A History of the Wife (35 page)

Rebuffed in public and rebuked in private, Southern wives undoubtedly lived under conditions of patriarchal rule that would be unbearable today; yet it would be wrong to think that all or even most of these women were unhappily married. Scott’s
Southern Lady
contains numerous examples of happy marriages based on the statements women wrote in their diaries, letters, and reminiscences. Fanny Moore Webb Bumpas wrote in her diary on March 9, 1842: “How comfort- able! How great a happiness to have a companion, a partner of all joys

& woes in whom entire confidence can be placed.” Susan Cornwall Shewmake made the following entry on March 1, 1861: “Tomorrow will be thirteen years since my marriage. How swiftly time has flown and how full of happiness have these years been to me.” A Georgia planter’s wife expressed gratitude for her relatively long marriage: “God bless my precious husband and keep him at my side as long as I live.... We grow older but age only brings an increase of affection. We have joyed and sorrowed together for twenty-three years.”
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Of course, marital satisfaction varied, then as now, depending on the nature of the spousal relationship.

First-person accounts of long-term slave marriages, mainly in the form of oral history, are less sentimental, yet occasionally one finds an eloquent statement in the most simple language; for example, Minerva Wendy from Alabama speaking of her husband of fifty-nine years. “I’s a June bride 59 years ago when I git married. De old white Baptist preacher name Blacksheer put me and dat nigger over dere, Edgar Bendy, togedder and us been togedder ever since.”
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And long after slavery had ended, Caroline Wright from Texas was proud to assert: “Will and me has been married ’bout 75 years and is still married. It’s disrespectful how de young folks treats marriage nowadays.”
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Generally speaking, antebellum white wives in the South differed from Northern wives in their greater number of children, their depend- ence on slave labor, and such touted cultural features as “Southern hos- pitality.” Yet however different the cultures of the South and the North, they had much in common. Both were regulated by English common law, with wives professing obedience to their husbands. Both were

almost exclusively Christian and shared a belief in the higher destiny of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as compared to the new immigrants from Ireland and other Catholic countries. Southern women with means went North to fashionable spas like Saratoga Springs, became friends with their Northern counterparts, and sometimes married their sons and brothers. Until the Civil War, there was no lack of intercourse between Northern and Southern families.

Many Northern and Southern couples lived in long-established set- tlements—burgeoning cities, towns, and small rural communities that were at least connected to each other by passable roads and regular mail. But as Americans migrated westward, they encountered primitive settings that challenged their resources and brought out qualities in women that would not have been called for, or even considered appro- priate, in the East. There was no place for a frail and decorous wife on a farm in Indiana, not to mention the Oregon Trail. Physical strength, psychological endurance, courage, ingenuity, even some measure of independence were demanded from female pioneers.

S I X

Victorian Wives on the American Frontier

T
he story of the pioneers who set- tled the American Midwest and West is the rightful stuff of legend, so

mythologized by survivors that it’s often hard to untangle historical fact from stereotype and fiction. Our best records for the experience of mar- ried women are diaries, travel journals, letters, and memoirs—multifar- ious handwritten documents that have found their way into local archives, and which have only recently been systematically studied.
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Many aspects of their lives strangely recall the experiences of immi- grants to America two hundred years earlier. For one thing, there was a high ratio of men to women. Men from the eastern states, Canada, and Europe often preceded the women, and then found themselves longing for feminine companionship. They sent back for their wives and sweet- hearts or ostentatiously welcomed any single woman brave enough to venture forth on her own.

