[The article I wrote] was about old maids. ‘Happy Women’ was the title, and I put in my list all the busy, useful, independent spinsters I know, for liberty is a better husband than love to many of us — Diary of Louisa May Alcott, February 14, 1868
Friends,
This summary and review is a companion blog-essay to my review of Martha Vicinus’s Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920. It’s true that C-S’s book is about a previous generation of women, but C-S’s book is about the same topic from another angle. C-S examines the inward and private experience of women attempting to live independent useful fulfilled lives and where do they go for these? the institutions that Vicinus book argues was the only way single women in the UK could find the power and money and influence to enable future women and themselves also to choose a fulfilled life apart from their roles with men.
C-S’s is a much more upbeat book than Bridget Hill’s Women Alone: spinsters in England, 1660-1850 or Vicinus’s, not because of the tone so much but because C-S has found enabling norms and thought and behavior in the laws and customs of the US in the northeast after the revolutionary and before the Civil War. The average marital age creeping up, and more women were not marrying. S-C focuses on individual single women for whom liberty meant: economic independence, a room of their own, and the expansion of the mind in genial company. In her introduction, she looks to “the search for autonomy among women” and found that in her chosen era in the US this manifested itself in bourgeois individualism: women had “internalized” an “individualized ethic” that came from changes in structure and values of early modern families. Out of the Enlightenment came changing family relationships, and out of the first years of the US “republican motherhood” as an ideal emerged. I’d say the whole emphasis on how important mothers and motherhood is comes from Rousseau, that Janus-faced “feminist” for 18th century women. Under this aegis women asked for more respect, mutuality with men, authority for themselves. .
She asks why some women don’t marry: marriage market numbers get in the way, costs of supporting children, domestic arrangements in some cultures; opportunities for other kinds of self support. There are intangible reasons too: a daughter consigned to take care of the aged Pin some households (Verity in Poldark), the family or the girl deemed herself unmarriageable (this reminds me of Verity Poldark in the Poldark books too smart, too homely, thinking for herself) and didn’t seek a partner for her; some women shy away from sexual intercourse, because of the dangers of pregnancy, perpetual childbirth means she has too many children to do anything else.
But women began to voice more reasons: desire for greater intellectual life, more interesting one!, had a vocation marriage & motherhood inhibits. Ideas of self improvement, ambition, service, achievement, duty, independence shaped by different attitudes towards gender in the US. C=S is careful to distinguish vocation from career. A woman might still be embedded in family and not independent – vocation not bringing in money to live — this brings in Jane Austen to my mind. Teaching won’t hack it; low prestige, low pay, long hours, looked upon as temporary.
Statistics show rise in unmarried women in Massachusetts, and also west and less so south. Problem for women in a society based on enslaving large numbers of people to do the hard work of the and not themselves overtly enslaved, experience shows that they tolerate no rebellion or independence, hierarchy is presented as unquestionable. Sometimes white women could end up very isolated personally and socially if they couldn’t manage to marry or to obey. Southern slave-based culture ferocious towards white women who broke away in the least ways: makes them docile, a “lady” first. In the west there were pioneer settlers, and gradually women were permitted to homestead.
She names seven women and offers brief resumes; some were part of unacknowledged lesbian pairs — lesbianism was not acknowledged by most people at the time. Laura Clay (1949-19410, daughter of Cassius Clay of Kentucky, lived with divorced mother, ran successful farm, deplored any arrangement where someone is dependent on another for life’s necessities; Clare de Graffenried (1849-1921), labor bureau social investigator; Elizabeth Grimball, South Carolina teacher, refused to return home to live with parents; Eliza Frances Andrews (1840-1931) wrote and worked for women’s education; Olive Johnson White, moved out west 1866, a homesteader; so too Edith Kohl; and Clarissa Griswold; “bachelor” Bess Corey another. Laura Crews homesteaded in Kansas and Iowa.
