Spinster (15 page)

I'd been content all this time to keep Maeve Brennan a fantasy. Her mysteriousness and omniscient point of view discouraged prying, and it seemed only right to respect her wishes. With Neith it was different. Her direct address to the reader made her feel more approachable, almost as if she were asking me to find her.

After a bit of digging I located Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, a professor at Brown University, who'd been researching Neith's biography for fifteen years.

She told me that Neith had been born, the second of five children, in Indiana in 1872 to a schoolteacher with literary ambitions and a Civil War hero turned book agent. That they decided to name their daughter after an ancient Egyptian deity who never married—well, it's hard not to get mystical about that.

In scholarly terms, the goddess Neith was an example of a “female parthenogenetic cosmogenesis”—a virgin mother who created herself out of her own being and gave birth to the universe, considered by theologians to be one of a handful of deities that gave rise to Christianity's Virgin Mary. Like her Greek counterpart
Athena, she embodied both male and female powers, presiding over war, hunting, and weaving, and was always depicted alone. Her patron temple in the lost city Sais housed a midwifery school with female doctors and students, and she was said to reweave the world on her loom every day. Her symbol was a shield and two arrows, which in some eras was seen as a spindle (yet another commonality with the spinster), and she was usually depicted wearing a red crown; coincidentally, or not, Neith herself had her father's red-gold hair (“Titian blonde,” as it was commonly referred to then and for some reason isn't anymore).

The family lived in a modest frame house that grew more boisterous with each baby—another three were born in fast succession—until 1880, the peak of the national diphtheria epidemic, when all four of her siblings died in one week.

Neith was eight years old, old enough to understand what was happening without understanding it at all. After a dark, difficult year, her parents packed up their house, shut the door on the past, and set out for California, which made good on its fabled promises. Henry helped launch
The Los Angeles Times
and
The Los Angeles Tribune
, and Mary founded an arts club that eventually became today's Rose Parade.

In 1891 the family moved again, this time to Boston, where they seem to have slipped easily into the East Coast media establishment; Mary was an editor at the progressive journal
ARENA
, and Henry worked as a publisher. Neith, however, loathed their new city upon arrival:

In the dim gray atmosphere shapes of people all dressed in black wandered vaguely about. Life was diminished, all faces were sad or worried or just blank, the air was foggy and sooty, the buildings gray and grimy, the streets narrow and crowded with dingy forms.

More than a century after she lived there, that city had felt much the same to me.

Writing was Neith's greatest release and satisfaction, and though, like most women of her generation, she didn't go to college, she was fortunate enough to have politically progressive parents who strove to encourage her predilection. In Los Angeles she'd published little pieces in her father's newspapers. Now she wrote reviews and articles for
ARENA
, and when she was twenty a firm in which her father held a stake published her first book, a volume of nature poetry.

To Neith's enormous relief, when she was twenty-four the family relocated to Manhattan and quickly went their separate ways: following a brief stint together in one of the newly built apartment buildings in the East Twenties, the elder Boyces moved north to the suburb of Mount Vernon, and as soon as she found a job, Neith got her own place, downtown.

“Just the sight of the city, not yet prickling with skyscrapers nor buzzing with motors, was exhilarating,” she remembered years later. New York City “was not closed in upon itself, it seemed in connection with the world, it seemed alive.”

Work—by which I mean paid employment outside the home, in factories and offices and schools, rather than the ancient unpaid labors of child-care and housekeeping—is central to the evolution of all women in America, and fundamental to that of the single woman.

The first reason is practical and obvious: for centuries, the majority of women were barred from making money and simply couldn't afford to live comfortably (rather than on the margins, as prostitutes, beggars, or vagrants) on their own. Unless a woman
was born into means, marriage was a financial and social necessity, her only chance to leave her family of origin and (hopefully) secure the economic standing of herself and her future children. As the historian Gerda Lerner observed, even the choice to remain single was a matter of electing one form of dependency over another: nuns relied on their male superiors; unmarried daughters on their male family members; prostitutes on the “protection” of male authorities. Propertied widows could lead relatively independent lives—but even that grim good fortune required marrying first. Well-paid work, then, and the ability to be self-supporting, gave a woman the option to push off marriage until she was older, or avoid it altogether.

The second reason is more intriguing: single women are perceived more positively when the economy needs them—meaning that macro-level financial forces have contributed mightily to their public reputation. It happens to have been a Newburyport native, businessman Francis Cabot Lowell, who (unwittingly) triggered the country's first significant wave of respected single women.

In the early 1800s, as water-powered machinery began to surpass traditional horsepower, Lowell thought to harness the fast-moving Merrimack River farther downstream, thirty-five miles southwest of Newburyport. In 1813, he established the Boston Manufacturing Company; in 1826, the company was incorporated with several others into America's first planned factory town, named in his honor, today known as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.

