Section I: The Domestic Traditions

Chapter II: The Great Adventure

"As the vine which has long twined in graceful foliage about the oak, and has been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy plant has been rifled by the thunderbolt, cling around it with its caressing tendrils, and bind up its shattered boughs, so it is beautifully ordained by Providence that woman, who is the ornament and dependent of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity, winding herself into the sudden recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the broken heart."

—From The Lady's Album, 1848.

"Woman has a better, a holier vocation. She works in the elements of human nature. Her orders of architecture are formed in the human soul—Obedience, Temperance, Truth, Love, Piety—these she must build up in the character of her children; often she is called upon to repair the ravages which sin, care, and the desolating storms of life leave in the mind and heart of her husband, whom she reverences and obeys. This task she should perform faithfully but with humility; remembering that it was for woman's sake Eden was forfeited, because Adam loved his wife more than his Creator."

—Mrs. S. J. Hale in Woman's Record, 1872.

"But the woman is the glory of the man. . . . Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man."

—Paul to the Corinthians.

The truest things are the platitudes which everybody speaks, but which few ever think of practising. The sensible men and women of the past century knew then—as they do now—that the betrothal and wedding customs in vogue were preposterous, injurious, and even vulgar; and that the prospective bride and bridegroom were rendered unfit for parenthood by the fatigue of the wedding preparations and the abnormality of their situation. Every father and mother, out of their own experience, could have warned and advised—on matters of housekeeping and property settlements they did so—but on the purposes and consequences of marriage, the one great central relation which concerned the engaged pair and posterity, nothing was said.

It was as if each generation should begin without receiving any cumulated information on the subject of house-building, and should therefore be obliged to try all the experiments and make all the mistakes of previous generations over again. Because of the "conspiracy of silence," young lovers were deprived of every safeguard of knowledge in respect to sex and parenthood. It is impossible to understand the woman's attitude toward marriage, domesticity, and motherhood, unless one visualizes the ignorance and perversion of ideas with which girls came to the great event of their lives. At the risk of tediousness it is necessary to present the material phases of marriage in order that their consequences in diverting attention from the aspects most significant to society, may be comprehended.

To the young girl the engagement ring was the symbol both of obligation and individuality, for by virtue of it she became for the first time in her life a person of importance. To her schoolmates she was an object of envy because she was peeping through the door which they all desired to enter. If the young man were acceptable to her parents, her father was frankly glad to transfer the economic burden of a daughter to another man; while her mother began to treat her with a mixture of respect and solicitude which she could not comprehend. Theoretically she knew that she had incurred an obligation to her betrothed which would some day demand wifely surrender and devotion; but the more protected and innocent she was, the less did she understand what lay behind the veil of marriage. To think definitely of her future relation to her husband and to prepare herself for its consequences would have been as gross an impropriety as to expose her person to his gaze.

Nor was she conscious that she would be expected to submit her will and her opinions as well as her body to his control. Although she heard on Sunday from the pulpit that wives were to obey their husbands; and although she knew that her mother, in all essential matters, submitted to her father, however unwillingly, she trusted that her own charm and shrewdness would prove as potent after marriage as it seemed to be before. For during the spell of unrealized desire the two young lovers idealized each other; and the lover, who had, perhaps, only lately ceased from bullying his mother, and would take it for granted that his wife should defer to him as his mother had yielded to his father, during this one interval deferred to his betrothed. She could not but suppose that a lover so tender and devoted, who brought her gifts and did whatever her whims commanded, would be less dominant than other women's husbands.

Yet if the betrothal were prolonged enough, the lovers would find that golden ring the beginning of a chain against which both would chafe. According to the customs of the time, neither could properly show an interest in any other unmarried person of the opposite sex without giving cause for justifiable jealousy. Although jealousy was generally regarded as a testimony of affection, it was—if the lovers had but known it—merely a mean exhibition of that suspicious, proprietary attitude which would make the marriage a bondage rather than the highest expression of mutual confidence.

