Thank you for coming to this discussion about some fictional females and how they were often both mirrors of and models for many real-life women.
Every age has its own assumptions about women’s nature, and over the years, American women have been described as being, by definition, selfish or selfless, sensual or spiritual, saint or sinner, irrational and impulsive or cold and calculating. The definition is important, and I’d like to talk about how it changed over time and how the changes affected a major aspect of women’s lives–the issue of work.
From the beginning of the 19th century till after the Civil War, the prevailing image of women is made very clear in a couple of quotes by James Fenimore Cooper in his last novel, The Ways of the Hour, published in 1850. A nice old gentleman says to a young woman that: a “true woman is a kind, gentle, affectionate, thoughtful creature, whose heart is so full of you, there’s no room in it for herself.” And the woman, being herself a true woman, agrees, saying that a woman’s submission to her husband is a law of nature, and her part in the world is to be mild, patient, and “if necessary, forgiving.” Keep that description of the true woman in mind, because it’s important to see it slowly change.
In any case, work didn’t become a problem or even an issue for middle-class American women until after the Civil War. The conflicts faced by heroines during those early years involved choosing between the good and the bad suitor, or waiting for that good suitor to propose, or persuading one’s parents to allow the marriage. Even a big depression in 1837, which forced many middle-class women into trying to support their families when their husbands or fathers lost all their money, didn’t change anything, because almost all the novels that dealt with that situation ended with the heroines happily giving up whatever work they had found to go back to the protection of a newly solvent father or a husband.
Despite that emphasis on the “true woman” image, some women had nevertheless been active in abolitionist activities, some had worked as nurses during the war, and since 1848 many had read about the suffrage movement, which became more vocal and more inescapable every year. Still, the first novel about a middle-class woman who works because she wants to, not because she has to, didn’t appear till 1871 The book was called The Silent Partner, and the author was Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who already had both a national and an international reputation as a novelist and poet when this novel was published. Her books were avidly read and always well reviewed, and in this one her heroine makes an unusual choice for the time: she turns her back on love and domesticity in favor of what she sees as a vocation.
The Silent Partner is about a rich and conventional young woman whose father dies and leaves her his 1/3 part in a profitable mill. A very moral person, she decides she should assume some of her father’s responsibilities, but the other two partners, one of whom is her fiancé, tell her they will never allow her to be anything but a “silent partner” and that that should satisfy her because she could have the pleasure of spending her dividends on feminine frippery without the problems of earning them. This makes her break her engagement and, with the help of a young mill worker, begin to investigate the lives of the poor people whose labor earns her dividends. When she sees the poverty and ugliness of their lives, she begins to spend her income to arrange for nursery schools for the children, clinics for the sick, recreational facilities for the adolescents, and evening schools for the adults. Her moral crisis comes when another man, this one someone who understands and approves of what she’s doing and loves her anyway, proposes. Because she loves him too, she’s tempted, but then she decides that she can’t be equally committed to a home, husband, and family and to her unpaid but very real work in the mill town. When she chooses the latter, she goes against every contemporary convention about women, and while her choice was not yet a common one either in life or in literature, it must have given at least a few readers something to think about.
But that’s a novel about a women whose work came to her rather than the other way around. By the 1880s, a decade later, more than a few middle-class women were going to co-ed state universities or to women’s colleges, and they began to realize that they were notbydefinition weak, foolish, submissive, or even necessarily domestic. This discovery was mirrored in some popular fiction by three well-known novelists who wrote books about women who were or wanted to be doctors and who each had to decide what they really wanted in life. Medicine, by the way, was the first acceptable profession for women because it was considered “nurturing,” and therefore less outrageous for them to follow than others.
The first of these books was Doctor Breen’s Practice (1881) by William Dean Howells, a major author, editor, and critic. The heroine is a homeopathic doctor who is called a “doctoress” and not taken seriously by other people, which is not surprising because she’s presented as not being very competent. A young man is attracted to her but is afraid to approach because he thinks she is one of those frightening “new women” people were talking about – seen as the opposite of “true women” – but as he gets to know her, he realizes that she has only become a doctor in order to “do good,” which is a very womanly attribute and which enables him to propose. She accepts immediately, and Howells tells his readers that she finally became a happy woman by using her skill on the workers in her husband’s factory – “under the shelter of his name.” For Howells, conventional charity exercised as a married woman is the only real satisfaction for the “true woman,” whom he still held up as an ideal.
The second novel was Doctor Zay (1882) by the same Elizabeth Stuart Phelps who wrote The Silent Partner. When this book opens, Dr. Zay is already a serious and respected doctor who loves her work and has decided never to marry. A road accident brings a young man into her care, and he slowly falls in love with her, proposes, and assures her he would never expect her to give up her practice. At first she refuses him, explaining: “You would come home . . . I should not be there . . . It would seem to you as if you were neglected. . . I will never marry a man unless I can make him divinely happy.” Unlike the heroine in The Silent Partner, however, she decides to give it a try despite her doubts about his ability to keep his promise. Phelps doesn’t say what happens after their marriage, but both she and her heroine seem to have little faith in the possibility of success.
