Section I: The Domestic Traditions
Chapter I: The Conventions of Girlhood
"Creatures of circumstance who waited to be fallen in love with. . . . We stood and waited—on approval. And then came life itself and tore our mother's theories to tatters."
—Cicely Hamilton.
"The chief element of a good time . . . as these countless rich young women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel you are looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one of its chief joys. . . . My cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle caressed them with parcels and checks. . . . So far as marriage went, the married state seemed at once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them, composed in equal measure of becoming important and becoming old. I don't know what they thought about children. I doubt if they thought about them at all."
—H. G. Wells.
"Fine girls sittin' like shopkeepers behind their goods, waitin' and waitin' and waitin'. . . ."
—Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Feminine life in the middle Nineteenth Century, and to a degree now almost inconceivable, was permeated with the current traditions of what good women had been, and by the assumption that these stood for the pattern of what they should still be. From the moment of birth their sex was outwardly marked by the color of their ribbons, which became the embodiment, as it were, of their discreet and pallid characteristics. Throughout the weeks that followed the mother watched impatiently to see whether the baby's hair would be curly—" for curly hair is so pretty in a girl, you know." By the time the infant could walk and talk, she had learned that there were things taboo for her which were perfectly proper for the little male creatures of her kind: she might not yell, nor romp, nor scuffle, nor, in short, "be a tomboy," because it was not nice for a little girl.
While the little boys of her age were gradually emancipated from lingerie garments, she still remained the charming baby-doll of the household. Her clothes continued to be made of light-colored and fragile materials, which she was constantly adjured not to soil. Her complexion, her hair, her tiny hands and feet were discussed in her presence as if they were marketable assets. Almost the first words in her vocabulary were "nice" and "pretty;" the one subtly stimulating sex-consciousness, the other associated with her physical limitations and the good looks which were to be a chief end of her existence. For her alone was coined the phrase: pretty is that pretty does. Boys did not have to be pretty, only good and smart; and, therefore, in the initial rivalry of the sexes she instinctively learned to lay her emphasis on prettiness. As a consequence, while she was still in knee-length dresses, clothing, manners, and appearance became of superlative importance. Her guardians need not have been surprised, when, a few years later, she became a vain and self-conscious creature, already measuring her beauty against that of other girls, and prematurely trying it on the males of her acquaintance.
But alas for her if her hair did not curl—if she turned out plain, or "not so pretty as her mother was"! She heard from grandmothers and other ladies of fading complexions and charms, over their needlework and tea, a chorus of pity. Many a little girl has cried her eyes out in secret because she had straight hair, large ears, or a muddy skin. This constant emphasis upon appearance had the effect, upon one temperament, of concentrating the desire of her whole nature on the attainment of conventional prettiness; upon another more sensitive one to create a morbid embarrassment amounting to tragedy; and sometimes upon stronger natures, to turn their aspirations toward some form of practical efficiency or to intellectual pursuits. However it turned out, before the girl-child was ten years old she had received an indelible impression that beauty, particularly a purely physical and luscious loveliness—such as would have been a disadvantage to a boy—was the most important attainment of a young girl's life.
Very early in this process of inculcating femininity it was necessary to check and pervert her physical impulses. Like the racing-horse, she must be trained while yet a colt never to break her gait. The goal of conventional prettiness permitted no indulgence in dirt or sunburn, therefore she could not run or play freely out-of-doors nor develop her muscles in competitive games that required speed and wind, a quick eye and a sure aim. Being a lively animal, her natural energy would try to find outlet somewhere at first, according to her temperament and coerced by her parents' ideals of woman's sphere. If she had a robust body and a strong-willed, original personality, she would kick over the traces and break through the corral fence a good many times before the habits of domestication became ingrained. Such a temperament was always a source of trouble until she submitted to the life predestined for her by the traditions of her foremothers. She was, indeed, fortunate if her temper was not embittered, her health undermined, or her life made unhappy by the thwarting of her natural character.