The introduction to this book ends on Nancy Choderow’s ideas about women’s psychology in The Reproduction of Mothering with her ideas about motherhood, and Carole Gilligan, Lyn K. Brown and Kate Millett with their theories of female development, affiliation with mother and then one another (sisters, friends) and nurturing and caring for others, the community as the dominating ethic rather than competitive individualism.
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Edith Pijpers (1886-1963)
Chapter One: C-S makes the astonishing attempt to prove that there was a strain of thought that did not decry no marriage but looked at singleness as blessed. Just what Vicinus, Hill and others I’ve read on British women deny. C-S acknowledges customs against this idea: in the US communities actually required unmarried women not prostitutes to live in licensed families, headed by respectable property holding men. This reminded me of customs in Europe forcing a poor woman living alone to apprentice her sons and put her girls in service. No woman allowed to live unsupervised by a man. But she finds poetry and magazine columns saying that the question, why should a woman marry at all needs to be answered; these publications outline the misery and strife of being “fetter’d to a [man of a] different mold.” US literature acknowledges happy marriages are the exception, while marriage esteemed more highly, “old maids” were revalued. Religion helped: is the man corrupting her? she must ensure her own sanctity (this recalls Clarissa Harlowe refusing Lovelace after the rape). Women’s moral purity shows in lesser sex drive. God likes celibate people and grants them conversion experiences. “Fetter’d” was an adjective for marriage; religion’s powerful hostility to sex helped women in the US; women writers stories in the US of the happiness of a single life. She needed to be chaste and seen to be self-sacrificing, to be good because then she would be useful (defined as happy): the cause, US communities needed the services of single women.
Then she tells of stories Catherine Sedgwick a novelist told, of stories and columns in Godey’s Lady’s Book, which sanctify the celibate, a maiden sisterhood; Sedgwick emplies the less you bother yourself over love or sex the more you know peace of mind. Discipline is good for soul. Better to be single than suffer the miseries of a bad marriage or compromise one’s integrity to gain husband or competency: this idea found widespread currency In US newspapers, periodicals, fictions, advice books
Chapter Two, “Hymen’s Recruiting Sergeant” is supposedly about “factors influencing the rate of marriage,” except it’s not. The chapter does list all the factors pressuring women to marry but far more space is given up to speculating on why statistics and commentary shows us that in the northeast of the US and some areas of the west, considerably less women chose marriage than in the south, south east. There were opportunities for paying jobs, teaching among them, factories.
Women were made to be the daughter staying home and in this role could find much satisfaction in the US given the state of fluctuating social life. There was a shift from traditional family economies in the widening of capitalism and so much more land available so parental control over their children started to give way in the US far more than say the UK. In the US far less gov’t agencies or social network so unmarried women had a real function in a family and small community.
The discourse in the US was far more about the gravity of your choice and how once you chose to marry you give up your identity. You have to obey the husband, live for him, for your children and women were endlessly pregnant. I do think here out of Austen’s letters you can find out why she chose not to marry, not to lean on the few flirtations that did happen and fled the one proposal. Renaming yourself is loss of identity. Stories of male abuse, women deserted. She suggests that articulation of the importance of women’s friendships and that women find far more satisfaction in confiding in other close women friends than any husband or family member (who would be biased against many complaints). They open sought emotional and spiritual (back to how religious the US is at base) support from other women.
Yes spinsters dreaded old age, poverty, had a limited right for family support. What if you become invalided? Cult of domesticity was very strong. This line of thought takes us to
Chapter Three: “To what thraldom is her noble spirit subjected?” is about the meaning of antebellum marriage
C-S looking at women who chose not to marry. We get examples of women who just turned down good proposals. And stories and novels of women made miserable in all sorts of ways by marriage. Again Catherine Sedgwick, an important novelist, dwells on this terrain. The loss of individual goals, pursuits, one’s will — these stories remind me of Clarissa Harlowe’s meditations and reasoning for her refusal to marry not just Lovelace and Solmes but really anyone. “At stake was female autonomy.” And the one happy dream of Clary’s is she gets control of the small farm her grandfather left her and goes to live on it.
