4 1790s Second Great Awakening begins 1800 Thomas Jefferson elected president 1807 Robert Fulton launches the Clermont, the first American steamboat 1808 Congress ends the African slave trade 1810s– States abolish property 1820s requirements among white men for voting and officeholding 1812– War of 1812 against England 1814 interrupts transatlantic trade 1819 Panic causes economic collapse and hardships for debtors Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block 1800–1860 1819– Conflict over admission of 1821 Missouri as a slave state ends with the Missouri Compromise 1823 First textile mill opens in new city of Lowell, Massachusetts 1824 Erie Canal completed, accelerating commerce 1828 Andrew Jackson elected president, initiating era known as Jacksonian democracy 1830 Godey’s Lady’s Book begins publication 1830 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad opens the first passenger line 1830s Growth of first commercial cities 1830s Labor movement gains strength 1830s Temperance movement expands 1833– Lucy Larcom works in 1842 Lowell textile mills 1834 Female operatives at Lowell first go on strike 1834 First Female Moral Reform Society formed 1835– Runaway slave Harriet Jacobs 1842 hides in her grandmother’s attic 1837 154 Panic touches off major industrial depression L ucy Larcom spent her teenage years as a mill worker in the new factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts, on the Merrimack River. In 1835, at the age of eleven, she had moved to Lowell with her widowed mother, who had taken a job as manager of one of the company-owned boardinghouses to support herself and her children. For Lucy, working in the textile factory, a “rather select industrial school for young people,” was the formative experience of her life, and she carried the memory into her future career as a poet and writer.1 She loved doing work that was significant to the larger society and wrote of “the pleasure we found in making new acquaintances among our workmates.” But in later years, she became uneasy with the condescension toward her humble past as a factory girl. “It is the first duty of every woman to recognize the mutual bond of universal womanhood,” Larcom wrote in her memoirs. “Let her ask herself whether she would like to hear herself or her sister spoken of as a shopgirl or a factory-girl or a servant-girl, if necessity had compelled her for a time to be employed.”2 Larcom’s experiences embodied two of the three crucial elements shaping the lives of women in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. First, photos: top, The Granger Collection, New York; middle, The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY; bottom, American Textile History Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts she subscribed to the influential ideology of womanhood, home life, and gender relations that treated women as fundamentally different from men; this ideology placed women on a pedestal, simultaneously elevated and isolated by their special domestic role. Second, Larcom was participating in the first wave of American industrialization, a process that dramatically redirected the young nation’s economy and created new dimensions of wealth and poverty, new levels of production and consumption, and new ways of life. Historians tend to identify these two elements with two different and emerging classes — domestic ideology with the middle class, industrialization with the working class — but through the eyes of women like Lucy Larcom, it is possible to see that they were mutually influential. The very cotton fibers that mill girls like Larcom spun and wove symbolize the third major element considered in this chapter: slavery. By the nineteenth century, slavery was a southern social and economic system but one with profound national implications. Slavery was of incomparable importance to American women in the antebellum (pre– Civil War) years, not only to slaves and those who lived by or profited from unfree labor but also to those who dedicated themselves to ending slavery and, ultimately, to all who would endure the devastating conflict fought over it. ◆ THE IDEOLOGY OF TRUE WOMANHOOD Lucy Larcom’s concern with the implications of her factory years for her character as a woman reflects a powerful ideology of gender roles that historians have variously labeled “the cult of true womanhood,” “the ideology of separate spheres,” or simply “domesticity.” This system of ideas, which took hold in the early years of the nineteenth century just as the United States was coming into its own as an independent nation, treated men and women as complete and absolute opposites, with almost no common human traits that transcended the differences of gender. The ideology of true womanhood also saw the larger society as carved into complementary but mutually exclusive “spheres” of public and private concerns, work and home life, politics and family. “In no country has such constant photos: top, The Irish Collection, John J. Burns Library, Boston College; bottom, Library of Congress LC-B8171-152-A 1837 Sarah Josepha Hale becomes editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book 1837 Samuel Morse patents the Morse code for the telegraph 1839 Mississippi changes laws to protect married women’s title to inherited property 1841 Catharine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy published 1845– Potato blight in Ireland 1849 prompts a huge wave of immigration to the United States 1845 Lowell Female Labor Reform Association formed 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass published 1848 Ellen and William Craft escape from South Carolina slavery 1848 New York State passes Married Women’s Property Act 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention held 1850 Compromise of 1850 includes an oppressive federal Fugitive Slave Law 1850s Commercial sewing machine developed 1851– Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle 1852 Tom’s Cabin published 1860 Ellen and William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom published 1860 Republican Abraham Lincoln elected president 1860 Southern states begin to secede from the Union 1861 Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl published 155 156 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes,” declared Alexis de Tocqueville, the French observer of American culture in the 1830s. “American women never manage the outward concerns of the family, or conduct a business, or take a part in political life; nor are they, on the other hand, ever compelled to perform the rough labor of the fields, or to make any of those laborious exertions, which demand the exertion of physical strength. No families are so poor, as to form an exception to this rule.”3 The experience of innumerable women in antebellum America — the slave women of the South, the mill girls of the North, the impoverished widows of the new cities, the rising number of female immigrants, even the hardworking farm wives — contradicted these assertions. Yet no aspect of this complex reality seemed to interfere with the widespread conviction that this gender ideology was “true.” The challenge of understanding American women’s history in the first half of the nineteenth century is to reconcile the extraordinary hegemony — that is, breadth and power — of the ideology of separate spheres with the wide variety of American women’s lives in these years, many of which tell a very different story. Christian Motherhood An ideology as culturally widespread as that of true womanhood is difficult to reduce to a set of beliefs, but several basic concepts do stand out. First and foremost, proponents situated true women in an exclusively domestic realm of home, family, and childrearing. They considered housewifery and childrearing not as work but as an effortless expression of women’s feminine natures. Action and leadership were reserved for man; inspiration and assistance were woman’s province. The home over which women presided was not merely a residence or a collection of people but, to use a popular phrase, “a haven in a heartless world,” where men could find solace from a grueling public existence. “The perfection of womanhood . . . is the wife and mother, the center of the family, that magnet that draws man to the domestic altar, that makes him a civilized being, a social Christian,” proclaimed the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1860. “The wife is truly the light of the home.”4 At the core of the idea of woman’s sphere was motherhood. This basic contention was present in late eighteenth-century rhetoric about the importance of Republican Motherhood to the success of the American democratic experiment (see pp. 121–22). In stark contrast to the self-serving individualism expected of men and rewarded by economic advancement in the larger world, proponents of true womanhood described motherhood as a wholly selfless activity built around service to others. Oddly enough, given the importance that American political culture placed on independence of character, maternal selflessness was seen as the very source of national well-being, training citizens of the new nation to be virtuous, concerned with the larger good, and yet industrious and self-disciplined. Even women without children could bestow their motherly instincts on society’s unloved and ignored unfortunates. “Woman’s great mission is to train immature, weak and ignorant creatures, to obey the laws of God,” preached author and ◆ The Ideology of True Womanhood domestic ideologue Catharine Beecher in one of her many treatises on true womanhood, “first in the family, then in the school, then in the neighborhood, then in the nation, then in the world.”5 Beecher herself was unmarried and childless (see Reading into the Past: “The Peculiar Responsibilities of the American Woman”). Women’s expansive maternity was thought to make them natural teachers and underlay the feminization of this profession in the early nineteenth century. Whereas in the eighteenth century, teaching was seen as a fundamentally male vocation, by the nineteenth century women were increasingly regarded as best suited to instruct the young, and primary school teaching became an overwhelmingly female occupation. Especially in New England, public education was becoming widespread, and classrooms were staffed by young Yankee women, literate but less expensive to hire than men. By one estimate, one-quarter of all women born in New England between 1825 and 1860 were schoolteachers at some point in their lives.6 Women’s motherly vocation had a deeply religious dimension. True womanhood was a fervently Protestant notion, which gave a redemptive power to female devotion and selfless sacrifice. The true woman functioned as Christ’s representative in daily life, and the domestic environment over which she presided served as a sort of sacred territory, where evil and worldly influences could be cleansed away. Beecher insisted that “the preparation of young ministers for the duties of the church does not surpass in importance the training of the minister of the nursery and school-room.”7 The special identification of women with Christian piety was firmly established by a new wave of religious revivals that swept through American society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beginning in the frontier communities of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, the Second Great Awakening moved east by the 1810s and 1820s. Western New York was known as the “burned-over district” because of the zealous religiosity that swept through it in these years. Conveyed by preachers inspired by personal spiritual conviction rather than theological training, religious fervor especially thrived outside large cities. In the South, blacks and whites were drawn together in similar extended revivals. A cultural phenomenon with many different sources, the Second Great Awakening was a reaction both to the political preoccupations of the revolutionary period and to swift changes in the American economic system. This religious revivalism also had a populist element, as it bypassed established clerical authority in favor of more direct spiritual experience among the broad mass of the American people. New forms of Protestant worship, especially in Baptist and Methodist congregations, were evangelical, stressing personal conversion and commitment to rooting out sin in this world. Religious enthusiasm and activism gave women, who were the majority of converts in these revivals, an arena for individual expression and social recognition that they were denied in secular politics. To establish their reputations as effective religious leaders, popular evangelical preachers relied on their female followers. Catharine Beecher’s father, Lyman, and her brother, Henry Ward, were two such evangelical ministers. As for Catharine herself, she was never able to experience a full personal conversion and always doubted the depth of her religious conviction. 