Thanks for coming here to today for a discussion about how the issues surrounding women and work, and how the choices they have to make about these issues, aren’t something new, but have been with us for about 125 years. In other words, since just after the Civil War, when middle-class women first decided that they wanted to work even when they didn’t have to because they were widowed or orphaned, or their fathers or husbands ran into financial difficulty and couldn’t support them.
We know that they did stay home because historical records tell us so, and we think that they were happy to do so because novels, which usually reflect reality, tell us so. Among the thousands of novels published between 1800 and the end of the Civil War, there isn’t one that has a heroine who says she wants to work, dreams of working, wonders what it would be like to work, or was sorry that she couldn’t work. The first novel about a middle-class woman who choosesto work instead of marrying the man she loves was The Silent Partner by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and that didn’t appear until 1871.
But I’d like to fast-forward to the 1880s and look at three novels about women who either were or wanted to be doctors. That’s not just a coincidence, because for most of the 19th century women were supposed to be gentle, caring, and nurturing creatures, so it seemed to make much more sense, in life and in books, for women who wanted a profession to turn to medicine rather than to engineering or law. These three novels are very important to today’s topic because they show very clearly that from the very beginning, women had – and knew they had – the same choices they have today: they could work, marry, or try to combine the two. There was also a fourth option, but that one didn’t surface till the 20th century, and we’ll get to it later.
What all three novels have in common is that they were written by major, popular, famous, well-reviewed authors – one male and two females – and were read by both men and women. The three heroines also have a lot in common: they were all beautiful (or they wouldn’t be heroines), they were all independently wealthy (so they didn’t have to work) and they were all carefully described in great detail as being very womanly (if they had been “mannish,” their decision wouldn’t have been so surprising). So let’s begin.
The first book is Dr. Breen’s Practice by William Dean Howells, published in 1881. It’s not one of his best books, which came later in his career, but he had already written a couple of novels, published many volumes of essays and literary criticism, and had an international reputation. Mostly he was the very well-known and respected editor of The Atlantic magazine, and had a reputation for being against the sentimental novels of the past, so what he had to say about a “career woman” is a pretty good clue as to what most people thought back then.
The setting is an upscale summer resort to which Grace Breen, a young, inexperienced, unsure-of-herself doctor, goes with her mother and with her old school friend Mrs. Maynard, who is there without her husband and as Grace’s patient because she suffers from “nerves” – a common problem for many women in real life and in novels during much of the 19th century.
One of the first things Howells does is show the reader how ordinary people respond to the idea of a woman doctor. The female guests, with one silly “suffragette” exception, are either shocked that such a well-bred young lady should have chosen to do “man’s work,” or amused at the idea of a woman doctor, calling her a “doctoress” and saying they would never use such a second-rate substitute for the real thing.
A male guest, nice, conventional young Walter Libby, knows Mrs. Maynard and her husband outside, so is of course introduced to the group. He’s never met what was called a “new woman” and is afraid that a woman doctor will be arrogant, bossy, and stuck-up, but she’s pretty so he spends time with her and soon realizes to his relief that she’s none of those things and only wants to be a doctor in order to “do good,” and that’s a very womanly thing: women traditionally are the dispensers of charity. But he’s completely convinced of her femininity – by which he means helplessness and gratitude for the help of a man – in a scene that she describes to her mother this way, and which is the scene that makes him begin to fall in love:
I dropped some things out of my lap . . . and by the time I had gathered them up I was wound round and round with linen threads so that I couldn’t move a step, and Mr. Libby cut me loose. I could have done it myself, but it seemed right and natural that he should do it.
Meanwhile, even Mrs. Maynard, when she becomes seriously ill after disobeying Grace’s instructions, wants a “real doctor” – by which she too means a man – and insists on one being called in as a consultant. Grace gets a Dr. Mulbridge to take on the role, and he’s not very happy about it because he doesn’t want to be subordinate to a anyone, especially not a woman. But he too is won over when he sees that she’s not interested in the prestige of the title but only in doing good. He realizes that “she’s not presumptuous but faithful, docile” – excellent qualities for a wife if not for a doctor – and that she’s just “had her head addled by women’s talk.” He’s so won over that he proposes and even offers to let her continue to practice under his guidance. Of course , since she doesn’t love him, she has no problem rejecting his proposal.
