a way to preserve dignity on the trail. As Catherine Haun’s party crossed the Rockies, she described how she joined in to keep the wagons from plunging uncontrollably back and forth. She complained bitterly, not so much that the work was difficult as that it was “unladylike.”5 Enslaved women were even more exposed than free women to hard labor in these westward caravans. Bridgette “Biddy” Mason, for example, made the overland journey in 1848 with her Mormon owners. Although a nursing mother with three daughters, Mason was charged with the dusty job of tending the cattle trailing the wagon trains.

Women had exclusive responsibility for children on the trip. Since the average period between births for white women in 1850 was twenty-nine months, it is reasonable to assume that many, perhaps most, women of childbearing age were either pregnant or nursing and caring for infants in the wagons. Pregnancy was not discussed publicly, although “confinement” was not possible on a wagon train. Often the only way that a historian reading a woman’s letters or diary can detect a pregnancy is through the woman’s references to “getting sick,” followed soon afterward by mention of a new child. “Still in camp, washing and overhauling the wagons,” Amelia Stewart Knight wrote in her 1853 trail diary. “Got my washing and cooking done and started on again . . . (here I was sick all night, caused by my washing and working too hard).” Within two weeks, just as their trip ended, she gave birth to her eighth child. She had been pregnant but had not referred directly to it for the entire six-month trip west.6

In contrast to the infrequent references to birth, deaths, especially of children but also adults, were amply described. On her way to Oregon, Jane Gould Tortillott wrote about overtaking a particularly ill-fated wagon train. “There was a woman died in this train yesterday,” she wrote. “She left six children, one of them only two day’s [sic] old.”7 As the number of overlanders rose, more and more graves marked the trail. Lydia Rudd, who had begun her trip west so optimistically, within weeks was counting the graves she passed. Many migrants died of cholera, a swift-moving infectious disease that killed by severe dehydration. The disease had come with European immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century, and the overland migrants brought it with them as they traveled west. Sarah Royce wrote in her diary about the death of a man in her group: “Soon terrible spasms convulsed him. . . . Medicine was administered which afforded some relief . . . but nothing availed and in two or three hours the man expired.” After the body was buried and the wagons were cleansed, Royce could only wait. “Who would go next?”8

Women’s relief at having arrived at their destination in Oregon or Washington or California was quickly replaced by the realization that they still had to build homes and establish communities. Long after they had moved west, many continued to miss the lives and families they had left behind. Yet, while individual women suffered during the crossing, their way of life and standards for womanhood eventually triumphed, and for most, their willingness to move west was vindicated. In contrast, Native women and the resident Mexican citizens experienced the United States’s growing continental reach as conquest and displacement. The process of American expansion set women against each other on the grounds of culture, race, and ethnicity.

The Underside of Expansion: Native Women and Californianas

In the Far West, three groups of people — emigrants from the East, Indians, and Californios (Mexican citizens who lived in California prior to American statehood) — came upon each other with various combinations of curiosity, hospitality, alliance, exploitation, and violence. Starting in the late eighteenth century, Californios thinly populated the Pacific Coast up to the San Francisco Bay. Coastal Natives became their laborers and servants. Inland and to the north, larger numbers of Indians still lived the lives of their ancestors. The arrival of emigrants beginning in the mid-1840s brought rapid change. Within a few years, the Californios had lost control of the coastal lands, the lives of the Natives had been profoundly disrupted by epidemics, warfare, and death, and California had become the thirty-first state of the United States. As migrating overlanders crossed through Indian Territory in large numbers, they imagined that they were constantly at risk from the “red man.” Over and over, trail accounts speak of Indian “attacks” that turn out to be something quite different. Hunger and epidemics were spreading among the Plains Indians, a consequence of encroaching American settlement. To alleviate their poverty, Indians begged for or demanded food and money from the emigrants as they passed through their lands. In 1849, Sarah Royce’s wagon train was stopped outside of Council Bluffs, Iowa, by Sioux who wanted payment of a toll. A tense encounter ensued, but the Americans refused to pay and declared that “the country we were traveling over belonged to the United States and that these red men had no right to stop us.” Royce recorded “the expression of sullen disappointment, mingled with a half-defiant scowl” on the Indians’ faces as the emigrants moved on.9

In and around the U.S. Army forts and trading posts that dotted the trail were Native women who had left their own people to live with white men in informal sexual and domestic unions but who had been abandoned when the men married white women. In some cases their Native communities did not allow them to return, so these women ended up on the edges of white culture, as domestic servants to women settlers or prostitutes to men, and were met with scorn as “black dirty squaws.”10 “Squaw” had originally been used by white people simply to mean “Indian woman,” but the word had come to hold exclusively negative connotations of sexual degradation and unrelenting, unrewarded, and unskilled female labor.

Compared to the numerous accounts from white women who feared Indians, few Native women left records of how they felt about white people. In her autobiography, Sarah Winnemucca, a Paiute from the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, related her encounter with American emigrants who crossed into her people’s lands when she was a small child: “They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since, and I have never forgotten their first coming.” The Paiutes had their own rumors that the white people “were killing everybody and eating them.” The men of her father’s band were away from camp and the women and children were gathering seeds when they realized that whites were approaching. The terrified women buried their children up to their necks in mud and then hid their faces with bushes. “Can any one imagine my feelings buried alive . . . ?” Winnemucca recalled. “With my heart throbbing and not daring to breathe, we lay there all day.” Her parents rescued her later that night. Soon after, the band’s winter supplies were burned by a party of white men, and their impoverishment began.11

An Indian Woman Gathering Acorns, 1859

Collecting acorns was part of California indigenous women’s traditional gathering work. Women dried and ground the acorns as a staple of their diets. However, by the time the Hutchings’ California Magazine published this image, California Indians had already undergone a horrific decade of intentional decimation and forced removal to reservations carried out by American colonists. The accompanying article stated that Indians were “the lowest in morality and intellectual ability on this continent.” Like European colonists of earlier eras, the unnamed author pointed to the subsistence labor of indigenous women as a sign of Indian backwardness. The scene of acorn gathering therefore both romanticized and racialized the work of Indian women.

Native peoples on the Pacific Coast suffered severe losses as Americans poured into their lands. California Indians were particularly devastated. Their traditional sources of food were destroyed by American mining and agriculture. Sarah Winnemucca’s mother feared that her “young and very good-looking” sister was unsafe among white men, even those whom her family considered friends. These assaults, along with the sexually transmitted diseases that American men brought with them, dramatically reduced Native women’s fertility. The Indian population of California, which had already been cut in half by disease and poverty in the years of Mexican rule, declined even more precipitously — from 150,000 to 30,000 — between 1850 and 1860.

Californios, descendants of the original Mexican colonists, also experienced loss of land as well as status under American rule. Most of the first Mexican women who had come to California (Californianas) were the wives of soldiers and banished convicts. However, both Mexican and American legend romanticized the women of the small class of grand Mexican landholders. Starting in the 1830s, American men who went to California made their way into Mexican society by marrying the women of these elite families. In 1841, Abel Stearns, an ambitious merchant from Massachusetts, married Arcadia Bandini, daughter of one of the largest landholders in California. Arcadia, who was fourteen when she married the forty-year-old Abel, outlived her husband; when she died in 1912, she was the richest woman in southern California.

Arcadia Bandini Stearns was unusual. While Mexican law gave married women more control over their property than did U.S. law, this did not protect them from the loss of wealth and standing that they, along with their men, suffered once California was absorbed into the United States. (See Reading into the Past: “Narrative of Mrs. Rosalía Vallejo Leese,” pp. 230–31.) This was the experience of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, a Mexican woman who married an American army officer when she was seventeen and he was thirty. She became the first person to chronicle her people’s experience for an English-speaking audience. In her 1885 historical romance, The Squatter and the Don, she gave a powerful fictional account of the long legal process by which the U.S. government’s guarantees to the citizens of Mexican California were abrogated and their lands gradually taken from them. Despite Ruiz de Burton’s high literary and political standing, she died landless and impoverished in 1895. Instead of Ruiz de Burton’s work, which was based on personal experience, the more enduring fictional account of the Californio experience has become the 1880 novel Ramona: A Romance of the Old Southwest, written by the Massachusetts writer Helen Hunt Jackson.

Rosalía Vallejo de Leese, with spouse and children, c. 1850

Rosalía Vallejo came from an extended family of colonial Mexican military officers. Against the wishes of her brother, she married Jacob Reese, who had converted to Catholicism, and became a Mexican citizen. Through dress and posture, this landowning Californio family conveyed their dignity and privilege, which at the time of the photograph had been upset by American occupation. By the end of the Civil War, Jacob Reese returned to New York, leaving Rosalía and her children in California.

Once California became a state in 1850, legislators sought to preserve some of the advantages that Mexican law provided married women, but gradually state courts and legislatures began to rewrite and reinterpret the laws of marital property to conform to the American standard, which favored husbands over wives. These legal shifts may have helped to accelerate the transfer of California lands from Mexican to American ownership in the 1850s and 1860s. As this happened, many Californianas followed the path of Native women into landlessness, domestic service, and poverty.

READING INTO THE PAST

Narrative of Mrs. Rosalía Vallejo Leese, Who Witnessed the Hoisting of the Bear Flag in Sonoma on the 14th of June, 1846

Rosalía Vallejo was born in Monterey in 1811 to a prominent military family who helped to colonize Alta California for Spain. In the late 1830s, after Mexican independence, she married a naturalized citizen named Jacob Leese. After residing several years in Yerba Buena (now San Francisco), Rosalía and Jacob built a family ranch on a land grant in Sonoma that had been secured by Rosalía’s brother Mariano Vallejo. In Sonoma, Rosalía Vallejo de Leese encountered the small group of American settlers who had invaded Sonoma and declared an independent “republic” in June of 1846. Almost thirty years later, she shared her testimonio in Spanish with Henry Cerruti, one of the interviewers hired by Hubert Howe Bancroft to gather materials for a comprehensive history of California. The interview focused on the event known in American history as the “Bear Flag Revolt,” but which Vallejo de Leese described as the “all-out robbery of California.” Cerruti, a European immigrant whose first language was neither Spanish nor English, wrote down Vallejo de Leese’s words in English. In this version of her testimonio, bilingual scholars have revised Cerruti’s awkward translation for clearer expression.

As soon as the Bear Flag was raised, I was told by the thieves’ interpreter that I was now a prisoner. This interpreter’s name was Solís. He was a former servant of my husband’s. Solís pointed to four ragged desperados who were standing close to me with their pistols drawn. I surrendered because it would have been useless to resist. They demanded the key to my husband’s storehouse and I gave it to them. No sooner had I given them the key than they called their friends over and began ransacking the storehouse. There were enough provisions and liquor there to feed two hundred men for two years. A few days after my husband was taken away, John C. Frémont arrived in Sonoma. He said that his sole purpose for coming was to arrange matters to everyone’s satisfaction and protect everyone from extortion or oppression. Many paid writers have characterized Frémont with a great number of endearing epithets, but he was a tremendous coward. Listen to me! I have good reason to say this. On June 20, we received news that Captain Padilla was on his way to Sonoma with a squad of one hundred men to rescue us. As soon as Frémont heard about this, he sent for me. He ordered me to write Padilla a letter and tell him to return to San José and not come near Sonoma. I flatly refused to do that, but Frémont was bent on having his own way. He told me that if I refused to tell Padilla exactly what he told me to say, and if Padilla approached Sonoma, he would order his men to burn down our houses with us inside. I agreed to his demands, not because I wanted to save my own life, but because I was pregnant and did not have the right to endanger the life of my unborn child. Moreover, I judged that a man who had already gone this far would stop at nothing to attain his goals. I also wanted to spare the Californio women from more trouble, so I wrote that ominous letter which forced Captain Padilla to retrace his steps. While on alert for Padilla’s possible attack, Frémont changed out of his fancy uniform into a blue shirt. He put away his hat and wrapped an ordinary handkerchief around his head. He decided to dress like this so he would not be recognized. Is this the way a brave man behaves?

During the whole time that Frémont and his ring of thieves were in Sonoma, robberies were very common. The women did not dare go out for a walk unless they were escorted by their husband or their brothers. One of my servants was a young Indian girl who was about seventeen years old. I swear that John C. Frémont ordered me to send that girl to the officers’ barracks many times. However, by resorting to tricks, I was able to save that poor girl from falling into the hands of that lawless band of thugs who had imprisoned my husband. . . .

I could tell you about the many crimes committed by the Bear Flag mob, but since I do not wish to detain you any longer, I will end this conversation with this: those hateful men instilled so much hate in me for the people of their race that, even though twenty-eight years have gone by since then, I still cannot forget the insults they heaped upon me. Since I have not wanted to have anything to do with them, I have refused to learn their language.

SOURCE: Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz, translators and editors, Testimonios: Early California through the Eyes of Women, 1815–1848 (Berkeley: Heyday Books, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley), 28–29.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What parts of Vallejo’s testimonio emphasize her experiences as a woman and a mother?

How did Vallejo de Leese draw on ideals of manhood to challenge the prevailing heroic narratives about Frémont and the Bear Flag “revolt”?

The Gold Rush

The combination of the discovery of gold in 1848 with the end of the Mexican War and the achievement of statehood in 1850 greatly accelerated the Americanization of California. The year before the discovery of gold, there were four thousand overland migrants; the year after, there were thirty thousand. Overlanders were joined by other gold-seekers who sailed around the southern tip of South America or crossed the Panamanian isthmus. International migrants flocked to the goldfields from Chile, Sonora Province in Mexico, and even China. At the end of the war with Mexico, California had been populated by one hundred thousand Indians, perhaps a tenth as many Mexicans, and only a few thousand Americans. After the discovery of gold, it became one of the most cosmopolitan places on earth. Based on almost unlimited hopes for the quick achievement of fortune, California society was thoroughly cash-dependent; anything could be bought, and everything cost dearly.

