Women in the 19th Century: Separate but Equal?

Cartoon from The Vote, a newspaper published by the Women's Freedom League (February, 1911)

This short summary of the texts I've read while preparing for my final exam in American Studies shows the history of masculine and feminine role models constructed almost two centuries ago. Unfortunately, they are not completely deconstructed yet.


While the 18th century America was dominated by the theological discourse, in the 19th century religion gradually lost its status as the central cultural defining power. In the theological discourse the subordination of women was viewed as ‘God-given destiny’. With the scientific progress in the 19th century this order started to lose its footing. A new - now more acceptable - reason for keeping the established gender hierarchy was found: NATURE.

The physical - biological - difference between men and women was extended by constructing men and women not only as totally different but also as binary oppositions: The male dominance was secured by codifying men and masculinity as the norm. The qualities assigned to men were connoted with strength and defined by reference to their opposite: the woman. Masculinity came to stand for humanity; the woman became “the other” - the deviation from the norm.
Not only men but also women came to understand the female sex as the passive, emotional, practical, patient, “silent and unseen” being who prefers and needs the shelter of home and the protection of a man because of her ‘natural’ weakness. For both men and women the differences between them seemed indisputable because they were justified by nature - and no one can fight nature. As a consequence of their respective attributes the physical difference between the sexes was extended to “naturally” determine their social roles.

Thus the world as a social construction was divided into two separate spheres. The masculine sphere was the public sphere, its according concept was power; the proper feminine sphere was the domestic sphere and here the according concept was moral influence. Because the separate spheres were established as “natural” and because they were accepted by both women and men, they could be claimed to be of equal value. Thus, on the surface, the subordination of women could be negated although on the economic, social and legal level women got the short end of the stick.


Ideology of Spheres

Home was regarded as the woman’s proper sphere. It provided shelter from the dangerous outside world. Outside the home, men engaged in hard work and competition.
In the 1960s Barbara Welter used the phrase “The Cult of True Womanhood”, meaning the cultivation of women’s virtues of domesticity, piety, purity and submissiveness in the 19th century. These virtues were of course working in favour of strengthening the difference between male ‘power’ and female moral ‘influence’.
A very interesting point is that the housework was never officially referred to as work. Cooking, baking, washing etc. were occupations, offices, even (the very romantic sounding) “mysteries”; they were considered pleasant duties - pleasant because in doing them, the woman could fully dedicate herself to her ‘natural’ role and function as the self-sacrificing, caring mother and wife. Her pleasant duties could not be compared to the ‘work’ or 'labour’ of men - maybe, because these were paid for. The woman presides over the sanctities of domestic life and the man is the ‘breadwinner’. Wage-earning was associated with manhood.


Working Women

But working women (such as the Lowell Mill Girls) did exist. For the white middle class women stressing the shelter of home could have been one way of distinguishing themselves from the working-class women and thus a means of maintaining class boundaries.
Jobs like those of the mill girls did not directly challenge men’s jobs because the women’s work there consisted of weaving, fulling, spinning which were famous for being pleasant ('naturally' feminine) duties. These worker's overseers were male (like it 'naturally' should be).
The problem was that this was new, paid labour. Another problem was the presence of those women in the public sphere, which was, analogous to the dominant discourse, regarded as rather ‘unnatural’. Wage earning women became symbols of the threats posed to the concept of manhood. Men’s anxieties were expressed by their complaints that women were taking jobs away from them (and thus the proper masculine role), and also through the working men’s call for ‘family wages’ – wage packets high enough to permit their wives and children to withdraw from paid work – thus identifying the husband as the proper and natural wage-earner.
Once again women’s unfitness for paid work was emphasised by calling attention to their ‘physical organization’, their ‘moral sensibilities’, ‘fragile constitution’ etc. Presumably, only man had the constitution for paid labour. To declare women unfit for work helped to justify underpaying them when they had to work.


Celebration of Motherhood

Another explanation of the discomfort with working women is the great importance tagged on women's social identity as mothers. The celebration of middle-class Motherhood was one of the main reasons of the marginalization of housewives as workers. The role of the mother was considered to be what God had in view when creating the woman.
In the working-class those women who could not or did not wish to remain in their homes and get absorbed in the maternal role, provided the excuse for a growing middle-class intrusion into the working-class households, as middle-class reformers claimed that women who could not or did not aspire to middle-class standards of domesticity, were poor mothers.


Middle-Class Reformers

Generally middle-class reformers were trying to help the urban poor, providing them with food, clothing and religious consolation. But very often their intervention was based on harsh and unsupported judgements. Facing the great crisis of poverty in the New York streets the reformers took the symptoms for causes and focused on transforming two elements of the working-class family life: the place of children and the role of women. The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) was founded. One of its programs was the so-called “placing-out” system. It sent poor children to foster homes in rural areas (where labour was scarce) – sometimes even without informing their parents. The goal was double fold: to disperse the surplus of labour but also to separate the innocent children from the tyranny of their unprotected mothers. Unprotected because many of those mothers were widows, and thus without a male protector. Unlike their middle-class contemporaries these women did not consider mothering a full time task of supervision. They expected their children to start working from an early age. By the 1850s, huckstering, scavenging and crossing-sweeping were the main means by which children could earn their keep.


Prostitution

Young girls also found another way of getting a living: prostitution. These were not professional child prostitutes; rather they turned to occasional prostitution to supplement other earnings. Prostitution was quite public in the antebellum New York. It was not yet a statutory offence, and although the police harassed streetwalkers and arrested them for vagrancy, they had little effect on the trade. The CAS members were worried about the modesty of the females of thirteen and fourteen walking the streets without a protector. During the century the attitudes surrounding prostitution changed from empathy for the prostitutes to utter rejection. Generally, today the majority of people have kept the latter Victorians’ attitudes towards prostitution.