Yet US culture which supposedly prized individualism and autonomy did not value female autonomy and it was as hard here to get institutions to acknowledge women’s individual existences as anywhere else. So how did women come to value their private wishes. C-S says the US constitution influenced by philosophes whose thinking implies or states principles and laws and judicial decisions which value privacy, limiting states’ coercion of individuals; treatises and essays on the importance of protecting privacy and how the state should ensure this. Is not this the core of Rowe V Wade? Scaglia mocked the idea of individual privacy. The philosophes here are Marquis de Condorcet, Wm Godwin, and John Stuart Mill. S-C finds instances of spinsters resisting submitting themselves to state control. They would say they had things they wanted to do and to accomplish — children got in the way
S-C turns to American stories about misery and danger of endless pregnancies — filled with revulsion of feeling (reminding me again of Jane Austen, this time in her letters). S-C cites names familiar to me — e.g., Fanny Kemble’s diary of her time on her husband’s plantation. Kemble writes about the exploited, raped, women whose bodies were directly (by violence and marking and indirectly literally destroyed, their minds shattered, no identity allowed but that of cattle. S-C cites and describes Alcott’s Diana and Persis where the heroine is urged not to live alone with a group of like-minded women. Alcott proposes singlehood as a prerequisite for artistic development.
S-C feels the idea of a vocation grew in antebellum US — presented as for men, but women could of course think why not me? Individuals write about desire for high attainments. (I know when I try to say Austen had vocation not a career most Austen scholars and Janeites are not pleased with that: they want to hear she wanted to make money, have a public career — this is not what some of the US women presented here wrote about — this makes me think of Constance Fennimore Woolson’s heroine, Anne. Lucy Larcom’s life story is often used by S-C – she is one of those who pretended she was forced into publication, didn’t want reviews, was not ambitious but her stories show her true yearnings to use “the values of US culture” in support of individual courses of action — for women. Reading this helps develop a perspective for the “anomaly” that is new and inspiriting. You were not to be personally ambitious; that remained a no-no.
The chapter ends on the essential compromise S-C finds American women making: they actively pursued self-development and personal growth. You might say that’ll end them up in their room, a dependent daughter, and in fact there is where Emily Dickinson’s pattern fits in. The startling thing about the fourth chapter of this book is Emily Dickinson’s choices suddenly make sense as a kind of exaggerated version of what other spinster daughters/sisters/aunts chose when they could not find a vocation outside the house.
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Chapters Four to Five: “When I get my freedom” & “I have reached the age for action”
What was avoided was ambitiousness and selfishness: if you were seen to be working for others as part of your vocation, you could get away with it. The problem then was how to support yourself. And in curious ways what emerges in chapters 4 and 5 is a kind of reverse picture of Vicinus. Each of the women start out with a burning vocation, one which evades masculine sovereignty (sounds like Austen, no”) and the way they end up doing this is they become part of religious institutions, institutions doing philanthropic work (which Vicinus talked of in settlement houses associations) and nursing groups (during war). American women asserted their independence first, undertook a calling in a quest for autonomy and self-actualization in something she believed in and ended up as a part of a group that in the UK formed itself from the upper classes first.
What then were the images that came to represent a woman’s freedom: wearing men’s dress or dress that looked very man-like, “throwing away shackles” (fetter’d was a synonym for marriage in the UK too) and one finds three themes: how can she achieve “economic security,” that “room of one’s own” (how this does resonate with all these US women) and “the opportunity to expand intellectual horizons.” I’m struck with this last as in the UK material anti-intellectualism and disdain for bluestockings kept this kind of desire silent; not in the US at the time.
She tells stories of individual women and quotes famous voices, speeches, attitudes. Susan B Anthony was firm on the need for “the higher dignity of the paid occupation.” Autonomy rests on someone’s ability to support oneself. Well women tried to re-define economic independence so as to make this more minimal.