Most of the gold-seekers were men. For every one hundred men who came to gold country, there were only three women.12 Some of these women came with their husbands, either to share in the adventure or to fulfill a sense of conjugal duty. But some women longed to go west to pursue their own adventurous dreams. In a letter to her mother soon after news broke of the discovery of gold, Susan B. Anthony, later one of the founders of the women’s rights movement, wrote, “I wish I had about $100,000 of the precious dust. I would no longer be [a] School marm.”13 Anthony did not go, but there were women who did join the rush, some to work close to the mines and others to set up businesses in San Francisco or Sacramento and make their fortunes at a distance. (See Primary Sources: “Female Labor in the Gold-Rush Economy,” pp. 257–65.) One of the few African American women in gold-rush San Francisco was Mary Ellen Pleasant, who ran a boardinghouse and a restaurant from 1849 through 1855. “A smart woman can do very well in this country,” one woman wrote to a friend back east. “It is the only country that I ever was in where a woman recev’d anything like a just compensation for work.”14

Despite the economic unpredictability of gold-rush California, women continued to maintain class differences among themselves. Only rarely did middle class women live at the goldfields. Most white women at the diggings lived more hardscrabble lives. While their husbands sought their fortunes at the mines, they supported their families by feeding, housing, sewing, and laundering for the hordes of unmarried men who were willing to pay well for such services. Mary Ballou, who ran a supper table for miners, was astounded at the money she could make in California compared to how little women’s labor was worth in the East. Even so, she concluded, “I would not advise any Lady to come out here and suffer the toil and fatigue that I have suffered for the sake of a little gold.”15

“Entreprise de Mariages,” Charivari, 1849

This French satirical cartoon demonstrates the immense international interest in the California gold rush and the notable scarcity of women in the gold fields. In the wake of the 1848 French Revolution which encouraged republican freedom of the press, Parisian humor magazines poked fun at the absurdities of gold-rush life. Here, Charivari lampoons writer and reformer Eliza Farnham’s plan to send brides to California miners. The sign behind the merchant indicates a wedding business that promises an “assortment of widows” to repair California bachelor households and the caption indicates that this commercial item is in “high demand.”

Of all the women in gold-rush California, prostitutes have drawn the most attention from historians, much of it either romantic or salacious. “The first females to come were the vicious and unchaste,” wrote Hubert Howe Bancroft, the state’s first historian. “Flaunting in their gay attire, they were civilly treated by the men, few of whom, even of the most respectable and sedate, disdained to visit their houses.”16 This image of the gold-rush prostitute who was accorded the respectability in California denied to her elsewhere in American society is inaccurate. So, too, is the claim that sexual labor provided these women with wealth and independence. The glamorous whores of California legend were few and limited to San Francisco. Closer to the goldfields, the majority of prostitutes worked in seedy “crib hotels,” where they had sex with many men for $1 or $2 per customer. All were at great risk for venereal disease, violence, and early death.

The hierarchy of sex service in midcentury California reflected sharp racial and national distinctions, with white American and French women in the highest strata, and Mexicans, South Americans, and African Americans much lower. At the very bottom were the Chinese. By the late 1850s, approximately thirty-five thousand Chinese men had come as miners but had been forced by discriminatory laws into low-paid, unskilled labor. The much smaller numbers of immigrant Chinese women were found almost exclusively in prostitution, a situation that did not change until federal measures restricted Chinese immigration in 1882 (see p. 372). By 1860, approximately two thousand women had been kidnapped or purchased in China and sent to the United States, where they were resold for tremendous profits. Chinese prostitutes were held in virtual slave conditions. Their terms of indenture were repeatedly extended for all sorts of spurious reasons, and many did not outlive their terms. Should they somehow elude their captors and the Chinese syndicates that organized the trade, they had no place to turn. U.S. courts ruled that prostitutes who had run away were guilty of the crime of property theft (of themselves) and brought them back to their masters. A few Chinese prostitutes were able to marry Chinese laborers, but American law prohibited marriage to white American men.

ANTEBELLUM REFORM

The physical expansion of the United States, along with the economic transformation of early industrialization, generated a thriving spirit of moral and social activism from 1840 to the Civil War. Antebellum reformers pushed beyond established social and cultural norms in their attempts to improve, even perfect, both the individual and the society. The centers of this reform ferment were in New York and New England, as if the era’s impatience with established boundaries took a metaphoric rather than physical form in that region. Initially rooted in deeply religious conviction, the antebellum reform movement eventually followed the lodestar of moral virtue to arrive at the deeply political issues of abolition and women’s rights. Accordingly, reform activism was virtually nonexistent in the slave South.

Women played a notable role in antebellum reform. By one estimate, at any given time as many as 10 percent of adult women in the Northeast were active in benevolent and reforming societies in these years.17 The influential ideology of true womanhood credited women with the selflessness necessary to counterbalance male individualism. Women’s modest efforts on behalf of the community’s welfare were thus compatible with domesticity and female respectability. But over time, women’s dedication to moral and social causes led them beyond their homebound roles and to the edges of woman’s allotted sphere. In the case of women’s rights, some women crossed over into new gender territory altogether.

Expanding Woman’s Sphere: Maternal, Moral, and Temperance Reform

Following the intense wave of revivals in the late 1820s known as the Second Great Awakening (see pp. 160–62), women from an ever-wider swath of American society became involved in efforts to deepen and broaden the Protestant faith. Initially their role was to support male missionaries in bringing Christianity to the unconverted at home and abroad. For the most part, they deferred to male clergy and kept to their place, but the fervor of their faith inspired some to venture into new territory, figuratively and literally. In 1836, for instance, Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spaulding traveled with their minister husbands to Oregon Territory by wagon, probably the first American women to do so, to convert the Nez Perce and Cayuse Indians.

Even in these supportive roles, however, pious women began to form their own organizations dedicated to aspects of their religious duty. They formed mothers’ societies to protect the virtue of their children from the rampant immorality they perceived in a society in social and economic flux. These organizations published magazines to advise mothers and established and administered orphanages and Sunday religious schools. By emphasizing the Christian exercise of maternal responsibility, their members wielded their maternal role to expand social authority for their sex. Pious women also formed moral reform societies to combat the upsurge of drink, prostitution, and other forms of what they called “vice.” By the early 1840s, there were four hundred female moral reform societies in New England and New York. Moral reform enthusiasm was expansive enough to cross boundaries of race and class. Women of the tiny African American middle class formed their own societies to encourage standards of sexual decorum and family respectability in the free black community. The Lynn, Massachusetts, branch brought together artisans’ wives and unmarried seamstresses to guard against the prostitution that they feared would take root in factory towns.

Moral reform societies were particularly concerned with the increase in casual sexuality among young women impoverished by the economic forces of rapid industrialization. Female moral reformers raised money to send ministers to save the souls of those women who had already “fallen” and campaigned to exclude from upstanding society “persons of either sex known to be licentious.”18 Eventually they became bolder and reached out directly to prostitutes, despite the threat that such actions posed to their own womanly respectability. Because they considered sexual excess as fundamentally male and regarded all women, even prostitutes, as its victims, they felt that sexual immorality represented sin in its most distinctly male form. To be sure, if prostitutes were not sufficiently penitent, they lost their claim to Christian women’s sympathy. Nonetheless, women’s moral reform activism deepened many middle-class women’s gender consciousness and expanded their sense of common womanhood, thus helping to lay the foundations for the women’s rights movement.

Women’s religiously motivated social activism in the mid-nineteenth century reached its height in the temperance movement. Americans were heavy drinkers in these years, but the temperance fervor focused on more than alcohol abuse. In an era of rapid and disorienting economic growth, the lack of self-restraint expressed through drunkenness provided a convenient explanation for why so many people suffered dramatic downward social mobility. The gospel of temperance promised that if a man could just control his impulses, subdue his appetites, and redirect his energies, his family might survive and even prosper through economic shifts. No reform movement was more widely supported in the 1840s and 1850s.

The Fruits of Temperance, 1848

Created by the famous lithographer Nathaniel Currier, this hand-colored engraving was published in New York by J. B. Allen. Available at an affordable price for middle-class families, it illustrated the domestic harmony that flowed from a temperate father and husband. Furthermore, in an era of numerous financial “panics,” the prosperous factories in the background also tied temperance to commercial growth and upward mobility. The fine-print caption reads: “Behold the son of Temperance, with buoyant heart and step, returning to his home, the partner of his bosom looks up and smiles his welcome; his children fly to meet him, their little arms embrace him, and with lip and heart they bless him.” How might this image have appealed to men and women for different reasons?

Although drunkenness was considered an exclusively male vice, images of its female victims — the suffering wives and children of irresponsible drunkards — figured prominently in anti-alcohol propaganda. Not content to remain mere symbols for the tragedies that “King Alcohol” wreaked, women became active proponents of temperate living. They began to form their own Daughters of Temperance societies to challenge both the morality and the legality of commerce in alcohol. When New York women activists created a women’s temperance society in 1852, five hundred women attended the convention.

Like the moral reform associations, women’s temperance organizations incubated the expression of female discontent with middle-class family life and marital practices. Temperance activism allowed women to criticize men for their failure to live up to the marital bargain, by which wives would subordinate themselves to their husbands so long as the men were reliable breadwinners and evenhanded patriarchs. Numerous female activists began their reform careers within the temperance movement, among them Susan B. Anthony, the women’s rights pioneer, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the most prominent midcentury African American woman writer and speaker. After the Civil War, women’s temperance activism continued to grow until it led to the most important women’s organization of the Gilded Age, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (see pp. 319–20).

Exploring New Territory: Radical Reform in Family and Sexual Life

As women’s enthusiasm for moral reform and temperance suggests, family and sexual life were important concerns of antebellum female reformers. The private nuclear family that was so central to the middle-class cult of domesticity was also a locale for domestic violence, sexual abuse, and female disempowerment. Some antebellum reformers called for more radical changes in women’s sexual and reproductive lives and for the establishment of alternative social systems not based on the private family.

Women’s menstrual, reproductive, and sexual complaints made them eager advocates and consumers of health reform. Unwilling to rely on the questionable diagnoses of regular physicians, health activists developed alternative therapeutic regimes to increase bodily vitality. They made use of natural, non-invasive methods and urged against too much sensual stimulation, believing it unhealthy. The “water cure,” a system that emphasized cold-water baths and loose clothing, offered comfort to women worn out from too many and too frequent pregnancies. A program developed by reformer Sylvester Graham stressed the benefits of cold, unspiced foods (from which we inherited the Graham cracker) and promised to remedy sexual as well as digestive complaints.

Mary Gove Nichols, an outspoken critic of the sexual abuses hidden within marital life, advocated both the Graham and water-cure systems. Through the 1840s, she spoke forcefully and wrote explicitly about women’s physical frustrations and sufferings in marriage. Insistent that “a healthy and loving woman is impelled to material union” — that is, sexual intercourse — “as surely, often as strongly as man,” she declared that “the apathy of the sexual instinct in woman is caused by the enslaved and unhealthy condition in which she lives.”19 The Ladies Physiological Society of Boston, active between 1837 and 1841, enthusiastically sponsored Nichols’s direct speech about female sexuality. In addition to hosting lectures on physiology and anatomy, Society members gathered in each other’s home, cultivating an “intimate, confessional peer education model,” where white women activists could support each other in achieving sexual virtue.20 Black abolitionist Sarah Mapps Douglass also embraced the cause of women’s health education in the 1850s, giving public lectures in Philadelphia on female physiology with the aid of a “French manikin.”

Radical reformers of sexuality and the family could be found as residents of the many communitarian experiments that sprang up in the 1830s and 1840s. These intentional communities posed a range of challenges to conventional notions of marriage and the family. The Shakers occupied one end of the continuum, prohibiting all sexual relations, even within marriage. Men and women lived and worshipped in separate but conjoined communities, coming together to dance and sing their religious ecstasies. Obviously unable to enlarge their numbers by biological reproduction, Shakers took in orphans, apprentices, and individuals in flight from unhappy families, including destitute widows. In the 1830s, an estimated six thousand Shakers lived in nineteen communities throughout the country. Their celibate way of life and the alternative they offered to the private, patriarchal family strongly appealed to women, particularly inasmuch as their founder and chief saint was a woman. Mother Ann Lee (see p. 130) had emigrated in the 1770s from England, where she had suffered marital rape and domestic abuse. She taught that God was both male and female, and that marriage was based on the subjugation of women and thus violated divine law.

On the other end of the continuum, the Oneida community sanctified extramarital sexuality. Moved by deep dissatisfaction with his own marriage, John Humphrey Noyes founded a community in 1848 in Oneida, near Syracuse, New York. Its members owned property collectively and raised children communally, but the collectivization of sexual relations was the source of the community’s greatest notoriety. Both men and women were sexually active but foreswore monogamy, lest they substitute attachment to an individual for the exclusive love of God. They also practiced a strict contraceptive regime that required men to withhold ejaculation through prolonged sexual intercourse. Despite the Oneidans’ sexual radicalism, they were deeply Christian and justified all their practices in biblical terms. The collectivization of housework, the availability of different sexual partners, male responsibility for contraception, and what might fairly be called the institutionalization of foreplay offered women at Oneida alternatives available nowhere else. Yet Noyes’s insistence on retaining authority over all community life (including assigning sexual partners) also gave Oneida a deeply patriarchal air. Nonetheless, the Oneida community survived into the 1880s.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons, was the most historically significant of these intentional antebellum communities. It is also difficult to assess through the eyes of women, because the estimations of insiders and outsiders were so different with respect to women’s status in it. Founded in 1830 in Palmyra, New York, the Mormons numbered fifteen thousand nine years later. The group migrated several times, eventually forming a cooperative community in Nauvoo, Illinois. Responding to rumors that Mormon leaders had multiple wives, non-Mormons drove them out, and starting in 1847, the community trekked farther west to Utah. There, polygamy became an open practice, a sign of special divinity. In 1870, in response to federal pressure against polygamy, the Utah Territory enfranchised its women to indicate their power and stature. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the great philosopher of nineteenth-century women’s rights, brought her own critique of marriage to Salt Lake City in 1871, she reported that “the Mormon women, like all others, stoutly defended their religion, yet they are no more satisfied [with their marriage practices] than any other sect.”21 The Mormons held to the practice of polygamy until 1896, when they formally rejected it in order for Utah to be admitted as a state.

While the Shakers, the Oneidans, and the Mormons were inspired by radical Christian notions of human perfectibility, there were other communal experiments based on more secular, indeed socialist, ideas. The most famous was Brook Farm, founded in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1841 by members of the Boston-based intellectual circle known as the Transcendentalists. For its brief existence, Brook Farm combined high culture and cooperative labor. Although young Georgiana Bruce, recently arrived from England, was not one of the luminaries of the experiment, she enthused, “[T]he very air seemed to hold more exhilarating qualities than any I had breathed before.”22 Margaret Fuller was the most prominent woman associated with Brook Farm, which she visited frequently as she was writing the first full-length feminist treatise in American history, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. “What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule,” she wrote, “but as nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded.”23

Crossing Political Boundaries: Abolitionism

Of all the forms of antebellum social activism, the movement to abolish chattel slavery had the most profound impact on American history, contributing significantly to the social and political tensions leading to the Civil War. Like temperance and moral reform, abolitionism arose out of a deep religious conviction that truly God-fearing Christians had the obligation to eliminate sin — in this case slaveholding. “Let but each woman in the land do a Christian woman’s duty,” implored the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1836, “and the result cannot fail to be [the slave’s] instant, peaceful, unconditional deliverance.”24 But unlike other reform movements, abolitionism brought its proponents, women along with men, into open conflict with America’s basic political and religious institutions.

Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?

This image, widely used in antislavery literature, expresses the complex sentiments that underlay women’s abolitionist activism. The rhetorical question “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” challenges the fundamental premise of chattel slavery that the slave woman was mere property. This version appeared in the special pages for women in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator.

