Part 1
WOMAN’S WORK IN AMERICA
EDITED BY
ANNIE NATHAN MEYER
_WITH AN INTRODUCTION_
BY
JULIA WARD HOWE
NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1891
COPYRIGHT, 1891,
BY
HENRY HOLT & CO.
THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS, RAHWAY, N. J.
EDITOR’S PREFACE.
To Mr. Theodore Stanton, the editor of “The Woman Question in Europe,” I hasten to acknowledge my indebtedness. After reading that interesting book it occurred to me that a volume on the work of women in America could be made equally valuable and interesting.
In the spring of 1888, therefore, I began to collect the necessary material. Naturally it was not possible, nor did it seem desirable, to follow the exact lines of Mr. Stanton’s work. In his book, each chapter is devoted to a different country, and the woman question therein is treated by the author of the chapter in all of its aspects.[1] It seemed best, on the contrary, to divide the American history as nearly as possible into as many chapters as there are phases of woman’s work. The task of selecting as collaborators eighteen women, where so many brilliant women abound, was a very difficult one; I need say nothing in defense or explanation of my choice, however, but am satisfied to let the work done speak for itself.
But before the task of selecting the contributors came that of dividing the whole great field of woman’s work. Here I can only bow my head before the flood of criticism that is bound to bear down upon me. I suppose it is inevitable that to many it will seem that undue importance has been accorded to one subject, and too little to another. I can but plead that in no case have I allowed myself to be influenced by prejudice, but only by the best judgment I was capable of bringing to bear. On mentioning this book to a well-known editor and poet (a man), I was gravely asked why I had omitted a chapter on “Woman in Marriage,” as it would make a very readable and certainly a very prolific subject. My answer was that so far as I knew women had never been denied that privilege, and so it could have no legitimate place in my book. In that reply, although uttered lightly, lies the principle upon which I have worked; the fields of labor described here contain evidences of woman’s progress; they are those in which women, if entrance were not absolutely denied them, were at least not welcomed, nor valued. Furthermore, they are phases of woman’s work that have some direct bearing on the status of woman in this country.
And now a word on the object of the book, for many will shrug their shoulders and say: “Why separate _work_ into _man’s_ work and _woman’s_ work? What is gained by this division? Why not be content with the simple word _work_? Is it not sufficient to be a factor in the world’s growth, or must the ages keep a constant reckoning of _meum_ and _tuum_?”
If the time has come when the word work is a neuter noun, I admit that the value of this book would be reduced; but even then I think it might justly claim a historical value, a value as a history of the struggle on woman’s part to have her work accepted just as a “factor in the world’s growth,” judged on its own merits, not
Mere woman’s work, Expressing the comparative respect Which means the absolute scorn.
But aside from the value of the book as a record, it claims a value as an inspiration to greater effort; for in our eyes the time has not yet come when all effort should cease. The arguments against the development of woman have been many, and although centuries have passed, the changing years merely ring different tones upon the same theme. We may acknowledge that the day is past when it is necessary seriously to plead the capacity of woman to accomplish certain things; that victory has been won with tears of blood; but the fight still centers about the propriety of it. The large band of ignorant and prejudiced objectors is fast giving place to another of a more kindly, but more dangerous type. More dangerous because instead of employing the weapons of disdain, they use those of homage; instead of goading with scorn, they disarm with the incense of a false and hollow sentimentality. This new wave of feeling divides Life into Intellect and Emotion, the Mind and the Heart, Matter and Soul, etc., the one man, woman the other. These sentimentalists, who certainly include as many women as men, argue that every woman is the natural companion of man, and so is upheld by some strong shoulder. When faced by the awful statistics of unmarried females in the United States, they fall back on some hypothetical father, brother, or cousin. Therefore it is considered highly supererogatory that a woman should be taught to stand upon her own feet, when the adjacent shoulder answers the purpose as well. This belief holds its own with a peculiar tenacity, because there is a certain heroic satisfaction in retaining your sentiment notwithstanding all the arguments that can be brought forward by the low materialists.
This book is nothing else than a history of woman’s slow, but sure, training to stand balanced upon her own feet. She has looked about upon the thousands of falling sisters, and has very reasonably reached the conclusion that the only way to make sure of standing is to make use of her own feet.