The segregation of lovers from the rest of the community, and the taboo surrounding them, was symptomatic of the isolation in which they were to live the rest of their lives. From this time the man must never show any admiration for another woman; and the girl must conceal whatever interest she might have in any other man. In village communities, in church gatherings, in temperance and missionary societies, men herded with men and women flocked with women, losing the stimulus of the social and intellectual comradeship enjoyed by the sexes in modern life. Aside from the monotony of such a society its worst aspect lay in the in-and-in breeding of sex characteristics. Men,associating constantly with men, perpetuated the standards and habits inherited from their fathers; women, corraled by themselves, gossiped of their narrower experiences, perpetuating their own pettiness. Between boy and girl, between lover and maiden, between adult man and woman, stood always the menacing figure of sex with the sword of chastity, lest propriety and property be violated. Not a little of the lack of comprehension of each sex by the other arose from this survival of the ownership of woman, which resulted in a general assumption that neither could have any decent pleasure in the society of any person of the other sex except their own life partner.

The engaged girl, however, was not likely to question or to resent the flattering jealousy of a man whose preference set her for the first time upon a pedestal, even had she not been diverted by the conventional preparations for the marriage. Indeed, the man often became quite subordinate in her mind to the trousseau and the wedding display. Her parents were the more inclined to indulge her extravagant notions—for the last time—because it would reflect credit upon themselves. In the early part of the Nineteenth Century the ordinary bride's outfit followed the traditions of the European peasant woman, and consisted chiefly of the chest of linen and household furnishings made by her own hand; but, as manufactures supplanted home-made articles, the bride devoted more and more attention to the personal trousseau. For months before the wedding-day she cut and fitted and sewed; crocheted and tatted and embroidered; in order that she might be able to exhibit to her female friends and, incidentally, to the bewildered lover, so many dozens of elaborate, hand-made chemises, nightgowns, petticoats; tablecloths, napkins, and towels. And while the bride was working night and day harder than ever before in her life, the proud mother, with scarcely less enthusiasm, assisted the ambitious dressmaker of the neighborhood to contrive as many and as elaborate dresses as possible from the money provided by a father whose pride it was to give his daughter a suitable outfit.

If it be thought that all this was only mere girlish extravagance, let us remember that for the domestic woman the wedding-day was not only the first, but the sole time that she would ever be a person of public interest. Not even if she should bear a son to become the savior of his country, would she be the principal in her family, or so conspicuous a figure in a solemn ceremony. For a day of such importance nothing was quite good enough. The trousseau was as essential to the prospective bride as an outfit to the explorer of arctic or tropical wilds; or, rather, it was like the equipment of a traveler who sets out for an unknown Oriental country—for who knew what might be needed and yet unattainable in the great adventure upon which she was about to embark!

Like other adventurers, she might be taking many inappropriate things. The girl who married a young instructor attached to one of the best colleges might find it necessary to lay away the dozens of delicate undergarments, replacing them with plain, stout materials to be washed with her own hands. The trousseau, at the end of the first year, might be quite useless in view of prospective motherhood; and might be laid away in lavender, never to be resurrected, perhaps, except for some old-folks masquerade devised by her grown-up daughter.

No small part of the enjoyment of the antewedding preparations lay in the receiving of presents. While cities were few in America, and the bulk of the population lived in villages and rural neighborhoods, the custom of bridal gifts was seldom overdone; but, after the war, the increase of wealth and the growth of urban communities gave women, particularly, leisure and excuse for excessive emphasis on the ornamental side of life. The habit of giving wedding presents—as is the tendency of such conventions—became an exaggerated social obligation which has only recently begun to diminish in force. The friends of both families vied with each other in expressing not so much their affection as their social status by the elegance of their contribution to the display. Day after day the bride and her fiancé received them, discussing their beauty, usefulness, and cost in view of the future menage. In a country town, where the neighbors clubbed together to fit out completely the new kitchen, the friendly practicality of the gift was a fit expression of the attitude of the village toward a popular young couple. But more often the gifts were a showy agglomeration of more or less useless or unsuitable articles, in the polite acknowledgment of which the overworked bride spent all her spare time for weeks before and after marriage. All the pleasant excitement attendant upon giving and receiving was likely to be destroyed by the numerous duplications-no bride could accept enthusiastically a sixth cut-glass bowl or a seventh butter-knife. When the wedding etiquette reached the stage where all the presents must be displayed to the givers and the guests in a room set apart for them, the custom had degenerated into undisguised commercialism.

