Sweetness is to woman what sugar is to fruit. It is her first busines to
be happy - a sunbeam in the house, making others happy. True, she will
often have "a tear in her eye", but, like the bride of young Lochinvar,
it must be accompanied with "a smile on her lips."
Girls and
women are willing enough to be agreeable to men if they do not happen to
stand to them in the relation of father, brother, or husband; but it is
not every woman who remembers that her raison d'être is to give out
pleasure to all as a fire gives out heat.
Rev. E.J.Hardy, Manners Makyth Man, 1887
Possibly
the most important, and most broadly felt pattern dominating the life
of the Victorian woman was what the reformer Jane Addams once called the
"family claim." According to the family claim, women, far more than
men, were regarded as possessions of their families.
In much of the
world at the turn of the century, families regarded their sons as
possessions too, but by the end of the 18th century in the U.S.
important political and economic forces had begun to weaken the ties of
parents and sons, but not – to anything like the same extent – between
parents and daughters. There were many reasons women continued to be
regarded as family possessions.
- Physical demands of Home Work
-- America remained an overwhelmingly rural society. In rural homes,
technology had made relatively few inroads, and the burden of work for
women remained immense. Whether a woman married (which 90% did) or
remained single, her life was largely confined to the care of family
members and home.
Housework alone required enormous physical
effort. Few women stayed in bed past daybreak, even when they were
sick. They ran the house, made the clothes, cared for the sick, and grew
and processed much of what the family ate. Middle class families in
urban areas were beginning to install indoor plumbing and electrical
wiring.
But the typical housekeeper's sole labor-saving devices
were her treadle sewing machine, the mechanical wringer she used to do
the wash, and the great cast-iron stove she fired up each morning to
cook the meals and boil the water.
Nursing: In addition, at
unpredictable times throughout the year women had to abandon some part
of their housework to care for someone who was sick. The major killer,
then as now, was heart disease, but tuberculosis, pneumonia, influenza,
gastritis, cancer, typhoid fever, diphtheria, malaria, polio, and
measles also took a heavy toll, killing many hundreds of thousands every
year. Alcoholism and mental illness also added to women's burdens.
Maids:
Well-to-do housewives employed cooks, maids, nurses, and laundresses to
free them from many of these tasks, but nine out of ten homes never had
any domestic help.
Home Production: The burdens of housework
kept most wives out of the labor force. Only 3% of white wives (25% of
black wives) worked for wages. But farm wives earned money by selling
butter and eggs; poor city women took in boarders and did piece work for
the garment industry; black women did laundry in their homes.
-
Weak State - The physical burdens that women faced were especially great
because the US had such a weak state at that time. The US provided none
of the social services that we now take for granted: medical services,
old age pensions, nursery schools. Women were the doctors, nurses,
psychiatrists, teachers, and social workers of the day. Without the
services that they provided privately, American society would have
collapsed.
- Lack of Reliable Contraception - The physical
burdens of family and social care that women shouldered were accentuated
by the difficulty they faced in controlling their fertility. As land
became more scarce in the US and providing for new generations more
difficult, American men and women struggled to limit the number of
children they brought into the world. Ever since 1800, the birth rate in
America had been declining, from roughly 7 children per family to an
average of 3.5 by 1900. This figure excluded blacks, who bore an average
of five children, and it masked enormous variation among whites. Women
with husbands in the professions or in business routinely had two or
fewer children, while rural farm wives and urban immigrants gave birth
to as many children as had women in colonial America.
Birth
Control: The decline in the birth rate took place before the widespread
availability of birth control. Some couples favored abstinence to limit
the number of children they bore. Many more favored withdrawal, the
rhythm method, or one of a wide range of contraceptive devices then
available, including condoms, sponges, douches, and cervical caps.
Unfortunately, none of these methods was very effective, and some posed
special problems. Abstinence required utter self-denial, withdrawal
considerable self-control. Many men objected to using condoms. Douching
proved difficult for the great majority who had no bathroom. And the
rhythm method often failed because medical texts disagreed about the
timing of ovulation. (Many couples carefully restricted intercourse to
the period midway between the menses, thinking it to be safe, only to
find the wife pregnant nonetheless.) When contraceptive methods failed,
one in five pregnancies ended in abortion. Poor women, in particular,
relied on this most drastic means of birth control.
The imperfect nature of birth control affected women in two important ways:
First,
and most obviously, it made it impossible to plan their lives, because a
woman could never predict whether she might become pregnant.
Second,
and more subtly, the haphazard nature of birth control had a powerful
effect on sexuality. Wherever the appearance of children posed an
economic threat, women, more than men, were forced to assume
responsibility for sexual control. To achieve economic success men had
to be aggressive and out-going; to protect that success, women had to be
restrained and modest -- qualities that did not enhance women's chances
of becoming economically independent of their families.
Legal
Constraints - Wherever private forces were insufficient to enforce the
family claim, the law stepped in to guarantee women's compliance.
The
marriage contract into which the vast majority of women entered
resembled an indenture agreement between master and servant. Indeed,
economically speaking, women might be viewed as the last large class of
indentured servants in America. Under the terms of the marriage
contract, a husband promised to support his wife in return for her
promise to serve and obey him, and many men objected to their wives
working outside the home on the grounds that doing so violated this
solemn agreement. [Note that this agreement limited men as well, by
making them single-handedly responsible for the economic support of the
family]
Divorce: Once married, only one in ten women divorced.
The permanence of most marriages was due to several factors: the
relative maturity of those who wed; the cost of maintaining separate
households; the difficulty most women found in supporting themselves; as
well as the stigma attached to divorce. But the law played an important
role as well, especially as legislators became aware of a modest, but
nonetheless unsettling, rise in the divorce rate at the end of the
century. Between 1889 and 1906, state legislatures, seeking to tighten
their laws, greatly reduced the statutory grounds for divorce.
