Typhoid Mary (6 page)

The new woman  . . . is neither new nor a woman  . . . In America, woman commands man and man does not count there. She lives so that she can have a good time; she lives for sensations  . . . The American woman’s interest does not lie in the man; she wants to be alone, and she can’t be alone without dabbling, today in chemistry, to-morrow in physiology and the day after in Buddhism.

     They might even start
thinking
, Reich seems to be worrying, before shifting, creepily, into some really bizarre reverie:

But she is very beautiful. She has the best complexion in the world, better than any European woman. She is well built and handsome  . . . She doesn’t try to have dignity or refinement. She wants to affect men by what she says, not what she doesn’t say. She has no passion or sentiment, they are alien to her. She is a mass of nervous energy.

     Another incensed man of the cloth, the Reverend Dr. Madison Peters, from the Church of the Epiphany, seems, like Henry James, to have found time to wander over to the Satanic halls and anterooms of Hell at the Waldorf Astoria, where he observes:

. . .  nine women out of ten will order drinks of the same kind that their escorts order, and quite as many of them. I have watched these women and I have wondered if they realized what these same men thought of them deep down in their hearts  . . . This brings naturally to mind the thought of why there are in this city today thousands of men in their thirties and forties, men of means or excellent salaries and incomes, who are not married. And why are there so many instances of men marrying, as society puts it, ‘beneath them’?

   
The answer is because so many of the daughters of their own fashionable set are given to drink, cigarette smoking, gambling (for that is what bridge whist has resolved itself unto) and to kindred vices. It is because men of the world and of society realize that such women are not fit to become the mothers of their children – not fit to preside at their table and over their household  . . . finding the women of their own circle given over to these vicious habits, (they) go ‘beneath it’ and find honest young women, whose names are not in the social register, as their help-meets.

     This sounds like positive social change, right? Anything the revs are against is surely a good thing. Fine-looking women, smoking and drinking and gambling and doing whatever they like? Sounds good! A few years earlier, women were not even given credit for being bad. Prostitutes were referred to as ‘fallen’ women, victims of ‘white slavery’, as if any independent thought – particularly when it came to matters of the flesh – was beyond their ability. Now, ‘bad’ women were everywhere, tearing at the very fabric of society, their most important responsibility to the world – to ‘keep a good household’ passed along to even more menacing and incomprehensible creatures, the servant girls.

     The Reverend Doctor continues his complaint:

These women seldom read; they have no thirst for knowledge: they seldom cultivate their minds by study. Only the other day I was going up in the elevator of one of the most fashionable hotels of the city when I heard a young woman say to another, and it was then five o’ clock: ‘I haven’t done a thing all day but play bridge.’ That is only an example  . . . the gambling whist habit has become so prevalent that women – dozens of them – go from house to house, from fashionable hotel to hotel day after day and night after night, reviving themselves by drinks of various sorts.

     The Reverend Doctor was right about one thing. Middle-class women were, to a great extent, abandoning the day-to-day tasks of running a household, turning instead into
another
kind of ‘new woman’, an entire population of females for whom home, marriage, and children had long since been discarded as the only reason to be.

     But did this amount to social revolution?

     To track the true causes and effects, the factors that
really
changed the lives, futures and aspirations of generations of women, you have to go back a few years, to Ireland, to that old standard – when you’re talking about earth-shaking, population-displacing sea-change – to the real cause of real disruption in the world order, and what were considered to be women’s roles. The true instigator of social revolution was starvation.

     Not having anything to eat makes you think. It makes you move. It makes you do things which only a short time earlier, you might never have considered doing. When the food ran out in Ireland during the great famine of the 1850s, the Western world
really
began to change. Ireland changed. It became emptier. The trajectory of millions of women’s lives altered drastically and abruptly as they hurried to flee appallingly hardscrabble existences and probable extinction. And America, when they arrived, changed with them.

     We don’t know much about Mary Mallon’s life prior to her first arrest and incarceration. She didn’t like to talk about it – and she didn’t publicly or in writings that we know of. But if you examine the history of Ireland and the Irish people in the years prior to and following her birth and her arrival in America, an illuminating context reveals itself. When we hear of Mary vaulting fences, smacking around cops, shacking up in a one-room tenement apartment with an alcoholic gentleman to whom she was not married, it’s helpful to put that seemingly unique assertiveness in its proper perspective. If there were ‘new women’, really, in 1907, then you could hardly find a better example than Mary Mallon, a single, childless, domestic laborer pinned to the floor of a careening Health Department ambulance.

     Unless you count the woman sitting on top of her, the other side of the equation.

     Josephine Baker was an educated professional, a woman of some advantage who, rather than spending her time playing bridge or swanning about town imitating wealthier doyens of the upper classes, became a pioneer, dedicating her life to the field of preventive health care for children. After a private school education, when Vassar proved out of reach, she attended the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, interned at the New England Hospital for Women and eventually moved from private practice to a distinguished career in public service. She lectured, authored books and was elected president of the Babies Welfare Association. As early as 1908, she was the leader of a team of nurses who taught hygiene and disease prevention in the worst districts of the Lower East Side, her efforts resulting in a significant drop in infant mortality. She was one of many remarkable women from relatively comfortable backgrounds who broke all the rules, fought the good fight, tried actively to make the world a better place – usually in the face of hostility and ignorance.