Emily Howland’s story is moving; it’s not well known because she was not a writer. Basically she fought to have the right to spend her life working to better the lives of black Americans; and could not have done it (been allowed to leave home) without the support of a quaker community and aunt. It took until she was 31 to free herself.
Rachel Stearns attended a female academy in Wilbraham, Mass, wanted to prepare herself for teaching; an uncle would not give her a dime whose own wealth was the result of her mother making sacrifices for him when she was a child. It’s not clear if she managed to teach anyway. She wrote of what she had been deprived (basically an allowance form a male) what she wanted and of the bleakness of a life “friendless, pennyless,” of the utter loneliness” of a womans economic dependence. It was she who enabled her niece Emily to leave home and find herself. Now S-C doesn’t take this further as Vicinus would so we don’t know what sacrifices and difficulties Howland knew as she worked her way to success in NYC. Howland’s life as told by S-C is an idealistic one; she identified what she wanted to do and lived up to her own vision.
Alice Carey (not in Wikipedia) spent 14 years working very hard for very little for the poor in NYC: her health was never better, she was never more gratified or in a better frame of mind, though she inveighed on how little women and poets were paid for anything
Mary Reed’s is the story of a woman who could not afford to continue in the Philadelphia Female Medical College. S-C tells of women teaching themselves by borrowing every book in the library (reminding me of Ferrante’s Lila). So for some self-education becomes a life-long pursuit. It did therefore help that (according to S-C) intellectual development was respected (pp 78-79)
Cornelia Hancock was luckier but her luck will seem strange. She found herself and came alive and loved the life of a nurse in the civil war. As told by S-C conditions were horrific, medicine didn’t begin to have enough, or enough people, but Hancock would work 20 hours a day, sleep in terrible conditions, continually soaked, hardly getting enough to eat. When the war was over, she moved to South Carolina where she taught ex-slaves under the auspices of the freedman’s bureau – it’s a story of achieving personal autonomy, working for the socially marginalized despised and needy and becoming a “self-directed, self-actualized independent woman’ (pp. 97-99).
What is striking about these women and makes them so different from European ones and hard for me to enter into is a large portion of their strength came from a conversion experience. It is in S-C’s book almost an assumption that just about all US people were religious, or least these sorts of middling women who were the first to have respect and autonomy made it based on a dependence on their relationship with God. What emerges is a religious country – to me all the more striking in that S-C appears utterly unself-conscious about this (as Vicinus was about the intensely cloying semi- and full blown lesbian relationships she describes as important for networking for women I colleges and boarding schools).
Without telling the specifics, Helen Hunt who wrote of how she looked forward to a time when women would not be socialized in schools and elsewhere just to be wives (exchange sex and domestic labor for material support was the way she put it in 19th century American English), Mary Lyon, Mary Moody Emerson. Some women found a room of her own was not enough: she needed a separate establishment to get free time – Helen Hunt to practice medicine.
Catherine Beecher was a public intellectual (part of the upper classes and got into print) training women to be independent, how to run a business, that they should live together. Underlying was a desire for privacy and power in feminine guise – it was “disguised as a woman’s natural love for a home,” she just didn’t need to have a man or children in it. Anthony wrote a speech that resonates with me: “The Homes of Single Women.” I loved the lines where she talks about making rooms for yourself that reflect you, your doing, desires – women alone market (shop for food), house-keep, garden and cook for themselves and are a “true woman” after all. There is psychological truth to this according to Durkheim: men don’t make homes for themselves as “naturally.” (p 77)
Unexpectedly, almost weirdly I find that Claire Fraser in Drums of Autumn, without the religion takes up some of these roles as she asserts herself. She was a nurse in WW2 and in 18th century America she is a surgeon, helps with a school, goes out like Lady Bountiful to teach and help others, write letters and keeps a journal about her medical activities. The diaries are not filled with romance but religion. They keep diaries “to have a ventilator from the interior” to talk to (p 80). They seek self-knowledge.
