A History of the Wife (30 page)

Starting in 1839, when Mississippi became the first state to grant wives property rights, the legal status of married women gradually improved, state by state. Between 1869 and 1887, thirty-three states and the District of Columbia gave wives control over their income. A few states—Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California— adopted laws of community property whereby family assets were owned equally by husband and wife. Moreover, in some states, like New York in 1860, women were made joint guardians with their hus- bands of their children; and, more dramatically, in the event of divorce, some states—Iowa as early as 1838—went so far as to grant sole cus- tody of a child to its mother.

Late-nineteenth-century treatises on the law took into account the changes that had taken place during the preceding two generations. As Hendrik Hartog has shown in his masterful book,
Man & Wife in Amer- ica
, law school casebooks from the 1890s incorporated the new statutes on domestic relations without abandoning older notions of wifely and husbandly responsibilities. A married woman still owed her husband traditional duties, such as housekeeping and sex. A married man still owed his spouse protection and support. Whatever new rights a wife had acquired in terms of her capacity to keep her property, earnings, and children, her identity as a wife still took precedence over any notion of autonomy. The common law idea of coverture, whereby a

wife was “covered by” her husband and owed him deference, cast a long shadow over interpretations of the law, even as more recent statutes in the majority of states produced progress in favor of the wife.
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WIFEHOOD IN AMERICA

While Americans shared with their English counterparts a common law heritage, numerous differences in the social makeup of the two countries produced notable differences in the conduct of English and American wives. Foreign travelers in the New World, such as Mrs. Trol- lope around 1830, were surprised at the “freedom of manners” that girls exhibited, which quickly changed into the “burdens of a teeming wife.”
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The English writer, world traveler, and abolitionist, J. S. Buck- ingham, in his lengthy visit of the South took note of the “the greater liberty” enjoyed by girls at day schools as compared with girls of the same age in England. Although he looked askance at the “great precos- ity of manners in both sexes” and the frequency of very early marriages, sometimes as early as thirteen for girls and fourteen for boys, Bucking- ham was forced to concede that “on the whole, married life appears to be quite as happy as in England.”
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Whereas both English and continental girls of the better sort were subject to strict rules of deportment and dress, American girls tended to be freer from external controls and subject primarily to the psychologi- cal pressures produced by their families and religion. But once they were married, most American women put ideas of freedom behind them. Without the plentiful domestic help found in England, wives were obliged to commit themselves to a never-ending chain of housekeeping chores. The vast majority of American wives did most things with their own hands, with the occasional help of hired workers to do the laundry and seasonal housecleaning. Except in the Southern states, where approximately one quarter of families had slaves, only 15 percent of the overall population could afford the services of live-in domestic help.

Less affluent Americans counted on the resources of all family mem- bers for economic survival. In most farm families, wives hoed and weeded, husbands plowed and reaped, and children as young as six or seven carried wood and water. In the Tennessee back country, Bucking- ham noted with compassion “the toils and privations which a settler

and his family have to undergo in clearing land, and surrounding them- selves with even the barest necessaries. Every member of the family must work hard, from daylight to dark, the women as well as the men, and the children as well as the grown people.... In general they were very dirty in their persons, the mother being too weary to wash them.”
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In the cities, households with scant means were grateful for the extra income of an unmarried son or daughter. Immigrant families, in partic- ular, depended not only on the work of husbands and sons, but on the additional labor of wives who took in laundry and boarders, and daughters who went into domestic service. These working families dif- fered from British families to the extent that they were not irrevocably locked into a system of class; the “working class” of one generation was often the middle class and sometimes even the upper class of the next. The economic and social fluidity of American society is one significant factor that must be taken into account when we look at the experiences of American wives.

Another is the great diversity of national and ethnic backgrounds. If Anglo-Americans continued to be statistically dominant, successive waves of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and Asia would, between the early nineteenth century and World War I, bring millions of new peoples to the United States, each group with its own language and cultural heritage. The wives of these immigrants were often torn between two sets of behaviors, since old- country conjugal models did not necessarily serve them well in their adopted homeland. The Irish mother who had been socialized to accept her husband’s alcoholic abuse, the orthodox Jewish wife who wore a wig in the Eastern European shtetl, the Japanese picture bride admonished to keep her eyes down in the presence of men—all con- fronted a society that subtlely encouraged them to question past pre- scriptions.

Special consideration must be given to black women. Before emanci- pation, slaves could not legally marry. As property of their masters, they were allowed, indeed encouraged to breed so as to produce more slaves, but even a religious ceremony did not guarantee that a couple could stay together. It was common for slave owners to sell members of a family—fathers, mothers, children—to the highest bidder. Families could be torn apart at one stroke of the gavel. Only freed blacks both in

the North and South were allowed to marry legally. After the Civil War, black men and women were their own property and could become man and wife according to the laws of each state. For a short period, between 1865 and 1880, there were even scores of marriages between whites and blacks in former Confederate states.

But many legacies from the past did not disappear overnight. In the South, schools, public conveyances, hotels, restaurants, and various forms of entertainment continued to perpetuate a system of segregation and white supremacy. Laws against miscegenation, enacted or reen- acted in forty-one states, made it a crime for blacks and whites to marry. In fact, South Carolina did not remove the official ban against interracial marriage from its statutes until 1999, and Alabama put off till the year 2000 its referendum to eliminate a similar provision.