Between 1845 and 1849, four years of relentless blight on the Irish potato crop, at least a million Irish people passed away, most the victims of starvation and disease. Three million others were left absolutely destitute. Their heartless English overlords did nothing to help. As the 1851 census of Ireland puts it:

. . .  the once proverbial gaiety and lightness of the peasant people seemed to have vanished completely, and village merriment or marriage festival was no longer heard or even seen.

     Marriage, even in furiously Catholic Ireland, was suddenly a very bad idea. If you were a dirt-poor potato farmer and your potatoes weren’t coming in, taking on a wife, much less a family, didn’t make much financial sense. It meant that you’d more than likely starve sooner, rather than later. Any already remote chances of moving up in the world – even in pre-famine Ireland – were diminished by the prospect of a wife and family to feed. People became reluctant to marry early – it made no sense, and parents became less inclined to subdivide their already near-worthless property holdings among heirs, as was the custom.

     Irish men and women lived very separate lives. Schools were segregated. Saloons and pubs were the exclusive preserves of men and whatever limited social activity revolved around them. Disapproving clergy and relatives were everywhere, and much of male social activity revolved around drinking. Marriage, increasingly, became based on economic circumstances – and those circumstances were bad and getting worse.

     From the mid-nineteenth century, the marriage rate among rural Irish declined dramatically – as did the number of children born, whether within wedlock or out of it. People were getting married less, and even when they did marry, women worked. They’d been running households for years, of course – seeing to the finances, cooking, cleaning, weaving, and in general, doing all those things which men couldn’t, or more accurately, wouldn’t, do. But the harsh realities of an economy based on the cultivation of the now-unreliable potato crop, required that women also work in the fields, digging turf, tending to chickens, selling crops at market. At the end of the day, the husband could go blow off steam at the pub, buy his mates some drinks, shoot a few darts, get stuttering drunk. The wife was left at home. Married couples rarely even ate together. The wife ate alone or with the children, then prepared a meal when hubby staggered home from the pub. As both parties were usually illiterate – or damn close to it – there wasn’t much to talk about in front of the fire. The thought of taking the wife out for a nice walk, maybe a visit to town, did not occur to too many husbands, who felt such a display would in some way diminish them. In short, marriage, particularly for a woman, was about as much fun as a lingering illness. If she wanted something for herself, or wanted to alter her circumstances, she stood up for herself, often physically, not infrequently using a blunt object as a persuader.

     With the famine, when millions of Irish peasants began pouring into New York, most of them were women. More to the point, they were women for whom the idea of deferring or avoiding marriage for economic reasons was nothing new. And they were women who were used to the idea that if one wanted to survive, one did for oneself. Men were as likely to be liabilities as assets.

     Few Irish women coming to America between 1849 and 1900 came with any ill-formed intentions of ‘finding a man’. They came looking to work hard, save money – and then hold on to that money. That so many of them became domestic servants who lived in the homes they served only reinforced this trend away from continued subserviency to a husband.

     They were truly a self-sufficient lot, these new women, oblivious – even contemptuous – of the idea of traditional women’s roles. They were proud, strong and in possession of great mental toughness. They came to America and took the work that was available – as servants and cooks to the middle and upper classes. There was a lot of work available, at least in the beginning, when almost every household, it seemed, had at least one servant. While millions of Irish women were deciding – or being forced by circumstances – to work their way into financial independence, American women, particularly of the Victorian age, struggled with the ‘servant problem’. The American ‘new woman’ was encouraged to keep a good house, but without getting her hands dirty. Her responsibility was to ‘educate’ her servants in the proper skills and comportment required of a ‘decent household’. The servant and the cook became, in this atmosphere, an essential, if frequently joked about, element of middle-class life, and they damn well knew how indispensable they were.

     By 1900 most Irish domestic help had had about enough of being looked down on and maltreated, and were having no more of it. Negotiations over working conditions and wages were often contentious. Any misguided attempts to legislate propriety amongst one’s servants in their leisure hours often resulted in frustration. Domestics, after working all day and into the evening, having no families to care for, and limited funds, often spent their off-hours in activities deemed inappropriate by their mistresses. Hanging out in saloons, buying dresses too similar in style to their mistresses’ than their mistresses appreciated. With a few bucks in their pockets and a nice dress or two, the unattached, unsupervised domestic servant girl could hang out in the beer gardens and dance halls, Bowery clubs or bars – maybe even enjoy a little slap and tickle.

     Employment agencies for domestics became prime recruiting grounds for whoremasters and brothel owners. Women heads of households were urged to take the training of their servants as a religious calling – the ‘spiritual’ benefits of appropriate behavior being thought as important as their cooking and cleaning skills. It’s hard to believe they persevered against such independent and determined subjects. How do you instruct a woman who’s already survived incredible hardship, who’s worked hard all her life, on how to live ‘properly’, when your life is, by contrast, a carefree wonderland of excess, sloth and caprice? When many families found it difficult to afford the number of servants they felt they required, attempts were made to form food ‘co-ops’, central associations where family meals could be prepared in a central location and delivered, cost-effectively, to households. This development did not go over well with traditional domestic cooks – and many of them organized against the co-ops, blacklisting families who had engaged their services, even threatening to go on strike. Families who underpaid or mistreated their help would find themselves infamous in the increasingly vibrant and vocal subculture of domestics, and such organized schemes such as price fixing and standardization of practices and working conditions were enacted, however informally, by networks of working women who exchanged information, resolved disputes, debated what tasks they could and should be responsible for in a given situation.