story has a girl admiring the “bloomer” costume, but her professor admonishes her that they are “only one of the many manifestations of that wild spirit of socialism and agrarian radicalism which is at present so rife in our land.”
The woman’s job was to keep the home cheerful, maintain religion, be nurse, cook, cleaner, seamstress, flower arranger. A woman shouldn’t read too much, and certain books should be avoided.
A sermon preached in 1808 in New York: “How interesting and important are the duties devolved on females as wives…the counsellor and friend of the husband; who makes it her daily study to lighten his cares, to soothe his sorrows, and to augment his joys.…”
Women were also urged, especially since they had the job of educating children, to be patriotic. One women’s magazine offered a prize to the woman who wrote the best essay on “How May an American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism.”
The cult of domesticity for the woman was a way of pacifying her with a doctrine of “separate but equal”—giving her work equally as important as the man’s, but separate and different. Inside that “equality” there was the fact that the woman did not choose her mate, and once her marriage took place, her life was determined. Marriage enchained, and children doubled the chains.
The “cult of true womanhood” could not completely erase what was visible as evidence of woman’s subordinate status: she could not vote, could not own property; when she did work, her wages were one-fourth to one-half what men earned in the same job. Women were excluded from the professions of law and medicine, from colleges, from the ministry.
Putting all women into the same category—giving them all the same domestic sphere to cultivate—created a classification (by sex) that blurred the lines of class. However, forces were at work to keep raising the issue of class. Samuel Slater had introduced industrial spinning machinery in New England in 1789, and now there was a demand for young girls literally, “spinsters”—to work the spinning machinery in factories. In 1814, the power loom was introduced in Waltham, Massachusetts, and now all the operations needed to turn cotton fiber into cloth were under one roof. The new textile factories swiftly multiplied, with women 80 to 90 percent of their operatives—most of these women between fifteen and thirty.
Some of the earliest industrial strikes took place in these textile mills in the 1830s. Women’s daily average earnings in 1836 were less than thirty-seven cents, and thousands earned twenty-five cents a day, working twelve to sixteen hours a day. In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, came the first known strike of women factory workers; 202 women joined men in protesting a wage cut and longer hours, but they met separately. Four years later, women in Dover, New Hampshire, struck alone.
In Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, when a young woman was fired from her job, other girls left their looms, one of them then climbing the town pump and making, according to a newspaper report, “a flaming Mary Wollstonecraft speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the ‘moneyed aristocracy’ which produced a powerful effect on her auditors and they determined to have their own way, if they died for it.”
Several times in those strikes, women armed with sticks and stones broke through the wooden gates of a textile mill and stopped the looms.
Catharine Beecher, a woman reformer of the time, wrote about the factory system:
I was there in mid-winter, and every morning I was awakened at five, by the bells calling to labor.… Then half an hour only allowed for dinner, from which the time for going and returning was deducted. Then back to the mills, to work till seven o’clock.…[I]t must be remembered that all the hours of labor are spent in rooms where oil lamps, together with from 40 to 80 persons, are exhausting the healthful principle of the air…and where the air is loaded with particles of cotton thrown from thousands of cards, spindles, and looms.
And the life of upper-class women? Frances Trollope, an Englishwoman, wrote in her book Domestic Manners of the Americans:
Let me be permitted to describe the day of a Philadelphian lady of the first class.… She rises, and her first hour is spent in the scrupulously nice arrangement of her dress; she descends to her parlor, neat, stiff, and silent; her breakfast is brought in by her free black footman.… Twenty minutes before her carriage should appear, she retires to her chamber, as she calls it; shakes and folds up her still snow-white apron, smooths her rich dress, and…sets on her elegant bonnet…then walks downstairs, just at the moment that her free black coachman announces to her free black footman that the carriage waits. She steps into it, and gives the word: “Drive to the Dorcas Society.”
At Lowell, the Female Labor Reform Association put out a series of “Factory Tracts.” The first was entitled “Factory Life as It Is By an Operative” and spoke of the textile mill women as “nothing more nor less than slaves in every sense of the word! Slaves, to a system of labor which requires them to toil from five until seven o’clock, with one hour only to attend to the wants of nature—slaves to the will and requirements of the ‘powers that be.’”
Around that time, the New York Herald carried a story about “700 females, generally of the most interesting state and appearance,” meeting “in their endeavor to remedy the wrongs and oppressions under which they labor.” The Herald editorialized: “we very much doubt whether it will terminate in much good to female labor of any description.… All combinations end in nothing.”
Middle-class women, barred from higher education, began to monopolize the profession of primary-school teaching. As teachers, they read more, communicated more, and education itself became subversive of old ways of thinking. They began to write for magazines and newspapers, and started some ladies’ publications. Literacy among women doubled between 1780 and 1840. Women became health reformers. They formed movements against double standards in sexual behavior and the victimization of prostitutes. They joined in religious organizations. Some of the most powerful of them joined the antislavery movement. So, by the time a clear feminist movement emerged in the 1840s, women had become practiced organizers, agitators, and speakers.
When Emma Willard addressed the New York legislature in 1819, she told them that the education of women “has been too exclusively directed to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty.” The problem, she said, was that “the taste of men, whatever it might happen to be, has been made into a standard for the formation of the female character.” Reason and religion teach us, she said, that “we too are primary existences…not the satellites of men.”
In 1821, Willard founded the Troy Female Seminary, the first recognized institution for the education of girls. She wrote later of how she upset people by teaching her students about the human body: “Mothers visiting a class at the Seminary in the early thirties were so shocked.… To preserve the modesty of the girls, and spare them too frequent agitation, heavy paper was pasted over the pages in their textbooks which depicted the human body.”
Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Elizabeth Blackwell got her medical degree in 1849, having overcome many rebuffs before being admitted to Geneva College. She then set up the New York Dispensary for Poor Women and Children “to give to poor women an opportunity of consulting physicians of their own sex.” In her first annual report, she wrote:
My first medical consultarion was a curious experience. In a severe case of pneumonia in an elderly lady I called in consultation a kind-hearted physician of high standing.… This gentleman, after seeing the patient, went with me into the parlour. There he began to walk about the room in some agitation, exclaiming, “A most extraordinary case! Such a one never happened to me before; I really do not know what to do!” I listened in surprise and much perplexity, as it was a clear case of pneumonia and of no unusual degree of danger, until at last I discovered that his perplexity related to me, not to the patient, and to the propriety of consulting with a lady physician!
Oberlin College pioneered in the admission of women. But the first girl admitted to the theology school there, Antoinette Brown, who graduated in 1850, found that her name was left off the class list. With Lucy Stone, Oberlin found a formidable resister. She was active in the peace society and in antislavery work, taught colored students,