A History of the Wife (44 page)

tive ideas.

Editorials in the
Journal
made valiant efforts to stem the tide of pro- gressive change for women. They decried the “mistaken rush of girls into the world of business and trade” and lauded efforts to “regard housekeeping as a science” and “lift the whole idea of domestic serv- ice to a higher plane” (February 1896). They praised the tendency for people to move to the suburbs, especially “young married couples who are moving into the country and building simple and pretty homes at the very start of their wedded life.... The more our girls breathe in the pure air which God intended for all, but which man in the cities pollutes, the better women we shall have: the fewer worried mothers we shall see” (December 1898). Suburban life, we know today, did not turn out to be the salvation of American wives and mothers.

Yet there is something so close to our present anxieties in these late nineteenth-century editorials that we cannot dismiss them outright as the monolithic musings of retrograde spirits. Take, for example, a Janu- ary 1899 article titled “The Rush of American Women,” which begins by asserting that a “sense of rush has taken hold of the American woman,” which had proven detrimental to family life. “Outside inter- ests have crowded out home affairs in the case of too many of our wives and mothers.... The whole business of women’s clubs and women’s organizations of every sort is being overdone.” The writer reminds her married readers that governing a home allows for very little leisure time, and ends with a patronizing injunction:

It is high time that our women should lead calmer lives, and get away from the notion that what we call “progress” in these days demands that they shall fill their thoughts and lives with matters at the cost of their health or peace of mind. Our homes must have more of a restful calm, and our wives must not be lured into nervous haste and forgetfulness by wrong ambitions or foolish ideas of what the world expects of them.

Substitute the idea of paid employment and one hears the same cri- tique of wives and mothers coming from conservative pundits a hun- dred years later. Yes, we agree, it is high time that our women should lead calmer lives. Unfortunately, most wives today cannot choose to

make housekeeping an exclusive profession, even if they wanted to, and there are few alternatives to working forty hours per week outside the home and at least twenty more at home. Most husbands do not yet share housekeeping tasks equally with their wives, most families can- not afford substantial domestic help, and few community services are available to make the working couple’s life less stressful. A hundred years ago, if we are to believe this editorial and similar documents, many middle-class women who were able to leave housekeeping tasks in the hands of their servants preferred the hustle and bustle of outside activity to the monotony of cleaning and cooking, regardless of the effect on their families and their own peace of mind.

While the conservative critics of the 1880s and 1890s directed their attacks against the restlessness of the New Woman and her abandonment of domesticity, radical and progressive thinkers defended her right to rebel against fixed sex roles and to strike out in the direction of greater independence. They emphasized the need for women to be able to sup- port themselves through paid employment, which was seen less as a threat to marriage itself than an end to female degradation encountered in the “marriage market.”
14
In his immensely popular
Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899), economist Thorstein Veblen offered a devastating portrait of the middle-class wife, whose lack of paid employment attested to her husband’s social status. Veblen’s term “conspicuous consumption” her- alded an era of consumerism during which married women were increas- ingly targeted as buyers of household goods and personal items intended largely to display the family’s wealth.

Among the intellectuals who conceptualized married women’s situa- tion within the context of capitalistic America, none was more insight- ful than Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Her reformist book,
Women and Economics
(1898), prefigured the work of Simone de Beauvoir a half century later in its insistence that female dependence upon male income was the primary reason for women’s secondary status. Gilman was aware that the economic change she envisioned for women was already taking place. Her goal was to analyze that change and encour- age it.

In Gilman’s Darwinian view of things, the exodus of women from the home was an inevitable part of nineteenth-century industrialism: with machines replacing the labor of women on the farms, they no longer

needed to be full-time housekeepers.
15
Outside work was seen as a lib- erating force for women, one that would enlarge their horizons and put them on an equal standing with men. Gilman was by no means an enemy of marriage, only of that form of marriage which restricted and weakened women’s lives. In traditional marriage, she wrote, “The woman is narrowed by the home and the man is narrowed by the woman.”
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Gilman recognized that the labor of women in their homes “has a genuine economic value,” in that it “enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could.” But this economic value was neither recognized by society nor equitably rewarded. “The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.”
17
Her solution was not to pay women for their domestic and maternal labor, either in the form of an allowance from their husbands or a government stipend for each child, as in some European nations, but to encourage women to achieve economic inde- pendence on their own.