As the great day drew near the bride and her family were usually engaged in a whirl of feverish preparations: the house must be prepared for a wedding breakfast, supper, or reception, the church decorated for the ceremony, the wedding attendants schooled in their parts-even the bride and groom must "rehearse" the pageant in which they were to be the chief figures. Even for a "simple" wedding the fatigue and the expense were invariably greater than had been anticipated, and the higher emotions of all concerned were drowned in the effort to make as much "splurge" as possible, and in anxiety about petty, material details. Thus the parents and the household went to bed on the bridal eve utterly exhausted, and with last admonitions to the young girl to sleep that her beauty might not be dimmed on the morrow.

The wedding-day itself would probably remain forever, in the memories of both bride and groom, a nightmare of jumbled impressions—the confusion and haste of last preparations, the full-dress parade, the blur of curious spectators, even the solemn vows and prayers; the congratulations, tears, and kisses; the eating, drinking, and going away—all alike, to the chief actors in the spectacle, could only be a series of perfunctory performances to be lived through in order that they might be allowed to attain the joy of permanent companionship. It was as if the King's trumpeters had announced from the city towers: "Behold this man and woman about to enter upon the most intimate human relation! See how correct, how respectable they are!"

Meanwhile, during all this furor, the groom had been quite a minor figure, occupied in waiting on the bride, assisting in the preparations, and privately cursing the social traditions which had involved him in so irksome a tangle of splurge and etiquette. If he were a simple, clean-minded fellow, the irritation and the strain of his abnormal position were likely to put him in anything but a loverlike frame of mind; if he were the "average young man," he would probably accept the invitation of his bachelor friends to celebrate the last days of his freedom with an orgy of eating, drinking, and unprintable jests.

The facetious attitude toward marriage was often, in country neighborhoods, carried to the height of a vulgar practical joke in the custom of the "shivaree." Upon the wedding-night or upon the return of the newly-wedded pair from the honeymoon, the men friends surrounded the house, let loose a pandemonium of hideous noises, demanding a sight of the bride and a speech from the groom. The custom was, in fact, so general in many places that the bridal pair provided refreshments in advance for the invading party.

It was certainly only by the grace of God and much mutual affection that the young married couple kept their respect for each other through these preliminaries of marriage. After this nerve-racking performance the bridegroom not infrequently found himself the guardian of a shrinking child, who was on the verge of hysterics through exhaustion and fear. To many a man there must have been a shock of astonishment, if not of dismay, on discovering that his wife was afraid of him, and had only the vaguest notion of their inevitable marital relation. The convention of absolute ignorance in which the young girl had usually been brought up, made of the sex relation an experience scarcely less terrible than bodily assault. Girls whose persons since their childhood had been sacred even from their mother's eyes, who had been taught not to look at their own bodies, and to bathe in the dark, found themselves in the keeping of men to whom the sex relation was already a commonplace. The husband, as a rule, entered upon marriage with slight illusions and with the natural impulses of a healthy animal. The young wife had been taught to ignore the very idea of passion, and, in proportion as she was physically delicate and modest, received a shock which was intensified if she immediately became pregnant. After a honeymoon of shame and disillusionment, she would gradually readjust her ideas to the facts of life under the instruction of her husband, and if she were fully occupied with household details, would ultimately recover an ideal of wedded happiness. Then, and not till then, would she fully understand why her mother and other wives had wept instead of rejoiced on her wedding-day.

On the other hand, the young husband, with every intention of cherishing her, might find himself in the position of an unintentional brute, and might suffer as great a disappointment as the bride, because of mutual misunderstanding. If he were a man of fine feeling and quick perception, and if the wife were a vigorous and sensible girl, the readjustment might be swift and happy; but if he were just the ordinary thick-skinned, wholesome fellow of the world, the wife merely surrendered, and both emerged into mutual toleration rather than happiness.

When the great adventure of marriage had been undertaken, then, indeed, began the real development of the girl of the past century. Molded and hemmed in by the traditions of what was proper and desirable for girls, she had more or less consciously looked forward to emancipation into a larger life, in which she was to be not only the helpmate of her husband, but a responsible personality. She had been educated to believe that in place of an aggressive part in life, her power lay in her "influence," and with this vague hypnotism she expected to mold the life of her husband and to control her children. In many cases she found herself in the situation of the wife described in the following paragraph:

"A few significant incidents had revealed to her that his good nature covered cold-blooded indifference where all but his own interests were vitally concerned. His apparent pliability hid a dexterity which evaded every recognized principle. In vain she exerted the influence with which he had pretended to invest her. The first effort proved that it never really existed. It was no more in his life than the valuable ornament on his mantelshelf—a thing to be dusted, preserved, and admired in leisure hours, never set to serious use."