The call for immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery and full civil rights for black people first came from the free black community, which by 1820 numbered over a quarter of a million. Many free blacks were kin to enslaved people, whom they struggled to purchase or smuggle into freedom through the Underground Railroad, the elaborate system of escape routes developed to aid fleeing slaves. African American women sustained black abolitionist work through fund-raising, writing, and public speaking. In 1831, Maria Stewart, a black domestic servant from Connecticut, became the first American woman known to have spoken publicly before mixed audiences of women and men. Stewart championed the intellectual contributions of African American women to the cause of racial equality. In one of her speeches, published by the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator, Stewart demanded: “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”25

Black men and women who had experienced slavery directly also challenged the institution. Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838 to become an internationally renowned advocate of freedom for his people. Sojourner Truth was born in New York in 1797 as Isabella Baumfree, a slave before the institution was abolished in that state. After her emancipation, she spent several years in a religious community in New York City, dropped her slave name, and rechristened herself Sojourner Truth to signify her self-chosen vocation as an itinerant preacher and prophet. Starting in 1846, she also became an abolitionist lecturer, traveling as far west as Kansas. Unlike most other black abolitionists, Truth did not present a respectable, middle-class face to the world. She spoke and acted like the woman she was — unlettered, emotionally intense, opinionated, and forthright. In her dialect and style, she made a tremendous impact, especially on white audiences. Author Harriet Beecher Stowe praised “her wonderful physical vigor, her great heaving sea of emotion, her power of spiritual conception, her quick penetration, and her boundless energy.”26

Knowing that their numbers and influence were insufficient to uproot slavery, African American abolitionists sought sympathetic white allies, beginning with William Lloyd Garrison. From 1831 until 1865, Garrison edited the Liberator. Women were always a substantial proportion of Garrison’s followers. His radical principles, universalist notions of human dignity, and personal appreciation for women’s discontent with their sphere made him a trusted leader. Elizabeth Cady Stanton — not one to bestow praise on men lightly — wrote of him: “I have always regarded Garrison as the great missionary of the gospel of Jesus to this guilty nation, for he has waged uncompromising warfare with the deadly sins of both Church and State. My own experience is, no doubt, that of many others. . . . [A] few bold strokes from the hammer of his truth and I was free!”27

In 1833, Garrison founded the American Anti-Slavery Society, which was committed to the immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery. Its membership was racially integrated, although the majority of its members were white. At first, men led the organization and women took supporting roles. Lucretia Mott, an influential Quaker who went on to become the leader of female abolitionists, attended the founding meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, but neither she nor any other women were listed as members. “I do not think it occurred to any one of us at the time, that there should be propriety in our signing the [founding] document,” she later wrote.28

Accordingly, women abolitionists, white and black, organized separate auxiliary female societies. In the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, formed also in 1833, black women were 10 percent of its members and an even higher proportion of its officers.29 Among the most prominent were Charlotte Forten (grandmother of the better-known Charlotte Forten Grimké); Forten’s daughters, Margaretta, Sarah Louise, and Harriet; and Grace Bustill and Sarah Mapps Douglass (not related to Frederick). Despite having greater wealth and education than the overwhelming majority of African Americans, these women were no strangers to racial prejudice. In 1838, when a nationwide meeting of women abolitionists was held in Philadelphia, a mob, infuriated by witnessing black and white women meeting together, attacked them and burned down Pennsylvania Hall, the building they had just dedicated to the abolitionist movement.

Female abolitionists’ willingness to go beyond the limits of female propriety to defeat slavery, combined with their increasing realization that free women, white as well as black, experienced barriers to full personhood like those faced by slaves, pushed many of them in the direction of women’s rights. Sarah and Angelina Grimké led the way. Born into a wealthy and politically prominent slaveholding family in South Carolina, in 1829 the sisters fled to Philadelphia, where they became Quakers and abolitionists. Driven by their deep conviction of slavery’s profound sinfulness, they followed Maria Stewart’s lead in 1836 and preached against slavery to “promiscuous” (mixed) audiences of men and women, providing shockingly detailed descriptions of the sexual corruptions of slavery. The Massachusetts General Association of Congregationalist clergy publicly reprimanded them: “We appreciate the unostentatious prayers and efforts of woman in advancing the cause of religion at home and abroad . . . but when she assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer, . . . her character becomes unnatural. . . . We especially deplore the intimate acquaintance and promiscuous conversation of females with regard to things ‘which ought not to be named.’ ”30 The sisters neither admitted error nor retreated. Instead, they insisted that it was not man’s place but God’s to assign woman’s sphere. Combining religious conviction and American democratic ideals, Sarah wrote: “Men and women were CREATED EQUAL; they are both moral and accountable beings; and whatever is right for man to do, is right for woman.”31

The Grimkés’ courageous defense of their equal rights as moral beings and social activists produced a split in the abolitionist movement over the role of women. One wing, led by Garrison, moved to include women as full and equal participants in the work of converting white Americans to realize the moral necessity of abolishing slavery. After 1840, women served as officers and paid organizers of the American Anti-Slavery Society. A second wing, which included among its leaders Frederick Douglass, insisted that the issue of women’s equality needed to be kept separate from that of abolition. The non-Garrisonians moved in the direction of more pragmatic, political methods, including the formation of political parties against slavery. These two issues — separating abolition from women’s rights and moving beyond moral to political methods — were connected. Women, who were identified with moral purity and who lacked political rights, had little to offer a more political approach to abolitionism, at least until they began to make claims for suffrage.

The surfacing of political methods within abolitionism reflected the dramatic democratization of electoral politics in this period. By 1840, virtually all adult white men, regardless of wealth, had the right to vote. White men of all ranks followed elections closely, boasted proudly of their partisan inclinations, and contended openly for the candidates of their choice. Historians have labeled this expansion of political involvement “Jacksonianism” because the Democratic Party, formed in 1828 to nominate Andrew Jackson for the presidency, was its first institutional embodiment, followed in 1834 by the formation of the Whig Party. While in 1824 only 30 percent of adult white men went to the polls, 80 percent did so in 1840. However, many free black men lost political rights in these years and, by 1860, they were enfranchised in only four states — Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

Nor were women included in the Jacksonian expansion of the franchise. On the contrary, the right to vote was becoming the distinguishing characteristic of white American manhood. Yet, as the reformist spirit of the age began to spill over into politics, women were drawn into the excitement of electoral contests. They participated in political discussions and championed candidates and parties. When they felt compelled to formally register their political opinion on an issue, they turned to the only mechanism allowed to them: petitioning their legislators. As early as 1830, non-Indian women petitioned the U.S. government to halt the violent removal of the Cherokees from their own lands. Women also petitioned their state legislatures to ban the sale of alcohol and to make men’s seduction of women punishable by law.

Women abolitionists conducted the most controversial of these petition campaigns. Starting in the 1830s, they began to gather thousands of signatures on petitions to Congress to ban slavery in the territories and in Washington, D.C., and to end the slave trade from state to state. “Let us know no rest til we have done our utmost to . . . obtain the testimony of every woman . . . against the horrible Slave-traffic,” they declared.32 In 1836, Congress passed a “gag rule” to table all petitions on slavery without discussion, but abolitionist women only intensified their efforts. Their congressional champion, John Quincy Adams (who had become a Massachusetts congressman after a single term as president), defended the movement of women beyond the boundaries of woman’s sphere into the male world of politics. “Every thing which relates to peace and relates to war, or to any other of the great interests of society, is a political subject,” he declared. “Are women to have no opinions or actions on subjects relating to the general welfare?”33

Entering New Territory: Women’s Rights

Starting in the 1840s, all of these developments — moral reform and temperance, circulating petitions against slavery, the Grimkés’ defense of their equal right to champion slaves — led many women reformers into women’s rights. But unlike other activists, advocates of women’s rights openly challenged the basic premise of true womanhood — that women were fundamentally selfless — and insisted that women had the same claim on individual rights to life, liberty, property, and happiness as men.

First articulated in 1792 by the English radical Mary Wollstonecraft, the doctrine of women’s rights was brought to the United States in the 1820s by Frances Wright, a Scotswoman who gained great notoriety by her radical pronouncements on democracy, education, marriage, and labor. The threat that Wright’s ideas represented to notions of respectable Christian womanhood can be appreciated by Catharine Beecher’s horrified description of her: “There she stands, with brazen front and brawny arms, attacking the safeguards of all that is venerable and sacred in religion, all that is safe and wise in law, all that is pure and lovely in domestic virtue.”34 For several years, any woman who publicly advocated radical ideas was derisively called a “Fanny Wright woman.”

For women’s rights to grow from a set of ideas associated with one maligned individual into a reform movement took several decades. Changing state laws that deprived married women of all independent property rights was an early goal. These laws treated wives as nonpersons before the law, on the grounds that they were dependent on and subordinate to their husbands’ authority. This pervasive Anglo-American legal principle was called “coverture,” a term signifying the notion that marriage buried (or “covered”) the wife’s selfhood in that of the husband (see p. 53). A law to undo coverture by granting married women the same rights to earnings and property as single women and all men was introduced into the New York State legislature in 1836 by Elisha Hertell. Hertell was assisted by Ernestine Rose, a Jewish immigrant who had fled from an arranged marriage in Poland to England. There she married a man of her own choosing and later settled with him in New York City, where she became a leader in the “free — thinking” (atheistic) community. Despite great effort, however, Rose was able to gather only a handful of women’s names on a petition supporting Hertell’s bill.

By the 1840s, two other women joined Rose to work on behalf of married women’s economic rights. One was Paulina Wright (later Davis), an activist who had started her career as a women’s health educator. The other was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, destined to become the greatest women’s rights thinker of the nineteenth century. (See Primary Sources: “Women’s Rights Partnership: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the 1850s,” pp. 266–72.) Born into a wealthy and politically conservative New York family, Elizabeth Cady possessed great intelligence and high spirits that consistently led her afoul of the boundaries of woman’s sphere. Her father, Daniel Cady, was a prominent lawyer and a judge, and although she could never hope to follow in his footsteps, she studied law informally in his office. As a young woman, she was deeply influenced by her cousin, the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. In his home, a stop on the Underground Railroad, she met fugitive slaves. She also met her future husband, the charismatic abolitionist orator Henry Stanton. In 1840, despite her father’s opposition, Elizabeth and Henry married. When Henry introduced his new bride to Sarah and Angelina Grimké, they noted that they “were very much pleased” with Elizabeth but wished “that Henry was better calculated to help mould such a mind.”35

Elizabeth Cady Stanton soon found her mentor in Quaker and abolitionist leader Lucretia Mott. On her honeymoon in London in 1840, she met Mott at an international antislavery convention at which female delegates were confined behind an opaque curtain and barred from participating in formal discussions. Both women were incensed, but the thrill of meeting each other outweighed the insult. “The acquaintance of Mrs. Mott, who was a broad, liberal thinker on politics, religion, and all questions of reform, opened to me a new world of thought,” Cady Stanton later recalled.36 For the next several years, Mott instructed her young protégée in the principles of women’s rights. Cady Stanton lobbied in the New York legislature for reform of married women’s economic rights. In April 1848, the legislature passed the first New York State Married Women’s Property Act that gave wives control over inherited (but not earned) wealth.

By this time, Cady Stanton was the mother of four boys and living in the small industrial town of Seneca Falls, New York. Her husband was often away working for the abolitionist cause. With Lucretia Mott as her teacher and Henry Stanton as her husband, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was perfectly situated to bridge the gap between the moral activist tradition of women reformers and the increasingly political focus within abolitionism. She was also eager for a dramatic change in her own life. “The general discontent I felt with woman’s portion as wife, mother, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide,” she wrote, “the wearied, anxious look of the majority of women impressed me with a strong feeling that some active measures should be taken to right the wrongs of society in general, and of women in particular.”37 In July 1848, Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Mott’s sister Martha Coffin Wright, and two other local female abolitionists called a public meeting in a local church to discuss “the social, civil and religious condition of Woman.” Of the approximately three hundred women and men who attended, one-third, including a large contingent of Quakers, endorsed a manifesto titled “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” which, in part, rewrote the Declaration of Independence to declare that “all men and women are created equal” (emphasis added).38

Bloomer Costumes

The heavy skirts worn by middle-class women in the mid-nineteenth century were awkward and confining. In 1851, women’s rights advocates began to adopt a “reform dress” that featured loose trousers under a shortened skirt. The fashion was named after Amelia Bloomer, a Seneca Falls neighbor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Bloomer championed the outfit in her reform magazine, the Lily, and “bloomerism” traveled widely. This image was published in 1851 in the British satirical magazine Punch. That year, London hosted the first World’s Fair, where bloomer-outfitted women were frequently sighted. The cartoonist, John Leech, published over two dozen such cartoons, linking “bloomerism” with women engaged in unpleasant male activities such as smoking and drinking in pubs. The cartoonist visually exaggerates the bloomered women and their outfits and contrasts them with the respectable, modest women who shy away from them. In the image, street urchins also publicly ridicule them. Elizabeth Cady Stanton later observed that this ridicule is what eventually convinced her to abandon the outfit, much as she liked it.

The Seneca Falls manifesto went on to list eighteen instances of “repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.” (See the Appendix, p. A-1, for the complete text.) Women were unjustly denied access to professions, trades, and education; their rights in marriage and motherhood; their self-confidence; and their moral equality before God. The most controversial resolution asserted women’s equal right to vote. To abolitionist purists, however, resort to the ballot represented participation in a fundamentally corrupt system. Yet more and more issues about which women cared — including temperance and abolition — were being debated and resolved within the electoral arena. And, as Cady Stanton repeatedly insisted, all the other changes needed in women’s condition would ultimately require women’s ability to affect the law. Frederick Douglass, living nearby in Rochester, was the only man in the room who could not vote, and he supported the suffrage resolution eloquently. After debate, the delegates passed it.

In the years after the Seneca Falls Convention, the women’s rights movement grew energetically but haphazardly. Lucy Stone, the first U.S. woman college graduate and a traveling lecturer on abolition and women’s rights, inspired many women to join the ranks. Women learned about the new movement from friends and relatives. In 1851, Susan B. Anthony, living in nearby Rochester, heard about it from her mother and sister, traveled the short distance to Seneca Falls, and there met Cady Stanton. The two women immediately formed a working friendship that lasted sixty years. Women brought women’s rights ideas with them as they migrated west. In 1850, California emigrants Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce (later Kirby) debated women’s rights as side by side they plowed their Santa Cruz farm. Beginning with a national women’s rights meeting in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, women’s rights advocates met in conventions to share ideas, recruit new adherents, and fortify themselves for future efforts. At one such meeting, in 1851 in Akron, Ohio, abolitionist and former slave Sojourner Truth delivered a women’s rights speech that has come down through the years as a forceful case for a new standard of womanhood expansive enough to include women like herself (see Reading into the Past: “I Am as Strong as Any Man”).