Female Friendships & Networks

One more aspect of the female experience in the 19th century is the female friendship and women’s networks. The relationships ranged from the supportive love of sisters, through the enthusiasms of adolescent girls, to sensual avowals of love by mature women. Such intimate friendships were considered socially acceptable and fully compatible with heterosexual marriage. Many womanly bonds continued across a lifetime. Theirs was an emotional world to which men had little access. This was, as well, a female world in which hostility and criticism of other women were discouraged, and thus a milieu in which women could develop a sense of inner security. In this way women who had little status and power in the large world of male concerns, possessed status and power in the lives and worlds of other women.
One very intimate occasion that created very powerful bonds among women was childbirth. Pregnancy and childbirth carried with them the ever-present possibility of death or the prospect of permanent physical limitations. Women were looking forward for the childbirth with legitimate fear. The support of female friends, neighbours and family members helped them to manage the time of crisis.
Another aspect of fear from labour and delivery was that many women did not let it come that far. Abortion was not prohibited until ‘quickening’ (the moment when a woman for the first time felt the baby’s movements). No reliable tests for pregnancy existed, and even quickening could not confirm with absolute certainty that a woman was really pregnant. Hence, either a woman herself or a doctor could take actions designed to restore the menstrual flow after one or more missed menstrual periods on the assumption that something might be unnaturally “blocking” or “obstructing” her normal cycles. Abortion entered the mainstream of American life during the middle decades of the 19th century. It became highly visible and quite common as a means of family limitation among white middle-class women: At the turn of the 19th century American women bore an average of 7 children before their fertile years ended; at the turn of the 20th century it was 3 to 4 children.


Women’s Legal Status

To come back to the gender difference: It not only determined the division of work and the everyday spheres, but also women’s legal status in general.
Property, for example, was a masculine concept. Accordingly, subordination and dependence were feminine concepts. A woman’s legal status was tied to her marital status; once married, a woman became the property of her husband, along with any estate or wages she brought to the union. She could not sue, execute a will, or vote. In addition, she had no legal rights to her children and was excluded from higher education. Single women over 18 and widows could own property but could not vote. A married woman was thus left economically dependent on her husband and she relied on his beneficence.
Before 1848 a few laws were passed in some states in the U.S. giving women some limited property rights, but the 1848 Married Women’s Property Act was more comprehensive than its forerunners. It was amended to include even more rights in 1860; later, married women's rights to control property were extended still more.


Black Women

In the 19th century black women were either brought to America as slaves or were born in America as slaves. Their situation was particularly complicated. On the slave ships, unlike black men, black women and girls were not shackled. One of the consequences was that they were more easily accessible to the criminal whims and sexual desires of seamen.
Once in America, on the one hand their slaveholders expected them to work as hard as any male slave, on the other hand they were expected to provide their slaveholders with replenishment of their labour force. That means they were not only bought to work but also to bear children. And if the latter didn't happen voluntarily, the women were threatened and put under pressure until they finally gave in and went to live with men the slaveholder had chosen for them. Running away from the estates was also rather difficult with children and few women decided to leave their children when an opportunity appeared.
Also, after the abolition of slavery in 1865 in America, black women did not have much choice when looking for work. Usually the only jobs they could hope to get were jobs in domestic service. So the improvement of the black women's conditions went even slower, because they were not only facing gender but also racial discrimination.


The Woman’s Movement

The woman's movement in the 19th century concentrated on three main issues:
1. Service and social action along with male middle-class reformers.
2. The campaign for women’s rights, initially in the form of temperance unions and abolition, and gradually calls for suffrage.
3. Emancipation from structures, conventions, and attitudes reinforced by law and custom.

The underlying theme of the woman movement was that women were human beings too and had similar intellectual and spiritual properties as men, and, therefore, they deserved equal rights and opportunities to develop their potential as human beings. By the time of Seneca Falls Convention, women were ready for change.
In the struggle for women’s rights Elisabeth Cady Stanton was one of the leading figures. Encouraged by the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1848, together with a network of other women and men who held egalitarian views, she organized the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, where 100 people (68 women and 32 men) signed the so-called Declaration of Sentiments. The Declaration of Sentiments was rhetorically modelled upon the Declaration of Independence. The latter’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal” was re-modelled into “that all men and women are created equal”. The main concern was to point out the overall subordination of the woman in legislation.
After the Seneca Falls convention Stanton met Susan B. Anthony and from then on they remained in contact and used to collaborate. Anthony is famous for leading a woman’s protest at the 1876 Centennial, delivering a Declaration of Rights written by Stanton and Frances Dana Barker Gage. Thereby women were asking that justice, equality, and all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the US, be guaranteed to them and their daughters for ever.
Other important women reformers were those associated with the Hull House – a social settlement founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Women in the Hull House were coresidents and friends. They collaborated with many other female institutions and gained much social power . They were connected to other women's organizations and they also cooperated with male reformers. The Hull House women were highly educated. Their focus was on the enforcement of antisweatshop legislation and the regulation of working hours for women as well as prohibiting work for children under 14 and regulating the labour of children aged 14-16.


Every time a woman crossed the borders of what was discursively defined as ‘proper’ for her, every time a woman showed that ‘nature’ didn’t prevent her from doing something that was thought of as ‘naturally masculine’, the power relations were at least a little bit challenged.
But the 19th century discourse cemented women as "the (subordinate) other", the deviance from the norm so firmly (because 'naturally') that the 21st century women still have to fight for equal rights and equal treatment of men and women, and they still need a thick skin and perseverance in order to prove that the separate spheres were socially constructed and not biologically given.