Women have many so-called champions of their “purity,” and “innocence;” champions that are shocked at opening so many new fields of “man’s work” to women; but they are strangely ignorant of the very real contamination to which they expose their _protegés_ by crowding them into the few already overcrowded channels, and refusing to let in fresh air and sunshine. Men and women both are born into the world helpless and unprotected; it may seem an ugly and bitter truth, but it is so, that in this struggle for existence daily going on about us, men and women do indeed stand “side by side,”—not, as with the poet,
Full summed in all their powers,
but each individually carrying on a struggle against suffering, starvation, crime, and death,—forces that remorselessly attack women, barren of the chivalrous regard of sex with which these sentimentalists seem to grace them.
And if it is true that both sexes fight the same battle for existence, who can honestly deny to women (at present physically the weaker), the best possible equipment that education of all kinds can furnish? I shall not even touch upon the other, and more poetic, argument of the divine rights of genius, which is of no sex; but I am content to employ only the prosaic one of the practical needs of life, an argument which here in America is by far the most potent one.
My own labors on this book have been purely editorial; and after selecting the chapters, and the authors, and laying down certain general principles and suggestions, my responsibility ceased. The principles laid down by me have been:
Facts and history rather than eloquence;
Truth before picturesqueness;
A total absence of railing against the opposite sex.[2]
The greatest care has been taken to assure accuracy; if mistakes do creep in, notwithstanding this, I must beg the reader not to judge too harshly, as the capacity for making mistakes in a book like this is illimitable. However, I trust the leniency of the reader will not be too severely taxed.
While being an ardent believer in the future progress of woman, it would be impossible to subscribe myself to every theory that may be found in these pages. To say one agrees in every detail with the opinions of eighteen women, all of whom are well known to be “women with opinions,” is to boast of a breadth of mind, a roundness of judgment to which I am too modest to lay claim. But I can surely say that every one of the writers has cordially joined hands in the making of the book; the long hours spent in the writing of it, the many annoyances encountered in collecting historical data, all is forgotten in the hope that this book may serve:
1. To set certain plain facts, shorn of all sentiment, before the world in accessible form;
2. To preserve the record of a great, brave, and essentially American struggle;
3. To serve as a stimulus to many women who are working along a very weary road;
4. To hold up before the entire sex in every sphere of life only the highest standard of excellence.
In closing, I want to thank heartily, not only my collaborators, but also those whose names do not appear, but who have, nevertheless, added greatly to the interest and value of the book.
ANNIE NATHAN MEYER.
NEW YORK, _January, 1891_.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE EDITOR’S PREFACE, iii
I. INTRODUCTION, JULIA WARD HOWE, 1
II. THE EDUCATION OF WOMAN IN THE EASTERN STATES, MARY F. EASTMAN, 3
III. THE EDUCATION OF WOMAN IN THE WESTERN STATES, MAY WRIGHT SEWALL, 54
IV. THE EDUCATION OF WOMAN IN THE SOUTHERN STATES, CHRISTINE LADD FRANKLIN, 89
V. WOMAN IN LITERATURE, HELEN GREY CONE, 107
VI. WOMAN IN JOURNALISM, SUSAN E. DICKINSON, 128
VII. WOMAN IN MEDICINE, MARY PUTNAM JACOBI, M.D., 139
VIII. WOMAN IN THE MINISTRY, REV. ADA C. BOWLES, 206
IX. WOMAN IN LAW, ADA M. BITTENBENDER, 218
X. WOMAN IN THE STATE, MARY A. LIVERMORE, 245
XI. WOMAN IN INDUSTRY, ALICE HYNEMAN RHINE, 276
XII. WOMAN IN PHILANTHROPY—CHARITY, JOSEPHINE SHAW LOWELL, 323
XIII. WOMAN IN PHILANTHROPY—CARE OF THE SICK, EDNAH DOW CHENEY, 346
XIV. WOMAN IN PHILANTHROPY—CARE OF THE CRIMINAL, SUSAN HAMMOND BARNEY, 359
XV. WOMAN IN PHILANTHROPY—CARE OF THE INDIAN, AMELIA STONE QUINTON, 373
XVI. WOMAN IN PHILANTHROPY—WORK OF ANTI-SLAVERY WOMEN, LILLIE B. CHACE WYMAN, 392
XVII. WOMAN IN PHILANTHROPY—WORK OF THE W. C. T. U., FRANCES E. WILLARD, 399
XVIII. WOMAN IN PHILANTHROPY—WORK OF THE RED CROSS SOCIETY, CLARA BARTON, 411
APPENDIX A—ARTICLE VI., 424
„ B—ARTICLE III., 425
„ C—ARTICLE IV., 434
„ D—ARTICLE VII., 441
„ E—ARTICLE X., 446
„ F—BIBLIOGRAPHY. 449
INDEX, 451
I. INTRODUCTION.
BY
JULIA WARD HOWE.