Gradually, these pioneering activists began to reform the laws that denied women, especially wives, their rights, particularly their economic rights. Cady Stanton and Anthony conducted the most successful of these early campaigns in New York State. Cady Stanton, confined by her growing brood of children, wrote the speeches and petitions from her Seneca Falls home. In these years, she spoke in public only once, in 1854, before the members of the New York legislature. Anthony, freer as an unmarried woman, traveled through the state to collect signed petitions on behalf of women’s civil and political rights. Women’s rights reformers also confronted cultural practices such as fashion that, along with laws, constrained women.

In 1860, the New York State legislature finally passed a more comprehensive Married Women’s Property Act that gave wives the rights to own and sell their own property, to control their own wages, and to claim rights over their children upon separation or divorce. Cady Stanton was ready to move on to a campaign to liberalize divorce laws, but this was too much even for women’s rights radicals. Moreover, by this point, political conflicts over slavery between North and South had reached such a level of intensity that, like other Americans, women’s rights activists were thoroughly preoccupied with the fate of the Union.

READING INTO THE PAST

SOJOURNER TRUTH

I Am as Strong as Any Man

The most oft-cited version of Sojourner Truth’s eloquent 1851 women’s rights speech was published by a white activist, Frances D. Gage, twelve years after it was delivered. Recently, historian Nell Painter has drawn attention to a version of the speech published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle at the time Truth made her remarks. In this presumably more accurate version, Truth makes her important argument for women’s rights on the basis of her own experience of black womanhood but without the southern dialect, the “Ain’t I a woman” refrain, or the lament for her children lost to slavery, all of which Gage attributed to her.

I am a woman’s rights [woman]. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. . . .

I can’t read, but I can hear. I have heard the Bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and the woman who bore him. Man, where was your part?

SOURCE: Marius Robinson, The Anti-Slavery Bugle, June 21, 1851, reprinted in Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: Norton, 1996).

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

How is Truth using her own experience to expand the definition of womanhood?

How does Truth interpret the Bible through a women’s rights lens?

CIVIL WAR, 1861–1865

Ever since the northern states had ended slavery early in the nineteenth century, national political leaders had tried to ignore the practice as an exclusively southern problem. In 1820, Congress had crafted the Missouri Compromise, which drew a line across the territories of the Louisiana Purchase at the southern border of the new slave state of Missouri and declared that no further slave states (with the exception of Missouri itself) could be established north of it. The goal was to keep the number of slave and nonslave states equal so as to give neither side an advantage in the Senate. Despite the petitions of abolitionist women, the two major parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, cooperated in keeping debate over slavery out of national politics. But continuing western expansion, especially the 1848 acquisition of lands from Mexico that lay outside the Louisiana Territory, eroded this fragile political balance.

In 1850, congressional leaders crafted a second compromise. California would enter the Union as a nonslave state, in exchange for which special federal commissioners would be appointed with the power to return people charged with being runaway slaves to those who claimed to be their masters. Although slave-catching of fugitive slaves was already protected by the Constitution and existing federal legislation, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act strengthened the law in favor of slaveholders and increased the threat of kidnapping for free people of color in the North. What southerners regarded as proper federal protection of their property rights, northerners regarded as evidence that an expansive slave power was taking over the country. From this point forward, the expansion of slavery became an increasingly explosive national political issue, culminating in the secession of South Carolina in December 1860 and the beginning of the Civil War in April 1861.

Just as the Civil War pitted brother against brother, women, too, were intensely divided in their loyalties, with the difference, of course, that women were barred from both the ballot box and the battlefield. But as in all civil wars, the home front was impossible to separate from the battle front. Women on both sides actively supported their causes and their armies. A small but surprising number participated directly, either on the battlefield or in the politics that shaped the changing purposes for which the war was fought. All women were affected by the war — its passions, victories, devastations, and deaths.

Margaret Garner

Six years after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, Kentucky slave Margaret Garner and her family fled across the Ohio River to freedom. When slave-catchers caught up with them, Garner killed her daughter Priscilla rather than see her returned to slavery. The ensuing fugitive slave trial, the longest in American history, defended Margaret from return to Kentucky on the grounds that she must be tried for murder under Ohio law. The strategy failed and she was reenslaved, sold further south, and died of typhoid two years later. Both abolitionists and proslavery forces made her trial a cause célèbre. Which position does this 1867 painting of the episode support?

Women and the Impending Crisis

As the political conflict over slavery intensified, women were drawn into the growing crisis. Most famously, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin to dramatize the dangers facing the escaping slave under the new federal law. By far the most popular American novel ever written, the story of the slave Eliza fleeing slave-catchers to save her child was avidly read when it first appeared in installments in an antislavery newspaper in 1851 and 1852. Inspired by Stowe’s book, Harriet Jacobs, who had actually escaped from slavery twelve years before, determined to write her own story. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself was published in 1861, with the help of white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. (See Chapter 4.)

Harriet Beecher Stowe

This is likely the earliest photograph of author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Although the exact date is unknown, it was probably taken between the birth of her fifth child in 1843 and the publication, in 1852, of the novel that made her world-famous.

Throughout the political events of the 1850s, women’s involvement was everywhere. In 1854, the Republican Party was founded to oppose the expansion (though not the existence) of slavery, and it succeeded in bringing the issue squarely into the center of national politics. The party’s 1856 presidential nominee was U.S. senator John Frémont of California, one of the men who had originally surveyed the Oregon Trail. His wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, was the first wife of a presidential candidate to figure significantly in a national campaign. Daughter of U.S. senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, the young, attractive, and vivacious woman was considered a liberal influence on her husband. Campaign paraphernalia advertised Jessie as much as her husband. Although John Frémont was defeated by the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan, the Republicans succeeded in displacing the Whigs to become one of the two major national parties.

Then, in 1857, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of slavery in the momentous case Dred Scott v. Sandford. The case might more appropriately be called the Dred and Harriet Scott case since it involved not only Missouri slave Dred Scott but also his wife, Harriet. Together they sued their owner for their freedom and that of their two daughters. By being brought in 1834 into federal territory where slavery was not lawful, the Scotts argued, they had become free persons. A majority of the Supreme Court ruled against the Scotts. In addition, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote an opinion that the entire legal framework dating back to the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional because it violated slaveowners’ property rights. The sons of the Scotts’ original owner eventually bought them their freedom, but the larger battle between pro- and antislavery forces for control of the federal government had been profoundly intensified by the decision.

The election of 1860 took place against the background of abolitionist John Brown’s abortive guerrilla raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, which was intended (but failed) to start a general slave uprising. To southerners, the handful of black and white antislavery warriors under Brown’s command constituted exactly the violent threat that they long had feared from abolitionists. Many northerners regarded Brown quite differently, as a martyr. “I thank you that you have been brave enough to reach out your hands to the crushed and blighted of my race,” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote to Brown as he awaited execution after his capture by federal forces. “I hope from your sad fate great good may arise to the cause of freedom.”39

For president, the Republicans nominated former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln, a moderate critic of slavery, hardly an abolitionist. Nonetheless, his election was intolerable to the South because he was a Republican. But to many northerners, Lincoln’s election was cause to celebrate. Twenty-one-year-old Frances Willard, who would go on to head the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the 1870s, observed events from her Illinois home: “Under the present system I am not allowed to vote for [Lincoln], but I am as glad on account of this Republican triumph as any man who has exercised the elective franchise can be.”40

By April 1861, eleven southern slave states had seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America. On April 13, South Carolina slaveholder Mary Chesnut watched as southern gunboats fired on U.S. ships that Lincoln had sent to provision federal Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. She recorded her reaction upon learning that federal forces had surrendered to the Confederates: “[I] sprang out of bed and on my knees — prostrate — I prayed as I never prayed before.”41

Chesnut understood that war had begun in earnest. North and South, men and boys rushed to enroll in their local regiments, and wives and mothers prepared to say good-bye. “Love for the old flag became a passion,” wrote Mary Livermore from Illinois, “and women crocheted it prettily in silk, and wore it as a decoration on their bonnets and in their bosoms.”42 Both sides hoped for a brief war and a glorious victory but got instead a four-year conflict, the deadliest war in American history.

Women’s Involvement in the War

Although formally excluded from enlistment and armed service, both Union and Confederate women were deeply involved in the war. Eager and patriotic, a minority found their way to the battlefields, as nurses, spies, and strategists; a few, disguised as men, even served as soldiers. (See Primary Sources: “Women on the Civil War Battlefields,” pp. 273–86.) Far more women participated at a distance. Because both armies were decentralized and almost entirely unprovisioned — except for munitions — by their respective governments, women volunteers were responsible for much of the clothing, feeding, and nursing of the soldiers. In the South, this was done at a local level. Within a few months after the conflict had begun, Mary Ann Cobb, wife of a Confederate officer in Georgia, found herself charged with rounding up provisions for a company of eighty men, largely by going door-to-door among her neighbors.

In the North, where women had greater experience in running their own voluntary associations, soldiers’ relief was better organized. Local societies were drawn together in a national organization known as the United States Sanitary Commission. Mary Livermore spent the war directing the Chicago branch. Her duties were manifold: “I . . . delivered public addresses to stimulate supplies and donations of money; . . . wrote letters by the thousand . . . ; made trips to the front with sanitary stores . . . ; brought back large numbers of invalid soldiers . . . ; assisted to plan, organize, and conduct colossal [fund-raising] fairs . . . ; detailed women nurses . . . and accompanied them to their posts.”43 The experience turned Livermore and others like her into skilled, confident organization women, and after the war they used these experiences to build even more ambitious women’s federations. On the basis of her experience organizing relief supplies for northern soldiers, Clara Barton went on to found the American division of the International Red Cross.

The labors of such women earned them elaborate praise. But for the average woman on either side of the conflict, these were not so much years of uplifting service or patriotic heroism as years of prolonged suffering. Women struggled to support their families without the aid of husbands, sons, and brothers. Anna Howard Shaw, who later became one of America’s leading suffragists, was a young woman living in rural Michigan in 1861: “I remember seeing a man ride up on horseback, shouting out Lincoln’s demand for troops. . . . Before he had finished speaking the men on the [threshing] machine had leaped to the ground and rushed off to enlist, my brother Jack . . . among them. . . . The work in our community, if it was done at all, was done by despairing women whose hearts were with their men.”44

Since the North lost much of its labor force to the fighting, the South, which relied on slave workers, initially had the advantage. Even so, most white southerners were small-scale subsistence farmers who relied almost entirely on their own labor rather than on that of slaves. Numerous women from these families demanded that the Confederate government excuse their husbands from service or provide them with the wherewithal to support their families. For a group of women who had long served only as symbols of southern patriotism and objects of husbandly protection, this signaled the beginning of direct political engagement. With or without official leaves, numerous southern soldiers responded to the entreaties of their wives to leave their posts, come home, and bring in the harvest. “Since your connection with the Confederate army, I have been prouder of you than ever before . . . ,” one such woman wrote to her husband, “but before God, Edward, unless you come home we must die.”45 By the middle of the war, such seasonal desertions, conservatively estimated at more than one hundred thousand, as much as 10 percent of the Confederate forces, were a major strain on the South’s capacity to fight.

As the conflict wore on, patriotism and optimism gave way to discontent on both sides. In the South, the situation was exacerbated by a Union naval blockade that led to food shortages and triple-digit inflation. In the spring of 1863, the women of Richmond rampaged through the streets protesting the high cost of food and demanding that they be able to buy bread and meat at the same prices as the Confederate armies. Three months later, New York City was paralyzed by mobs protesting passage of a federal Conscription Act that allowed wealthy men to buy themselves out of the draft for $300. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had just moved to the city with her three youngest children, found herself in the middle of the upheaval. She watched with horror as one of her older sons was recognized by the rioters as “one of those three-hundred-dollar fellows.” “You may imagine what I suffered in seeing him dragged off,” she wrote to her cousin. Alone with her children, Cady Stanton prepared a speech to deliver, if necessary, which aimed to “appeal to them as Americans and citizens of the Republic.”46 As the mob redirected their violence toward the city’s African Americans, Adelaide Butler, the free black matron of the Colored Orphan Asylum also sprang into action to shepherd over two hundred children to safety while the orphanage burned to the ground behind them.

Emancipation

While the South was fighting to preserve slavery and defend its sovereignty, the war aims of the North remained muddled. For more than a year, Lincoln insisted that his only goal was to end secession and restore the Union. The president was unwilling to declare opposition to slavery for fear that the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware, where slavery was legal, would leave the Union and join the Confederacy. The abolition of slavery became the Union’s goal only after slaves themselves took action through a massive, prolonged process of what has been characterized as “self-emancipation.” Like the slaves who for decades had run away, men and women in large numbers began to flee into the arms of the Union army, buoyed by news of northern victories and hoping that they would be freed. One woman described her escape onto a Union gunboat sailing down the Mississippi River. “We all give three times three cheers for the gunboat boys and three times three cheers for big Yankee sojers an three times three cheers for gov’ment,” she recalled; “an I tell you every one of us, big and little, cheered loud and long and strong, an’ made the old river just ring ag’in.”47 Union officers disagreed on how to respond to the masses of refugees. Those unsympathetic to the antislavery cause wanted to return them to their owners, but the army eventually decided on a policy of accepting them under the category of confiscated enemy property. Thousands of these human “contraband” provided crucial aid to the Union army as laborers, cooks, and servants. As many as forty thousand gathered in Washington, D.C., where Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and others organized a freedmen’s village.

As their numbers increased, Lincoln realized that the steady flight of the southern slave labor force offered an irresistible military advantage to the Union. Accordingly, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on January 1, 1863, which declared all slaves in rebel territory “forever free” and instructed the Union army and navy to “recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” The status of slaves living in the Union border states and areas of the Confederacy already under Union control, however, was left untouched. Since the Union could not actually emancipate slaves in lands it did not control, the proclamation was meant only to encourage slaves in the renegade regions to abandon their masters and free themselves. Despite its limits, however, the Emancipation Proclamation finally made the Civil War a war against slavery.

Women’s rights leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were determined to push Lincoln to enact a more comprehensive abolition policy. “If it be true that at this hour, the women of the South are more devoted to their cause than we to ours, the fact lies here,” wrote Cady Stanton. “The women of the South know what their sons are fighting for. The women of the North do not.”48 (See Primary Sources: “Women’s Rights Partnership: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the 1850s and 1860s,” pp. 266–72.) Along with Lucy Stone and other women’s rights activists, they formed the Women’s National Loyal League to force Lincoln to adopt a broader emancipation policy. As abolitionist women had done thirty years before, they gathered signatures on petitions to Congress to “pass at the earliest practicable day an act emancipating all persons of African descent.”49 The league collected and submitted to Congress 260,000 signatures, two-thirds of them from women. The first popular campaign ever conducted on behalf of a constitutional amendment, these efforts contributed significantly to the 1865 passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which permanently abolished slavery throughout the United States.

