A History of the Wife (42 page)

prize can there be in life than to find, when the hair has grown white and the step is losing its spring, that the children one has borne return her love and care a hundredfold and that every day the interest on the outlay grows apace? I don’t know of any; and I would not exchange the love of my sons and daughters, and the fireside quiet that is mine at near sixty, for the wealth of all the Rothschilds. . . . A WORKMAN’S WIFE, Plymouth, Sept. 6.

I had known my husband over three years before we were married, and saw a great deal of him; consequently we thought we understood each other’s disposition sufficiently to live happily together. But we had not been man and wife many months before I found he was drifting away from me. . . . The advice from different friends was: “If he goes his way, you go yours.” But I knew this was not the way to win him back; so, after bearing it pretty patiently for three years, I set about in my mind the best way to go to work. . . . I always met him at the door myself, as though nothing had happened, and paid the same little atten- tions I had always paid before we were married, took great care to study what friends he liked, and made a rule to ask one or two cheerful ones to dinner two or three times a week. . . . So by degrees, I was enabled to wean him from bad companions, and now, for the past year or more, we have been as happy as possible . . . MIDDLE-CLASS WOMAN, Croydon Sept. 12.

Before many years pass we hope to celebrate our golden wedding, please God, and we are not tired of one another yet. But I made many mistakes. . . .

I know how to manage my husband now, and have learned to double his pleasures, which are not many, by sharing in them. . . . WINNY JONES, Swaffham, Sept. 17.

On the whole, the happy wives were not so unequivocal as the unhappy ones. They assumed that marriage called for tolerance of a hus- band’s weaknesses, and even wifely subjection. They believed it was their, rather than their husband’s, duty to make the marriage work. One wife made three private vows of behavior on the eve of her wedding, which she kept for fifteen years before telling her spouse; another corrected her own youthful mistakes and learned in time to “manage” her husband; a

third gradually weaned her husband away from “bad companions”; a fourth went so far as to give her husband a “latchkey” that allowed him to return at all hours of the night until he tired of his freedom. All sub- scribed to the view that the home should be a marital sanctuary, protect- ing a husband from the evils of the outside world, be it the aggressiveness of the workplace or the debauchery of drink and promiscuous sex. The “true woman” was devoted to her work as homemaker, wife, and mother. Some of these wives were clearly influenced by traditional religious views of woman as the weaker vessel, destined by God to bow to her husband and bear numerous children. The most unusual correspon- dent of the group was the working man’s wife so clearly conscious of her class difference from the majority of letter writers and so clearly content with her lot. It is noteworthy that this wife who had been mar- ried for forty years and the other older wives were the most happy. They had gotten through the difficult period of early marital adjust- ment, childbearing, pinched financial resources, and were, in their later years, cognizant of their blessings. Even this small sample seems to support the view, current in the work of some psychologists today, that old age can be “golden years” for couples who manage to stay

together.
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FURTHER BRITISH AND CONTINENTAL CONTROVERSY

The debate on the Woman Question continued long after the letters in the
Daily Telegraph.
British women reformists, such as Mona Caird, Sarah Grand, and Olive Schreiner, were attacked by anti-reformists, such as Eliza Lynn Linton, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the popular nov- elist Ouida. Male writers, too, whether they were for or against changes in women’s situation, also mirrored the turmoil surrounding the New Woman. Unlike the works of earlier fiction writers—for example, Austen, Brontë, Gaskell, and Dickens—the novels of the 1880s and 1890s no longer tended to end with marriage. Instead, a wedding might appear at the beginning or middle of a novel, followed by many pages devoted to its problems. Or a novel might end in no marriage at all.
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British novelists were somewhat behind their continental counter- parts in abandoning the marital “happy end” for grimmer portraits of love, sex, and marriage. Already in 1832, the French novelist George