Comstock
Laws: The law added force to the traditions that bound women to the
family in other ways as well. Women's efforts to control their fertility
met especially severe legal resistance. Since the middle of the
nineteenth century a movement of middle-class men, led by doctors, but
also including such prominent political figures as Theodore Roosevelt,
had sought to inhibit what they believed to be an immoral trend among
white, middle-class women to restrict childbearing. Warning of "race
suicide," by which they meant the extinction of
White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants, these crusaders fought to ban
contraception and abortion. By 1900 doctors and their sympathizers had
persuaded Congress to outlaw the dissemination of birth control
information through the mails; many states restricted the sale or
advertising of contraceptive devices; and the Society for the
Suppression of Vice, headed by Anthony Comstock was waging a campaign to
enforce these laws. Moreover, every state in the country banned
abortion except to save the life of a mother.
Economic
Restrictions: Women who managed to circumvent the law's effort to
control their fertility and enforce the family claim found themselves
restricted in other ways. Despite a movement since the middle of the
nineteenth century to increase women's economic liberty, most states
continued to reinforce patriarchal authority within the home by
restricting women's ability to engage in the economic world beyond their
households. In Pennsylvania a woman could not enter a business contract
without her husband's approval. In Georgia, a woman's earnings belonged
to her husband. And in Louisiana a married woman did not have legal
title even to the clothes she wore.
It was in the area of public
affairs, however, that women suffered the broadest legal disability.
Viewed as the dependents of their husbands or fathers, women, for the
most part, could not serve on juries; could not hold elective office;
and, except in four sparsely populated western states -- Wyoming,
Colorado, Idaho, and Utah, could not vote. Thus did the law bind women
to the domestic sphere.
Despite the strength of the family claim,
structural changes in economic life were beginning to undermine it. By
the turn of the century improved technology, an expanding transportation
network, and burgeoning cities were pulling women out of the household
into jobs and professions that had never existed before or that had long
belonged exclusively to men. Indeed, the large-scale migration from
farm to city that began as industrialization accelerated in late 19th
century America may well be the most important change taking place in
women's lives in the early twentieth century. It created jobs and the
chance for a limited independence they could not find in rural America.
In
1870 60 percent of the women employed outside the home worked as
domestic servants. These jobs allowed working-class daughters to
contribute to family income, yet still confined them to a familial
setting. By 1900, however, the proportion of women engaged in domestic
service had declined to one-third. Meanwhile, factory, office, retail,
teaching, and other professional jobs grew at a rapid pace. As a
consequence, the number of working women expanded far faster than the
growth of the female population. By 1900 about 40% of all unmarried
women were working for wages. Young women's increasing separation from
family control and their intermingling with men in the world of work
fostered a growing spirit of independence.
Changing Opportunities:
Domestic
Service: The most common employment for women in 1900 was still
domestic service, accounting for a third of all women workers. But long
hours limited freedom.
Factory Work: Most women, given the
chance, chose factory work over life as a servant, and manufacturing
claimed the next largest group of women workers, slightly less than a
third. The typical female factory worker tended to be young, single, and
an immigrant or the daughter of immigrant, and she tended to be working
in the garment industry.
White Collar Work: If a family could
afford to keep a daughter in school through the eighth grade and if she
spoke good English, the path would be opened to a position as a sales
clerk, teacher, secretary.
Prostitution: Between 2-5% of all
young women workers turned to prostitution. Contemporaries usually
blamed women's low wages for the problem, but other factors were often
more important. Among the Chinese lived many prostitutes who had been
kidnapped in China and brought to the United States to live in virtual
slavery. In the case of many other women, lack of education, trouble at
home, unscrupulous seducers, disreputable employment agencies, or a
desire for "easy money" often played a part. A young woman making $5.00 a
week in a store could make $35.00 as a prostitute. For some women
prostitution led to a miserable life of venereal disease, drugs, and
crime. But for most the experience seems to have been temporary, lasting
no more than five years and ending in a return to menial work at low
wages or marriage.
Liberation: Was the world of work liberating for young women? In some ways no, but in others yes.
Sexual
Segregation and the Wage Gap: The gender roles that divided work in the
family carried over into the world of work outside the home. Rarely did
women perform the same work as men. Indeed, in jobs where both men and
women were employed, the men were almost always on the way out. Many
male workers resented women workers, and condemned them for taking work
needed by men. But in fact technological change made direct conflict
rare. Employers liked to reserve the growing number of unskilled jobs
for women, who were mostly young, temporary workers. They hired men, on
the other hand for the higher paying, heavier, and more highly skilled
jobs. Overall, upward of 90 percent of all wage-earning women worked in
jobs where women workers were heavily concentrated, and where,
therefore, the values of the family claim tended to be re-imposed.
The
Family Wage: Moreover, because women were restricted in the jobs they
could choose, they made about half what men earned. Because women were
young, temporary, and had little training they found it difficult to
command high wages. But there was another factor, that prevented women
from earning as much as a man could, even when they were doing exactly
the same work, THE FAMILY WAGE.
Most young women went to work to
help their families survive in a world in which the family wage was more
ideal than reality, but the world of wage labor proved liberating in
small, but important ways. The heterogeneity of the city led women to
question traditional values. Mixing daily with men on the streets and in
the offices, violating by their very presence the Victorian ideal of
separate sexual spheres, they set a new standard of female
assertiveness. Their earnings, even if handed over to their mothers,
made them less dependent, for they had contributed to the family
support, and in doing so gained new power. These experiences rendered
their lives before marriage less distinct from those of men and helped
them loosen the family claim.
source: http://women-clothes-store.blogspot.com