Although Gilman focused on economics as the key to liberation, her vision encompassed the broader aims of Abba Goold Woolson a gener- ation earlier, who had proclaimed the right for women to live fully human, noncontingent lives in every respect. Work was honored as a fundamental means of self-fulfillment: “to do and to make not only gives deep pleasure, but is indispensable to healthy growth. Few girls to-day fail to manifest some signs of this desire for individual expres- sion.”
18
It was inevitable that modern women, with their celebration of individual differences, would reject an earlier, one-size-fits all, conjugal model.

Specialization was seen as a boon to family living. Not every wife need be cook, house cleaner, and nanny. Rather, with women entering the workforce in increasing numbers, many of their traditional house- keeping duties could be fulfilled by specialized workers. And here Gilman’s vision of societal change has yet to be realized, for she imag- ined apartment houses for professional women with families, a com- mon dining room, housecleaning done by efficient workers, “a roof garden, day nursery, and kindergarten, under well-trained professional nurses and teachers.”
19
Ah, yes, working mothers then and now would flock to such a dwelling.

Gilman was both an acute social critic and an optimistic visionary. As

she told an audience in 1903: “We shall have far happier marriages, happier homes, happier women and happier men when both sexes realize that they are human and that humanity has far wider duties and desires than those of the domestic relations.”
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How these ideas played out in her personal life reveals the gap that always exists between the ideal and its practical reality. Gilman was married twice, first to the artist Charles Walter Stetson when she was twenty-four in 1884. A year later, she gave birth to a daughter, Kather- ine, who occasioned in her mother both profound joy and deep despair. Hers was more than a “normal” postpartum depression, for it reduced her to weeping, fatigue, and near psychosis. A regimen of total bed rest devoid of any intellectual stimulation, undertaken at the advice of neurologist Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, only worsened her despair. As pre- sented in her autobiographical novella
The Yellow Wallpaper
(1892), she came to see her depression as a flight from marriage and motherhood, exacerbated by well-intentioned, but ultimately destructive, patriarchal figures.
21
Eventually she and her husband divorced, which did not pre- vent her from remarrying in 1900, this time to her lawyer cousin, George Houghton Gilman. This marriage seems to have been congen- ial, perhaps because it did not limit Gilman’s active life as a writer and lecturer.

By the time of her second marriage, she had already established her- self on the national scene. She was the renowned author of
Women and Economics,
to be followed in the decades to come by several other books, dozens of articles, and numerous public lectures. Between 1909 and 1916, she also published a monthly magazine,
The Forerunner,
for which she wrote most of the copy. Gilman’s role as wife and mother took a backseat to her role as public figure. She even gave her daugh- ter, Katherine, to Stetson and his second wife to raise, and did not take her back until she was grown. In later life, the New York household consisting of Charlotte and George Gilman, and her daughter, Kather- ine, seems to have been a happy one, perhaps because George—seven years Charlotte’s junior—seems to have deferred to his wife’s forceful personality.

One mark of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s strong will was the way she dealt with breast cancer at the end of her life. At a time when breast cancer was still a taboo subject, Gilman faced it with courage and equa-

nimity. From 1932, when the disease was discovered, until 1934, when her husband died unexpectedly, she continued to write and lecture. Then she moved to California to live with her daughter, and, in 1935, aware that her cancer had not been arrested by the best medical efforts of her day, she ended her life with a dose of chloroform, leaving behind a suicide note that read: “I have preferred chloroform to cancer.” The note appeared in her posthumously published autobiography
The Liv- ing of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(1935).