In 1863, after two years of grueling warfare, the military tide began to turn in the Union’s favor. An important factor was the Union army’s decision to permit African American men to fight. Close to two hundred thousand enlisted, providing a final burst of military energy as well as a manly model of black freedom. Black women such as Susie King Taylor and Harriet Tubman lived and traveled with these troops, serving as nurses, spies, and military laborers. (See Primary Sources: “Women on the Civil War Battlefields,” pp. 273–86.) On July 4, 1863, the Union won a decisive battle at Vicksburg, Mississippi, just one day after its equally decisive victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Still, the war lasted two more years. In the autumn of 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched the western division of the Union army across Georgia and South Carolina, determined to break the spirit of the rebellion by destroying everything of value as he went. At her plantation, Mary Chesnut found “every window was broken, every bell torn down, every piece of furniture destroyed, every door smashed in.”50

Finally, on April 9, 1865, almost four years to the day after the attack on Fort Sumter, General Robert E. Lee, head of the Confederate army, surrendered. An ex-slave woman from South Carolina remembered, “[On] de fust day of freedom we was all sittin’ roun’ restin’ an’ tryin’ to think what freedom meant an ev’ybody was quiet an’ peaceful.”51 “The people poured into the streets, frenzied with gladness,” wrote Mary Livermore, “until there seemed to be no men and women in Chicago, — only crazy, grown-up boys and girls.” Then, five days later, Lincoln was assassinated. “From the height of this exultation,” Livermore wrote, “the nation was swiftly precipitated to the very depths of despair.” She continued, “Never was a month so crowded, with the conflicting emotions of exultation and despair, as was the month of April 1865.”52 Not all women saw it the same way. “Thank God, the wretch has gotten his just deserts,” exulted a Confederate woman.53

CONCLUSION: Reshaping Boundaries, Redefining Womanhood

In the years from 1840 to 1865, the women of the United States had traveled a tremendous distance. They had taken a country across a continent. They had joined in a series of social movements to remake and reform American society. They had challenged slavery and undertaken systematic reform in their own status as women. They had begun to demand their inclusion in the democratization of American politics. And, along with men but in their own ways, they had joined in the fight over the character and existence of the Union, participating in the Civil War both on and off the battlefield.

Their experiences through these changes had by no means been the same. Some women had taken possession of new land, in the process displacing others from their homes of long standing. Some had challenged crucial elements of American society and culture and ended up challenging conventional notions of womanhood itself. And while some had defended and lost their right to own slaves, those who had been slaves became free women. Through all of this, however, American women had been deeply involved in these years of momentous national change and had been changed in the process. In the decades after the Civil War, in the victorious North and the defeated South, they began to enter more fully into public life, as workers and socially engaged citizens, in civic organizations and in colleges. Like 1848, 1865 was a decisive year in the history of the nation and of its women.

CHAPTER 5 REVIEW

KEY TERMS AND PEOPLE

Terms

moral reform societies

Daughters of Temperance societies

Ladies Physiological Society of Boston

Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society

New York State Married Women’s Property Act

Seneca Falls Convention

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

People

Sarah Winnemucca

Arcadia Bandini Stearns

Susan B. Anthony

Mary Gove Nichols

Sarah Mapps Douglass

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Lucretia Mott

Sarah and Angelina Grimké

Frances Wright

Ernestine Rose

Lucy Stone

Margaret Garner

Susie King Taylor

Harriet Tubman

Mary Ann Bickerdyke

REVIEW QUESTIONS

What was the significance of U.S. territorial expansion for American women? How did expansion bring different groups of women into conflict with each other across lines of race, ethnicity, region, and class?

How did women’s reform movements either strengthen or challenge the tenets of true womanhood? Analyze the underlying connections between various women’s reform movements — for instance, the relationship between abolition and health reforms.

Although war is often viewed through a male frame, how would you describe women’s involvement in the Civil War, both on the home front and on the battlefield?

Making Connections How did America’s diverse women engage with the overarching idea of Manifest Destiny and the increasingly controversial institution of slavery in these decades of national expansion? When considering various women’s labor and family roles, what changes and continuities can you identify in the antebellum period?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Female Labor in the Gold-Rush Economy

THE GOLD RUSH PRESENTED CALIFORNIA’S working women with both unusual entrepreneurial opportunities and greater vulnerability to exploitation. The 1850 census showed that women and girls made up only 8 percent of California’s nonnative population. By 1860, the proportion of females increased to 28 percent. Within communities of new migrants, the scarcity of females put a premium on the domestic and sexual labor traditionally provided by women. With access to capital and a bit of luck, some women were able to take advantage of their circumstances and even accumulate family property. Many working-class women and women of color living near mining camps pursued the same promise of upward mobility but frequently encountered isolation, poverty, and violence. Indigenous women, who had long been hired as domestic workers on Californio ranchos, now encountered new and lethal forms of coercive labor under U.S. occupation. While individual stories offer examples of remarkable resourcefulness and initiative, the overall economic prospects of California’s women in the gold-rush era divided along lines of race, class, and indigeneity.

The new technology of photography produced many images of diverse communities of men at work panning gold. Figure 5.1 offers a rare photograph of a woman at a mining site. Judging from her clothing and the basket in her hand, what economic contributions is she likely to be making to this group of miners?

Figure 5.1 Panning for Gold in Auburn Ravine (c. 1852)

FAMILY ECONOMIES AND WOMEN’S DOMESTIC WORK

AS THE FOLLOWING DOCUMENTS ON WHITE, African American, and Native American women and girls reveal, women’s working lives during the gold rush varied as much as their ethnic and class backgrounds. Although some women spent time prospecting for gold, they were more likely to do cooking, laundering, boarding, and sewing for miners willing to pay high prices. In many migrant households, married women’s domestic work brought much-needed cash to the family economy, especially when prospecting proved fruitless. The sources that follow reflect a range of women’s experiences with economic success and failure in the gold fields northeast of Sacramento. Compare and contrast the documents by or about white “49er” Luzena Wilson, former slave Nancy Gooch, and Cherokee migrant Barbara Longknife. How did the gender segregation of labor shape the earning abilities of gold-rush women? How might each of these women have viewed their work for money in relation to their unpaid labor for their families?

LUZENA STANLEY WILSON ‘49ER

LUZENA STANLEY HUNT WAS BORN TO A QUAKER FAMILY in North Carolina, but later moved to Missouri and married Mason Wilson. Luzena and Mason Wilson traveled overland to California in 1849 with their two small boys. In 1881 she recounted her days as a “Forty-niner” to her daughter Correnah Wilson Wright, who typed up her narrative. Mills College, Correnah’s alma mater, published the memoir in 1937. After a grueling continental crossing and six months of residence in Sacramento, the Wilsons moved out to the mining camp of Nevada City, where Luzena looked for an opportunity to contribute to the family income. From Wilson’s vantage point, women’s scarcity elevated their position and opened the door to economic opportunity. How does Wilson use her domestic skills to her family’s advantage? In doing so, does she adhere to the conventions of true womanhood or transgress them? What do you make of Wilson’s statement that “I shortly after took my husband into partnership”? Who might she have hired for her cook and waiters? How might this account have been different if Wilson had been keeping a diary instead of retelling the family history to her daughter thirty years later?

Memories Recalled Years Later for Her Daughter (1937)

Chapter Six

From the brow of a steep mountain we caught the first glimpse of a mining camp. Nevada City, a row of canvas tents lining each of the two ravines, which, joining, emptied into Deer Creek, lay at our feet, flooded with the glory of the spring sunshine. The gulches seemed alive with moving men. Great, brawny miners wielded the pick, and shovel, while others stood knee deep in the icy water, and washed the soil from the gold. Every one seemed impelled by the frenzy of fever as men hurried here and there, so intent upon their work they had scarcely time to breathe. Our entrance into the busy camp could not be called a triumphal one, and had there been a “back way” we should certainly have selected it. Our wagon wheels looked like solid blocks; the color of the oxen was indistinguishable, and we were mud from head to foot. I remember filling my wash-basin three times with fresh water before I had made the slightest change apparent in the color of my face; and I am sure I scrubbed till my arms ached, before I got the children back to their natural hue. We were not rich enough to indulge in the luxury of a canvas home; so a few pine boughs and branches of the undergrowth were cut and thrown into a rude shelter for the present, and my husband hurried away up the mountain to begin to split out “shakes” for a house. Since our experience of rain in Sacramento, we were inclined to think that rain was one of the daily or at least weekly occurrences of a California spring, and the first precaution was to secure a water-tight shelter. Our bedding was placed inside the little brush house, my cook stove set up near it under the shade of a great pine tree, and I was established, without further preparation, in my new home. When I was left alone in the afternoon — it was noon when we arrived — I cast my thoughts about me for some plan to assist in the recuperation of the family finances. As always occurs to the mind of a woman, I thought of taking boarders. There was already a thriving establishment of the kind just down the road, under the shelter of a canvas roof, as was set forth by its sign in lamp-black on a piece of cloth: “Wamac’s Hotel. Meals $1.00.”

I determined to set up a rival hotel. So I bought two boards from a precious pile belonging to a man who was building the second wooden house in town. With my own hands I chopped stakes, drove them into the ground, and set up my table. I bought provisions at a neighboring store, and when my husband came back at night he found, mid the weird light of the pine torches, twenty miners eating at my table. Each man as he rose put a dollar in my hand and said I might count him as a permanent customer. I called my hotel “El Dorado.”

From the first day it was well patronized, and I shortly after took my husband into partnership. The miners were glad to get something to eat, and were always willing to pay for it. As in Sacramento, goods of all kinds sold at enormous figures, but, as no one ever hesitated to buy on that account, dealers made huge profits. The most rare and costly articles of luxury were fruits and vegetables. One day that summer an enterprising pioneer of agricultural tastes brought in a wagon load of watermelons and sold them all for an ounce (sixteen dollars) each. I bought one for the children and thought no more of the price than one does now of buying a dish of ice-cream. Peaches sold at from one to two dollars each and were miserable apologies for fruit at that. Potatoes were a dollar a pound and for a time even higher. As the days progressed we prospered. In six weeks we had saved money enough to pay the man who brought us up from Sacramento the seven hundred dollars we owed him. In a little time, the frame of a house grew up around me, and presently my cook stove and brush house were enclosed under a roof. This house was gradually enlarged room by room, to afford accommodation for our increasing business. . . . We had then from seventy-five to two hundred boarders at twenty-five dollars a week. I became luxurious and hired a cook and waiters. Maintaining only my position as managing housekeeper, I retired from active business in the kitchen.

SOURCE: Luzena Stanley Wilson, ’49er: Memories Recalled Years Later for Her Daughter Correnah Wilson Wright (Oakland, CA: The Eucalyptus Press, 1937).

NANCY GOOCH REUNITES HER FAMILY IN CALIFORNIA

LIKE LUZENA WILSON, NANCY GOOCH TRAVELED from Missouri to California but her overland journey was a forced one. Slaveholder William Gooch took Nancy and Peter with him when he struck out for the goldfields, leaving behind the enslaved couple’s three-year-old son Andrew. In 1850, when California passed a constitution outlawing chattel slavery, Nancy and Peter began to work for themselves. Nancy Gooch did domestic work and took in laundry. The Gooches bought farmland in Coloma by 1858 and eventually even acquired the original gold discovery site of Sutter’s Mill. They did so in a hostile legal environment in which state laws prevented African Americans from voting or testifying against whites in court. The state even passed its own Fugitive Slave Law in 1852 to allow former slaveholders to claim enslaved people who arrived with them in California before the 1850 state constitution was ratified. After Peter passed away in 1861, Nancy Gooch continued her domestic work, carefully accumulating the $700 needed to send for her son Andrew and his family.54 Postwar emancipation opened the door Gooch had been waiting for and by 1870, she used her savings to bring her son to California. She lived until 1901 in Coloma, surrounded by her extended family.

Domestic portraiture for both white and black Americans in the mid-nineteenth century served as a sign of respectability and middle-class aspiration. The photo shown in Figure 5.2 was taken in 1857, when Nancy and Peter Gooch were still struggling to acquire land and save enough money to reunite their family. At this point, their son remained enslaved and beyond their reach. Figure 5.3 portrays the Gooch/Monroe family around 1870, when Nancy had finally managed to bring together her son, Andrew (seated with a child on his lap), along with his wife and other sons. Considered together, what do these photographs convey to you about the importance of marriage and extended family for black Californians? What is the possible significance of the book Nancy Gooch is holding in Figure 5.3? What comparisons can you make between Nancy Gooch’s status as a domestic worker and laundrywoman and her self-presentation in these family portraits? Note the photographers’ backgrounds, clothing, facial expression, and posture.

Figure 5.2 Peter and Nancy Gooch Portrait, San Francisco (1858)

Figure 5.3 Nancy Gooch and the Monroe Family (c. 1870)

BARBARA LONGKNIFE WRITES HOME TO INDIAN COUNTRY FROM THE GOLDFIELDS

LIVING IN COLOMA DURING THE 1850s, the Cherokee woman Barbara Longknife could easily have known Nancy Gooch. The migration to California wasn’t her first overland journey, for as a ten-year-old girl, Barbara had been forcibly removed with her family from Cherokee traditional lands in the East to Indian Territory (see pp. 176–77). In 1850, pregnant with her first child, Barbara and her husband, William Longknife, journeyed with a larger group of Cherokees to California. Barbara’s letters to Stand Watie, head of a prominent family in the Cherokee Nation, offer a “counter narrative of the gold rush” that speaks mainly of a working woman’s economic struggle and homesickness.55 Responsibilities for her family — in particular for her sick daughter — compounded the burden of Longknife’s domestic work. The letters preserve Longknife’s original spelling. What insight do these letters give you into Longknife’s contributions to her family’s survival? What are the main sources of her dissatisfaction? How did Longknife use her letters to maintain her ties with family in the Cherokee Nation?