157 158 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 READING INTO THE PAST Catharine Beecher The Peculiar Responsibilities of the American Woman In the first chapter of A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), a book devoted to the details of childrearing and homemaking, author and domestic ideologue Catharine Beecher (1800–1878) elaborates her theory of American democracy and women’s place in it. She insists that women’s inclusion in the American promise of equality is completely compatible with the subordination that she believed was divinely ordained in wives’ relations to their husbands. What does this passage, written more than a half century after the American Revolution, indicate about Beecher’s vision of the grand political purposes served by women’s special domestic role, for both the United States and the rest of the world? In this Country, it is established, both by opinion and by practice, that woman has an equal interest in all social and civil concerns; and that no domestic, civil, or political, institution, is right, which sacrifices her interest to promote that of the other sex. But in order to secure her the more firmly in all these privileges, it is decided, that, in the domestic relation, she take a subordinate station, and that, in civil and political concerns, her interests be intrusted to the other sex, without her taking any part in Nonetheless, the career she was able to build for herself as an authority on proper Christian womanhood was much assisted by the association of the Beecher name with evangelical piety. Women’s reputation for deeper religious sentiment was closely related to the assumption that the true woman was inherently uninterested in sexual expression, that she was “pure.” The notion of woman’s natural sexual innocence was a relatively modern concept. In traditional European Christian culture, women had been considered more dangerously sexual than men. The belief in women’s basic “passionlessness,” as one historian has named it, was a new idea that, in the context of the time, served to raise women’s stature.8 In the hierarchical nineteenth-century Protestant worldview, woman was less tied to humanity’s animal nature than man was, and this lifted her closer to the divine. Sexual appetite in the female was virtually unimaginable.9 These assumptions made the presence of prostitutes ◆ The Ideology of True Womanhood voting, or in making and administering laws. . . . In matters pertaining to the education of their children, in the selection and support of a clergyman, in all benevolent enterprises, and in all questions relating to morals or manners, [women] have a superior influence. In such concerns, it would be impossible to carry a point, contrary to their judgement and feelings; while an enterprise, sustained by them, will seldom fail of success. If those who are bewailing themselves over the fancied wrongs and injuries of women in this Nation, could only see things as they are, they would know, that . . . there is nothing reasonable, which American women would unite in asking, that would not readily be bestowed. . . . To us [Americans] is committed the grand, the responsible privilege, of exhibiting to the world, the beneficent influences of Christianity. . . . But the part to be enacted by American women, in this great moral enterprise, is the point to which special attention should here be directed. . . . The proper education of a man decides the welfare of an individual; but educate a woman, and the interests of the whole family are secured. . . . The woman, who is rearing a family of children; the woman, who labors in the schoolroom; the woman, who, in her retired chamber, earns, with her needle, the mite, which contributes to the intellectual and moral elevation of her Country; even the humble domestic, whose example and influence may be moulding and forming young minds, while her faithful services sustain a prosperous domestic state; — each and all may be animated by the consciousness, that they are agents in accomplishing the greatest work that ever was committed to human responsibility. Source: Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (New York: Marsh, Capen, Lyon, and Webb, 1841), ch. 1. profoundly disturbing to nineteenth-century moralists. If women were as lustful as men, there would be no one to control and contain sexual desire. As Dr. William Sanger wrote in his pathbreaking 1858 study of prostitution in New York City, “Were it otherwise, and the passions in both sexes equal, illegitimacy and prostitution would be far more rife in our midst than at present.”10 (See Primary Sources: “Prostitution in New York City, 1858,” pp. 188–92.) Starting in the 1820s, pious women expanded their religious expression beyond churchgoing to participation in a wide variety of voluntary organizations that promoted the spiritual and moral uplift of the poor and unsaved. Some of these female benevolent associations sponsored missionary efforts to bring the blessings of Christianity to unbelievers at home and abroad. By the 1830s, an extensive network of Protestant women’s organizations was sending money to church missions throughout Asia and Africa. A handful of adventuresome women 159 160 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 ◆ New York City Prostitutes Whether the number of prostitutes rose dramatically in the mid-nineteenth century, as many observers charged, in large cities they were certainly more visible and thus more disturbing to the middle-class public. Prostitutes and their clients commonly frequented the “third tier” of theaters, which was informally reserved for them. As this contemporary cartoon indicates, they could even be found at the most elegant theaters. The joke in this cartoon refers to the difficulty of distinguishing between prostitutes and reputable women of fashion. The term “gay” referred to prostitution, not homosexuality, in the nineteenth century. © Look and Learn/ Peter Jackson Collection/Bridgeman Images. went to preach the gospel abroad, mostly as wives of male missionaries. Ann Hasseltine Judson, who served with her husband in the 1820s in Rangoon, Burma, was the first American woman missionary in Asia. Closer to home, female missionaries brought Christian solace to the American urban poor. Pious middle-class women joined their ministers in “friendly visiting” to preach the word of Christ to society’s downtrodden and outcast. A Middle-Class Ideology Despite the wide range of those who subscribed to its tenets, the ideology of true womanhood was a thoroughly middle-class social ethic. Certainly, the assumption that a woman should be insulated from economic demands to concentrate on creating a stable and peaceful home environment presumed she was married to a man able to support her as a dependent wife. The middle-class wife in turn was responsible for what Beecher characterized as “the regular and correct apportionment of expenses that makes a family truly comfortable.”11 The idealized true woman, presiding over a virtuous family life, was a crucial staple of the way Americans contrasted themselves with European aristocratic society. Adherence to the ideology of true womanhood also helped people of the middle classes to distinguish themselves from those they regarded as their social and economic inferiors. In ◆ The Ideology of True Womanhood ◆ Lilly Martin Spencer, Washerwoman (1854) Lilly Martin Spencer, an immigrant from France, was virtually the only woman in antebellum America to make a living as a painter. Despite her efforts at painting grander historical subjects, her domestic paintings were so popular that she concentrated on this genre. Her subjects included both domestic sentiments and domestic labor. She used her own servant as a model, and her paintings demonstrate an intimate knowledge of the actual labor involved in maintaining a household, as in this unusual painting of laundering. The same servant/model appears in other Spencer paintings, always robust and smiling. Spencer’s own domestic life was unconventional: she had thirteen children, of whom seven survived, but with her husband’s assent, she served as the family breadwinner while he tended to the household duties. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; purchased through a gift from Florence B. Moore in memory of her husband, Lansing P. Moore, Class of 1937. their charitable activities among the poor, true women preached the gospel of separate sexual spheres and female domesticity, convinced that the absence of these family values, rather than economic forces, was what made poor people poor. These ideas reflected changing conditions in middle-class American women’s lives. The birthrate for the average American-born white woman fell from 6 in 1800 to 4.9 in 1850, in part because economic modernization meant that children were less important as extra hands to help support the family and more likely to be a financial drain. Also, technological developments — for example, the new cast-iron stove, which was easier and safer than open-hearth cooking — were just beginning to ease women’s household burdens. As the industrial production of cloth accelerated, women no longer had to spin and weave at home, although they still cut and sewed their family’s clothes. Depending on their husbands’ incomes, middle-class women might be able to hire servants to help with their labors. Even so, the middle-class housewife did plenty of work herself. Despite technological developments, leisure time was a privilege for only the very richest women. Laundry, the most burdensome of domestic obligations, remained a difficult weekly chore. The doctrine of domesticity was elaborated by ministers in sermons and physicians in popular health books. But women themselves did much of the work of spreading these ideas. The half century in which this rigid ideology of gender first 161 162 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 flourished was also the period in which writing by women first found a mass audience among middle-class women. Lydia Sigourney, a beloved woman’s poet; Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, popular author of numerous sentimental novels; and Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the influential women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book (with 150,000 subscribers in 1860), all built successful careers elaborating the ideology of true womanhood. (See Primary Sources: “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” pp. 201–7.) In her influential and much reprinted Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), Catharine Beecher taught that woman’s sphere was a noble “profession,” equal in importance and challenge to any of the tasks assigned to men. Her younger half sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, relied heavily on the ideas of woman’s sphere in her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851), which became the most widely read American novel ever written (see Reading into the Past: “Reflections on Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” p. 245). In the judgment of such women, the tremendous respect paid to woman’s lofty state was one of the distinguishing glories of nineteenth-century America. While proponents of true womanhood insisted that woman’s sphere differed from man’s, they regarded it as of equal importance to society and worthy of respect. Lucy Larcom put it this way: “God made no mistake in her [woman’s] creation. He sent her into the world full of power and will to be a helper. . . . She is here to make this great house of humanity a habitable and a beautiful place, without and within, a true home for every one of his children.”12 The many women of the nineteenth century who energetically subscribed to the ideas of true womanhood were not brainwashed victims of a male ideological conspiracy. Private writings of middle-class women from this period, letters and diaries notably, show women embracing these ideas and using them to give purpose to their lives. Not only could the true woman claim authority over the household and childrearing, but the widespread belief in her special moral vocation legitimated certain kinds of activity outside the domestic sphere. Despite its middle-class character, the doctrine of true womanhood was strikingly widespread throughout antebellum American society. Almost the only women during this period who openly challenged its tenets were the women’s rights radicals (see pp. 238–43). Domesticity in a Market Age By fervently insisting that women had to be insulated from the striving and bustle of the outside world, the advocates of true womanhood were implicitly responding to the impact of larger economic pressures on women’s lives. The ideology of separate spheres and women’s sheltered domesticity notwithstanding, women’s history during this period can be understood only in the context of the burgeoning market economy. The development and growth of a cash-based market-oriented economy — as opposed to one in which people mostly produced goods for their own immediate use — reaches back to the very beginnings of American history and forward into the twentieth century. But early nineteenth-century America is rightly seen as the time in which the fundamental shift toward market-oriented production took place. ◆ Women and Wage Earning The spread of market relations had particular implications for women. In preindustrial society, men’s work as well as women’s was considered fundamentally domestic. Both sexes worked within and for the household, not for trade on the open market. By the eighteenth century, this was already changing as commercial transactions were growing in significance. Especially within urban areas, various household goods — soap and candles, for example, or processed foods like flour and spices — were available for purchase. By the early nineteenth century, households needed to acquire more and more cash to buy consumer goods to fill the needs of daily life. Acquiring this money became men’s obligation. With the rise of the market economy, much of men’s work moved outside the home, and women alone did work in the domestic realm for direct use. Because work was increasingly regarded as what happened outside the home, done by men and compensated for by money, what women did in the home was becoming invisible as productive labor. From this perspective, the lavish attention the proponents of true womanhood paid to the moral significance of woman’s domestic sphere might be seen as ideological compensation for the decline in its economic value. Industrial depressions, which affected the entire society and not just the lower rungs of wage earners, were becoming a regular, seemingly inescapable characteristic of industrial society, the bust that inevitably followed the boom. In 1837, the U.S. economy, which had been growing by leaps and bounds, violently contracted, and prices dropped precipitously, banks collapsed, and wages fell by as much as a third. The Panic of 1837, as it was called for the response of investor and wage earner alike, was an early and formative experience in the lives of many women, among them the future women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony, whose father lost his grain mill business in that year. Despite waning recognition of women’s role in economic production, popular nineteenth-century ideology assumed that in the household, women could counteract some of the more disturbing aspects of economic expansion. A woman’s household management skills and emotional steadiness were supposed to be crucial in helping her family weather the shifting financial winds that were such an unnerving aspect of the new economy. “When we observe the frequent revolutions from poverty to affluence and then from extravagance to ruin, that are continually taking place around us,” wrote Mrs. A. J. Graves in her popular handbook Woman in America (1841), “and their calamitous effects upon families brought up in luxury and idleness, have we not reason to fear that our ‘homes of order and peace’ are rapidly disappearing?”13 Seen this way, the proper conduct of woman’s sphere virtually became a matter of economic survival. ◆ WOMEN AND WAGE EARNING As Mrs. Graves’s admonition indicates, the depiction of woman’s sphere as unconnected to the striving and bustle of the outside world is misleading. Indeed, women felt the pressures of a consumer-based (or cash-based) market economy in many ways. Some women found ways to make money from within their households — for 163 164 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 instance, by selling extra butter or eggs. Barely visible to a society focused on its own capacity for productive prosperity, impoverished urban women, widowed or deserted by men, scrounged or begged for pennies to buy shelter, food, and warmth. Of all women’s intersections with the cash economy and the forces of the market revolution, none was more important for women’s history than the employment of young New England women like Lucy Larcom as factory operatives at the power-driven spindles and looms of the newly established American textile industry. Though their numbers were small, these young women constituted the first emergence of the female wage labor force (see the Appendix, p. A-17). From Market Revolution to Industrial Revolution To understand the experiences of early nineteenth-century women factory workers, we must place them in the setting of the era’s industrial transformations. The growth of a market economy encouraged the centralization and acceleration of the production of goods. This industrializing process was gradual and uneven, a fact that becomes especially clear when we focus on the distinct contribution of women workers. For a long time after industrialization began, people continued to produce goods at home, even as their control over what they made and their share of its value were seriously eroded. In this transitional form of manufacture for sale, male entrepreneurs, or “factors,” purchased the raw materials for production and distributed them to workers in their homes, then paid for the finished goods and sold them to customers. Workers no longer received the full cash value of what they had produced since the factor also made money from the process. In essence, the workers were receiving a wage for their labor instead of being paid for their products, which were no longer theirs to sell. Their labor was increasingly considered only a part, not the entirety, of the production process. Shoemaking is a particularly interesting example, both because its transition to full industrialization was prolonged and because women and men underwent this transition at different rates. Making shoes for sale was already an established activity by the early nineteenth century, especially in cities north of Boston, notably Lynn, Massachusetts. At first, shoes were manufactured in home-based workshops in which the male head of the household was the master artisan and his wife, children, and apprentices worked under his direction. Starting in the 1820s and 1830s, a new class of shoemaking entrepreneurs brought male shoemakers, who specialized in cutting and sewing soles, to a centralized site, while women continued to sew the shoes’ uppers and linings at home. By the 1840s and 1850s, women’s labor was being directed and paid for by the entrepreneurs. It was not until later in the nineteenth century, after the Civil War, that women’s part in shoe production moved into factories. Clothing manufacture remained in a similar “outwork” phase for a long time. Women working at home produced most of the clothing manufactured for sale in the antebellum period. By 1860, there were sixteen thousand seamstresses in New York City alone.14 Industrialization ravaged many of these mid-nineteenth-century ◆ Women and Wage Earning poor women and their families. Other than for slaves, manufacture of clothing did not begin to shift into factories until after the Civil War — and well into the twentieth century the workshop form of production continued to thrive, in sweatshops (see p. 296). Other industries that relied on women outworkers included straw-hat making and bookbinding. Limited to their homes by childrearing responsibilities, married women remained home-based industrial outworkers much longer than men or unmarried women. The more exclusively female that outwork was, the more poorly it paid. Manufacturing could be said to be fully industrialized only when it shifted to a separate, centralized location, the factory, at which point home and work were fully separated. In factories, entrepreneurs could introduce more expensive machinery and supervise labor more closely, both intended to maximize their profits. Factories and the machines within them were the manufacturers’ contribution to the process, the “capital” that gave them control and ownership over the product of the workers. Male artisans, no longer the masters of their family workshops, experienced the shift to the factory as absolute decline; for women the shift of manufacturing to outside the home offered a more mixed experience. Factory ownership was entirely in the hands of men, and women, whose secondary status had already been established in home manufacturing, earned a much lower wage than men for tasks that were inevitably considered less skilled. Yet women’s turn to factory labor also gave them the chance to earn wages as individuals, and at times to experience a taste of personal freedom. As Lucy Larcom explained, young women like herself “were clearing away a few weeds from the overgrown track of independent labor for other women.”15 The Mill Girls of Lowell By the 1820s, textile production, one of the most important of America’s early industries — and certainly the most female dominated — was decisively shifting in the direction of factory labor. If the impoverished “tailoresses” working out of their dark urban garrets stood for the depredation of women by industrial capitalists, the factory girls of the textile industry came to represent the better possibilities that wage labor might offer women. And “girls” they were — unmarried, many in their teens. (See Primary Sources: “Early Photographs of Factory Operatives and Slave Women,” pp. 208–15.) Though they were only a tiny percentage of women — as of 1840, only 2.25 percent16 — these first female factory workers understood themselves, and were understood by others in their society, as opening up new vistas of personal independence and economic contribution for their sex. The story of the first women factory workers began in the American textile industry during and immediately after the War of 1812. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Americans bought wool, linen, and cotton cloth manufactured in the textile factories of Great Britain. The war with England interrupted the transatlantic trade in factory-made cloth, creating an irresistible opportunity for wealthy New England merchants, who had heretofore made their money by 165 166 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 importing British textiles, to invest in American-based industry. In 1814 in Waltham, Massachusetts, a group of local merchants opened the first American factory to house all aspects of textile production under one roof. In an early and daring example of industrial espionage, they had spirited out of England designs for water-driven machinery for both spinning and weaving. The investors enjoyed quick and substantial profits, and in 1823 the same group of venture capitalists opened a much larger operation twenty-three miles away, on Merrimack River farmland north of Boston. The new factory town, named after the leading figure in the merchant capital group, Francis Cabot Lowell, soon became synonymous with the energetic American textile industry and with the young women who provided its labor force. Previously, in England and in earlier, unsuccessful efforts at factory textile production in the United States, whole families who would otherwise be destitute were the workers: children worked the spinning machines and looms. This impoverished working population gave factory production a bad name, best captured by British poet William Blake’s terrifying 1804 image of the “dark satanic mills” soiling “England’s green and pleasant land.”17 Textile factories were regarded as poorhouses designed for keeping indigent people from disrupting society. Given the availability of land for farms in the United States, this type of labor force was not as obtainable for aspiring American textile industrialists. But an alternative had been identified as early as the 1790s by President George Washington’s secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, an early promoter of American industrial production. Hamilton advocated hiring the unmarried daughters of farming families, who could move in and out of industrial production without becoming a permanent and impoverished wage labor force like that which haunted England. By laboring for wages in textile factories, these young women could for a time help provide their families with the cash that they increasingly required. The fact that the spinning of fiber for cloth had been the traditional work of women in the preindustrial household (especially unmarried women, hence the term “spinster”) provided an additional argument for turning to a female labor force. To the delight of New England textile capitalists, girls from Yankee farm families took to factory labor in the 1820s and early 1830s with great enthusiasm. Earning an individual wage offered them a degree of personal independence that was very attractive to these young women. Many were eager to work in the factories, despite thirteen-hour days, six-day workweeks, and wages of $1 to $2 per week.18 “I regard it as one of the privileges of my youth that I was permitted to grow up among these active, interesting girls,” Lucy Larcom wrote in her memoirs, “whose lives were not mere echoes of other lives, but had principles and purposes distinctly their own.”19 Even though they saved their wages and sent as much as possible to their families, the mill girls occasionally spent some of their earnings on themselves; for this they were regarded by contemporaries as spoiled and selfindulgent. And although their workdays were extraordinarily long and the labor much more unrelenting than that to which they were accustomed, they reveled in the small amounts of time they had for themselves in the evenings. Larcom’s reminiscences detail the classes she and her sister attended, the writing they did, and ◆ Women and Wage Earning the friendships they made. Factory girls at Lowell and elsewhere even formed female benevolent societies, as did their more middle-class counterparts. One problem, however, stood in the way of the success of this solution to the problem of factory labor: Where were the young women workers to live? Given the scale of the labor force required by the large new factories and the decentralized character of the New England population, young women would have to be brought from their homes to distant factories. Parents were reluctant to allow their daughters to be so far from home and away from family supervision. Factory work for women, probably because it had been so dreadfully underpaid in England, was suspected of being an avenue to prostitution. The manufacturers’ solution to both the housing and moral supervision dilemmas was to build boardinghouses for their young workers and to link work and living arrangements in a paternalistic approach to industrial production. Four to six young women shared each bedroom, and their behavior was closely supervised. The boardinghouses, and the camaraderie among young women that flourished there, added to the allure of factory labor. To the farm girls of New England, this was greater cosmopolitanism than they had ever known. For about a decade, the city of Lowell and the Lowell system (as the employment of young farm girls as factory workers was called) were among the glories of the new American nation. Visitors came from Europe to see and sing the praises of the moral rectitude and industry of the women workers in this new type of factory production, free of the corruptions of the old world. “They were healthy in appearance, many of them remarkably so,” Charles Dickens wrote after a visit in 1842, “and had the manners and deportment of young women; not of degraded brutes of burden.”20 The dignity and probity of the Lowell girls were crucial elements in the optimism that temporarily thrived regarding the possibilities of a genuinely democratic American version of industrial factory production, in which all could profit from the new levels of wealth. “The experiment at Lowell had shown that independent and intelligent workers invariably give their own character to their occupation,” Larcom proudly wrote.21 Young women workers wrote stories, essays, and poems about their experience at the factories for their own literary journal, The Lowell Offering, to put their uprightness and their intelligence on display. Larcom began a long career as a writer this way. Factory owners, not insensitive to the propaganda value of such efforts, underwrote the magazine, paid the editor’s salary, and distributed issues widely. The End of the Lowell Idyll Eventually, however, economic pressures took their toll on Lowell’s great promise, at least for the workers. Declining prices for cotton and wool and investors’ expectations of high returns led factory owners to slash wages. Within the first decade, wages were cut twice. The factory owners counted on the womanly demeanor of their employees to get them to accept the cuts. But they were wrong. In 1834 and 1836, in response to lower wages, Lowell girls “turned out” — conducted spontaneous strikes — and in the process began to question notions of womanhood that 167 168 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 ◆ The Lowell Offering The Lowell Offering was the mill owner–sponsored publication of original writings by women workers known as “factory girls.” Conditions in the mills had already begun to deteriorate by 1845, the date of this publication. Nonetheless, the image’s foreground shows a confident, literate, individual woman stepping out into the larger world. In the background are the mills and boardinghouses in which the working girls lived and worked. Note the idealized pastoral frame, so different from the actual reality of the industrial process and its impact on the city, factories, and workers of Lowell. © Everett Collection Historical/Alamy. ◆ Women and Wage Earning forbade such demonstrations of individual and group assertion. They repudiated the deference and subordination expected of them on the grounds of their sex and championed, instead, their dignity and independence as proud “daughters of freemen.” One young striker, Harriet Hanson, who went on to become a leader in the woman suffrage movement, remembered that the strike “was the first time a woman had spoken in public in Lowell, and the event caused surprise and consternation among her audience.”22 But the Panic of 1837, which triggered contraction of the entire industrial economy, doomed the efforts of the women operatives to act collectively, defend their jobs, and preserve the level of their wages. Workers were laid off and mills shut down. Young girls went back to their farm families to wait out the economic downturn. When the economy revived and the mills resumed full production, workers were expected to increase their pace, tend more machines, and produce more cloth. Production levels rose, but wages did not. Moral concerns were giving way to the bottom line. In the 1840s, Lowell’s women workers formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association and joined with male workers in other Massachusetts factories in petitioning the state legislature to establish a ten-hour legal limit to their workdays as a way to resist work pressure and keep up levels of employment. This turn to the political system to redress group grievance was part of the larger democratic spirit of the period. It is especially striking to find women engaged in these methods at a time when politics was regarded as thoroughly outside of woman’s sphere. Indeed, the legislative petitions of the women textile workers of the 1840s are an important indicator that women were beginning to imagine themselves as part of the political process. But for precisely this reason, because women still lacked whatever voting power male workers could muster, they were unable to secure any gains by their legislative petitions (see Chapter 5). Conditions of factory labor were changing in other ways as well, most notably in the composition of the labor force. The Lowell system had been devised in the context of a shortage of workers willing to take factory jobs. By the 1840s, however, immigrants were providing an ever-growing labor pool for industrial employment. Coming to the United States in large numbers, they poured into the wage labor force. The Irish were both the largest and the most economically desperate of all the new arrivals. Starting in 1845, a terrible blight on the potato crop that was the staple of the Irish diet, exacerbated by the harsh policies of England toward its oldest colony, threw the population into starvation conditions and compelled well over a million Irish men and women to emigrate to the United States. The textile capitalists, no longer pressured by labor shortages to make factory employment seem morally uplifting, paid low wages to and enforced harsh working conditions on these new immigrant workers, who soon constituted the majority of mill laborers. Part of the initial attraction that native-born farm girls had for capitalists was the knowledge that they would eventually marry and return to their families and farms, and therefore their factory labor would be only a brief episode in their lives. The dreaded old world fate of becoming a permanently degraded and dependent wage labor class went instead to the Irish Catholic immigrants, who by 1860 were well over half of the workers in the industry. Immigrant men now worked the looms and immigrant 169 170 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 ◆ Irish Immigration Mary Anne Madden Sadlier, the author of the first American-written novel about an Irish immigrant woman, herself left Ireland in 1844. Living first in Montreal, she and her husband, James Sadlier, a book and magazine publisher, moved to New York City in 1860. Her novel Bessy Conway, or The Irish Girl in America (1861) modified the domestic focus of true womanhood ideology for a Catholic audience and blamed Protestant values and prejudices for the poverty and social ills that the Irish experienced in the United States. The Irish Collection, John J. Burns Library, Boston College. women the spindles. The high moral character of the factory operatives — the womanly demeanor and hunger for self-improvement that were once the boast of the industry — was no more. Wage earning was increasingly seen as undermining respectable femininity. Working women and true women were going their separate ways. At the Bottom of the Wage Economy Tremendous prejudice was directed at the Irish in the early years of industrialization, in no small part because they were becoming so thoroughly identified with wage labor. The Irish were one of the very few immigrant groups in nineteenthcentury American history in which the number of women roughly equaled that of men. Those who did not work in factories labored as domestic servants. In preindustrial America, the housewife had turned to young neighbors or relatives as “helps” in her domestic obligations. Lucy Larcom worked for her sister in this traditional capacity whenever the downturns in factory conditions were too much ◆ Women and Wage Earning for her. But in industrializing