Sand had shocked her contemporaries with
Indiana
—the story of a wife’s flight from a brutal husband. The tomes comprising Balzac’s
Human Comedy
, written in the thirties and forties, were replete with monomaniacal husbands and fathers responsible for the misery of their wives and daughters. In his
Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées,
Balzac offered prospective wives two marital models—the traditional marriage of convenience and the romantic marriage of passion. Two friends, released from their convent school, make totally different marriages, one based on family considerations, the other on the mandate of her heart. Despite Balzac’s personal romantic orientation, he comes down on the side of the woman who finds happiness in domesticity and motherhood, whereas the passionate heroine who loses her first hus- band through the excesses of voluptuous pleasure (!) and dies during a second marriage as a result of her own violent jealousy provides a sobering cautionary tale.

But it was Flaubert a generation later who established the prototype of the unhappy wife par excellence in
Madame Bovary.
Little did it mat- ter that she was a pathetic provincial creature bred on the romantic illu- sions of her age; Flaubert turned her into a larger-than-life adulteress, more to be pitied than censured in her refusal to remain the faithful wife of a humdrum country doctor. The legal action brought by the conser- vative government of Napoleon III against Flaubert and his publishers in 1857 for their insult to morality foundered in the flood of words issuing from an eloquent defense attorney and a progressive judge, not to men- tion the tide of public opinion in favor of Madame Bovary.

It remained for Tolstoy to create a truly heroic adulteress in
Anna Karenina
(1875–1877). Beautiful, passionate, aristocratic, Anna Karen- ina leaves her cold husband and a beloved child for the handsome offi- cer Count Vronsky. The consequences of this act are devastating for all concerned. Like Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina commits suicide, abandoning an illegitimate child as well as the son from her marriage. However much Flaubert and Tolstoy identified with their heroines, the wives were still made to pay in the end for their marital infidelities. Female adultery without ultimate punishment was still unthinkable.

By the 1880s, British novelists were catching up with continental writers in depicting the problematic nature of marital relations. Thomas Hardy led the pack of writers convinced that marriage, as practiced in his time, was a minefield for disaster. In
The Mayor of Casterbridge

(1866), the title character had in his youth committed the outrageous act of selling his wife and child to a seaman—an act that came back to haunt him when he was older and successful, and one that inevitably led to his downfall and death.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
(1891) follows the history of a country girl seduced and made pregnant by her upper-class employer, then married to a man who deserts her when he learns of her past. In the end, Tess stabs her first lover and spends a few blissful days with the husband she has never stopped loving, before being arrested and hanged.
Jude the Obscure
(1894) combines a searing condemnation of British class-based society with a fatalistic vision of the unhappiness inherent in most heterosexual relations. Jude, a village stonemason, is tricked into an early, unfortunate marriage with a woman who soon abandons him. Then he falls in love with his cousin and lives with her illegally for several years. When their three children meet tragic ends, he and his cousin separate, and Jude dies a miserable death. It was the bleakest of Hardy’s novels, and the least popular.

Numerous other British novelists critiqued the institution of mar- riage and addressed the Woman Question. Consider
The Odd Women
(1893) by George Gissing. “Odd women,” also called “redundant women,” were those half million females who had no chance of “mak- ing a pair” in late Victorian England, because women significantly out- numbered the men. Four of the central characters in Gissing’s novel are unmarried women, and two of them—Rhoda Nunn and Mary Barfoot— remain unmarried by conviction in order to help other “odd women.” They have set up a school to teach single women clerical skills so they may become economically self-sufficient. In the course of the book, one hears all the arguments for and against traditional womanhood and conventional marriage, though Gissing’s heart is clearly on the side of the New Woman.