I have a feeling Vicinus would say this is hopelessly idealized: I suggest the difference between the books is Vicinus is looking to explain how women can build power and why didn’t they in the early to mid-20th century. S-C is not looking to see how women can have power to alter their society
“The age for action” concentrates on that moment women finish school – we saw with Barbara Pym, I saw in Claire Tomalin and also Katherine Mansfield, once the girl is finished school, she is given no place or job in society she can be fulfilled by. Tomalin’s early years are marriage and 4 babies. Mansfield destructive free sex and a bohemian existence without enough money. Pym write novels no one wants.
So here S-C writes of individual women’s struggles form this point of view. They suffer badly from depression because they don’t want to marry and are given nothing else. Some do “make it” by turning to God – this reminds me of Renassance learned ladies in their closets. Other first submit to God and then somehow escape (Howland, Hancock, &cc but Stearns not)
The section on Emily Dickinson comes here and it’s among the best things I’ve read – she just is another more extreme and S-C quotes some poems by ED I had not read before.
I’m ceded, I’ve stopped being theirs;
The name they dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church,
Is finished using now,
And they can put it with my dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools
I ’ve finished threading too.
Baptized before without the choice,
But this time consciously, of grace
Unto supremest name,
Called to my full, the crescent dropped,
Existence’s whole arc filled up
With one small diadem.
My second rank, too small the first,
Crowned, crowing on my father’s breast,
A half unconscious queen;
But this time, adequate, erect,
With will to choose or to reject,
And I choose—just a throne
Louisa may Alcott’s novel for women, Diana and Persis is about the process of artistic development as experienced by antebellum women. Persis goes to Paris, does study, take up her sculpture but in the end marries. Diana stays in Boston, works away at writing (who is this?), dedicates herself to this. If she never reaches what she aimed at, she has much satisfaction. Alcott (apparently) has in this novel a woman “extending control over her medium” and “expanding her vision.” But outside the studio, things are not so good. Compare this to Jewsbury’s Two Sisters, one goes on stage and self-destructs, the other marries someone who will not let her fulfill herself. Neither is allowed by the to practice self-fulfilling art. So there is an American paradigm quite different from the English.
S-C end this section with the comment that women could escape being a wife, widow, mother but not a daughter. The pose of the submissive daughter was “high emotional price to pay.” Dickinson ended up “the madwoman” of Amherst.
This book is about making the self, a private individual task which in some lucky cases the woman did branch out into public work – they are trying to find and test out new roles primarily from the home and through accepted roles. She comes back to how these single women had to deal with a “primary identity as a daughter.”
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Remedio Varo
Chapter Six: A Daughter, an Immortal Being (a line from Dickinson I believe)
Cecilia Hancock’s reply: “If I had been unfortunate enough to marry some forlorn person and been obliged to stay in some disagreeable part of the country, you would not feel you could control me in coming home at your discretion. Now in that case it might be very humane to send for me. But I am pleasantly located with congenial friends and congenial employment and an independent home but am not allowed to stay in it in peace (p 108)
This chapter charts the struggles many women had freeing themselves from their parents: unless you were married you were not recognized as a fully self-governing adult. How hard it was to break away, not only disobeying the norm but girls were brought up to love the parents, especially to care for the mother. Women were seduced by the compliments to their gifts; they were told domestic life was crucial to their health as women; they loved those to whom they rendered service. (I guess I escaped more easily because the last was not true of me.) Sacrifice, acquiescence, duty, and the idea someone else owned you just about. Parents were conservative – most of these daughters wanted to do radical reform work. They came close to wishing themselves dead when they stayed. How the structure of home life made a vocational identity impossible or frustratingly difficult. Think of Austen with her desk by a creaking door; were it not for Cassandra would she have had any time.
Chapter Seven: “My earthy all:” Sisterhood and the search for autonomy
Now she again crosses the terrain of Vicinus when she talks of how sisters bonded, and went to female academies and the role of academies, associations, institutions in both freeing but also binding women. Women needed we see again and again female support, females with you, female encouragement – you could get this from a sister, but the relationship could also be fraught, and one odd central norm was that sisters were interchangeable. Remember how it was pretended Cassandra and Jane were interchangeable. Actually the Austens discovered this was not so; thus Cassandra far more often sent for than Jane.