America, especially as the numbers of Irish immigrants grew, mistress and maid were becoming separated by a much greater cultural and economic gap and losing their sense of common task and purpose. In 1852, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founding mother of the American women’s rights movement (see pp. 238–43), complained of the “two undeveloped Hibernians in my kitchen” whose ignorance of modern household procedures she felt powerless to remedy.23 The industrious, Protestant, Yankee middle-class housewife saw the Catholic Irish “girls” she hired to cook and clean and do laundry as dirty, ignorant, and immoral. The divide between native-born middle-class mistress and immigrant wageearning maid could almost be said to define class distinctions among women. Complaints about the difficulty of finding or keeping “good help” were a staple of middle-class female culture (see Figure 4.4, p. 205). Some women organized societies to place needy girls as workers in suitable homes. However, the objects of their charity rarely regarded domestic service as a privilege. Domestic servants’ habits of working erratically, changing employers often, and presenting a sullen demeanor were means of protesting a form of employment they did not like and that was not respected in democratic America, where the deference expected in personal service already had given it a bad name. Their female employers could never understand why, even when wages were competitive, their domestic servants did their best to switch to factory employment. There, though the workday was long and the labor hard, a factory job ended with the dismissal bell after which a young woman’s time became her own. At the very bottom of the economic ladder, beneath even the lower rungs of domestic service, were the urban poor. America had always had its poor people, but this destitute class was new, as it included able-bodied people willing to work but unable to find jobs that would support themselves and their families. The most desperate of the urban poor were the women with children but without men (or, more precisely, without access to the higher wages a man could earn). These poor urban women were the absolute antithesis of true womanhood. The rooms in which they lived could hardly be called homes: they were not furnished, clean, or private. Unschooled and unsupervised, their children went into the streets or worked for a pittance to help support their families. Housework was especially difficult for poor urban women: they carried water for laundry or coal for warmth or small amounts of food for dinner up steps into tiny tenement apartments or down into cellar spaces (where twenty-nine thousand lived in New York City as of 1850).24 After each downturn of the industrial economy, the numbers of urban poor swelled. The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows, formed in New York City in 1799, was the first American charity organized by women for women.25 The charitable ladies did not provide outright cash or employment, instead dispensing spiritual and moral ministrations along with occasional food, coal, and clothing. In such exchanges, just as in the relationship between mistress and maid, middle-class and poor women met each other across the class divide, probably struck more with what separated them than with what they allegedly shared by virtue of their common gender. 171 172 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 ◆ William Henry Burr, The Intelligence Office This 1849 painting of an employment office dramatically portrays the harsh reality of poor working women in search of employment, as two young women are displayed before a potential employer by the male proprietor. The sign at the back reads “Agents for Domestics. Warranted Honest.” © Collection of the New-York Historical Society, USA/Bridgeman Images. ◆ WOMEN AND SLAVERY Perhaps the greatest irony embedded in the dynamic beginnings of industrial capitalism is the degree to which it rested on a very different social and economic system that also thrived in early nineteenth-century America: chattel slavery. By 1800, as northern states abolished slavery, the institution had become identified exclusively with the South. Even so, a great deal linked the North with the South. The gigantic cotton crop grown by slave labor was the raw material of New England’s textile industry. Among the greatest advocates of American democracy ◆ Women and Slavery were numerous southern slaveholders, including four of this country’s first five presidents. And at many levels, the North and South shared a national culture. Their citizens read the same books and magazines, worshipped in the same Protestant denominations, and voted for the same political parties. Southern white women followed many essentials of the cult of domesticity. But underlying these similarities were fundamental differences, signifying a conflict that eventually led to civil war. The absence in the South of the wage relationship between producer and capitalist lay at the heart of these sectional differences. There were great profits accumulated in the South, and much of what was produced there was intended for sale. But the workers of the system were not paid any wages for their labor. They were chattel slaves, human property, the value of whose current and future labor, along with the land they worked, constituted the wealth of their owners. Like the factory buildings and machines that produced wealth in the Northeast, they were capital; but they were also human beings. Far more than even the most impoverished, degraded wage worker in the North, slaves were forbidden the basic elements of personal freedom — to live with their own families, to move about, to be educated, to marry and raise children — not to mention the loftier rights of citizenship. The slaves were traded as valuable commodities, objects of a legal commerce that was recognized by the laws of all the southern states and protected by the careful wording of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, the Constitution, in permitting legislation ending the transatlantic slave trade after 1808 and relegating control over the institution of slavery entirely to the states, laid the foundation for an enormous commerce in slaves within the United States. The profitable, vigorous internal market in slaves touched the lives of virtually all African American persons, for each man and woman experienced either the horror of being sold, the fear of being sold, or the heartrending knowledge of a loved one being sold. The auction block loomed over all. Plantation Patriarchy Slave ownership in the nineteenth century was increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer whites. Only an estimated 25 percent of southern white families owned any slaves in 1860; of these, only a small minority owned enough to qualify for elite status and significant political and economic power. On these great slave plantations, the large concentrations of land and labor formed the power basis of southern slave society (see Map 4.1). There, slaves were organized into large work gangs in which they raised the cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco that made the South wealthy. These plantations were not only the economic core but the social, political, and cultural centers of slave society. In general, the nineteenth-century slave South did not develop the dynamic civil society that flourished in the North. The growth of an industrial economy and of a wage labor class was limited in the South to a few urban centers, such as Richmond and Atlanta. With the sole exception of party politics, which wealthy men dominated, public life did not thrive. As a result, plantation women’s lives varied significantly from those of northern women. 173 174 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 Number of Slaves per Slaveholder, per County, 1860 IOWA ILLINOIS Over 15 4–14 1–3 INDIANA MARYLAND DELAWARE OHIO VIRGINIA MISSOURI KENTUCKY Disputed or no returns No slaves held NORTH CAROLINA TENNESSEE INDIAN TERRITORY SOUTH CAROLINA ARKANSAS GEORGIA MISSISSIPPI E W ALABAMA LOUISIANA N S ATLANTIC OCEAN TEXAS FLORIDA Gulf of Mexico 0 MEXICO 0 100 200 miles 100 200 kilometers ◆ Map 4.1 Number of Slaves per Slaveholder, per County, 1860 The cotton boom shifted enslaved African Americans to the lower and western South. In 1790, most slaves lived and worked on the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake and in the rice and indigo areas of South Carolina. By 1860, the centers of slavery lay along the Mississippi River and in an arc of fertile cotton land sweeping from Mississippi through Georgia. To begin with, family life was different. The ideological distinction between public and private, work and family — much touted in the North — did not really exist on the great southern plantations. The plantation was residence and workplace simultaneously, and the white male head of household presided over both. Instead of the mutually exclusive but allegedly equal gender roles dictated by the northern culture of domesticity, slave society was proudly patriarchal, with men’s social and political power derived from their leadership in the home. Wealthy white southern men were fiercely jealous of the honor of their women and their families, and they were notorious for their willingness to resort to violence to avenge any perceived slights against them. Female deference to male authority was considered a virtue, and any moral superiority granted to women gave them no social or political authority. Inasmuch as wealthy women left the daily tasks of childrearing to their slaves, maternity was neither revered nor sentimentalized. Owners regarded slave men and women not just as workers but as permanent children — at best amusing, guileless, but lacking in judgment and authority. By this ◆ Women and Slavery ◆ Charlotte Forten Grimké As a member of the tiny antebellum black middle class, Charlotte Forten combined belief in the ideals of true womanhood and political and social activism on behalf of her race. She was born in 1837 into a relatively prosperous and politically active family in Philadelphia and was educated in Salem, Massachusetts. During the Civil War, she traveled to Union-controlled islands off the coast of South Carolina to teach emancipated slaves and kept a fascinating diary of her experience there. She married Francis Grimké, whose father and former owner was the brother of white abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké. Fotosearch/Getty Images. obfuscating ideology, the plantation community was treated as a single large family, with master-parents and slave-children, bound by devotion and reciprocal obligations of service and protection. One white woman, writing about her father’s plantation, truly believed that “the family servants, inherited for generations, had come to be regarded with great affection. . . . The bond between master and servant was, in many cases, felt to be as sacred and close as the tie of blood.”26 When slavery was abolished, masters and mistresses were often astounded to discover the degree of hostility their former slaves felt toward them. Plantation patriarchy was a gender and family system, but one organized around racial difference and inequality. The structures and inequalities of race, much like those of gender, were so omnipresent as to seem natural and God-given. “Black” equaled “slave” and was understood as the opposite not only of “white” but of “free.” In contrast to this belief, it is important to recognize that by 1830 there were a third of a million black people in the United States who were not slaves, half of them living in the South. The lives of these people and their claims to free status were deeply compromised by the power of slavery and racial inequality. In the South, they were kept out of certain occupations, forbidden to carry firearms, 175 176 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 denied the right to assembly, and required to have passes to travel from county to county. Even in the North, where a small black urban middle class emerged in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, most free blacks occupied the lowest ranks of wage