Violet Blair Janin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman represent extreme forms of the married New Woman. Both were—in very different ways—products of an age that allowed middle- and upper-class women new possibilities for self-determination. Janin imposed her will on an adoring husband, lived a separate life from him in a different city, con- trolled her own money, and got involved in a number of women’s clubs and organizations. Only toward the end of her life, when age and infir- mity weakened her husband, did she assume the conventional respon- sibilities of a caring wife.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was equally unsuited to traditional conju- gality. She divorced one husband, gave up the care of her daughter, struck out for herself as a wage-earning writer, and established an egal- itarian marriage with a younger man. In her life and work, she led the vanguard of change for married women. Like her British contemporary Cicely Hamilton, author of a widely read work titled
Marriage as a Trade
(1909), Gilman recognized that marriage would continue to be a com- pulsory career for most women, unless the doors of other occupations were open to them.

Before Gilman, no one had so clearly articulated the need for paid employment for married as well as single women. She noted that 3 million American women were already working by the turn of the cen- tury. In the agriculture sector, the Census of 1900 counted over 300,000 women as farmers, planters, or overseers, as well as 500,000 women (mostly black) who were farm laborers. By 1910, over a mil- lion wives worked as factory workers, clerks, saleswomen, teachers, bookkeepers and accountants, managers of business, and college pro- fessors, to name some of their major occupations.
22
Gilman was cer- tainly correct in her prediction that women, including married women, would swell the ranks of the labor force as never before,

though her prophecy was not to be fully realized until the last decades of the twentieth century.

But Gilman’s prophecy that women’s employment would result in “happier marriages, happier homes, happier women and happier men” is open to question. Like many visionaries, she did not foresee the problems that would be produced by the realization of her hopes.

E I G H T

Sex, Contraception, and Abortion in the United States, 1840–1940

W
e often speak of the dramatic changes that took place during the second half of the twentieth century as constituting a sexual revolution; yet like most revolutions, this one

evolved gradually for decades before speeding up and overtaking tradi- tional mores. The partisans of sexual freedom, the pill, and legal abor- tion in the 1960s and 1970s did not know it, but they were the distant inheritors of changing attitudes and practices that had begun more than a hundred years earlier. Let’s go back to that earlier era to see how it experienced its own upheavals in the realms of sexuality, contraception, and abortion, and how it laid the subterranean foundations for today’s sexual norms.

IDEOLOGY AND EXPERIENCE

Victorian women were commonly characterized as “angels in the house,” ethereal spirits lacking sensual and sexual needs, less lusty and “purer” than men. This view was furthered not only by nineteenth- century novels featuring innocent brides and virtuous wives, but also by the medical treatises promoting an ideology of female sexlessness. The esteemed British doctor William Acton (cited earlier) was con- vinced that “many of the best mothers, wives, and managers of house-

holds know little of... sexual indulgence. Love of home, of children, and of domestic duties are the only passions that they feel.” And Acton was by no means the only physician who characterized good women by their lack of sexual desire.
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In the 1870s and 1880s, as debate over the Woman Question became more vocal on both sides of the Atlantic, a new version of female sexuality began to refute the earlier one. Many thinkers of both genders allowed that women were not so different from men in the heat of desire. The American Elizabeth Evans, in
Abuse of Maternity
(1875), scoffed at the idea “that passion is much weaker in the female than in the male” and insisted that whatever difference there was resulted from “training” and “restraining circumstances.” Challenging the received wisdom of Victorian society, she attributed women’s chaste outward appearance to “the force of public opinion.”
2
Similarly, reversing his previously expressed opinion that many women were basically frigid, even as wives, Dr. George H. Napheys later insisted: “It is a false notion, and contrary to nature, that this passion in a woman is a derogation to her sex.” And accepting the mutual nature of desire between husband and wife, he concluded: “There should be no passion for one which is not shared by both.”
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