Barbara Longknife to Stand Watie, Coloma, June 8, 1854

Dear Sir,

I gladly embrace the present opertunity of addressing you by the way of this letter. we are in moderate health at the present time and hope these lines may find you and your family emjoying the same blessing. we have made nothing in this country as yet more than barely supported the family. William has been trying his luck in the mines, did not make it pay over board, we have had a great deal of sickness in our family since we came to this Country and our doctor bills has cost us a great many dollars together with other expenses connected with Dr. Bills. we are still living in Coloma and I think it is very probable we will remain here as long as we stay in this Country. I would like very much to see all my old friends in the nation. California is not what it was represented to be, if I was back again I would let California be the last place that I would go to. I am engage in washing at present and have been for a considerable length of time it pays better than anything else that I can do. give my best respects to Mr. Huss and all enquiring friends & receive for your self and family the same. You will please write when this comes to hand and give me all the news of importance. William & myself are the only ones of the mess that I know anything about. R. Tuff died on the plains. Welch died after we got here, the last I heard of your Brother Charles he was going north in 52, have’nt heard from him since. John Candy is in this country somewhere, was in this place a few days since, he has not made his pile yet. when you write you will direct your letter to Coloma Eldorado Co California

Very respectfully your friend

Barbary Longknife

Barbara Longknife to Stand Watie, Coloma, October 11, 1857

Dear Cir

I take this oppertunity of wrighting you a few lines to let you no we are yet in the land of the living. Charles E. Watie was hear to day, he is working at 3 dolars per day, that is good wages for this time. we are all well except my little girl, she has had the bilious fevor and it has left her all most blind of boarth eays. I live in hopes that her site will come back a gain. if I had money I would take her to some other Doctor but as it is I have the best Doctor thir is in this place. we have made a living in this Country and that is all. to rase money enough to take us home we could not if it was to save us all. we could not do that mush and we have not had that mush at one time cince we have bin in the country and Charles says he dont know wether he ever will make that mush or not; that he feels old now that he has worked so hard. not only him that has worked I have worked hard as the next one in the Country and all I have is a living. if I did not work as I do we would be so mush behind that we never would get strate again and if I had never come to this Country I would have now what I have not and that is good health. We have dun the best we could cince hire we have been. Every thing has been hy and is yet. baken is 28c per pound pork 25c per pound and beef 25c per pound . . . no the times is gon when Labor was from 5 to 8 a day for some people. It was good for some but not all. . . . now I say to Mr. Longknife if we doe not have moeny enought in two years to take us home I will then Baige min and my childs way home. to stay hear and work as I do any longer than that time I will not put up with it if I can help it. I am willing to help all I can but I an tyeard of this Country. . . .

Mrs. Barbra Longknife

SOURCE: Edward Everett Dale and Gaston Litton, eds., Cherokee Cavaliers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939).

ENSLAVEMENT AND APPRENTICESHIP OF CALIFORNIA INDIAN WOMEN AND GIRLS

THE RAPID GROWTH OF CALIFORNIA’S POPULATION that brought economic opportunity to some migrant women proved disastrous for Native American women. Tens of thousands of Indian women and girls living in California on the eve of the gold rush suffered extreme violence and terror, including wars of extermination, rape, and de facto slavery in the ensuing years of white expansion.

Figure 5.4 is a hand-colored engraving of a young Native American woman created in the 1850s during peak years of anti-Indian violence. The sobering French caption reads, “Sixteen-year-old Southern California Indian female at the price of a pound of gunpowder and a bottle of brandy.”56 Everything else, from the girl’s own story to the artist’s name and the purpose of the image, is unknown. What details do you notice in the portrait of the young woman? What further questions would you want to ask about her image and its context?

Figure 5.4 “Indienne Californienne du Sud” (c. 1850s)

Apart from de facto trafficking, California Indian children also became subject to an institutionalized system of child labor. State laws governing Native American apprenticeship posed one of the primary contradictions to California’s status as a “free” state. The ironically named 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians regulated relations between whites and Native Americans in matters dealing with labor, land and court procedures. It established an Indian convict leasing system, institutionalized whipping as a legal penalty for Indians convicted of stealing, and denied Indian testimony in court against a white person. Section 3, excerpted on the following page, claimed to guard against the “compulsory” detention of Indian minors but, in reality, it opened the door to numerous child kidnappings and even the murder of Indian parents. One historian argues that these laws made Indian children’s bonded labor “culturally invisible” because they placed Indian children alongside other family dependents under the patriarchal oversight of white male household heads.57

California Statutes, Chapter 133 “An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians,” 1850, Section 3

Any person having or hereafter obtaining a minor Indian, male or female, from the parents or relations of such Indian minor, and wishing to keep it . . . shall go before Justice of the Peace in his Township, with the parents or friends of the child, and if the Justice of the Peace becomes satisfied that no compulsory means have been used to obtain the child from its parents or friends, shall enter on record, in a book kept for that purpose, the sex and probable age of the child, and shall give to such person a certificate, authorizing him or her to have the care, custody, control and earnings of such minor, until he or she obtain the age of majority. Every male Indian shall be deemed to have attained his majority at eighteen, and the female at fifteen years.

SOURCE: Kimberly Johnson-Dodds, Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians (Sacramento: California Research Bureau, September 2002), 28.

A YUKI GIRL’S CONTESTED APPRENTICESHIP

THE CASE OF THE YUKI GIRL “Shasta” (so named for her Shasta mountain origins) demonstrates how guardianship laws worked to give white families legal control over Indian minors. In 1857, San Francisco courts heard white physician Oliver Wozencraft’s plea for the return of a young Indian girl he claimed as his ward. Wozencraft charged that a “negro woman” named Charlotte Sophie Gomez had abducted the child from him three years earlier. The details of the case are not fully clear but some additional background is known. Wozencraft had served as a delegate to the California state constitutional convention, where he unsuccessfully proposed a ban on admitting free blacks into the state. Around the time Wozencraft first took Shasta into his household, he had served as a federal Indian Commissioner who attempted to negotiate treaties with northern California Indian tribes. Charlotte Gomez lived in a small community of black San Franciscans who were involved in aiding free blacks whose former owners attempted to have them sent illegally back into southern slave states. Thus, it is possible that Gomez had attempted to shelter Shasta because she believed Wozencraft was holding her captive. Yet, under California law, Gomez could not have testified against Wozencraft in court and, in fact, she found herself facing perjury charges for denying any role in Shasta’s removal from Wozencraft’s household. In July 1857, a San Francisco probate court, following the law allowing apprenticeship of Indian minors, determined that Wozencraft was a “suitable person to be appointed guardian.” Shasta returned to the Wozencraft household, where she resided until at least the 1880s.

Nineteenth-century newspapers can be read for both surface facts and underlying biases. For example, the Sacramento Daily Union article on the following page related Wozencraft’s version of Shasta’s story from her “adoption” to her “abduction.” Under what circumstances did Shasta first come into Wozencraft’s family? Was she actually an orphan? How does the newspaper describe the actions of Charlotte Gomez and other free African Americans involved in the case? How do they discuss Shasta’s Yuki family of birth? It isn’t clear whether or not Shasta, like so many other Indian minors, was being held as a domestic laborer. Is it possible that Shasta was truly considered a member of Wozencraft’s family?

“Story of ‘Shasta,’ an Indian Orphan Child” (1856)

An application was made, yesterday, to the Judge of the 4th District Court, for a habeas corpus to bring up the person of a little Indian girl, aged about 8 years, and named “Shasta.” The application was made by Dr. Oliver M. Wozencraft, and it is from him that we learn the following romantic story:

In the year 1851, Dr. Wozencraft was Indian Commissioner and Agent, and was engaged in making treaties with the various aboriginal tribes living in the remoter portions of the State. In the month of August, of that year, he made arrangements to go among the Uka [Yuki] tribe, who inhabited the Shasta mountains. . . . His object was to chastise the Ukas, for having a short time before surprised a train of packers, whom they murdered and despoiled of all their pack animals and merchandise. They had also endeavored to burn the town of Shasta. . . . Accordingly, the Commissioner, with twenty mounted dragoons and thirty Ylackas [a different group of California Indians] proceeded against the Ukas, and chased them for several days along the stream on which they were located, but the Indians continually escaped up the mountains. . . . [After more than a day’s pursuit, the soldiers managed to chase the Yuki men into the remote mountains, but captured a group of “squaws and children secreted in the bushes.” The following morning, Wozencraft learned that the “captives” had silently escaped from the area under cover of night] . . . but left a little orphan girl about three years old, whom they had during the march treated with great neglect. Dr. Wozencraft took charge of the little unfortunate, and sent her to Mrs. Wozencraft, in San Francisco. That lady adopted, as it were, the orphan, and raised her; becoming more and more attached to her, until some time in September, 1853, “Shasta,” for that was the appropriate name bestowed upon the girl, disappeared. Nothing more was heard of her until only a few days ago, when the Doctor and his lady as they were returning from church, met their former ward in the streets. On investigation it was discovered that she was living with certain colored persons, name Collyer and Charlotte Sophie Gomez. The Doctor immediately took measures to regain the custody and care of “Shasta,” and procured the issuance of the writ of habeas corpus, to which we have referred above.

It may not be uninteresting to state, in connection with the story of Shasta, that the stream upon which the Commissioner encamped has since been named “Squaw Creek,” in commemoration of the capture of the Uka women, which took place there. Many miners are located in its region, and the town of Natches is built upon its banks. We also learn that the Uka Indians afterwards accepted the alternative of peace, and became friendly.

SOURCE: “Story of ‘Shasta,’ an Indian Orphan Child,” Sacramento Daily Union, December 15, 1856.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What role did class, race, and family networks of support play in shaping the kind of gendered labor done by each of the women represented here?

How might discriminatory legislation like the testimony laws or the Native American apprenticeship law have curtailed the ability of some groups of women to make a living and acquire property?

What opportunities and vulnerabilities to exploitation did women encounter during the California gold rush? How were some women’s opportunities related to other women’s vulnerabilities?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Women’s Rights Partnership: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the 1850s and 1860s

TRACING THE EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY women’s rights movement through the half-century-long relationship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony reminds us that many aspects of that history are best understood in terms of the bonds between women. This particular relationship, though always oriented toward important political events, also illustrates the degree to which domestic demands constrained and informed female reformers, not just wives and mothers like Cady Stanton but also single, self-supporting women like Anthony.

The documents excerpted here allow us to follow the first decade of their relationship through their rich correspondence, augmented by autobiographical and biographical reminiscences, excerpts from the speeches they worked together to produce, and occasional newspaper reports of their activities.

The following account from Cady Stanton’s autobiographical reminiscences recalls the friends’ first meeting in Seneca Falls, sometime in 1850 or 1851, in connection with an antislavery meeting. The two lived in booming industrial towns only a few hours from each other in upstate New York. Cady Stanton wrote her account thirty years after the fact. How might the intervening years have affected her memories of the event?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Recalls Meeting Susan B. Anthony (1881)

It was in the month of May, of 1851, that I first met Miss Anthony. . . . There she stood with her good earnest face and genial smile, dressed in gray silk, hat and all the same color, relieved with pale blue ribbons, the perfection of neatness and sobriety.

It is often said by those who know Miss Anthony best, that she has been my good angel, always pushing and guiding me to work. . . . Perhaps all this is in a measure true. With the cares of a large family, I might in time, like too many women, have become wholly absorbed in a narrow family selfishness, had not my friend been continually exploring new fields for missionary labors. Her description of a body of men on any platform, complacently deciding questions in which women had an equal interest, without an equal voice, readily roused me to a determination to throw a firebrand in the midst of their assembly. . . .

[From 1848 through 1860], Susan B. Anthony circulated petitions both for the civil and political rights of woman throughout the State [New York], traveling in stage coaches and open wagons and sleighs in all seasons, and on foot from door to door through towns and cities, doing her uttermost to rouse women to some sense of their natural rights as human beings, to their civil and political rights as citizens of a republic; . . . they would gruffly tell her they had all the rights they wanted, or rudely shut the door in her face, leaving her to stand outside, petition in hand, with as much contempt as if she were asking alms for herself. None but those who did that petition work in the early days for the slaves and the women, can ever know the hardships and humiliations that were endured.

SOURCE: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda J. Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (Rochester, NY: Susan B. Anthony, 1881), 1:56–62.

APARTICULARLY RICH EXCHANGE OF LETTERS between the two coworkers in 1856 concerns Anthony’s involvement in the educational reform movement of the time. Two-thirds of the teachers in the state of New York were women — including, for a while, Anthony herself. Yet only men were allowed to speak at the annual state teachers’ conventions. Since 1853, Anthony had challenged that exclusion, and now that she had succeeded, she was getting ready to address the meeting on behalf of an issue of great meaning to her: coeducation. While she was struggling to prepare for one of her first public speeches, her friend was herself preparing for the birth of her sixth child. (For the historic contributions that this daughter grew up to make, see page 418 on Harriot Stanton Blatch’s own career as a feminist reformer.) What do these letters tell us about the psychological challenges that women like these faced in undertaking careers as public reformers? How do the personal obstacles that the two women faced differ?

Anthony to Cady Stanton, Rochester (May 26, 1856)

I hear the [women’s rights] movement much talked of & earnest hopes for its spread expressed. But these women dare not speak out their sympathy. . . . Don’t you think it would be a good plan to first state what we mean by educating the sexes together, then go on to show how the few institutions that profess to give equal education fail . . . and lastly that it is folly to talk of giving to the sexes equal advantages, while you withhold from them equal motive to improve those advantages. . . . When will you come to Rochester to spend those days, I shall be most happy to see whenever it shall be . . . [you may bring your servant] Amelia and the two babies of course and as many more as convenient. With love.58

SOURCE: Ellen Carol DuBois, ed., The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 60–61.

Anthony to Cady Stanton, Home-Getting, along towards 12 O’Clock (June 5, 1856)

And Mrs. Stanton, not a word written on that Address for Teachers Convention. This week was to be leisure to me and lo, our [servant] girl, a wife, had a miscarriage . . . and the Mercy only knows when I can get a moment; and what is worse, as the Lord knows full well, is, that if I get all the time the world has, I can’t get up a decent document. So for the love of me, and for the saving of the reputation of womanhood, I beg you, with one baby on your knee and another at your feet, and four boys whistling, buzzing, hallooing Ma, Ma, set your self about the work. . . .

. . . [N]o man can write from my stand point, nor no woman but you, for all, all would base their strongest argument on the unlikeness of the sexes. . . . Those of you who have the talent to do honor to poor — oh! how poor — womanhood, have all given yourselves over to baby-making; and left poor brainless me to battle alone.59

SOURCE: DuBois, Cady Stanton–Anthony Reader, 61–62.

Cady Stanton to Anthony, Seneca Falls (June 10, 1856)

Dear Susan, Your servant is not dead, but liveth. Imagine me, day in and day out, watching, bathing, nursing, and promenading the precious contents of a little crib in the corner of my room. I pace up and down these two chambers of mine like a caged lioness, longing to bring nursing and house keeping cares to a close. Is your speech to be exclusively on the point of educating the sexes together, or as to the best manner of educating women? . . . Come here and I will do what I can to help you with your address, if you will hold the baby and make the puddings. . . . It is not well to be in the excitement of public life all the time. . . . You, too, need rest Susan; let the world alone awhile. We cannot bring about a moral revolution in a day or two. Now that I have two daughters, I feel fresh strength to work for women. . . . It is not in vain that in myself I feel all the wearisome cares to which woman even in her best estate is subject. Good night.

SOURCE: Ann D. Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840–1866 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 325.