So both Walter and Dr. Mulbridge understand that Grace doesn’t have it in her to be a real doctor, andMrs. Maynard, when she gets better, adds her two cents and gives Grace a lecture:
You’re not fit to be a doctor. You’re too nervous, and you’re too conscientious. . . . No matter how much experience you had, if you saw a case going wrong in your hands, you’d want to call in some one else to set it right. Do you suppose Dr. Mulbridge would have given me up to another doctor because he was afraid he couldn’t cure me? No, indeed! He’d have let me die first. . . .
By this time Grace herself understands not only that she’s too “impulsive, timid, and nervous” (which were some more of the adjectives that defined the “true woman”) to be a good doctor but also that women have no confidence in doctors of their own sex. if Mrs. Maynard had had the same confidence in her that she had had in Dr. Mulbridge, she, Grace, would have been able to cure her. At which point she has no problem giving it all up for Walter, and Howells assures his readers that after her marriage she was very happy helping her husband’s factory workers “under the shelter of [his] name.”
So Grace Breen chooses one of the three options: marriage rather than work – a decision most readers agreed with.
But the second and third novels are written by women, and the perspective is rather different.
A year later, in 1882, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who in the previous 10 years had written half a dozen serious and popular novels women’s issues, published a book called Doctor Zay, about 29-year-old Atalanta Zaidee Lloyd, who is called Dr. Zay by everyone in the isolated Maine community in which she has been a respected and beloved doctor for several years. Since she’s beautiful and independently wealthy, it’s clear that her decision never to marry is a serious one.
But then there is a road accident outside the boarding house where she both lives and has her office, and seriously injured Waldo Yorke is brought inside, given a room, and of course becomes her patient. When he first regains consciousness and realizes his doctor is a woman, he doubts her skill, but he soon sees that he’s getting better, and he also sees how much attention she pays to her patients, day and night, how she is constantly studying medical journals, and how she is completely without feminine wiles.
After a while, he becomes ashamed that he, a man – a wealthy Boston Brahmin trained as a lawyer but who has never worked at it – has less to show for his life than she does, but he’s fallen in love with her and proposes anyway, assuring her that he admires her just as she is and wouldn’t expect her to give up her work. She refuses to take him seriously, so he returns to Boston, opens a law office, prospers, and at the end of a year returns to Maine for a second proposal, and It’s worth quoting some of this proposal.
I told you…that you should not be expected to surrender your profession…I am proud of you. . . . I want you just as you are. . . . What kind of fellow should I be, if I could approach a woman like you, and . . . offer her nothing but myself in exchange for an influence so important as yours. I . . . shall never be a great man, but I am not small enough for that!
That’s a pretty neat proposal for 1882, and she confesses she never expected to hear a man say anything like that, but she again refuses, and here are her reasons.
Mr. Yorke, you have been so unfortunate as to become interested in a new kind of woman. . . . You would come home . . . I should not be there….You would need me when I was called somewhere . . . and it would seem to you as if you were neglected. . . . It is because I love you that we must part. . . . I could not live unless I made you the happiest man in all this world. . . .
So he goes back to Boston, and a year later returns to try for a third time, at which point, having admitted that she loves him and won over by his persistence, she finally agrees – though she observes that what they are doing is not the usual marriage but “a problem to be undertaken.”
Phelps shows us very clearly both Dr. Zay’s professionalism and her “true womanliness,” which doesn’t mean that she’s helpless, like Grace Breen, but that she has a soft voice, loves music, cries when a baby dies, wears charming clothes when off-duty, and is so moral that she can force a man in the community to marry a young girl he’s gotten pregnant and hadn’t planned to marry! She has to have both sides to her personality because, as she explains to Waldo, both “force and delicacy” will be demanded of women simply because they are women.
So the second option for women was to try to combine marriage and career. Neither Phelps nor her heroine sound very optimistic – a marriage that’s a “problem” from the beginning is likely to develop more of them and Phelps’s loyal audience must have known that five years earlier she had written a wonderful novel about a woman artist who gets the same kind assurance from her suitor, marries him, and ends up bitterly unhappy and unfulfilled. Phelps herself didn’t marry until her later 40’s, long after her best work.
Two years later, in 1884, we get the third novel – A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett. Jewett’s most famous work was yet to come, but she already had a fine reputation because she was one of Howells’ protégés, and as editor of the Atlantic, he had been publishing her short work for almost 10 years. The country doctor of the title is actually modeled on Jewett’s own father.