A young man who had left his native Switzerland at the age of sev- enteen to homestead in Minnesota wrote to his family a few years later to send him a wife as soon as possible. She would have to be quite strong to care for the cows, pigs, and chickens, and keep house in the log cabin he had built, while he would be occupied with “man’s work.” After a two-year correspondence with the woman chosen by his par- ents, he met his bride for the first time in Saint Paul on June 4, 1858, at the end of her five-thousand-mile journey to America, and they mar- ried the very next day.
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Thousands of women responded to the call of the lonely frontiers- men, though few were so bold as one eastern woman who placed this advertisement in a Waterloo, Iowa, newspaper in 1860:

A young lady residing in one of the small towns of Central New York, is desirous of opening a correspondence with some young man in the West, with a view to a matrimonial engagement. . . . She is about 24 years of age, possesses a good moral character, is not what would be called handsome, has a good disposition, enjoys good health, is tolera- bly well-educated, and thoroughly versed in the mysteries of house- keeping.
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Presumably her skills as a housekeeper would have made up for her deficiencies in looks.

Promotional pamphlets made a special appeal to women. One brochure noted, “Under the laws of Iowa no distinction is now made between husband and wife in the possession and enjoyment of prop- erty. One-third in value of all the real estate of the husband, in case of his death, goes to the wife as her property in fee-simple, if she survives him.”
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This 1870 declaration coincided with the Married Women’s Property Act in England and reflected the laws enacted state by state in America that gave husbands and wives equal ownership of family assets, so it would have appealed to women aware of the new legisla- tion. But the old notion that a widow was entitled to only a third of the family property had not yet disappeared.

Most women, whether they settled in prairie or plains states, were initially shocked by the inhospitable conditions they encountered. The negative reaction of one early female settler in Illinois probably echoed that of many others: “When we got to the new purchase, the land of milk and honey, we were disappointed and homesick, but we were there and had to make the best of it.”
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Makeshift housing in cov- ered wagons, tents, lean-tos, shacks, and sod huts; dust storms and torrential rains, cyclones and floods, mud and dirt, grasshoppers, snakes, skunks, coyotes, wolves, and bears; the feared presence of Indians and white ruffians; the absence of churches, schools, and any other vestige of civilization—these were some of the major com- plaints women voiced. Few greeted their new homes with joy. Carrie Lassell Detrick remembered her mother’s dismay at seeing their first

Kansas home: “When our covered wagon drew up beside the door of the one-roomed sod house that father had provided, he helped mother down and I remember how her face looked as she gazed about that barren farm, then threw her arms about his neck and gave way to the only fit of weeping I ever remember seeing her indulge in.”
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Why then had these women been willing to uproot themselves from familiar settings, from family and friends and the comforts of stable communities, to hazard the great unknown? The simplest answer in most cases is that
they
did not make the decision. The decision to leave was made by their husbands. Since the husband was legally entitled to decide where his family would live, it would have been difficult for a wife to refuse to follow him, especially when he argued on the grounds of economic opportunity.

Mary Jane Hayden recalled the excitement about the discovery of gold in California and her husband’s unilateral decision to go there with some other New England men. When she asked him what he proposed to do about her and their six-week-old baby, he answered, “Send you to your mother until I return.” After an initial period of silence, Mrs. Hay- den, “nearly heartbroken at the thought of the separation,” could no longer hold her tongue.

I said, “We were married to live together . . . and I am willing to go with you to any part of God’s Foot Stool where you think you can do the best, and under these circumstances you have the right to go where I cannot, and if you do, you never need return for I shall look upon you as dead.” He answered, “Well, if that is the way you feel about it I will not go.” Mind you—no word of this was said in anger, for we had never differed in our two years of married life, and so it was settled that we should go the next year to the California gold mines.
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Mrs. W. B. Caton similarly accepted her husband’s unilateral deci- sion to move to Kansas in 1879: “To me it spelled destruction, despera- does, and cyclones. I could not agree with my husband that any good could come out of such a country, but the characteristic disposition of the male prevailed.”
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A poem titled “Overland 1852” gives expression to a commonly rec- ognized difference in attitudes between husbands and wives:

He had a notion to go west, he was the restless sort

And Lord knows, land was scarce, and our money always short

Still I cried the day he told me, and I begged for us to stay

He only said we’re goin’— it’s best we don’t delay.
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Once the journey was over and some form of rudimentary shelter had been established, husbands and wives set about struggling for exis- tence on their new terrain. With no one to count on but themselves, a couple could not narrowly discriminate between “male” and “female” spheres. Wives were often obliged to participate in the traditionally male jobs of planting, harvesting, tending livestock, even hunting, and this shared work may have added to more egalitarian partnerships in a number of marriages. But for the most part, wives devoted themselves to indoor tasks that were similar from one state to the next: preparing food, cooking, sewing, mending, washing, ironing, tidying up, and making the home as attractive as possible with a minimum of articles. Perhaps a prized rocking chair or even a wooden tea caddie was given pride of place. And almost always, there was a baby at the breast or one on the way.