In the character of Rhoda Nunn (the family name is obviously sym- bolic), he created an imposing example of an independent, proud, intelligent person, who devoted herself to “the greatest movement of our time—that of emancipating her sex.”
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But lest we think of her as an “unwomanly” virago, Gissing made her sensitive to the love of a per- sistent suitor, Evrard Barfoot. Their verbal exchanges constitute a cri- tique of marriage as it currently existed (a social “duty” held together by legal and commercial underpinnings) and a frank discussion of the merits of a “free union” (a nonlegal rapport based on passion and intel-

lect.) Evrard speaks the language of sexual emancipation when he pro- poses to Rhoda:

You can picture the kind of life I want you to share. You know me well enough to understand that my wife—if we use the old word— would be as free to live in her own way as I to live in mine. All the same, it is love that I am asking for. . . . the love of a man and a woman who can think intelligently may be the best thing life has to offer them.
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In the end, Rhoda Nunn chooses not to be a “wife” in any sense of the word because Evrard Barfoot turns out to have more conventional ideas on marriage than she does.

The two women in this novel who
do
marry represent the best and the worst of wifedom. Fanny Micklethwaite became a wife after a self- sacrificing engagement of seventeen years! After such fortitude, she and her husband both thrive in matrimony, despite their financial limita- tions. The other married woman, Monica Widdowson, accepted the proposal of an unprepossessing man twice her age, whom she scarcely knew, so as to escape the near poverty experienced by her two older, unmarried sisters. Within a year, the marriage proves to be an unmiti- gated disaster. Mr. Widdowson’s old-fashioned middle-class views on the prerogatives of a husband, his pathological jealousy regarding his young wife, their total lack of understanding for one another—all com- bine to send her flying into the arms of a would-be lover. Though she does not act out her adulterous fantasies (only because the lover gets cold feet), she leaves her husband under a cloud of suspicion and dies giving birth to his child. So much for happy unions in Gissing’s version of late-Victorian marriage.

On the other hand, the defenders of traditional marriage had hardly given up the ghost. Eliza Lynn Linton’s 1891 articles on “The Wild Women” presented the conjugal home as a haven of “peace” and “love.” She clung to the Victorian credo that “the man has the outside work to do, from governing the country to tilling the soil; the woman takes the inside, managing the family and regulating society. The more highly civilized a community is, the more completely differentiated are these two functions.”
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Linton dug her heels into the ground of separate spheres, despite the seismic shocks that were undermining that ground.

One of her major criticisms was reserved for the idea that women should be active in politics. “[W]here,” she asked, “will be the peace of home when women, like men, plunge into the troubled sea of active political life?” Sounding the counter-alarm to cries for women’s suf- frage, Linton offered an argument that would be used for the next twenty-five years: the vote for women would be bad for marriage, since it would introduce another potentially divisive wedge between hus- band and wife. She asked her readers to “imagine the home to which a weary man of business, and an ardent politician to boot, will return when his wife has promised her vote to the other side.... [We] all know miserable cases where the wife has gone directly and publicly counter to the husband.” Conservatives of Linton’s generation, ranging from staunch Catholics, Protestants, and Jews to eugenicists and social Darwinists, applauded her efforts to maintain the conventional division of labor between the sexes. The New Woman, with her thirst for educa- tion and economic self-sufficiency, her refusal to be coerced into mar- riage, and her desire to limit the number of her children, threatened the very foundations of the old order.

THE WOMAN QUESTION IN AMERICA

In America, as in Europe, the late nineteenth century witnessed hundreds, if not thousands, of “New Women”—women inspired to seek greater autonomy for themselves with or without marriage. When in 1874 the reformist Abba Goold Woolson proclaimed, “I exist . . . not as a wife, not as a mother, not as a teacher, but first of all, as woman, with a right to existence for my own sake,” she dared to articulate a thought that was barely conscious in the feminine mind, and one that most Victorians would have found appalling.
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Yet within the next quarter century, American women would begin to respond in numerous ways to the call for greater female independence and equal- ity with men. More and more women questioned the absolute need for marriage; as new opportunities for employment opened up, some even remained single by choice. Whereas domestic service was the major outlet for women workers (one half of all employed women according to the 1870 census), there were expanding opportunities for factory workers, seamstresses, and milliners, and, at a higher social level, for teachers, office workers, writers, and decorative artists.