Families were large, and siblings counted. The death or marriage of a sister was a turning point in others sister’s lives – brothers too.
Some did find you were better off with friends but it was more likely the sister would be loyal. Money came form families to sisters; they opened schools together, studied, She goes over the complicated relationship of Emily and Elizabeth Blackenwell, the first women physicians and how Elizabeth became the known one, how Emily was controlled by Elizabeth, differences in temperament. This is a very interesting story because they opened an infirmary in NYC, went back and forth to the UK, Emily was in the provinces; Elizabeth just gave them their titles. In the end Emily retired with another woman, Dr Elizabeth Cushnier because there she also had “Love and mutuality” to give meaning to her independence and autonomy”
Some sisters had a hard time when autonomy was thrust upon them. S-C does not despise this understandable result of such upbringings. The story here is of Harriot and Sarah Hunt
Remember too – S-C does not enough emphasize how this autonomy was presented as failure, despicable and the little sympathy for radical reform causes. So it was important for such a woman to have female friends, an association to belong to, a sister. You did want to belong to someone, to help and be helped and achieve and be recognized for this achievement by someone. I know myself how hard it is to do without the recognition.
Some of these pairs anticipate Elena Ferrante’s Lila and Lenu (My Brilliant Friend) — were Lila to have been given an equal education and not married off for money (by parents) for foolish version of prestige (by herself).
Some of the relationships remind me of the women in The Secret Sisterhood in their misunderstanding, vexations, the kinds of interpretation S-C gives whats happening to triangular conflicts.
I also was reminded the groups of sisters/nieces in Deborah Cherry’s book about women painters in the 19th century – there were famous quartets, female painting families – so this is the inner life of those presented by Cherry. I don’t have time to record the individuals – none of them are well known literati; some a little known like Alice and Phoebe Carey. Louisa May Alcott did not have sisters following her vocation and professionalism.
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Isabel Bishop (1902-88): Reading and Art
Chapter Eight: conflicts in the single life: heavy heart and heavy head. Now this chapter becomes harder: now we talk of the problem of earning a living.
It’s at this point the book turns dark – at heart what C-S suddenly admits is that the inner life of women of this era – in the US (and I think by extension Vicinus without her attention to private life as her focus shows this) the UK – women were made to feel their desire for independence was a social disease.
Read carefully with attention Trollope’s CYFH? Suggests Alice is erotically sexually deeply in love with John Grey (the TV series is a travesty of this and reverses it) and would have been very happy with him but that she was given foolish ideas by her lesbian cousin and evil male cousin, and rejected the deeply peaceful good life he was offering. He made it worse by his self-control and drive to dominance, But she has a disease it’s said more than once.
Meanwhile in the US the outward world was giving women for the first time through the industrial economy, need for schools, training, changes in family life to delay marriage to pursue self-development, accomplishments in careers outside the family
This chapter through story after story shows they were not paid anywhere near enough to earn a living when they followed these outward vocations. They could not be free, they could not afford space in dignity. Death or marriage of a sister or friend (who clubbed with them) could be devastating. Greater strain as they were also expected to do home tasks.
The chapter shows women breaking down under theses pressures: Sarah Pugh, Emily Parsons working in hospitals needed self respect from validation from others – and got it only from those they were literally working for. Women at home bored, frustrated. Women not married feared menopause as that put paid to any further marriage and yet they had not means of support – and they would be too old to work even for minimum pay.
So heroines earlier in the book are driven: Cecilia Hancock who say she hated organizational and institutional is driven to accept and conform
The problem with teaching was not enough money, no respect really and little adult companionship in the way it was organized. Women can’t relax; and they find satisfaction and peace only in hard work – Clara Barton became sick when not permitted to nurse; allowed to work ferociously for the Red Cross, which she built, she throve. Again and again women are rejected for professional positions they are as capable of the men at doing. – I am not naming the individual stories again – very bad psychic stress which they then were blamed for – as hysterical women. Had they married you see all would have been well busy with their babies and then family later on – all this hopelessly idealized.