But if she were born not too vigorous, and both docile and pretty, her path was smooth for her from the very beginning. Before she had mastered her letters she learned the horror of dirt, and set out on that approved career of dainty fastidiousness which is the glory of womankind. Instead of developing her muscles in large, free movements, she spent her placid girlhood in dressing girl-dolls that were models of ladylikeness; in giving little girls' tea-parties, where the social game of their elders was imitated in the exhibition of best clothes, the practice of polite, conversational gossip, and the rehearsal of the attractive arts; and in learning to make patchwork and her own clothes, prize cakes and fancy jellies—if her mother were of the older school; or, at a later date, in doing monstrous fancywork and embroidering her undergarments.
While her brothers played baseball and shinny or went swimming, she sat on a piano-stool, with her feet a few inches from the floor, practising the hour or two a day necessary to attain a meager proficiency. For in that day the ideal young lady must play the piano; not at all because she had musical talent worthy of serious cultivation, or because it was a necessary equipment for life—one scarcely knows why, unless to keep her out of mischief, or, perhaps, to make her more alluring to that future husband who might like a little music in the evenings now and then to soothe his nerves.
Nor was her domestic training of a much more thorough sort, although the tradition that the women of the household should be cooks and manufacturers was still widespread. Among middle-class American families the domestic habits of Europe persisted long after manufactured goods were to be had in stores, and even at the beginning of a new century country women are still canning fruit, making bedding, crocheting lace—still clinging to the handicrafts of a by-gone industrial period. But the daughters of the latter half of the Nineteenth Century have had, on the one hand, slight respect for these homely accomplishments; and, on the other, scant opportunity for training in the more serious duties of administration of the household.
The feminine training of the Eighteenth Century was purely domestic; that of our generation purely academic; and thus there has been at least sixty years in the interim when girls were brought up almost without education for domestic life, and wholly without practical preparation for any other kind of life. During this period the manufacture of cotton and woolen goods in factories was superseding domestic processes; and even the preparation of food products was being transferred from the home to large collective agencies. As the processes of production were taken out of the house the physically stronger girls and women without male support followed it into the factory, there to become producers again, or into great department stores, to be distributors. But the great body of mothers and daughters left behind in homes still clung instinctively to the convention that domestic life was the economic sphere of women, although the necessary handicrafts which had made it so were all but gone.
The housewife of the Eighteenth Century earned her own living, and often quite half that of the family, by her labor, beside bearing and rearing children; and many women in our time, on the other hand, are rapidly acquiring economic independence; but, in the century between, thousands of women in America scarcely earned their salt. Not because they were lazy or incapable, but because the older ideal did not permit any but a serving-woman to go outside the home to earn money, and the occupations which had formerly made the home both a workshop and a storehouse no longer demanded their service.
So when our docile young girl in her immaculate frock had tired of playing with dolls and giving mannerly parties, she occupied herself in painting on velvet, in embroidery, crochet, or tatting, and in piano practice, in the intervals of a very polite education. In school she learned the common branches and, if she kept on long enough, acquired a superficial knowledge of English and American literature, made a painful reading-acquaintance with classical French, absorbed a little political history of by-gone European states, and, occasionally, a little mathematical astronomy and polite, herbarium botany. In those days, no knowledge of physiology, no discoveries of the laws of life in the biological laboratory, ever disturbed the guarded decency of the mind of any potential mother of the race.
This purely cultural and well-intentioned, but misdirected, education for young girls was one of the early by-products of the theories of democracy. In the Old World men and women had been born to a definite status in society, in which economic opportunities, duties, training, and even costume, were predetermined; but in the newer world, when the pioneers of the Colonial period had established their families with a competence, it became their ambition to lift their descendants into a higher social class. While the father was earning the money to fulfil their ambition, and the mother continued to practise the traditional handicrafts of the household, the daughters went to school and expressed, by their white-handedness and all but useless accomplishments, the rising social status of the family.
As domestic manufactures were superseded by factory-made products, there was less and less for girls to do at home, and there arose a kind of spurious feminine craft in the shape of inartistic and perfectly useless fancy-work. When the patchwork quilt, the hand-woven bed-cover and linen sheet had been replaced by the manufactured comforter and cheap cotton, women began to devise pillow shams, bedspreads of cloth cut into crazy-shaped pieces, or knitted of a thousand tiny shells. When the feather pillow, which once cost the housewife so much labor, came to be made in quantities by machinery, she turned her ambition into baby-pillows, pine-pillows, headrests, throws, tidies, feather and hair flowers, sofa cushions, and rag rugs—in short, into a vast variety of quasi-ornamental, altogether hideous, and generally useless articles. The tradition that the woman should be a manufacturer—a tradition handed down from the dim ages when the female tanned the skins, wove the mats and blankets, and built the tepee—died slowly, and is not yet wholly vanished.