The third novel was A Country Doctor (1884) by Sarah Orne Jewett and is about a young woman who decides she wants to be a doctor, is encouraged by her guardian, who is himself a doctor, then while studying medicine meets a young man she is attracted to and who proposes to her. He doesn’t even pretend to accept the idea of her career, and after thinking long and hard, she decides she prefers medicine to marriage. When she is accused of being “strong-minded,” which was one of the worst things one could say about the “new woman,” she gives the only kind of answer the time could possibly accept: she turns to religion and says that God wouldn’t give women the same talents as men if what was right for men were wrong for women, and that she refuses to bury the talent God has given her. Since she too feels that combining her profession with marriage is impossible, she chooses the profession.
So in those three novels about a professional woman, the stage is set for a problem that still exists today, with the same three choices still to be made: marriage, work, or an effort to combine the two. None of those books carried the heroine into her future life, but two somewhat later novelists did try to imagine that situation, with mixed results.
The first novel is Tom Grogan, the number-one bestseller of 1896, by F. Hopkinson Smith, a sentimental and enormously popular novelist. The heroine takes over her husband’s contracting business when he’s hurt in an accident, then lies about him being in a nursing home when he’s really dead so that people will think she’s carrying out his orders rather than making her own decisions. She’s a tough boss who deals with crooks and competitors in a masculine and cutthroat business – but she also supports her old father, a crippled son, and a daughter; she doesn’t allow the men to drink or curse on the job; she remains sexually pure; and she nurses all the women and children in the community no matter how tired she is herself. She may be a new woman at work, but she’s a true woman after work because she’s shown to be nurturing, kind, moral, a devoted mother and daughter, and someone who isn’t interested only in proving what she can do.
That was written by a man and on the surface might be considered at least halfway modern, especially since the heroine is shown enjoying every aspect of her work, even the many unsavory ones. A different vision of a woman who has taken over a husband’s work is found in The Iron Woman (1911) by Margaret Deland – another bestselling and critically admired author. In this novel, which is about much more than the woman of the title because it’s a sequel to an earlier book about another woman, the Iron Woman inherits an iron-work factory from her husband, runs it more efficiently and more profitably than he had, also enjoys the competitive nature of the work – but has lost all her “womanly” qualities in the process. Deland, a conservative, die-hard believer in the true woman, describes the protagonist as being physically awkward, badly dressed, uninterested in creating a charming home, and not having a clue as to how to bring up her only son except by spoiling him. For Deland, fifteen years into the 20th century, no woman who not only works but enjoys working can ever–by definition–be a true woman or a good mother.
And yet, despite Smith and Deland, the world had changed by the time their books appeared. A novel called Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly by Hamlin Garland appeared in 1895, and though I don’t want to talk about the heroine’s problems here, I would like to read a few sentences from a letter her suitor writes as a marriage proposal:
“I do not require you to cook for me, nor keep house for me. You are mistress of yourself, to come and go as you please, without question. . . . I want you as comrade and lover, not as subject, or servant, or unwilling wife. . . . You can bear me children or not, just as you please. . . . I shall expect you to follow any profession or to do any work which pleases you. I have written frankly because I believed it would prejudice you in my favor. Had I believed otherwise. . . I should have written in terms of flattery and deceit.”
I don’t think either hero or heroine were typical of the time, but the novel was by a bestselling author and meant to appeal to a mass audience. Clearly there was a new way of thinking about women’s nature, even if not the way of the majority.
The last novel I want to talk about is Dorothy Canfield’s The Home-Maker (1924), a book that came out in the 1920s – a time known for being the Jazz Age during which everyone drank Prohibition gin and believed in what used to be called “free love.” Actually, then as now, the vast majority of Middle America lived lives quite different from those of the sophisticates described by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and here’s a story about two ordinary people caught in the disaster of unquestioned gender roles.
Eva, a perfectionist, hates being a home-maker because she doesn’t have enough money for household help, is impatient with her three children, and irritated by her husband who doesn’t earn enough to make things easier. Lester, a dreamer, hates being an accountant in the town’s department store but knows he must support his family. Both play their “natural” role until Lester is in an accident that paralyzes him.
Eva then has to support the family, gets a job in the store her husband had worked in, is quickly promoted to department head, earns more money than Lester ever did, and is very happy to be out of the house–though she never admits it and tells all her friends that she hates working because she knows that every woman is supposed to want to make a home and be a mother while her man is doing his thing out in the world. Meanwhile, Lester learns to cook and sew from books, manages to keep the house clean with the help of the children, adores listening to them and discovering what they’re like and what they need, and manages to solve all the discipline problems that had driven his wife mad.
When the doctor says he may be able to cure Lester, everyone is unhappy: Lester will have to go back to work, which he hates; Eva will have to go home, which she hates (she even goes to church to ask forgiveness for hoping in her secret heart that the doctor is wrong); and the children will have to deal with an impatient and angry mother, which they hate. Luckily the doctor understands all these unspoken undercurrents and after a private conversation with Lester tells the family he was wrong and that there is no cure. No one admits it, but everyone is relieved because living the roles that people expected of them is exactly what had made these particular people unhappy.
So because Eva is afraid of what people would say if she admitted she didn’t want to go back to the children, and because Lester can’t face the “scorn” and “contempt” with which he would be treated for choosing to do “women’s work,” Eva’s liberation comes not because she figures out who she is and what she wants to do, but because Lester chooses as the lesser of two evils to live his life as an invalid.
It’s not a very realistic ending, but the novel is one of the first treatments of a situation that is echoed today in many newspaper and magazine articles in which “house-husbands” still report feeling the contempt of other men and the pity of women for assuming that role.
– Book talk given at Morningside center, July 2003.