labor as common laborers, dock workers, and, among women, domestic servants. Despite slave society’s insistence that the racial divide was absolute, the line that separated “black” from “white” was constantly being breached. Masters could — and certainly did — compel slave women to have sexual relations with them. When a slave woman gave birth to her master’s child, how was the racial divide on which slave patriarchy was premised to be maintained? The legal answer was that the child followed the status of the mother: the child was a slave because her female parent was a slave. This simple legal answer to a complex set of social relations hidden within slave society had enormous implications for the lives of southern women, black and white. While slavery is usually considered a system for organizing labor and producing profit, it was also a way of organizing and restraining sexual and reproductive relations, of controlling which sexual encounters produced legitimate children. In other words, managing race necessitated managing gender and sexuality. Plantation Mistresses The link between racial inequality and gender ideals is evident in the effusive literary and rhetorical praise devoted to the southern white feminine ideal. Elite white women in plantation society were elevated to a lofty pedestal that was the ideological inverse of the auction block on which slave women’s fate was sealed. As in the North, white women were supposed to be selfless, pure, pious, and possessed of great, if subtle, influence over husbands and sons. But the difference in the South was that white women’s purity was defined in contrast not to the condition of men but to the condition of black slave women. As slavery came under more and more open criticism from northern opponents during the nineteenth century, rhetorical devotion to elite white women’s leisure and culture, to the preservation of their beauty and their sexual innocence, and to their protection from all distress and labor intensified. The message seemed to be that the purity of elite white womanhood, rather than the enslavement of black people, was the core value of southern society. “We behold,” proclaimed southern writer Thomas Dew, “the marked efficiency of slavery on the conditions of woman — we find her at once elevated, clothed with all her charms, mingling with and directing the society to which she belongs, no longer the slave, but the equal and the idol of man.”27 For the most part, women of the slaveholding class also held to the opinion that a lady’s life on a southern plantation was a great privilege. Any greater political and economic rights for white women were “but a piece of negro emancipation,” declared Louisa McCord, daughter of an important South Carolina slaveholder and politician, in 1852.28 She was sure that women like herself wanted no part of such a movement. Whereas in the North, womanly virtues were meant to be universal, in the South, they were proudly exclusionary, applicable only to the few, a mark of the ◆ Women and Slavery natural superiority of the elite and their right to own and command the labor of others. While the northern true woman was praised for her industrious domesticity, in the South a real lady was not allowed to sully herself or risk her charms with any actual labor, which was the mark of the slave. Leisure was especially the privilege of the unmarried young woman of the slaveholding class, who was not only spared any household obligations but also relieved of even the most intimate of responsibilities — dressing herself, for instance — by the presence of personal slaves. “Surrounded with them from infancy, they form a part of the landscape of a Southern woman’s life,” one woman recalled of her servants long after slavery had ended. “They watch our cradles; they are the companions of our sports; it is they who aid our bridal decorations; and they wrap us in our shrouds.”29 Once a woman married, however, she took on managerial responsibility for the household. Unlike their husbands, who hired overseers to manage slaves in the fields, plantation mistresses themselves oversaw the labor of the household slaves and the feeding, clothing, and doctoring of the entire labor force. One admittedly unusual plantation mistress, who insisted that she was more put upon than privileged by the ownership of slaves, recalled that when she heard the news of the Emancipation Proclamation, she exclaimed, “Thank heaven! I too shall be free at last!”30 Because slavery was a labor system in which there were no positive incentives for hard work, the management of workers relied almost entirely on threats and punishments, including beatings. Within the household, the discipline of slaves was the responsibility of the mistress. The association of allegedly delicate womanhood with brutal violence was a disturbing aspect of the slave system, even to its most passionate adherents. Opponents of slavery played endlessly on this theme to indicate the fundamental corruption of the system, which reached even to the women of slaveholding families. “There are female tyrants too, who are prompt to lay their complaints of misconduct before their husbands, brothers, and sons, and to urge them to commit acts of violence against their helpless slaves,” wrote Angelina Grimké, daughter of a powerful southern slaveowner, who left the South in 1829 to fight against the system (see pp. 235–36). “Other mistresses who cannot bear that their delicate ears should be pained by the screams of the poor sufferers, write an order to the master of the Charleston workhouse . . . to render the stroke of the whip or the blow of the paddle more certain to produce cuts and wounds.”31 In the South, as in the North, marriage for free women legally prohibited them from the privileges of property ownership. Changing this practice was one of the initial goals of the American women’s rights movement (see pp. 240–43), within which southern white women, committed to the plantation patriarchy, were notoriously absent. Thus it is ironic that the first states to liberalize property laws for married women were southern — Mississippi (in 1839) and Arkansas (in 1840). They did so in order to protect the inheritance of slave ownership. Far more than middle-class northern women, elite southern women were expected to bring dowries — wealth packages — into their marriages, and it was not uncommon for a young woman to bring into her new home slaves from her parents’ plantation. This was one of the many ways in which slaves were separated from their own families. 177 178 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 To protect their daughters — and the family property that had been transferred with them — against spendthrift husbands, southern patriarchs modified married women’s property laws to allow wives to retain title to inherited property. The first married women’s property law to be reformed in the North in response to pressure from women’s rights activists was not until 1848 in New York State. In all other ways, however, the slave system made for more severe constraints on free women than in the North. The rhetorical weight that rested on elite white women’s purity meant that women’s public activities were extremely limited. Unlike northern women, respectable southern white women had no means of earning money. Women who remained unmarried faced futures as marginal members in the households of their married kin. Whatever education existed for young women was oriented to the ornamental graces rather than more serious subjects. The sorts of charitable societies that northern middle-class women formed to care for the indigent and poor did not exist in the South, although plantation mistresses, defensive about whether they were sufficiently benevolent, frequently claimed that the care and feeding of their own slaves constituted an equivalent moral responsibility. For the most part, slaveholding women and men did not regard themselves as heading up a brutal and inhumane system. On the contrary, they were convinced that the society over which they presided, which elevated them to lives of such enviable grace and culture, was the best of all possible worlds, certainly better than the lives led by money-grubbing capitalists and degraded wage workers in the North. They regarded their slaves as well treated compared to the northern wage earners, whom they believed were ignored and eventually abandoned, their welfare of no concern to bosses who wanted only to exploit their labor and then dispose of them. “How enviable were our solidarity as a people, our prosperity and the moral qualities that are characteristic of the South,” one southern matron mourned many years after the Civil War. Even in retrospect, she believed that white southerners’ “love of home, their chivalrous respect for women, their courage, their delicate sense of honour, their constancy . . . [all] are things by which the more mercurial people of the North may take a lesson.”32 Non-elite White Women While the power of southern society lay in the hands of the plantation elite, the majority of whites were not large slaveholders. Indeed, close to three-quarters of all white families owned no slaves and relied on their own labor, occasionally hiring a slave or two from a neighbor. Even the great majority of those who did own slaves were working farmers themselves, living and laboring alongside the few slaves they owned. These small farmers are often called yeomen, a British term signifying the nonnoble agricultural classes. The slave system would not have worked without the active support of the many white people who did not profit personally from it. Non-elite white men patrolled the roads for runaway slaves, voted in favor of aggressively proslavery state governments, and served as overseers and skilled craftsmen on the great plantations. ◆ Women and Slavery Women on the small farms and modest households of the South had much less interaction with planter culture than did their husbands. There was no common women’s culture that linked them to plantation mistresses — another difference with the North. Indeed, the class gap between elite and non-elite whites was clearest when it came to women’s roles. While elite women lived lives of leisure in their grand plantation houses, women of the yeoman class worked very hard both outside and inside their small homes. They continued to produce goods mainly for their own family’s consumption, for instance, spinning and wearing homespun long after northern farm women were purchasing factory-made cloth. They sold a smaller portion of their produce for cash than those in the North. About the only thing that took such non-elite southern women away from their homes and farms was church. And even there, they lacked the numerous voluntary activities and associations that Protestant women formed in the North in pursuit of moral uplift. Although southern yeomen had few or no slaves over whom to establish their patriarchal authority, they did have wives. Thus female subordination was prized in this sector of southern society. If the difference between the lives of non-elite and elite women was one of the most pronounced distinctions among southern whites, the ethic of male headship bonded white men across class boundaries. “As masters of dependents, even if only, or perhaps if especially, of wives and children,” one historian observes, “every freeman was bound to defend his household, his property, against invasion.”33 Slave Women When we recall Tocqueville’s confident assertion in 1830 that American women were so privileged and honored that they “never labor in the fields,” we begin to see the degree to which the slave women of the South were not only ignored in all the sweeping generalizations of true womanhood but also excluded from the category of “woman” altogether. Ninety percent of the slave women of the South labored in the cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice fields that generated the region’s wealth. Plantation patriarchy extolled an image of slaves who provided personal and domestic service in their own households (see Figures 4.9 and 4.10, pp. 212 and 213), but these were a small minority. It was the giant mass of agricultural slaves on