Children were generally welcome as extra labor, and families tended to be large. One study of childbirth in Missouri during this period indi- cates that the average family had a child every two to three years, and another study estimates an average of ten children per frontier family, though more conservative estimates are only slightly larger than the national norm.
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The Swiss couple mentioned earlier—Theodore and Sophie Bost— were pleased to announce the birth of a baby girl in 1859, a year after their marriage. Writing to his parents in Switzerland, the proud new father sent a detailed description of his wife’s labor in Minnesota.

Dear Parents, thanks to God, Soso has her little girl Julie Adèle next to her, both in good health. She began to be sick Friday, the 19th at 3 o’clock in the morning and gave birth yesterday, the 20th, at 10 o’clock in the morning after very hard labor. She did not want the doctor to

come to deliver her, and, against my wishes, we called for the neighbor- hood mid-wife; but at 2:30 in the morning, I sent for the doctor, who . . . thought it would be best to let nature take its course and didn’t arrive till 10 o’clock. After his arrival, nature alone would not have been suf- ficient, and he had to make Soso suffer quite a bit until the arrival of Mademoiselle a half-hour later.
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Not all wives were so lucky. Beyond the Mississippi, midwives were relatively scarce, and physicians even more so. Birthing mothers could not always count on assistance beyond that of another married woman, a husband, or older daughter. Sometimes, when a husband was detained away from home and a doctor, midwife, or neighbor unavail- able, a woman had to give birth alone—surely a terrifying experience for any woman.

It was not just the physical dangers and hardships that oppressed frontier women, but also the psychological privations they endured. They wrote letters and diaries expressing their loneliness, isolation, homesickness, anxiety, despondency, grief, loss, and general misgiv- ings. Mollie Dorsey Sanford (whose story will be told at length later in this chapter) wrote in her diary on October 22, 1860, from Colorado: “I am ashamed to be so homesick. Of course I do not
say
all that I inscribe here... I try to be cheerful for By’s [her husband’s] sake, for fear he might think I wasn’t happy with him. He hasn’t the family ties that I have and cannot understand.”
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The inability to communicate one’s “morbid” feelings to a husband, even one as beloved and loving as Mol- lie’s, made the sense of female isolation even stronger.

Women missed the families they had left behind and bemoaned the lack of female companionship. Whenever possible, they established links with other women, often traveling long miles to participate in a quilting bee, attend a wedding, or lend a hand in childbirth. In her old age, an Oregon woman remembered the female network that early set- tlers depended upon: “When I was a girl, if a woman got sick she didn’t have to hire a trained nurse. Her neighbors came in, did the house- work, took her children to their homes to care for till she was well, brought her home-made bread and jellies and other things... .”
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In this respect, we are again reminded of women in colonial America.

But in another respect, nineteenth-century frontier women differed from their earlier forebears: they were not exclusively Anglo-

Americans. In addition to immigrants from Canada, Mexico, and other parts of the United States, women traveled to the Midwest and West from most European nations, and later, at the turn of the century, from China and Japan. On the prairies, Scandinavians were the most numer- ous of the foreigners, and seem to have had an easier adjustment than either Southern or English women, perhaps because most of the Nordic women themselves had come from modest farms. Other immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Germany also seemed to make rela- tively quick adjustments, but much depended on what one had been used to in the old country. A German wife of the burgher class might well have missed the refinements of her past life, whereas an Irish country girl who had found a husband in America when they were both in service probably rejoiced at the opportunity to homestead, however primitive the conditions.