The early factories of Lowell, Massachusetts, were staffed primarily by young women between the ages of fifteen and thirty who came by the thousands from the farms of New England to work the massive looms that turned raw cotton into cloth—neo-spinsters, if you will. They lived in cramped boardinghouses, their wages were only half those of the men, and the working conditions—their days started at five o'clock in the morning and
lasted fourteen hours, for an average of seventy-three hours a week—were brutal. In an autobiographical account published in 1883, a woman who started her factory career at age ten wrote that “a great many of the better class of millgirls” were there to “secure the means of education for some
male
member of the family. To make a
gentleman
of a brother or a son.” But for others, the chance for economic independence, not to mention a life away from their families, was a formidable lure. By 1840 there were eight thousand of them, 80 percent of the entire mill workforce.

Living and working together created a powerful sense of community. They proudly called themselves the “factory girls” and published the first American magazine managed and edited solely by women,
The Lowell Offering
. In his travel memoir
American Notes
, about his famous 1842 visit to America, Charles Dickens raved about the journal, describing it as “four hundred good solid pages, which I have read from beginning to end.” (Indeed, a pair of Boston-based scholars argue he drew on several of its anonymously published stories to pen
A Christmas Carol
, which came out the following year—yet another instance of the single woman's invisible contributions.)

The “mill girls” (as they were also known) were politicized, as well. In 1834, eight hundred of them went on strike to protest wage cuts; in 1845, more than 1,500 banded together to protest deteriorating factory conditions, forming the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, the first major union of working women in the United States.

By the late 1800s mill conditions had drastically worsened, but the Industrial Revolution that had given the factory girls their independence set into motion an ever-rising tide of products and publications that in turn created yet another wave of female wage earners: the thousands of young women who left their small towns and farms for New York City, drawn like iron filaments to a magnet, settling into crevices, finding jobs in factories and offices, living
in communal boardinghouses and even their own apartments. This was the wave Neith rode.

In 1893, a Mrs. M. L. Rayne published an incredibly helpful guide called
What Can a Woman Do
, a survey of every possible employment option available to women. According to Rayne, in the 1840s there were only seven industries open to women in Massachusetts (including teaching, keeping boarders, and working in the cotton mills); by 1893 there were roughly 300,000 women in that state alone earning their own living in nearly three hundred occupations, from journalism, law, and medicine to engraving, cigar making, beekeeping, and retouching photographs.

Key to women's ascent was the typewriter. Invented in 1867 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the original model was decorated with floral decals and mounted on a treadle table, like a sewing machine; promoters proclaimed it perfect for a woman's “nimble fingers.” In 1870, only 4 percent of stenographers and typists were women; within a decade their ranks had quadrupled; and by 1900, they were at almost 80 percent.

More crucially, as they had been in Lowell, women were a source of cheap labor. Due to institutionalized sexism, the unavoidable fact that this first round of female hires had little to no prior work experience, and “functional periodicity”—the widely held belief that menstruation was so debilitating that it prevented women from working full-time, therefore rendering them undeserving of full wages—employers found it very easy to justify paying women less than men. (In the late 1890s, in an ingenious effort to obtain equal pay for equal work, one of the new woman physicians, Stanford University's Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, invented a series of abdominal breathing exercises to counteract menstrual pain, called “moshers.”)

In her 1893 guide, Mrs. M. L. Rayne was forthright about this inequity—“Women, as a rule, received from twenty to thirty per centum less than men for the same or equivalent services,” she
wrote—but, hewing to a popular conservative line at the time, she urged her readers not to worry overmuch, arguing that a large percentage of men provided for a family of eight or ten, compared to “single women clerks who are working for themselves only.” Besides, she reasoned, “the adjustment of false averages in wages, even in these cases, may be a wrong one, but it is one which time and justice will remedy.” Unfortunately, her optimism was misplaced; after World War II this same argument was revived to keep women out of the workforce, and the wage gap still hasn't closed.

As the first women to feminize the workplace, these low-level clerical workers paved the way for higher-ranking female reporters and editors, who now seemed just a little less threatening. In 1885, when a young woman named Elizabeth Cochrane, incensed by a misogynist column in
The Pittsburgh Dispatch
, submitted an angry screed under the name “Lonely Orphan Girl,” the paper published an ad asking the author to come forward, and they offered her a job. Before the decade was out Nellie Bly (she'd assumed a pen name) had moved to New York City and become one of the most famous newspaper reporters in the country. Her imitators were legion. In 1898, the year Neith published her
Vogue
column, an estimated four thousand women in New York City alone were working in journalism. (To this legion, Mrs. M. L. Rayne offered fair warning: “I urge women to be sure of their ability before they enter the flinty paths of journalism, where it is a sin to be ignorant, and where you are expected to be wise, witty, sensible, poetical, and versatile for very moderate pay,” she wrote in a section of her book called The Lady Journalist.)