All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (9 page)

For middle-class reformers in the years after the war, writes the historian Rachel Seidman, new ideas about how “women
should not
be dependent on men,” began to take hold, while for working-class women, there was a new consciousness about how—with husbands, fathers and brothers at war or out west—they “
could not
” be dependent on men. These women went to work in ever greater numbers, and that wage-earning in turn awakened in them an awareness of gendered and class injustices.

A former teacher, Virginia Penny, wrote an 1869 book,
Think and Act
, about the challenges of income inequality facing working women who were increasingly living independent of men. She pushed for equal-pay protections from the government, and even suggested taxing better-compensated single men to help support unmarried women. Around the same time, Aurora Phelps of the Boston Working Women's League petitioned for “Garden Homesteads,” government-subsidized tracts of land near Boston to be given to unmarried women willing to work them; an imagined East Coast equivalent to the land being given away in the west as part of the Homestead Act.
³²
These proposals certainly weren't going anywhere. But single women were beginning to enter policy debates about how to make room for them in the world.

Some women went west themselves. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller reports that prior to 1900, around 10 percent of land claims in two Colorado counties were filed by unmarried women, some of whom—like South Dakota homesteader “Bachelor Bess” Corey—were more interested in the land-grab than the man-grab. When Oklahoma's Cherokee Strip was opened to homesteaders in 1893, Laura Crews raced her horse seventeen miles in under an hour to claim the piece of land that she would tend herself for years before oil was discovered on the property.
³³
Crews would be the last participant of the Cherokee land run to die, in 1976, at age 105, unmarried.
³⁴

This small but nearly unprecedented opportunity for independent women to buy property and keep it wasn't simply a real estate issue; land ownership had been long linked to political enfranchisement. America's first voters were not just white men, but white men who owned property; in England in 1869, unmarried women with property had been granted the right to vote in local elections. And the first women to petition for the franchise were women who had managed to acquire property: unmarried Margaret Brent was Maryland's first female landowner and, in the 1640s, requested two votes in local civil proceedings.

Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the Western territories in which women staked out land were places in which woman suffrage would precede passage of the nineteenth amendment. Women could vote in Wyoming, Utah, Washington, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, California, Arizona, Kansas, Oregon, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, and Alaska before 1920, while women in the more urban, established Eastern states (save for New York) had to wait for the Constitution to change.

The social crusades of the nineteenth century were made possible by the changing nature of female engagement with the world and new ideas about identity and dependence. The rate of American spinsterhood hit its first peak at 11 percent for American women born between 1865 and 1875.
³⁵

By the end of the nineteenth century, the country was awash in fears of insurrection by increasingly independent populations of women and newly freed slaves.

In addition to participating in social movements, women had been pushing themselves further educationally than ever before. The demand for teachers meant that teaching academies, known as “normal schools,” proliferated. Private colleges for wealthier women had begun to open,
starting with Mt. Holyoke in 1837, Vassar in 1861, Wellesley in 1870, and Smith in 1871. Bryn Mawr was founded in 1885, and, in ten years, was under the stewardship of its second president, M. Carey Thomas, a suffragist who would explain to her mother in a letter that since “marriage means loss of freedom, poverty, and a personal subjection for which I see absolutely no compensation . . . Thee must make up thy mind, sweetest mother, to have one old maid daughter.”

The Morrill Act, in 1862, had established land-grant colleges, including agricultural and mechanical schools in the West and Midwest, where curricular flexibility permitted more women to be admitted alongside men.
³⁶
In 1884, the Industrial Institute and College in Mississippi (originally the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls) became the first state-funded university for women's higher education.
³⁷
Spelman, the historically black women's college founded by two unmarried women, opened its doors in 1881.

But the insurgent liberty of people whose enforced subservience had until recently undergirded the country's power structure provoked a new, more damning wave of anti-spinster argument that ever more directly linked social disruption to unmarried women. These “mannish maidens”
³⁸
had not just missed out on, but were, in fact,
unfit
for, family life. Responding to Susan B. Anthony's temperance work in 1853, the
New York Sun
published a screed noting that, “The quiet duties of daughter, wife or mother are not congenial to those hermaphrodite spirits who thirst to win the title of champion of one sex and victor over the other.”

The imagined connection between social agitation and an unmarried state was so firm that even married activists got tarred as single, frigid, or unmarriageable. An 1838 edition of the
Mother's Magazine
asserted of women like the Grimké sisters (one of whom, Angelina, wed that same year and would go on to have three children; the other, Sarah, had already turned down at least one marriage proposal), “These Amazonians are their own executioners. They have unsexed themselves in public estimation, and there is no fear that they will perpetuate their race.”
³⁹

Perhaps in response to women's move away from marriage, law and custom began to make slightly more room for female independence within the institution, though it was a battle. Women had been petitioning for Married Women's Property Acts and privy examination acts,
which allowed a judge to speak privately with a wife outside the presence of her husband, and by 1839, courts had begun to grant them, kicking off the gradual overturn of
coverture
that would take more than a century. In the late 1860s, Myra Bradwell petitioned for a law license and argued that the 14th Amendment protected her right to practice. The Illinois Supreme Court rejected her petition, ruling that because she was married she had no legal right to operate on her own. When she challenged the ruling, Justice Joseph Bradley wrote in his decision, “It certainly cannot be affirmed, as a historical fact, that [the right to choose one's profession] has ever been established as one of the fundamental privileges and immunities of the sex.” Rather, Bradley argued, “The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.”
⁴⁰

Meanwhile, the legal system was cracking down on anything that would help women evade or exert control over those “benign offices.” The Comstock Act of 1873, along with a series of state laws implemented soon after, made it illegal to distribute any materials deemed “obscene,” including birth control and educational material about contraception. States were outlawing abortion, which until then had been legal under some circumstances; by 1880, the procedure was mostly prohibited, except to save the life of the woman.