THE FOLLOWING ARE THE FRAGMENTARY NOTES that Anthony left on the speech on coeducation she was struggling to compose in the winter of 1856–57. Her notes are supplemented [in brackets] by quotations of her speech from a contemporary newspaper report. From the bullet point–like notes, can you imagine Anthony delivering her ideas to an audience of not particularly sympathetic men? How does Anthony’s approach focus on education as a route to equality for the sexes? What connections did she make between equal education and economic independence for women, an issue to which she was especially attuned?

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

Why the Sexes Should Be Educated Together (1856)

Because their life work is so nearly identical . . . [To earn their bread and live is the work of both sexes. Every woman is born into the world alone and goes out of the world alone. . . . All women do not have husbands, and, besides, fathers and husbands die sometimes, and their wives and daughters may be obliged to earn a livelihood. Every father should educate his sons and daughters alike for upon each may devolve the task of earning their own bread.] The grand thing that is needed is to give the sexes like motives for acquirement — very rarely a person studies closely without hope of making that knowledge useful — as means of support or house or something to them.

That man may learn from his boyhood that woman is his intellectual equal and thus no longer look upon her as his inferior — Oh, dear dear there is so much to say & I am so without constructive power to put in symmetrical order —

Because separation and restraint stimulates the desires and passions . . . [Is it possible that boys and girls who have always associated together cannot go to college together? . . . The sexes behave better and learn better together.]

SOURCE: Enclosure in June 5, 1856, letter, in Gordon, Selected Papers, 323–24; and “Address by SBA on Educating the Sexes Together,” Rochester Daily Democrat, February 4, 1857, ibid., 334–38.

BY THE END OF THE 1850s, the two friends were immersed in the national crisis over slavery. Not only were North and South at odds, but so were radical and moderate opponents of slavery. Both Cady Stanton and Anthony, who were strong partisans of the abolitionist movement to end slavery immediately, absolutely, and without compensation to slaveowners, were among the former.

The following are two abolitionist speeches, one given by Anthony in 1859 and the other by Cady Stanton in 1860. While the nation was poised on the brink of civil war, neither the newly arisen Republican Party nor the Lincoln administration it had elected was ready to commit to the abolition of slavery. How do you think Anthony and Cady Stanton sought to increase popular support in the North for the more radical policy of making emancipation of the slaves the purpose of the impending war? How do you think each connects her own condition as a free woman to the suffering of male and female slaves?

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

Make the Slave’s Case Our Own (1859)

Let us, my friends, for the passing hour, make the slave’s case our own. . . . Let us feel that it is our own children, that are ruthlessly torn from our yearning mother hearts, and driven into the “coffle gang,” . . . That it is our own loved sister and daughter, who are shamelessly exposed to the public market, and whose beauty of face, delicacy of complexion, symmetry of form, and grace of motion, do but enhance their monied value, and the more surely victimize them to the unbridled passions and lusts of their proud purchasers.

. . . If, by some magic power, the color of our skins could be instantly changed and the slave’s fate made really our own, then would there be no farther need of argument or persuasion, or rhetoric or eloquence. But we . . . look upon the slave, as a being all unlike ourselves. . . . [T]he fact that he has for so many generations been the victim of the white man, seem conclusive evidence to the masses, that a condition that would be torture worse than death to us, is quite endurable, nay, congenial to him. Again, it is argued that we of the North are not responsible for the crime of slave holding, that the guilty ones dwell in the South. . . . Thus, do we put the slave’s case far away from us.

SOURCE: Susan B. Anthony, “Make the Slave’s Case Our Own,” c. 1859, original in Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON

To the American Anti-Slavery Society (May 8, 1860)

Eloquently and earnestly as noble men have denounced slavery on this platform, they have been able to take only an objective view. . . . [B]ut a privileged class can never conceive the feelings of those who are born to contempt, to inferiority, to degradation. Herein is woman more fully identified with the slave than man can possibly be, for she can take the subjective view. She early learns the misfortune of being born an heir to the crown of thorns, to martyrdom, to womanhood. For while the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the negro there is no such privilege. . . . [A]ll mankind stand on the alert to restrain their impulses, check their aspirations, fetter their limbs, lest, in their freedom and strength, in their full development, they should take an even platform with proud man himself. To you, white man, the world throws wide her gates; the way is clear to wealth, to fame, to glory, to renown, the high places of independence and honor and trust are yours; all your efforts are praised and encouraged; . . . all your successes are welcomed with loud hurrahs and cheers; but the black man and the woman are born to shame. The badge of degradation is the skin and sex.

SOURCE: DuBois, Cady Stanton–Anthony Reader, 82–83. The original transcript appeared in the Liberator, May 18, 1860, p. 78.

THE FOLLOWING TWO LETTERS SPEAK to the more personal impact on Cady Stanton and Anthony of the grand historic events surrounding the Civil War. The first, written by Cady Stanton in 1859, concerns John Brown’s failed raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. While white southerners were terrified by Brown’s actions, which were intended to spark a nationwide slave revolt, Cady Stanton revered him as a martyr to the cause of abolition. Her more personal connection came through the cousin she mentions, the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith, who covertly supported Brown and suffered a mental breakdown when the plot failed and was exposed.

Five and a half years later, Anthony wrote to Cady Stanton days after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, just after his second inauguration and the surrender of the Confederacy. Anthony begins by quoting a letter that she wrote to their male ally, Wendell Phillips. None of these abolitionists had supported Lincoln’s reelection, because they found his plans for postwar reconstruction too easy on the South. Still, the murder of Lincoln and the prospect of his untried successor, Andrew Johnson, taking over the presidency clearly unnerved Anthony. What do these two letters suggest about the impact of great historic events on individual women’s lives? How do Cady Stanton and Anthony express women’s frustration over the thwarting of their intense desire to take an active part in the historic conflicts swirling around them?

Cady Stanton to Anthony, Seneca Falls (December 15, 1859)

The death of my father, the worse than death of my dear cousin Gerrit, the martyrdom of that great and glorious John Brown — all this conspires to make me regret more than ever my dwarfed and perverted womanhood. In times like these, every soul should do the work of a fullgrown man. When I pass the gate of the celestial city and good Peter asks me where I wish to sit, I will say: “Anywhere so that I am neither a negro nor a woman. Confer on me, great angel, the glory of white manhood, . . . so that henceforth I may enjoy the most unlimited freedom.”

SOURCE: Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1899), 181–82.

Anthony to Cady Stanton, Leavenworth, Kansas (April 19, 1865)

I have this second finished a note to ever glorious [Wendell] Phillips. . . . Told Phillips “if the people had been assembled to consult as to the ability of the Vice President to take forward the Government, the vast majority would have shaken their heads in doubt — but the terrible blow came — the office was vacant — Johnson takes it — and the people already feel him the chosen of God to end the war.[”] . . . Was there ever a more terrific command to a nation to “Stand still and know that I am God” since the world began — The Old Book’s terrible exhibitions of God’s wrath sinks into nothingness — And this blow fell just at the very hour he was declaring his willingness to consign those five millions faithful brave, only loving loyal people of the South to the tender mercies of the ex-slave lords of the lash.

SOURCE: Gordon, Selected Papers, 543–44. The original is in the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

THE FINAL DOCUMENT IS A PUBLIC CALL, issued by Cady Stanton and Anthony in mid-1863, to create an organization of “loyal women” of the North. Women on both sides of the war had organized to support their troops (see Primary Sources: “Women on the Civil War Battlefields,” pp. 273–86), but women’s rights leaders in the North wanted something more. They wanted women to gather together and act politically to make emancipation official nationally; they also wanted women, in Anthony’s words, “to give support to the government in so far as it makes a war for freedom.”60 The organization they formed, the Women’s National Loyal League, circulated petitions and collected signatures to urge Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery in the United States (see p. 255). How did Cady Stanton and Anthony seek to use the crisis of the Civil War to advance women’s consciousness of their political obligations and capacities? What do you think they meant by “loyal”?

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON AND SUSAN B. ANTHONY

Call for a Meeting of the Loyal Women of the Nation (1863)

In this crisis it is the duty of every citizen to consider the peculiar blessings of a republican form of government, and decide what sacrifices of wealth and life are demanded for its defense and preservation. . . . A grand idea of freedom or justice is needful to kindle and sustain the fires of a high enthusiasm. . . . Woman is equally interested and responsible with man in the final settlement of this problem of self-government; therefore let none stand idle spectators now. When every hour is big with destiny and each delay but complicates our difficulties, it is high time for the daughters of the Revolution in solemn council to unseal the last will and testament of the fathers, lay hold of their birthright of freedom and keep it a sacred trust for all coming generations. . . . On behalf of the Woman’s Central Committee, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, SUSAN B. ANTHONY.

SOURCE: Harper, Susan B. Anthony, 226–27.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What tensions did Cady Stanton and Anthony each experience as they moved into public life?

How were Cady Stanton and Anthony able to support each other in their reform work?

How did the reforms and political developments of the 1850s affect Cady Stanton and Anthony’s beliefs and arguments relating to women’s rights?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Women on the Civil War Battlefields

THE BATTLEFIELD has not always been an exclusively male space. Wives and mothers of common soldiers came to cook, launder, and nurse the men of their families, while officers’ wives were permitted social visits with their husbands. But women went to the scene of fighting for other reasons too. Political passions are no respecter of gender, and patriotism, dedication to cause, eagerness to be a part of historic events, and the simple desire for adventure brought women to the bloody heart of the Civil War.

The most common battlefield role of women was nurse — the “angel” of the battlefield who comforted wounded and dying soldiers, representing domestic tranquility in the midst of armed conflict. Despite the desperate need for medical personnel to care for the enormous number of casualties, female nurses had to fight their own kinds of battles with male medical officers for the opportunity to serve. A much smaller number of women also served the Union and Confederate armies in less conventionally womanly ways, as spies, strategists, and even soldiers.

While the Civil War had a tremendous impact on women overall, generating aspirations for greater public responsibilities and more rights, those who had had direct battlefield experience found it difficult to have their particular contributions fully appreciated. Northern male veterans could count on an old-age army pension in recognition of their services. Finally, in 1890, the U.S. government granted pensions to twenty thousand women who served as paid nurses. Approximately one-tenth of these were African American women. Southern white women, of course, had no government to whom they could turn.

Many of the images in this essay are taken from memoirs written by women who served on and around battlefields, who wrote to make sure that the historical record included their stories. They succeeded in permitting us to see the Civil War through women’s eyes.

THE NURSES

An estimated ten thousand women served as nurses during the Civil War.61 Nursing was not yet a profession requiring special training and would not become so until the turn of the twentieth century (see p. 421). At first, both military hospitals and battlefield infirmaries were run by male surgeons who had little to offer the wounded beyond the removal of a limb and whiskey to blunt the pain. Their assistants were also men, themselves often recuperating from battlefield injuries. Nursing under wartime conditions seemed too brutal for women, an unacceptable offense against their modesty.

Nonetheless, care of the sick and injured was traditionally a female skill, and women began to offer their services as soon as the first call for troops was issued. In the North, Dorothea Dix, already well known for her work to improve the treatment of the insane, persuaded Edwin Stanton, U.S. secretary of war, to appoint her as superintendent of nursing for the Union army. “All nurses are required to be plain looking women,” Dix declared. “Their dresses must be brown or black with no bows, no curls, no jewelry and no hoop skirts.”62 Clothing had to be not only respectable but also functional in the gory environment of the military hospitals. Louisa May Alcott, unmarried and struggling to become a writer, was one of those Dix recruited. “I love nursing and must let out my pent-up energy in some new way,” she wrote in the journal that became her first published book, Hospital Sketches. “I want new experiences and am sure to get ’em if I go.”63 In 1861 Congress authorized pay of $12 a month for the female nurses under Dix’s supervision, about a third of what male nurses received.

In the regimental hospitals away from Washington, D.C., women whose relatives had been wounded or who felt moved to care for the troops convinced local medical staff to allow them to serve without army commission or pay. Mary Ann Bickerdyke of Illinois became a legend for her battlefield stamina and disregard for military hierarchy. Bickerdyke was a mother and widow in her midforties. She was a dedicated caregiver, moving from battlefield to battlefield, cooking and laundering as well as tending to the Union army wounded. Eventually, she was appointed field agent for the United States Sanitary Commission, which, despite its name, was not part of the government but rather a massive, largely female, volunteer organization that provided clothing and medical supplies to the Union army.

Like other nineteenth-century women with commanding personalities, Bickerdyke assumed the powerful female appellation of “Mother.” In an environment that reserved official control for men, the title of “Mother” could be translated into informal public authority. Bickerdyke insisted that she had the right to be near the action and to tend to the troops as she saw fit, on the basis of selfless concern for “her” boys. Indeed, Mother Bickerdyke seems to have treated most of the military men with whom she came into contact, including surgeons and generals, as overgrown boys for whom she knew best. Like other such female figures with unusual public standing who called themselves Mother — such as the late nineteenth-century labor organizer Mother Jones — Bickerdyke used this reworked maternal ideal as a framework for venturing beyond the genteel middle-class role of true womanhood.

Bickerdyke saw much military action. She arrived in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in time for the city’s surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant and escorted home Union soldiers released from the notoriously brutal Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia. In 1864, she joined General William Tecumseh Sherman, with whom she claimed a special bond, for his devastating march across the heart of the South. At the end of the war, when Sherman and his troops paraded through Washington, D.C., to celebrate victory, Mother Bickerdyke rode in a place of honor. Then she slipped back into private life. In 1886, the army awarded her a pension of $25 a month.

Figure 5.5 depicts the initial episode of the Bickerdyke story, her role at the battle of Fort Donelson, Tennessee, site of an early Union victory. Bickerdyke achieved renown for her courage in remaining at the killing fields late at night, until she was absolutely sure that she had found all survivors. The illustration, a steel engraving, was commissioned for My Story of the War, an account of the wartime contribution of the women of the Sanitary Commission, written in 1889 by Mary Livermore. It pictures Bickerdyke as a female savior, alone in her attempt to sustain life in a field of death. How did the artist choose to idealize her? How does the use of light (and dark) suggest women’s role on the battlefield?

Figure 5.5 F. O. C. Darley, Midnight on the Battlefield (1890)

Although the gender conventions of southern society were more restrictive and less encouraging of the kind of public presence and demonstration of organizational talent that characterized women’s nursing involvement with the Union cause, southern white women provided hospital care for Confederate soldiers as well. They could be found in the mammoth military hospitals in the capital of Richmond and at temporary medical facilities close to the battlefields and near their own homes and communities. Because records of the Confederacy, including lists and numbers of women who served as nurses, were destroyed in the Union seizure and burning of Richmond, it is impossible even to estimate their numbers.