whom the power of the planter class rested. Nowhere in early nineteenth-century America was labor less separated by gender than in the fields of the plantation South. Slave women and men hoed and planted and reaped alongside each other in gangs that worked from sunup to sundown. For purposes of accounting and sale, women were regarded as partial “hands,” but the lore of the plantation is full of stories of individual women famous for their strength and ability to work as hard as any man. A former slave named Ophelia Settle Egypt remembered that her mother “could do anything. She cooked, washed, ironed, spun, nursed, and labored in the field. She made as good a field hand as she did a cook.” Egypt recalled, with some pride, that her mother could “outwork any nigger in the country. I’d bet my life on that.”34 On the larger plantations, where some specialization of labor was possible, slave men practiced skills 179 180 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 ◆ How Slavery Improves the Condition of Women This illustration was published in The Anti-Slavery Almanac in 1838, just as women in abolitionism were becoming more assertive. The title ironically juxtaposes the evils of slavery and the ideology of female purity and protection. Not only does it show slave women being whipped and beaten, but it suggests that the white mistress herself has become brutalized by joining in the violence. Private Collection/The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images. such as blacksmithing and carpentering while individual women might gain reputations as slave midwives, but overall, the demands of slave labor made little distinction by sex. Even among household slaves, estimated at about 10 percent of the labor force of the South, men served as personal valets, as butlers, and occasionally even as nursemaids for their owners’ young sons. In other ways, however, slave women’s lives were distinguished from those of slave men. The particular vulnerabilities of their sex were exploited when they were beaten. Numerous stories record that slave women’s skirts were raised over their heads before whippings, to humiliate them and perhaps to make their physical sufferings greater. Only a woman in the late stages of pregnancy might be spared the worst whippings, and only then to protect her baby, who, when born, would be worth a great deal to the slaveowner. Similarly, after giving birth, women were suspended from field labor just briefly. Northern visitors commented frequently on the sight of an old slave woman bringing infants to the fields so that their young mothers could nurse them quickly and return to work. When beatings failed to discipline female slaves who resisted their masters’ control, sale was an even greater threat, especially if it meant separating a woman from her child. A ◆ Women and Slavery READING INTO THE PAST Mary Boykin Chesnut Slavery a Curse to Any Land The diary kept by the South Carolina slave mistress Mary Boykin Chesnut (1823–1886) has long been regarded as a major source for insights into the minds of southern slaveholders. More recently, historians have explored Chesnut’s views on the position of the women of this class. In her writings about the hidden but extensive sexual relations between slaveholding men and their female slaves, why does she seem so resentful of rather than sympathetic to slave women? March 14, 1861: I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. . . . [W]e live surrounded by prostitutes. An abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house elsewhere. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or Mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t name. God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system & wrong & iniquity. Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad. This is only what I see: like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives & their concubines, & the Mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children — & every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think — . . . . My disgust sometimes is boiling over — . . . . Thank God for my countrywomen — alas for the men! No worse than men everywhere, but the lower their mistresses, the more degraded they must be. Source: Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie (1905; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 21. runaway slave named Mrs. James Stewart told the story of a Maryland woman who was punished for resisting her master in all these ways: after beating her, the master controlled her by “taking away her clothes and locking them up. . . . He kept her at work with only what she could pick up to tie on her for decency. He took away her child which had just begun to walk. . . . He waited [to whip her] until she was confined [pregnant].”35 As chattels rather than persons with rights, slaves were not permitted legally binding marriage contracts, which might interfere with the master’s right to buy and sell them away from their husbands or wives. Nonetheless, men and women 181 182 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 READING INTO THE PAST Harriet Jacobs Trials of Girlhood Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) was born a slave in North Carolina. From the age of fifteen, she was sexually harassed by an older white man who wanted her as his concubine. After a decade, she escaped from his home, but because of her attachment to her children, she stayed nearby, hidden in the cramped attic room of relatives. There she remained for seven years until she and her daughter finally fled the South. So extraordinary was Jacobs’s story that its legitimacy was long doubted, but recent historians have substantiated virtually everything about her story, including her authorship. How does her response to sexual assault indicate her resistance to the dehumanization of slavery? I now entered on my fifteenth year — a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import. I tried to treat them with indifference or contempt. . . . He was a crafty man, and resorted to many means to accomplish his purposes. Sometimes he had stormy, terrific ways, that made his victims tremble; sometimes he assumed a gentleness that he thought must surely subdue. Of the two, I preferred his stormy moods, although they left me trembling. He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I turned under slavery went to great lengths to sustain conjugal and parental relationships. Frequently, such bonds linked women and men who belonged to different masters. In these “abroad marriages,” it usually fell to the man to visit his wife and children. Often traveling at night to visit his family, without his master’s knowledge or permission, the abroad husband risked being whipped or even sold away. (See Primary Sources: “Two Slave Love Stories,” pp. 193–200.) Slaves had their own ritual for solemnizing their marriages, by together “jumping the broom.” Masters might attend such ceremonies and even amuse themselves by providing for elaborate slave weddings that mimicked their own. But everyone understood that the bottom line was the slave’s status as property, not her emotional attachment to another slave. When the Civil War ended slavery in the South, many African Americans showed extraordinary determination in traveling great distances to find spouses long lost to sale. ◆ Women and Slavery from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him — where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature. He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny. But where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men. The mistress, who ought to protect the helpless victim, has no other feelings towards her but those of jealousy and rage. The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe. . . . Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves. Perhaps the child’s own mother is among those hated ones. She listens to violent outbreaks of jealous passion, and cannot help understanding what is the cause. She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to tremble when she hears her master’s footfall. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave. Source: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Seven Years Concealed (Boston: published for the author, 1861), ch. 5. Motherhood also distinguished the lives of slave women from those of slave men. For slave women, childbearing was simultaneously the source of their greatest personal satisfaction and their greatest misery, because their children ultimately belonged to the master. Slave mothers had the immensely difficult task of teaching their children to survive their owners’ power and at the same time to know their own worth as human beings. Many decades later, one woman remembered how her mother spoke to her daily about the cruelties of slavery. Still young enough to be treated as her owners’ pet, the child did not believe her mother until the master announced that her mother was to be sold away. “I felt for the first time in my life that I had been abused,” she recalled. “My mother had been right. Slavery was cruel, so very cruel.”36 Sexual relations between masters and slave women were an open secret in the South, heartily denied by slaveowners and yet virtually endemic to the society. The 183 184 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 READING INTO THE PAST Beloved Children: Cherokee Women Petition the National Council The expansion of chattel slavery and plantation agriculture into the lower South required the United States to assist its property-hungry citizens to take over the lands of the Native peoples living there. In the early nineteenth century, the federal government negotiated a number of land cessions in treaties with southern tribes, including the Cherokee. In 1817, thirteen Cherokee women sent this petition to their own National Council to warn against the transfer of any more lands to white ownership. Among the signers was eighty-year-old Nancy Ward, whose high standing among her people harked back to an earlier age in which women shared political and social authority with men. The signers spoke for those women who had given up their traditional agricultural responsibilities in favor of American domestic tasks, such as making clothing. Nonetheless, their words indicate a continuing identification through their gender with the land. How is this reflected in their petition? May 2, 1817 The Cherokee ladys now being present at the meeting of the chiefs and warriors in council have thought it their duty as mothers to address their beloved chiefs and warriors now assembled. Our beloved children and head men of the Cherokee Nation, we address you warriors in council. We have raised all of you on the land which we now have, which God gave us to inhabit and raise provisions. We know light complexions and white features of numerous nineteenth-century slaves were eloquent testimony to this intimate connection between slave and master. Mary Boykin Chesnut, a member of South Carolina’s slaveholding aristocracy, knew of this hidden reality. Her diaries are much quoted by historians for what they reveal about slave society’s contradictions (see Reading into the Past: “Slavery a Curse to Any Land,” p. 181). While running afoul of Christian morality, masters’ sexual exploitation of slave women was encouraged by everything else about the slave system: the master was the legal owner of the slave woman’s sexuality and reproductive capacity along with her labor; any child born of a slave woman was also a slave, thus benefiting the master financially; and a slave woman could occasionally gain small favors for herself or her children through sexual relations with her master. In one of the bestknown accounts of a master’s sexual aggression toward a female slave, Harriet ◆ Women and Slavery that our country has once been extensive, but by repeated sales [it] has become circumscribed to a small track, and [we] never have thought it our duty to interfere in the disposition of it till now. If a father or mother was to sell all their lands which they had to depend on, which their children had to raise their living on, [it] would be indeed bad & [so would it