If, on the other hand, the young husband were inspired by happiness and family responsibility to rise above his ordinary level, the young wife's childish ignorance and lack of intelligent sympathy with his aims not infrequently thwarted them.

Misled by the glamor of courtship and the expurgated novels of her girlhood, perhaps also by her parents' indulgence, the bride naturally supposed that her feelings, her wishes, would continue to be through marriage, as through the engagement, the determinant of their joint lives. Her astonishment, anger, and grief, when she found that she had to deal with a being who had always had his own way, and had always been deferred to by womenkind, often became a tragedy. She made herself and her husband wretched; while he in turn could not comprehend why his wife had suddenly become so different from what his mother was, from the docile creature a woman should be, from what she had appeared to be during their courtship.

The period of readjustment in which the husband and wife began to re-form each other's character might be uncontentious between self-respecting persons, but it was rarely happy. Out of it emerged a new ideal of happiness for both, or an enduring mutual discontent. If children arrived early the personalities of both parents were, at least temporarily, subordinated to the new relation. But the original causes of disillusionment were often merely latent, and gradually reappeared in the shape of unseemly contests over the discipline and education of the children, or in squabbles over expenditure and property. In a majority of cases that first great schism in their married life had brought so much pain that both parties ever after shrank with horror from another clash. Inevitably the woman, accustomed to obedience and clinging desperately to her ideal of a loving husband, gave way first; while the man, bewildered by the strength of the will he had met, cautiously avoided invoking it again. When each had realized the scarifying results of selfishness toward one they loved, there grew up a living hypothesis between them: "It is better to be loving than to be right." Then, slowly, the shadowy ghost of their youthful aura of marriage came back, and, if cherished by both, it might become a hovering angel of happiness.

Such lives, issuing in mutual readjustment and soon merged in the development of children, should have been and were, oftentimes, rich in domestic satisfaction; but with one phase of them, we may venture to say, no woman was ever content. As a child in her father's house, even to the day of her wedding, she had been by custom entitled to a living; and, by custom also, as a wife she had a right to a reasonable provision. But just when she could afford a new dress, and how much money for her personal expenses was to be forthcoming, and when, she did not know. It was considered unnecessary, indeed, it was scarcely proper for a wife to have an allowance—it savored of quarrels and too much wifely independence—for it was assumed that any decent husband would provide for his wife. As a matter of experience, the wheedling or termagant wives of indulgent husbands got more than they should have, in a proper division of the family income, while timid and more self-respecting women had to make suffice whatever a forgetful or selfish husband irregularly doled out; and often wept in secret humiliation before asking for what they were justly entitled to. Although in theory the wife had a right to a reasonable share of the family resources, she was, nevertheless, in the position of asking for it like a child or a charity dependent. That the average American husband was generous did not make the arrangement less unjust, though it might prevent the wife from insisting on a more equitable and self-respecting division.

But if the mother of a family found this financial tradition irksome, the childless wife—if she thought about it at all—was scarcely able to keep her self-respect. While she earned her board and lodging generally, and often the wage of a servant, if she did the whole work of the household, she was at least in a position of relative dignity. But in many cases the married partners took advantage of cheap immigrant service to lift themselves into a higher social stratum. Thus released from the heavier portion of the household cares, without children, without intellectual tastes, without any exacting occupation, she had nothing to do with her leisure but to return to the superficial accomplishments of her girlhood, or to fill the time with social engagements and the pursuit of dress. In short, she made something to do, instead of being compelled to do something necessary to the household and worthy of a human being.

Some wives, under this social régime, became lazy, frivolous, and extravagant; others developed an abnormal devotion to the petty details of dress and housekeeping, or an all but insane love of cleanliness, of order, or of ornament; and all became morally and physically anemic, wreaking on their partners the morbid peevishness of a childish and discontented disposition. Now and then, some stronger woman—with or without the approval of her husband, who could not be expected to know what was the matter—sought in lady-like philanthropy some expression of the pent-up energy within her; and rarely, a wiser man would take her into genuine partnership, replacing the natural tie of children with a useful business interest.