Chapter Nine: “The Mind Will Give Way” assertion and limits of social tolerance
This chapter is unusual for telling one woman’s story at length Mary S. Gilpin: her four brothers and father lived good productive lives in professions and did well financially; she had the same assertive competitive, ambitious personality they did, but each time she opens a school or starts an institution, either not enough people bring children, or it’s underfunded or her assertive personality is complained of and either she is thrown out or her venture fails. At the end she actually spends years in an asylum (imprisoned by a brother in effect) and late in life retreats to near a Naïve American village spending her years reading and writing down her own thoughts –
This is where her book transects Vicinus: institutions of church, university, medicine, law, science so the extension of female autonomy that was going on as a threat and worked to keep women in low places – -and the rhetoric is conscious. Social tolerance very rigid – don’t act out your independent mindedness or disobey (sexual) propriety or you will be cast out, punished, ostracized, ignore
Chapter Ten: The great social disease – on women and independence. In this chapter we see society closing ranks at the same time as there is gradual growth of liberty, independence for women – in the US the land-grant colleges let women enter and several colleges (sister schools) are opened just for women: Vassar, Wellesley
This social disease – could end in insanity; women weren’t using their organs and so would sicken. Companionate marriage offered but that does not allow for equality – John Grey offers Alice Vavasour a companionate marriage where what he says goes. And women who did go out to work did not experience independence or expansion of autonomy because they did for a short while and only as filler or to bring in “extra money” (usually very low status jobs).
Three important women writers about this topic: Ida Tarbell, Alice Repplier,Anna Garlin Spencer. They tried to reshape these arguments – they defended spinsterhood, showed women were marrying later in the 19th century, argued for the period of work before marriage and during.
What happened in the 1890s with the coming of Freudian ideas and studies in sex is that spinsterhood is sexualized: such women are miserable because not having sex, twisted, torment others. Celibacy a social disease (not I realize why Frances Power Cobbe wants to show “celibacy’ such a good way to be in life because you are free to do good, to actuate things that need to be done. Doctors dominating women in childbirth, against abstinence (they won’t give you contraceptive either so you are compelled into pregnancy).
So we see each time a new form of thought or change in social or economic structure comes, the patriarchal norms twist them to the subjection of women
So for a book that began with such hope and filled me with a sense of inspiration and goals for women that could be meant, C-S ends with a demonstration that women lost ground badly in the early part of the 20th century. There was a tremendous push-back against them not because so many more were independent and seeking not to marry but that they were for the first time ever _visibly_ so and more women than ever were self-supporting – because jobs had changed, because of WW1, after the suffragette movement. And the tragedy is that we can see that ceaseless propanganda and punitive norms worked, for as the decades from 1890 went on fewer women were marrying later, many marrying younger, despite the spread of contraception still having what we today would consider relatively large families.
All the vile talk and behavior in short worked: The sexualization of spinsterhood and the way Freud was used was an important factor. I’ll bring in last night I watched half-way through the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala film adaptation of The Bostonians and was horrified to see how this movie reinforced the sinister misogyny of the book so that Vanessa Redgrave playing Olive Chancellor is presented as a sick woman, her desire for independence a plot to dominate Varenna. Varenna herself is presented as a simpleton who is used by her unscrupulous father for his spiritual seances and they are presented as just as useless and corrupt in the sense of taking money for their cause. The more I watch some of these older Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala films the more disillusioned with them I become.
Especially striking is where S-C crosses the same terrain as Vicinus. I was shocked or startled at the positive representation of women’s friendships in boarding school when they crossed a line not only into homoeroticism and lesbianism but also creating dependencies and manipulative. Vicinus was for this because she argued (in effect) it is from such woman’s friendships and mentors and networks that power can be built
From the 1890s on and especially after Freud’s theories became popular women’s friendship were intensely stigmatized as deeply sick, as sexually perverted – all of them were now suspect.
