system:
I was there in mid-winter, and every morning I was awakened at five, by the bells calling to labor.… Then half an hour only allowed for dinner, from which the time for going and returning was deducted. Then back to the mills, to work till seven o’clock.…[I]t must be remembered that all the hours of labor are spent in rooms where oil lamps, together with from 40 to 80 persons, are exhausting the healthful principle of the air…and where the air is loaded with particles of cotton thrown from thousands of cards, spindles, and looms.
And the life of upper-class women? Frances Trollope, an Englishwoman, wrote in her book Domestic Manners of the Americans:
Let me be permitted to describe the day of a Philadelphian lady of the first class.… She rises, and her first hour is spent in the scrupulously nice arrangement of her dress; she descends to her parlor, neat, stiff, and silent; her breakfast is brought in by her free black footman.… Twenty minutes before her carriage should appear, she retires to her chamber, as she calls it; shakes and folds up her still snow-white apron, smooths her rich dress, and…sets on her elegant bonnet…then walks downstairs, just at the moment that her free black coachman announces to her free black footman that the carriage waits. She steps into it, and gives the word: “Drive to the Dorcas Society.”
At Lowell, the Female Labor Reform Association put out a series of “Factory Tracts.” The first was entitled “Factory Life as It Is By an Operative” and spoke of the textile mill women as “nothing more nor less than slaves in every sense of the word! Slaves, to a system of labor which requires them to toil from five until seven o’clock, with one hour only to attend to the wants of nature—slaves to the will and requirements of the ‘powers that be.’”
Around that time, the New York Herald carried a story about “700 females, generally of the most interesting state and appearance,” meeting “in their endeavor to remedy the wrongs and oppressions under which they labor.” The Herald editorialized: “we very much doubt whether it will terminate in much good to female labor of any description.… All combinations end in nothing.”
Middle-class women, barred from higher education, began to monopolize the profession of primary-school teaching. As teachers, they read more, communicated more, and education itself became subversive of old ways of thinking. They began to write for magazines and newspapers, and started some ladies’ publications. Literacy among women doubled between 1780 and 1840. Women became health reformers. They formed movements against double standards in sexual behavior and the victimization of prostitutes. They joined in religious organizations. Some of the most powerful of them joined the antislavery movement. So, by the time a clear feminist movement emerged in the 1840s, women had become practiced organizers, agitators, and speakers.
When Emma Willard addressed the New York legislature in 1819, she told them that the education of women “has been too exclusively directed to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty.” The problem, she said, was that “the taste of men, whatever it might happen to be, has been made into a standard for the formation of the female character.” Reason and religion teach us, she said, that “we too are primary existences…not the satellites of men.”
In 1821, Willard founded the Troy Female Seminary, the first recognized institution for the education of girls. She wrote later of how she upset people by teaching her students about the human body: “Mothers visiting a class at the Seminary in the early thirties were so shocked.… To preserve the modesty of the girls, and spare them too frequent agitation, heavy paper was pasted over the pages in their textbooks which depicted the human body.”
Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Elizabeth Blackwell got her medical degree in 1849, having overcome many rebuffs before being admitted to Geneva College. She then set up the New York Dispensary for Poor Women and Children “to give to poor women an opportunity of consulting physicians of their own sex.” In her first annual report, she wrote:
My first medical consultarion was a curious experience. In a severe case of pneumonia in an elderly lady I called in consultation a kind-hearted physician of high standing.… This gentleman, after seeing the patient, went with me into the parlour. There he began to walk about the room in some agitation, exclaiming, “A most extraordinary case! Such a one never happened to me before; I really do not know what to do!” I listened in surprise and much perplexity, as it was a clear case of pneumonia and of no unusual degree of danger, until at last I discovered that his perplexity related to me, not to the patient, and to the propriety of consulting with a lady physician!
Oberlin College pioneered in the admission of women. But the first girl admitted to the theology school there, Antoinette Brown, who graduated in 1850, found that her name was left off the class list. With Lucy Stone, Oberlin found a formidable resister. She was active in the peace society and in antislavery work, taught colored students, and organized a debating club for girls. She was chosen to write the commencement address, then was told it would have to be read by a man. She refused to write it.
Lucy Stone began lecturing on women’s rights in 1847 in a church in Gardner, Massachusetts, where her brother was a minister. She was tiny, weighed about one hundred pounds, was a marvelous speaker. As lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society, she was, at various times, deluged with cold water, sent reeling by a thrown book, and attacked by mobs.
When she married Henry Blackwell, they joined hands at their wedding and read a statement:
… we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority….
She was one of the first to refuse to give up her name after marriage. She was “Mrs. Stone.” When she refused to pay taxes because she was not represented in the government, officials took all her household goods in payment, even her baby’s cradle.
After Amelia Bloomer, a postmistress in a small town in New York, developed the bloomer, women activists adopted it in place of the old whale-boned bodice, the corsets and petticoats. The Reverend John Todd (one of his many best-selling books gave advice to young men on the results of masturbation: “the mind is greatly deteriorated”) commented on the new feminist mode of dress:
Some have tried to become semi-men by putting on the Bloomer dress. Let me tell you in a word why it can never be done. It is this: woman, robed and folded in her long dress, is beautiful. She walks gracefully…. If she attempts to run, the charm is gone… Take off the robes, and put on pants, and show the limbs, and grace and mystery are all gone.
Women, after becoming involved in other movements of reform—antislavery, temperance, dress styles, prison conditions—turned, emboldened and experienced, to their own situation. Angelina Grimké, a southern white woman who became a fierce speaker and organizer against slavery, saw that movement leading further:
Let us all first wake up the nation to lift millions of slaves of both sexes from the dust, and turn them into men and then…it will be an easy matter to take millions of females from their knees and set them on their feet, or in other words transform them from babies into women.
Sarah Grimké, Angelina’s sister, wrote:
During the early part of my life, my lot was cast among the butterflies of the fashionable world; and of this class of women, I am constrained to say, both from experience and observation, that their education is miserably deficient; that they are taught to regard marriage as the one thing needful, the only avenue to distinction.…
She said:
All I ask of our