White women showed their patriotic dedication to the Confederate cause by attending wounded soldiers’ bedsides, talking them through their suffering and dying, reading to them, and writing letters to their families. The dirtier jobs — bathing wounds, cleaning up the bloody sites of surgery, preparing corpses — were often done by slave women brought along by their mistresses. Relatively early, in 1862, the Confederate Congress began paying women for their nursing services. Their wages ranged from $30 to $40 a month, figures that seem quite high until the wildly inflated currency of the Confederacy is taken into account. Wages were allotted even for slave women, although the money was no doubt paid to their masters and mistresses.

The painting depicted in Figure 5.6 is one of the few images we have of southern women acting as nurses for Confederate soldiers. The painting is not a portrait of a particular woman, but a generalized image of southern white womanhood devoted to the Confederate cause. The artist, William Ludwell Sheppard, served in the Army of Northern Virginia and began his career as an illustrator and watercolorist of the war from a romanticized, southern perspective. In the Hospital was painted in the first year of the war. What audience did Sheppard have in mind? If we could compare it with an image from 1863 or 1864, what might be different? What are the similarities and differences between this and the prior image, of Mother Bickerdyke ministering to a Union soldier? How did this image help to build what later became, as one historian puts it, “the legend of female sacrifice, . . . of Confederate women’s unflinching loyalty”?64

Figure 5.6 William Ludwell Sheppard, In the Hospital (1861)

Catholic religious women were the only group of women on the battlefield with any prior experience in caring for the wounded. Their selflessness and virtue were unassailable. For these reasons, they were more welcomed than other Civil War nurses by the male military establishment, an attitude that is particularly remarkable given the rampant anti-Catholic prejudice of the era. Civil War chronicler Mary Livermore, no admirer of “the monastic institutions of that [Catholic] church,” nonetheless praised the Catholic nurses: “They gave themselves no airs of superiority or holiness, shirked no duty, sought no easy place, bred no mischief.”65 Livermore thought the sisters represented a model of organized public service that Protestant women would do well to follow. Dorothea Dix, on the other hand, resented the Catholic women, who were not under her supervision.

Dedicated to the service of God and humanity rather than the victory of North or South, the sisters attended both Confederate and Union wounded. During the long Union siege of Vicksburg, the Daughters of Charity cared for Confederate soldiers and civilians alike. A similar community provided nurses for the giant Satterlee Hospital in Philadelphia, which received many of the Union wounded from the war’s deadliest battle, Gettysburg. Figure 5.7 shows most of the forty sisters who served at Satterlee. How did the sisters’ religious habits solve the problems of uniform and functional clothing for nurses? While other Civil War nurses were portrayed individually, why and with what effect did these women appear as a group?

Figure 5.7 Daughters of Charity with Doctors and Soldiers, Satterlee Hospital, Philadelphia (c. 1863)

Most of the women valorized for their contributions to the war effort were white. Yet African American women, for whom the outcome was of the greatest importance, found their own way to the battlefields. Some were free black women from the North who went south to attend to the welfare of freed slaves living in areas occupied by the Union army. But others were themselves fugitives from slavery, who provided an important source of support labor for the northern war effort. These women served as cooks and laundresses for the Union troops and as servants for the officers. Although much of their labor was subservient, they were participating in an enterprise that would bring their people freedom, and this gave their labor new meaning.

Susie King Taylor, depicted in the photograph in Figure 5.8, is the rare example of a refugee from slavery whose name and wartime story we know. She was born near Savannah, Georgia, in 1848 to a fourteen-year-old slave mother. Her grandmother, who lived nearby, was free and taught Susie to read and write. In the spring of 1863, she fled with relatives to a South Carolina coastal island that was Union occupied, where she secured her own freedom. There the Union army encouraged the refugees to undertake formal marriages, and Susie, fourteen at the time, wed Edward King.

Like other eager freed slaves, her husband enlisted in one of the special “colored” divisions of the Union army, and King went to the battlefield with him. She worked as a laundress but was also entrusted with cleaning and caring for the musketry. The privilege of holding and handling guns was one of the markers of freedom for freed male slaves and for Susie King as well. “I learned to handle a musket very well while in the regiment,” she wrote, “and could shoot straight and often hit the target.”66 Primarily, however, she was a nurse and served in a segregated military hospital for black soldiers. She and the other black nurses received $10 a month, $2 less than white women.

After the war, King worked as a teacher and a domestic servant in Georgia until she was widowed. She then moved to Boston, where, in 1879, she married Russell Taylor. In 1902, she published A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs. Of the more than one hundred extant Civil War reminiscences by women, hers is the only account by a former slave woman. Part of the impulse to publish her story may have been to clarify that her wartime service — and perhaps that of other freedwomen as well — went beyond that of a laundress. Figure 5.8 is the image she chose as the frontispiece for her book. Compare it to the Sisters of Charity photograph shown in Figure 5.7. How does King convey her sense of dignity and historic contribution to the war effort?

Figure 5.8 Susie King Taylor

THE SPIES

By far, the most well-known African American woman on the battlefield was Harriet Tubman, renowned for her role as conductor on the Underground Railroad. Born a slave in Maryland about 1821, she ran away from her master in 1849 and returned numerous times, often disguised as a man, to rescue as many as seventy enslaved relatives and friends. When the war began, she came back from Canada, where she had gone to evade the Fugitive Slave Law, and made her way to the Union-occupied South Carolina coastal islands to offer her services. There, she functioned in virtually every role available to women in and around the fighting. She was a nurse, a liaison between the Union army and the many refugees from slavery, a spy, and a military strategist for Union coastal invasions into Georgia and South Carolina.

Tubman began her military service in the way that most women did, as a nurse, first to the former slaves and then to black troops along the Carolina coast. There is some indication that cures she learned as a slave made her especially valuable in this role. But it soon became clear that, as a black woman who could appear to be a common slave, she could move easily about the South, gathering information for the Union army. Union officers asked her to organize a corps from among the black male refugees to serve with her as military spies and scouts.

In 1863, on the basis of Tubman’s reports, a regiment of 150 black Union soldiers sailed up South Carolina’s Combahee River to cut the enemy’s supply lines, seize or destroy foodstuffs, and encourage the desertion of the slave labor force of the plantations along the banks. Eight hundred black men and women — “thousands of dollars worth of property,” according to a contemporary newspaper account — fled to the Union gunboats and were transferred to the freedmen’s encampments on the occupied Sea Islands.67 The raid was commemorated more than a century later when a group of black feminists from Massachusetts took as their name the Combahee River Collective (see p. 643).

Despite influential supporters, after the war Tubman was never able to secure the back pay or army pension that white women such as Mother Bickerdyke received. In 1867, her husband, John Tubman, was murdered by a white man, who was acquitted of the crime. She spent the rest of her life in Auburn, New York, struggling to raise money to support herself and an old-age home for ex-slaves that she established. Proceeds from her memoir, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, were her major source of income. Tubman was not literate, and so her oral reminiscences were recorded in book form by a neighbor and friend, Sarah H. Bradford. Figure 5.9, the book’s frontispiece, is described as a woodcut likeness of Tubman in her “costume as scout.” Like other women on the battlefield (see Figure 5.11), Tubman wore a combination of men’s and women’s clothing. The jacket may have been military issue. What about this outfit reconciles her femaleness with the largely male nature of the battlefield? What might have been the impact on her readers of showing this former slave woman posed in front of a military camp, carrying an ammunition pouch and a gun?

Figure 5.9 Harriet Tubman

If Tubman’s race allowed her to spy for the North, white southerner Rose O’Neal Greenhow’s sex allowed her to spy for the South. In the Union capital of Washington, D.C., nearby southern sympathizers were able to conduct a brisk trade in military information. Some of these spies were women who made use of their sexual attractiveness to serve their cause. Greenhow, one of the best known, was described by a contemporary as possessed of “almost irresistible seductive powers.”68

When the war broke out, Greenhow was a widow and mother in her mid-thirties. She was prominent in Washington, D.C., social circles and had connections to important congressmen, including her nephew, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Committed to the Confederate cause and opposed to freedom for black people, she gathered political and military information helpful to the South from her numerous admirers and lovers, allegedly including information that helped the Confederates win the first battle of Bull Run. Although constantly under suspicion, she avoided arrest by appealing to principles of gentlemanly chivalry shared by North and South alike.

Eventually, however, Greenhow was arrested and sent to a special Washington prison reserved for enemy agents, many of them women. She was subsequently released to Virginia. The circumstances of her death, soon after, were as extraordinary as those of her life. In 1864, she was a passenger on a British boat running the Union naval blockade off the Carolina coast. Northern gunships fired, and Greenhow’s lifeboat capsized. She was close to shore and would have made it to land except that she held on to her purse, which was heavy with gold, and therefore drowned.

The photograph in Figure 5.10 was taken by a member of the studio of renowned Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, when Greenhow was imprisoned. One historian writes that her gender was her disguise.69 What comment does the photographer’s artful posing make on Greenhow’s career as a Confederate spy? What do Greenhow’s dress, pose, and the presence of her daughter suggest about her imprisonment at Union hands?

Figure 5.10 Rose O’Neal Greenhow in the Old Capitol Prison with Her Daughter (1862)

THE SOLDIERS

Although we will never know their numbers, hundreds of women, possibly more, fought on the battlefields of the Civil War. These women warriors fall into two categories: those who were known to be women at the time and those who passed themselves off as men. In the first category were the so-called daughters of the regiment. Often arriving in camp with their newly enlisted husbands, a few may have also been as motivated by the desire to see military action as by marital sentiment. After performing such womanly tasks as nursing, cooking, and laundering, occasionally these women took on the all-important job of carrying the regiment’s flag (or standard) into battle. Soldiers, who were recruited at the local and state level, fought as much out of loyalty to their regiment as out of allegiance to the army or the nation, and the way their regimental colors were displayed represented their comradeship and military fervor. The standard bearer’s job was to lead and encourage the troops, and women who undertook this role inspired tremendous devotion from their comrades.

Bridget Divers, known as “Michigan Bridget,” was one of these regimental daughters. An Irish immigrant, she came to the First Michigan Calvary with her husband. Early in the war, her regiment was the object of a surprise attack, and the troops panicked. One of Divers’s comrades remembered how she leaped to her feet, grabbed the flag, and yelled, “Go in Boys and bate [beat] Hell out of them.”70 Divers found army life so much to her liking that, after the war, she continued to serve with her husband in the western Indian conflicts.

As with other such women, the legends that accrued around Michigan Bridget emphasized her combination of manly bravery and female sympathy. Figure 5.11, a steel engraving commissioned, like that of Mary Ann Bickerdyke (Figure 5.5), by Mary Livermore for My Story of the War, portrays Divers bearing the U.S. flag in the midst of battle. Divers knew how to shoot, and Livermore approvingly wrote of her, “When a soldier fell she took his place, fighting in his stead with unquailing courage.”71 How and with what purpose does the artist position Divers with respect to the battle? Why might she have been pictured with a flag instead of the gun that she allegedly knew how to use? And why might the artist have chosen to show her carrying not the regimental colors but the U.S. flag?

Figure 5.11 F. O. C. Darley, A Woman in Battle — “Michigan Bridget” Carrying the Flag (1888)

“Of the three hundred and twenty-eight thousand Union soldiers who lie buried in national cemeteries,” the editors of the History of Woman Suffrage (1881) wrote, “. . . hundreds are . . . women obliged by army regulation to fight in disguise.”72 “Passing women,” as historians have come to label such women, fought in many wars, but they seem to have been particularly numerous in the U.S. Civil War. The Union army discovered and dismissed many women among its recruits, and the sex of others was not discovered until they were wounded or killed. During the war, authorities’ greatest fear was that women who had sneaked into the ranks would engage in immoral sexual activities with male soldiers. Stories of women who disguised themselves as men in order to fight continued to surface for many decades. In 1910, an Illinois Civil War pensioner who had gone by the name Albert Cashier was discovered to be a woman, declared insane, sentenced to an asylum, where he dressed as a woman.73 For a long time after the war, some passing women, like Cashier, lived as men. They worked in men’s occupations and even married women, who invariably claimed to have believed their husbands to be men, which is hard to believe but impossible to dismiss.

With one exception, all of the well-known passing women of the Civil War era were Union soldiers. Loreta Velazquez, a Cuban immigrant, began her career in the Confederate army with her husband’s support but maintained her masquerade even after he was killed. Using the name Harry T. Buford, Velazquez fought as an officer with several regiments and participated in the Confederate victory at the first battle of Bull Run. Although she was wounded, she escaped detection and continued to live a life of high adventure after the war.

In 1876, Velazquez wrote a popular and controversial memoir, The Woman in Battle, in which she described her lifelong habit of wearing men’s clothes and the attraction that being able to make money like a man held for her. Her book included the illustrations shown in Figure 5.12 of her female and male personae. How did she depict herself as a woman, and what designated her visually as a man? Above all, what point might she have been seeking to make by demonstrating through illustrations that she could shift from role to role? How does her story begin to suggest what today is called the social construction of gender?

Figure 5.12 Madam Velazquez in Female Attire (left) and Harry T. Buford, 1st Lieutenant, Independent Scouts, Confederate States Army (right)

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What are the similarities in the images of women who served as Civil War nurses? What attitudes toward women help explain these similarities?

Male soldiers are issued official uniforms to designate their rank and military affiliation. What similarities do you notice in Divers’s and Tubman’s outfits? How might this clothing have constituted a kind of informal uniform for women on the battlefield?

The Civil War was fought between two cultures as much as between two economic and racial systems. Do you detect patterns in the images of northern versus southern women? What do these differences tell you about the gender dimensions of the North–South divide?

Taken as a group, do these images indicate that the women who participated directly in the war did more to maintain or to undermine standard gender roles?

SUGGESTED REFERENCES

Women and the Antebellum West

Gae Whitney Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes (1983).

María Raquél Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820–1880 (2009).

John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979).

Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi, eds., Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush (1997).

Lisbeth Haas, Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California (2013).

Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (1999).

Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (2011).

Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (2000).

JoAnn Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (1990).

Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trail (2016).

Women and Reform Movements

Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (2000).

Erica L. Ball, To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics in the Antebellum Black Middle Class (2012).

Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, vols. 1 and 2 (1994 and 2010).

Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869, 2nd ed. (2003).

Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (2011).

Lori D. Ginzberg, Women in Antebellum Reform (2000).

April R. Haynes, Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America (2015).

Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change, Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (1984).

Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (1998).

Andrea Moore Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality (1992).

Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz, The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism (2013).

Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina (1967).

Scott C. Martin, Devil of the Domestic Sphere: Temperance, Gender, and Middle-Class Ideology, 1800–1860 (2008).

Jean L. Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols (2002).

Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (2007).

Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (2014).

Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (2009).

Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (1992).

Women and the Civil War

Karen Abbott, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War (2014).

Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (1987).

Mary Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation (2010).

Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008).

_____, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996).

Libra R. Hilde, Worth a Dozen Men: Women and Nursing in the Civil War South (2012).

Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (2012).

Victoria E. Ott, Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War (2008).

Barbara A. White, The Beecher Sisters (2003).