The heroine is Nan Prince, daughter of a dead naval surgeon whom she never knew and a mother who dies when she’s two years old. She’s brought up by her widowed guardian, Dr. Leslie, who is everyone’s dream doctor: good, wise, makes house calls anytime and anyplace, and a brilliant physician who is a provincial Maine doctor in a very isolated community by choice. As a child and a young teen-ager, Nan accompanies him on his rounds as often as she can, and announces when she’s still in high school that she also wants to be a country doctor.
When the neighbors, who are all very fond of the girl, object for the usual conventional reasons, he tells them “I don’t care if it’s a man’s work or a woman’s work, if it is hers, I’m going to help her.” and to make sure that it isher work, he observes her carefully after she graduates, sees that she’s unhappy with the usual idle life of a middle-class young woman, and decides that she probably should be a doctor rather than do “woman’s natural work” – that is, marriage and family. He tutors her for a year, then sends her off to medical school in Boston.
At the end of her first year, after working hard and doing well, she gets in touch with an aunt she’s never met but who lives in Massachusetts and who invites her to spend a few days with her. The aunt is so pleased with Nan, who is charming despite her unfeminine notion of studying medicine, that she invites all the young people in town to meet her, and Nan is immediately accepted into the group. It’s summer time and they go swimming, sailing, hiking, picnicking, they play the piano and sing in the evenings, and she’s surprised at how much she enjoys the comradeship of her peers. The few days stretch into weeks, and there is soon a mutual attraction between her and a young lawyer, George Gerry, who unlike Dr. Zay’s Waldo Yorke, doesn’t even pretend to support her desire to work but makes it clear that she has an either/or decision to make. During a long night, she first finds herself dreaming of “love and marriage, Home-making and housekeeping, the dear, womanly, fashions of life,” but she then recognizes it as a fantasy for which she’s not suited. She rejects his proposal, tells him and her aunt of her decision to practice medicine, and goes back to her guardian for the rest of the summer before returning to medical school. The book ends with her saying ”O God, I thank thee for my future.”
That’s the basic plot, but again there are some interesting quotes. The first is from a discussion she has with her aunt and some other women before she realizes that she’s interested in George, and it’s a purely abstract discussion about the propriety of a woman having a profession.
I don’t see why it should be a shame and a dishonor to a girl who is trying to do the same thing [as a young man] and to be of equal use in the world. God would not give us the same talents if what were right for men were wrong for women. . . . I won’t . . . say that the study of medicine is a proper vocation for women, I only say it is the proper study for me. It . . . cannot be the proper vocation of all women to bring up children, so many of them are dead failures at it.
The second is from her conversation with George when she rejects his proposal.
I have been greatly surprised . . . because I found how strongly something in me has . . . shown me the possibility of happiness that should centre itself in one man’s love. . . . But I could not marry the whole of myself as most women can. . . .
So Nan ultimately chooses work rather than marriage – the third option. And notice that like Dr. Zay, her reluctance to marry is not only because she wants to practice medicine but because she’s afraid of not being able to give her husband her full attention and her whole being, and it’s this sentiment that allowed women readers – most of whom did not in 1884 want to be doctors or any other kind of professional! – to recognize the heroines as “true women” whose problems could be sympathized with and to a certain extent be understood. This wasn’t Jewett’s most successful work, either critically or commercially, but there it was, joining the growing list of novels that questioned the “truths” about women’s nature or place.
On to the final novel, which deals with what seems to be a very contemporary problem but which also turns out to have a long history. Dorothy Canfield’s The Home-Maker came out in 1924, when people were supposedly living in the exciting Jazz Age – the Roaring Twenties with its flappers, gangsters, Prohibition gin, and what used to be called “free love.” But the vast majority of Americans lived lives quite different from those of the sophisticates described by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and this is a story about two lower middle-class people living in a small conventional town in Middle America – ordinary people caught in the trap of 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” roles until Lester is in an accident that paralyzes him.
Eva then has to support the family. She gets a job as a stock girl in the store her husband had worked in, is quickly promoted to saleswoman and then 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 wantto make a home and be a mother while her man is doing his thing out in the world. Meanwhile, Lester in his wheelchair 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 back home, which she hates; and the children will again have to deal with an impatient and angry mother, which they hate. Luckily the doctor comes to understand all these unspoken undercurrents, and after a private conversation with Lester tells the family he was wrong and 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. Nevertheless, in this novel – again written by an author who was internationally famous for her fiction and nonfiction, commercially and critically successful, read by both men and women – we have the beginning of the fourth option for women who want to work: find a house-husband.
— Book talk given at Oceanside Library, October 2005.