In the same period, scientists around the world were working to justify the continued subjugation of women and nonwhites by making medical claims as to their inferior capabilities.

German scientist Carl Vogt wrote, in 1864, “The grown-up Negro partakes, as regards his intellectual faculties, of the nature of the child, the female, and the senile white.” Gustave Le Bon, a prominent social psychologist, wrote in 1879 that “In the most intelligent races . . . there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion.” Le Bon conceded that “Without a doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely.”
⁴¹

There was no doubt about a fear of rebellion that lay just beneath
these diagnoses. As Le Bon wrote, “A desire to give [women] the same education . . . is a dangerous chimera . . . The day when, misunderstanding the inferior occupations which nature has given her, women leave the home and take part in our battles; on this day a social revolution will begin, and everything that maintains the sacred ties of the family will disappear.”
⁴²

The American medical establishment built on European pronouncements to rationalize their recommendations to keep women's lives small, confined, and attached to men. In his 1873
Sex in Education; or A Fair Chance for the Girls
, Harvard professor Edward Clarke argued that the female brain, if engaged in the same course of study as the male, would become overburdened and that wombs and ovaries would atrophy.
⁴³
Chambers-Schiller reports that in the medical establishment, “a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen.”

Yet for all of this, women kept on not marrying and they kept on bucking for change.

The Progressive Era, from about 1890 to 1920, which coincided with the years in which American women were less likely to marry than ever before, was a moment of enormous political and social foment. These decades included defining fights for fair labor practices and reform of the tax code and public education, and a campaign against lynching, which in the south had become a deadly method of addressing the growing power of African-Americans.
⁴⁴

Immigrants from Europe were flooding East Coast cities, some moving toward the Midwest, while the Japanese population was growing on the West Coast. Chinese immigration had been halted, but Chinese communities already in the country continued to expand. The American puzzle became more intricate; fights for unionization were linked to the suffrage campaign, which, in turn, influenced the push for prohibition and the struggle to implement new social welfare measures. All
these battles were tied to a stream of technological innovations that made new professions possible, and employed new populations of Americans, in turn pulling them into the labor, suffrage, education, and civil rights struggles of the day.

Young women, many forced by financial crises in 1873 and 1893 to seek employment, arrived in cities looking for professional opportunities that were rapidly becoming more diverse. The retail market for factory-made goods, alongside inventions such as the typewriter and telephone, created jobs for women as shop girls, typists, telephone operators, and secretaries. In 1870, professional women accounted for less than seven percent of the nonagricultural female workforce; that percentage would more than double by 1920.
⁴⁵

Many women, especially poor immigrant women who labored in factories, worked long hours, seven days a week, in terrifying, unregulated firetraps. The deplorable conditions experienced by millions of female workers were at the roots of the labor struggle, which would be spurred forward in large part by unconventionally wed, or unwed, women.

“The first industrial strikes in the United States [were] led and peopled by women,” writes historian Nancy Cott, reporting on the account from a Boston newspaper of one of the first “turn-out” strikes in Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1830s, in which, “One of the leaders mounted a pump and made a flaming Mary Woolstonecraft [
sic
] speech on the rights of women.”
⁴⁶

Most of the women who were working in factories were young and unmarried. According to historian Kathy Peiss, four-fifths of the 343,000 women working for wages in New York City in 1900 were unmarried.
⁴⁷
“The Uprising of 20,000” was a 1909 walkout of female factory workers who made blouses called “shirtwaists.” The Uprising was organized by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and kicked off by twenty-three-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Clara Lemlich, then unmarried, who told a crowd of shirtwaist workers: “I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions.” That campaign lasted twelve weeks and resulted in union agreements with nearly all shirtwaist manufacturers save a few, including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where two years later, 146 workers, all but seventeen of them women,
and most younger than thirty and unmarried, would perish in a fire, unable to escape the building, which was locked to keep workers inside and prevent them from stealing.

Another participant in the Uprising was Russian-Polish immigrant and labor organizer and suffragist Rose Schneiderman, who would never marry. Her 1911 speech, in which she implored, “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too” became the mantra of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike of female textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and an anthemic phrase in the labor and women's movements that were to come. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a radical socialist who married at seventeen, but separated from her husband two years later, organized mining and textile strikes around the country and was arrested multiple times. She was dubbed by the writer Theodore Dreiser “an East Side Joan of Arc,” memorialized in a popular song called “The Rebel Girl;” she was a founding member of the ACLU.