to] be removed to another country. We do not wish to go to an unknown country to which we have understood some of our children wish to go over the Mississippi, but this act of our children would be like destroying your mothers. Your mothers, your sisters ask and beg of you not to part with any more of our land. We say ours. You are our descendants; take pity on our request. But keep it for our growing children, for it was the good will of our creator to place us here, and you know our father, the great president, will not allow his white children to take our country away. Only keep your hands off of paper talks for it’s our own country. For [if] it was not, they would not ask you to put your hands to paper, for it would be impossible to remove us all. For as soon as one child is raised, we have others in our arms, for such is our situation & [they] will consider our circumstance. Therefore, children, don’t part with any more of our lands but continue on it & enlarge your farms. Cultivate and raise corn & cotton and your mothers and sisters will make clothing for you which our father the president has recommended to us all. . . . Nancy Ward to her children: Warriors to take pity and listen to the talks of your sisters. Although I am very old yet [I] cannot but pity the situation in which you will here [sic] of their minds. I have great many grand children which [I] wish them to do well on our land. Source: Presidential Papers Microfilm: Andrew Jackson (Washington, D.C., 1961, series 1, reel 22). Jacobs described how, when she was only fifteen, her master began to insist that she have sex with him (see Reading into the Past: “Trials of Girlhood,” pp. 182–83). In the end, she thwarted her master’s intentions but only by finding another older white man to become her lover, a moral compromise for which she expressed deep shame for the rest of her life. Modern DNA analysis has strengthened suspicion that even Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States, was implicated in the sexual and reproductive underside of slavery. The likelihood that he had a long sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, starting when she was only fourteen and resulting in the birth of several children, suggests how commonplace masters’ appropriations of their female slaves’ bodies were. Modern efforts to render the Hemings-Jefferson relationship as a great interracial love story ignore the absolutely unrestrained white male power inherent in the structures of slavery. 185 186 CHAPTER 4 Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block, 1800–1860 The issue of deliberate breeding was an explosive one in the slave South. Opponents of slavery accused owners of encouraging and arranging pregnancies among their female slaves to produce more slaves to sell on the lucrative internal slave market. Evidence suggests that they were right. “Marsa used to sometimes pick our wives fo’ us,” former slave Charles Grandy recalled. “Marsa would stop de old niggertrader and buy you a woman. . . . All he wanted was a young healthy one who looked like she could have children, whether she was purty or ugly as sin.”37 Women of childbearing age who were described as “good breeders” brought a higher price on the auction block. The southern elite understandably resented the charges that they deliberately bred the slaves whom they claimed to protect, but the economic development of slavery in its last decades certainly points in this direction. In the nineteenth century, slavery expanded into what was called the “new” or “lower” South (western Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas). This move was greatly facilitated by a sustained, concerted effort of landhungry whites, aided by the state governments of Georgia and the Carolinas, to push the Indian peoples of the Southeast — the Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and especially Cherokees — off their extensive lands. The Cherokees in particular had tried to adapt to American society and resist land sales (see Reading into the Past: “Cherokee Women Petition the National Council”), and Cherokee women had learned the domestic tasks of housewifery. Cherokee leader Sequoyah had devised a written language, enabling the translation of the Christian Bible and the drafting of a political constitution. Some Cherokees even became slaveholders. But all of these efforts at assimilation proved ineffective once Andrew Jackson was elected president. Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 through Congress and then, ignoring Supreme Court decisions partially favoring Cherokee sovereignty, sent federal troops to Georgia to execute it. In 1838, the Cherokees were forcibly driven into the newly established Indian Territory west of the Mississippi, across what the Cherokees called the “Trail of Tears.” The lands taken from them became the center of slave-grown cotton and tobacco productivity. Meanwhile, in the older southern states of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, where soil had become exhausted and productivity slumped, slaves themselves became a kind of crop, a surplus to be sold. Any hope that the solidarities of gender might have crossed the boundaries of race and class was crushed by the burden that slave concubinage laid on southern society. Jealous or suspicious mistresses vented on their slaves the anger and rage they dared not express to their husbands. Harriet Jacobs feared her mistress every bit as much as she did her master. Female slaves who worked in the plantation house were at greatest risk, exposed day in and day out to the mistress’s moods. Slave narratives frequently describe an impatient or intolerant mistress striking out at a cook or a nursemaid or even a slave child unable to handle an assigned task. In their diaries and letters, slaveowning white women recorded their secret fears of violent retribution from slaves. As Civil War was breaking out, Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote anxiously about the death of a cousin who, it was suspected, had been “murdered by her own people.”38 Although both black and white women suffered in the slave system, slave women knew they could expect no sympathy from their mistresses. The luxury and culture of the white southern woman were premised on the forced labor and sexual ◆ Conclusion: True Womanhood and the Reality of Women’s Lives oppression of her slaves. Violence against and violations of slave women mocked southern deference to womanhood and female sexual purity. With only the rarest of exceptions, slavery turned black and white women against each other and set their interests and their perspectives in direct opposition. ◆ CONCLUSION: True Womanhood and the Reality of Women’s Lives Perhaps at no other time in American history were the prescriptions for a proper domestic role for women more precise and widely agreed on than in antebellum America. Much of the young country’s hope for stability and prosperity rested on the belief in a universally achievable middle-class family order, with the devoted, selfless wife and mother at the center. As we shall see in the next chapter, some women were able to use the ideology of true womanhood to expand their sphere in subtle ways, but even so, this ideology was exceedingly rigid and limiting, ignoring the reality of women who led very different sorts of lives. Factory operatives were outside the boundaries of acceptable womanhood because they lived and worked in what Godey’s Lady’s Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale called “the accursed bank note world” that only men were supposed to occupy.39 And slave women were deprived — absolutely — of the protection and privileges that were meant to compensate true women for their limited sphere. While the rhetoric of true womanhood seemed to place domestic women at the heart of American society, in reality the giant processes in which these other women were caught up — industrialization and slavery — were the dynamic forces shaping the young American nation and foreshadowing the trends and crises of its future. 187 P R I M A R Y S O U R C E S Prostitution in New York City, 1858 A s chief physician in the 1850s for the New York City “lock hospital” (where prostitutes suspected of venereal diseases were both incarcerated and treated), Dr. William Sanger had both knowledge of and compassion for the women he attended. Hopeful that more accurate information would help to eradicate prostitution, he interviewed two thousand prostitutes, using a carefully drawn-up set of questions. He was determined to bring the facts of prostitution to light and to convey the prostitutes’ experiences and thoughts more realistically. The originals of Sanger’s interviews were destroyed in a fire the year after he gathered them, so his published report to the trustees of the New York Alms House brings us as close as we can get to the prostitutes themselves. Interestingly, Sanger did no research into the men who were the prostitutes’ clientele. Sanger’s sample, although not randomly selected, was large enough to allow for useful generalizations: most prostitutes were from fifteen to twenty years old; three-fifths were native-born; among the immigrants, 60 percent were Irish; onefifth were married; half had children; half were or had been domestic servants; half were afflicted with syphilis; the average length of life after entering prostitution was four years. Sanger estimated that six thousand women were engaged in commercial sex in New York City, a number based on his careful survey of police records, lock hospitals, and known brothels. Others estimated much higher numbers. Even so, Sanger’s estimates were distressing. As Sanger repeatedly insisted, they reflected not the inherent lack of virtue of the prostitutes but rather the relentless financial pressure on poor urban women. The effects of a sharp economic depression in 1857 are detected everywhere in the prostitutes’ descriptions of their situations. Sanger believed that women were too often blamed for prostitution; he wanted to show that they were the victims, both of men’s callousness and their own lack of economic opportunity. Despite these reformist sentiments, however, Sanger held conventional notions of femininity. Indeed, he championed prostitutes because he was certain that most women would never of their own accord undertake a life of casual sex. Rather, he believed, they must have been deserted, seduced, driven by destitution, or forced into prostitution by some other extraordinary event over which they had no control. Underlying his compassion for those who were remorseful, the traces of a harsher set of judgments can be found. Thus Sanger’s report can be read as evidence of middle-class attitudes toward female sexuality, as well as of prostitutes’ own experience. 188 PRIMARY SOURCES: Prostitution in New York City, 1858 189 What follows is Sanger’s summary and analysis of the two thousand answers given to one of his most revealing questions: “What are the causes of your becoming a prostitute?” As you read, think about how the personal stories that Sanger relates allow us to imagine a more complicated set of explanations for individual women’s entry into prostitution than the categories he uses. William W. Sanger The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects throughout the World (1858) [Question:]What are the causes of your becoming a prostitute? . . . Causes Inclination Destitution Seduced and abandoned Drink, and the desire to drink Ill-treatment of parents, relatives, or husbands As an easy life Bad company Persuaded by prostitutes Too idle to work Violated Seduced on board emigrant ships Seduced in emigrant boarding houses Total Numbers 513 525 258 181 164 124 84 71 29 27 16 8 2000 This question is probably the most important of the series, as the replies lay open to a considerable extent those hidden springs of evil which have hitherto been known only from their results. First in order stands the reply [which 513 respondents chose], “Inclination,” which can only be understood as meaning a voluntary resort to prostitution in order to gratify the sexual passions. . . . Source: William W. Sanger, T...
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