When the initial stages of marriage had settled themselves more or less comfortably, the great adventure of the woman's life resolved itself into a journey along a country road, sometimes green and shady, sometimes dusty and rough, but seldom affording an exciting prospect. Like the farmer, with whose labor the vocation of domesticity has elsewhere been compared, the housewife pursued her unexciting round; or, more like a pet squirrel in a cage—well-fed and cared-for, but debarred by domestic traditions from exploring for herself the interesting world about her. All her knowledge was second-hand, so to speak, filtered through the mind of a partner who told her as much or as little as he thought she could comprehend; and the only other stimuli that were likely to reach her came through the educational experiences of the children or through effeminate publications filled up with household recipes and a little harmless stuff predigested for feminine needs.

The intellectual interests of married women, like those of most persons, are dictated by their experiences in life—a fact upon which modern journalism bases its principal appeal. The racing edition for sporting men; the yellow newspaper for crude people, who live wholly on sensations; the semi-religious, predigested survey of current events for the orthodox; adventure magazines with a few "hells" and "damns" to catch the drummer and the cowboy—or with lurid stories but no swear-words for those who like Western color, but are shocked by the real thing-these, in our era, are some of the thousand kinds for as many people. But before the Civil War there were fewer of any kind, and only one sort deemed suitable for women.

Whatever her taste, the journalistic estimate of woman's needs was adjusted to the kitchen-children-clothing-church routine of the ordinary woman's life. The great body of country and village housewives read the weekly county paper, a missionary or religious journal, and the Bible, regularly but quite unthinkingly. The more sophisticated read a Lady-Book, in which was always to be found a careful mixture of feeble romance, moral essays, cooking recipes, fashions, and designs for needlework. These polite magazines for the promotion of "religion and gentility" had for their aim the expression of "the spirit of progress without compromising true womanliness;" and reached large circulations, owing to an innocuous mixture of platitudes, trivialities, and French fashion plates.

Having had no thorough education in any direction, the ideally domestic woman seldom acquired a taste for abstract or enlightened information. Her idea of the pleasure of reading was to get the practical experience of other housewives on such matters as the making of new variations in crochet patterns and cake, and how to contrive a chair out of old barrel-staves; or, on the other hand, to fill up the lack of the picturesque and dramatic in her life with the emotional adventures of some immaculate heroine of fiction. As the deer comes to the salt-lick; as the laborer, doomed to repetitious drudgery, seeks variety in a drunken spree—so the domestic woman often found in her leisure hours a passive pseudo-excitement in romance. In much the same manner the modern woman of leisure satisfies her natural craving for adventurous interests with emotions induced by the theater and the orchestra. A modern satirist has acutely remarked that, while a man was supposing that his wife's ideal of a husband was a middle-aged, baldheaded man, who was a good provider, his wife was going to the matinee to adore a beautiful young man with dark eyes and a tenor voice.

The only activity outside the home in which married women might take part without violating the proprieties, was the support and promotion of religious work. The finances and the administration of the churches were in the hands of men; but the money for the minister's salary, for a new church carpet, or for foreign missions, was commonly raised by the women through socials, fairs, bees, picnics, suppers—where hot coffee and good pie might be expected to unloose masculine purse-strings. Here the woman of executive abil ity found a chance for leadership; here housewives exchanged the gossip of the neighborhood, or the ingenuities and economies by which they stretched their purses. While men were whet-. ting their minds on politics, on war or reconstruction, on tariff measures or the panic, and running the churches and the local government, women revolved within the narrow circle of domestic and pious detail, and kept silence on larger matters, as behooved the supplementary sex.

The conventional domestic ideal involved, as we have shown in a previous chapter, a girlhood spent in attaining a superficial education which had no direct relation to domesticity or to motherhood, and an early womanhood spent chiefly in preening and expectation. With such a preparation it was not surprising if women generally found marriage less romantic and less satisfying as a career than they had been led to anticipate. Instead of an interesting adventure into which they were to be led by the sympathetic and adoring hero of their dreams, the wife's role was usually that of an understudy for a leading part who never got a chance to take the boards. If, perchance, she showed dissatisfaction with her lot, she was always assured that motherhood was the only worthy career, to which wifehood and domesticity were merely supplementary—motherhood was to be her compensation. To a consideration of the career afforded by motherhood we must turn, therefore, if we would understand both the glory and the inadequacy of the Nineteenth-Century woman.