S-C says that what had been a sense of “womanhood’ and pride in your sexuality as feminine and your network of women’s friendships was attacked and women had another bad loss of self-esteem. This was a bad blow
Women who nourished and supported other women were presented as deviant – So say in Trollope’s CYFH? Kate Vavasour’s love for Alice is not presented as lesbian but it’s hinted and she is presented as deviant and destructive, she betrays Alice – not to make her independent but to get her to break with John Grey and offer herself and her money body and soul to George.
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Dame Laura Knight (1931): Good Night
In the Conclusion to the book S-C goes over what to me begins to become a bit suspicious – because I’ve seen these patterns of how women were once in charge (matriarchies – never was; in some cultures the fathers and brothers were in charge instead of the fathers and sons) or could go out in public (this never was) or public not separated off from private (never was) so now S-C would have us believe a period between 1780 and 1830 or so showed real progress for women partly based on new protestant beliefs, the loosening structure of society in the US, it’s lack of a tight social network so that an independent woman could find a praised niche. This is now described as destroyed by the new norms reinforcing subjection of women at the beginning of the 20th century.
Whether S-C is right or not, she also described the mechanisms by which most women were kept subject to their families throughout the 19th century, and she describes some of the ways of thinking and feeling that did help towards some liberation
That frontier and opening of educational institutions who needed teachers – pay was abysmal
What helps confirm women in singlehood or independence and not repeat the patters of a life of self-sacrifice to men and men’s children and family:
1) being ambitious, taught to want to offer service to a wider community.
2) Very important the desire to expand your intellect. This Vicinus talks about in two of her chapters: on boarding school and all women’s colleges. We can see why the persistence mockery and derision of learning as making a woman (horrors) a bluestocking so she obviously doesn’t want men or babies
3) a desire to explore, revere, cultivate the self
4) simply a desire to be free and independent – Alice Vavasour has this but no opportunity because the money left her is handled by her father and she is given nothing worthwhile to use it for – only George’s intensely selfish ruthless politicking
She quotes the religious language by which American women justified their pursuit of writing and communing or doing good work in a community – this kind of language was mostly not available in the UK – or elsewhere it seems – it gave courage because of the notion God was on your side. You are not going it alone
I’ve never much taken Hilary Clinton’s supposed piety seriously and when she includes this kind of thinking in her book I have felt she was hypocritical but it may be her tin ear and turgid style, and inability to sound sincere – and upper class identifications that grate on me
5) a family context which valued you as an individual and education, and sisters, mothers who supported you (rare) friendships with like minded women
S-C talks of some women who tried to set up utopian communities and the settlement movement. So again we are with Vicinus.
She thinks present feminism’s roots owe a lot to these early spinsters writing and women who did write in feminist ways for independence or revealing the deprivation and nightmares of their existences (like Fanny Kemble about enslaved black women on her husband’s rice plantations).
It’s a moving book which ends in the same place Vicinus does: a kind of bleak despair.
A few more to go before finally choosing individuals: Onto Anne Boyd Rioux’s Writing for Immortality is very good: a history and analysis of the culture of 18th century American and struggles of 4 to write and publish successfully in it: Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Stoddard and Constance Fennimore Woolson her choices. Showalter in her Jury of Her Peers, a rare history of American women writers from the eighteenth to the later 20th century, has sections on Stoddar, Phelps, and Woolson. Rebecca Traister: All the Single Ladies, which begins with how living independently has become a norm for women well into their thirties and yet if you want to cast suspicion on someone (Anita Hill) you ask her why she never married (frigid or a lesbian?), or if she did, why she never had children (selfish and lazy). Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: a book on how millions of women lived out their lives after WW1 without getting married (a whole generation of young men wiped out), her other writings are on novels of the era about single women.
Ellen
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