It may seem very strange that girls did not learn at least to cook, that being the oldest and most universal of women's occupations; and all the more as the chief pride of their mothers lay in housewifery, the center of which lay in the kitchen. As other handicrafts became less imperative, the housewife of the earlier period concentrated her whole mind on feeding her men-folks lavishly. Imbued with the colonial-English tradition of good eating, and spurred on by the rivalry of neighbor women equally energetic, she piled cake, pie, doughnuts, preserved fruit, and pancakes, with meat and vegetables, on the creaking table. She would doubtless have insisted on her pretty daughter learning to make all these elaborate dishes as she had learned them from her own mother, but for the arrival of thousands of immigrant Irish and German servants to give her cheap and willing assistance.
Nobody, not even a sturdy pioneer woman, continues to do hard manual labor when it is no longer either compulsory or admirable. The highly-skilled house-mother, remembering the hot stove, the aching feet, and the never-ending "woman's work," wanted her daughters to have an easier life than she had had, and was glad to accept the help of clumsy peasant hands in order to release them from such hardship. Moreover, the plain American fathers and mothers still associated gentle-hood with freedom from manual labor of an obligatory kind, and would not permit their soft-handed daughters to compete with foreign servant girls.
During the years of adolescence girls went to school, not because they expected to use the education they were getting in any practical way, but largely to fill up the time in a ladylike manner until they should be courted and married. If now and then some girl—too plain to join in the beauty contest, or too vital and ambitious to be contented with so tame a program of life—attempted to break through the meshes of the feminine cult into a larger sphere, she found few opportunities for solid education or occupation open to her, and was greeted with general disapproval. If she had a sturdy, fighting temper, and a love of learning or achievement, she sometimes threw away her pack of feminine traditions and took the trail in pursuit of the ideal. It was, indeed, a desert that they traveled—those first, few, strong-minded young women—and, however the adventure turned out, the effect of opposition, of lack of sympathy and opportunity, the starvation of the natural human soul hungering for justice and for the approval of its kind, could only be to pervert character. Some came out of the struggle strong creatures, but masculine imitations rather than fully developed women; others, maddened by injustice or misunderstanding, set their hands against every man, championing wild or premature causes; but the larger number disappeared from history, merely defeated feminine souls carrying too great a handicap.
During all those years when plain and pretty girls alike were growing up, they came somehow to know that their destiny was to be married. Not that any one asked them what they were going to be or do—that would have been quite improper or might have precipitated questions which girls should not ask. Their brothers, even before they left the grammar school, were encouraged to talk of their future occupations, and to make preparation for them. But while girls heard from the pulpit and the rostrum, and read in the harmless romances of Sunday-school books or ladies' magazines, that marriage and motherhood were the inevitable and only admirable career of woman, nothing was ever said to them, except by way of a joke, about either. Indirectly, some conscientious mothermight approach it shamefacedly, suggesting that the daughter should learn some household task, "because you may have a home of your own, some day;" but never a serious word was said about wifehood and motherhood. The atmosphere of prudery surrounding marriage and child-bearing, which was all but universal a century ago, is still common enough among ignorant women, who will never discuss before a spinster of any age, not even before a charity visitor, the facts incident to pregnancy. While boys were learning in the farmyard and from other men the facts and processes of reproduction, girls walked in a mist of secrecy and innuendo. When their mothers were bearing children they were sent away from home on some pretense, lest they should witness the great travail and be afraid; or, perhaps, because their parents were ashamed; or, it may be, solely because the convention was that young girls must be kept "innocent."