It is impossible to speak of American wives without recognizing their enormous geographical diversity. If the first two centuries of North American history were confined primarily to the East, the last two hun- dred years expanded overland to the Pacific Coast and beyond. Wives in Illinois, Utah, California, and Hawaii have had very different experi- ences from their sisters in the North and South, under laws that varied from state to state. For example, women in Wyoming were allowed to vote as early as 1869, and three more western states legalized women’s suffrage by 1896. One Wyoming wife, anxious to dispel the myth that suffrage had made the women of her state unfeminine, assured the readers of the
Woman’s Journal
that Wyoming husbands still returned from their daily work “to a bright fireside and well-ordered dinner, presided over by a home-loving, neatly gowned, womanly wife.”
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Else- where in America, as in England, women were not granted suffrage until after World War I. The issue of geographical diversity will be prominent in the pages that follow, alongside those of ethnic diversity and social class.

Last, it is important to recognize that the legal and sociocultural sta- tus of wives during the Victorian era was subject to change from an incipient women’s movement. The women who met at Seneca Falls in 1848 were mostly married women, and their concerns to improve the condition of their sisters would gradually alter the picture of American wifehood. The group led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony saw the existing institution of marriage as a form of bondage for women similar to the institution of slavery—an analogy that had

first been highlighted by the British writer Mary Wollstonecraft in her 1792
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
. By the 1850s the marriage- equals-slavery rhetoric was commonplace among reformers speaking out against the unfair distribution of power in marriage. In 1855, the early feminist Lucy Stone went so far as to enlist the clergyman officiat- ing at her wedding to state in public that he never performed a mar- riage ceremony “without a renewed sense of the inequity of our present system of laws in respect to marriage.”
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Alongside the Victorian picture of women as “angels,” a new vision of American womanhood was in the making. This vision pictured angels with bodies and brains. The lessons of Jane Austen’s and Charlotte Brontë’s headstrong heroines had crossed the Atlantic and fed into a progressive American stream of thought. Sarah Grimké, who had grown up in the South but moved to the North in order to pursue antislavery activities, critiqued the exclusively domestic orientation of women in her
Letters on the Equability of the Sexes
(1837). She believed that females brought up to think of themselves as “inferior creatures” naturally suf- fered from a lack of “self-respect,” which could, however, be corrected through education; and she argued that such an education would also benefit husbands, since they would ultimately have more interesting companions.
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In this same vein, the American minister George Bur- nap’s lectures, published in 1848, spoke of “the beauties of a well stored mind” and the attractiveness of educated women. He assured them that “a sensible and brilliant conversation will attract the notice of the well- educated of the other sex more than a coronet of jewels.”
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During the nineteenth century, the importance of education became something of a national obsession. State-funded coeducational primary schools spread rapidly from the East during the 1830s and 1840s, spe- cial academies and seminaries for women were established by midcen- tury, and women’s colleges sprang up in the antebellum and postbellum years. By 1890, twice as many girls as boys graduated from high school, and numerous colleges—both state coeducational and private women’s schools—were available for young women whose families could afford them.
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Education for women was nonetheless seen mainly as a pathway to marriage, and valued primarily for the making of good wives and mothers. The Reverend Burnap spoke for the received wisdom of his age when he wrote of the two sexes “that they should move in different

spheres.... To woman the care of home, the preparation of food, the making of clothing, the nursing and education of children.”
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Other midcentury spokesmen for women, for example Catherine Beecher in her
Treatise on Domestic Economy
(1841) and Sarah Josepha Hale, the influential editor of
Godey’s Lady’s Book
from the 1830s to the 1870s, all agreed that domestic education was to take precedence over any other form of learning, given the ultimate female vocation as helpmeet and homemaker. Few condoned education as a means whereby women could gain financial and social independence. Especially in the antebel- lum South, the idea that education might make a woman step out of her “sphere” was greatly to be feared. Even my own alma mater in Mas- sachusetts—Wellesley College, chartered in 1870—had as its logo “Non ministrari, sed ministrare” (Not to be ministered unto, but to minister), which we in the 1950s lampooned as “Not to be a minister, but a minister’s wife.”

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON: WIFE, MOTHER, ACTIVIST

Most of us know the name of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but how many know that this radical founder of the women’s rights movement was married for almost fifty years and had seven children? How did this wife manage to fulfill her obligations to her family and become, with her spinster friend Susan B. Anthony, the most famous nineteenth- century activist for women’s emancipation? Like Margery Kempe in the fourteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not allow her brood of children to hold back her calling, and like Kempe, she dramatized her mission in a remarkable autobiography composed at the end of her life. Though neither Margery nor Elizabeth were “representative” wives, both of their stories shed light not only on their own marriages, but also on the conventions of wifehood in their time and place.

Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897
begins with Eliza- beth Cady’s childhood as the daughter of a distinguished lawyer in the state of New York.
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Characteristic of Victorian autobiography, Eliza- beth speaks sparingly of her mother, except to say that she was “weary with the cares of a large family, having had ten children,” of whom only five survived into adulthood. Growing up with four sisters and one much preferred male sibling, who had the misfortune of dying at an

early age, Elizabeth set out to rival and then to replace her brother.

She spent much time in her father’s office listening to the clients, talking to the students, and reading the laws regarding women. In her Scotch-American neighborhood, “many men still retained the old feu- dal ideas of women and property. Fathers, at their death, would will the bulk of their property to the eldest son, with the proviso that the mother was to have a home with him. Hence it was not unusual for the mother, who had brought all the property into the family, to be made an unhappy dependent on the bounty of an uncongenial daugh- ter-in law and a dissipated son.”

Much moved by the “tears and complaints” of the women who came to her father for legal advice, Elizabeth was perplexed by the “injustice and cruelty of the laws” shown her in his books. One of the law stu- dents teased her by saying, “Now... if in due time you should be my wife, those ornaments [her jewelry] would be mine; I could take them and lock them up, and you could never wear them except with my per- mission. I could even exchange them for a box of cigars, and you could watch them evaporate in smoke.”