But girls are no more fools than boys, and the atmosphere of prudish or vulgar suggestion aroused in the keen-witted ones a determination to know how babies came, and what marriage meant. Many a young girl, not daring to ask what she wanted to know of older women, got a perverted knowledge from vulgar-minded servants, or from the medical dictionaries in the library; or puzzled out the obscene advertisements and tragedies of the half-world covertly described in the newspapers; or pored over the sexual horrors of the ancient scriptures, to satisfy her curiosity.
In the less curious and less original type of girl the conventional silence about her future career created a shrinking disgust from the facts of reproductive life. She became ashamed of her functions without knowing why. She could not help seeing that the figures of women were not beautiful during gestation, and that pregnancy and childbirth were a period of inconvenience, if not of semi-invalidism. While the "glory" of motherhood was constantly preached at her, she heard women criticising the indecency of wives who appeared in public in the later months of pregnancy, and sometimes saw the lascivious smiles, or overheard the comments of men upon them. Nor could she escape knowing that some men were wild beasts, nor the suggestion that men in general were not to be trusted in the dark. Thus everything in her own nature and everything in the social influences about her tended to produce repulsion, if not terror, for the only approved destiny held out before her.
Meanwhile, during the adolescent years of both the inquisitive and the acquiescent young woman, her mind was being colored by the effeminate fiction of the day, whose chief note was love and lovers, with a happy ending in marriage. That the experiences of the heroine did not seem to correspond with the lives of the women she knew, made it all the more alluring. In this dream-world there were no puzzling and inevitable facts of nature-the lover was always pure and brave and considerate; the heroine beautiful and adored. There was no baby even, as in real life, to precipitate difficulties, except on the last page, when he might arrive to fulfil the hope of an heir to some great property.
Somewhere along this road of female destiny the girl received a shock; from the newspapers, perhaps, or more often through some tragedy in her own community, she heard that some unhappy girl had murdered her baby or ended her unwedded romance in suicide. Then, suddenly, if she were capable of reasoning at all, she would realize that motherhood was only considered sacred when licensed by the State and by the Church.
At last, when she had filled in a few years following her schooldays with "helping her mother," "going into society," playing the piano, and teaching a Sunday-school class, and in modestly trying out her charms on the young men of her acquaintance, The Lover arrived. It is not without reason that the period of courtship has been depicted from time immemorial as the happiest of life. The exhilaration of quickening instinct, the zest of the game of advance and retreat, the grateful mutual flattery, are full of joy to the woman even more than to the man. For while to the man it might become the highest experience of his life if the ending were happy, it seldom had the full allurement of novelty. Very few men, probably, brought to their final courtship an unvulgarized mind, a chaste person, and an entire ignorance of the other sex, such as girls are expected to have. To the woman courtship and marriage were the culmination of a long dream, in which her natural instincts and hunger for life—a real life of her own—overcame her fear of men and her innocent dread of the travail of motherhood. Whether their temperaments were really domestic and maternal or not, passion, romance, and a desire for a career, combined with the tradition that marriage is the highest if not the only destiny to make young women take the path of least resistance.
It used to be said that childhood was the happiest time of life, and girlhood, even more than boyhood, full of joy. Certainly it was so when the parents were wise and sympathetic, and the children born with a harmonious temperament in a normal body. But the unconscious joy usually attributed to childhood has not so often existed in fact. Not even yet are parents wise enough to restrain without arbitrary coercion; to make the path of discipline and duty more alluring than that of self-indulgence; and to provide a wholesome outlet for physical energy. Nor are they sympathetic enough to enter into the fearsome questions of the young soul, and, out of the richness of adult experience, guide it till it attains courage and self-poise. In a girlhood such as I have been describing, happiness was only possible to the girl who submitted to the conventional mold. The more vigorous she was, the more potential character she had, the less easy she would find it to conform to the pattern laid before her. And if she did conform she was likely to arrive at womanhood physically undeveloped, and robbed of a part of her bodily vigor; prudish and ignorant, yet eager to be married; without preparation for domestic and maternal cares, and incapable of earning a fair living wage by any other means; and with an abnormally feminized conscience, which had no conception of men or the moral issues of their lives. The girl of the middle Nineteenth Century was fortunate if, by the grace of God and the accident of heedless parents, she sometimes arrived at the goal of marriage a little less docile, pretty, anemic, conscientious, and incompetent than the ideals of her time would have had her become.