A comprehensive view of the attainments made by American women in this century, and especially during the last fifteen years, cannot but be of great importance and value. The cruel kindness of the old doctrine that women should be worked for, and should not work, that their influence should be felt, but not recognized, that they should hear and see, but neither appear nor speak,—all this belongs now to the record of things which, once measurably true, have become fabulous.
The theory that women should not be workers is a corruption of the old aristocratic system. Slaves and servants, whether male or female, always worked. Women of rank in the old world were not necessarily idle. The eastern monarch who refused an army to a queen, sent her a golden distaff. The extremes of despotism and of luxury, undermining society and state, can alone have introduced the theory that it becomes the highly born and bred to be idle. With this unnatural paralysis of woman’s active nature came _ennui_, the bane of the so-called privileged classes. From _ennui_ spring morbid passions, fostered by fantastic imaginations. A respect for labor lies at the very foundation of a true democracy.
The changes which our country has seen in this respect, and the great uprising of industries among women, are then not important to women alone, but of momentous import to society at large. The new activities sap the foundation of vicious and degraded life. From the factory to the palace the quickening impulse is felt, and the social level rises. To the larger intellectual outlook is added the growing sympathy of women with each other, which does more than anything else to make united action possible among them. A growing good will and esteem of women toward women makes itself happily felt and will do even more and more to refine away what is harsh and unjust in social and class distinctions and to render all alike heirs of truth, servants of justice.
The initiative is now largely taken by women in departments in which they were formerly, if admitted at all, entirely and often unwillingly under the dictation of men. Philanthropists of both sexes, indeed, work harmoniously together, but in their joint undertakings the women now have their say and, instead of waiting to be told what men would have them think, feel obliged to think for themselves. The result is not discord but a fuller and freer harmony of action and intention. In industrial undertakings they still have far to go, but women will enter more and more into them and with happy results. The professions indeed supply the keystone to the arch of woman’s liberty. Not the intellectual training alone which fits for them, but the practical, technical knowledge which must accompany their exercise puts women in a position of sure defense against fraud and imposition.
In the volume now given to the public the progress of women in all of these departments is presented by persons who have made each of them a special study, and who have done good and helpful work in them, with, moreover, the outlook ahead which is the important element in all labor and service. The world, even the American world, is not yet wholly converted to the doctrine of the new womanhood. Men and women who prize the ease of the _status quo_, and the imaginary importance conferred by exemption from the necessities which prompt to active exertion, often show great ignorance of all that this book is intended to teach. They will aver, men and women of them, that women have never shown any but secondary capacities and qualities. Women who take this ground often secretly flatter themselves that what they thus say of other women does not apply to themselves. A speaker representing this class lately asked at a legislative hearing in Massachusetts why women did not enter the professions? why they did not become healers of the sick, ministers, lawyers? One might ask how he could escape, knowing that in all of these fields, so lately opened to them, women are doing laborious work and with excellent results? A book like the present will furnish chapter and verse to substantiate what is claimed for the attainments of women. It will not, indeed, put an end to foolish depreciative argument, based upon erroneous suppositions, but it will furnish evidence to confute calumny, to convince the doubtful.
II. THE EDUCATION OF WOMAN IN THE EASTERN STATES.
BY
MARY F. EASTMAN.
The movement in behalf of the education of youth in America followed so closely upon the landing of the colonists on an unsettled and forbidding coast, and was continued so persistently and so successfully, under stress of poverty and peril, that it seizes upon the imagination, and justly stirs a profound sense of gratitude in succeeding generations.
That in its inception, and for a long period, it was but a partial, in fact, but a half movement, after all, appears only in the light of a later day; which, indeed, it had helped to kindle,—when the words, “children,” “youth,” and “people” began to take a wider significance.
The men who gathered in the cabin of the “Mayflower” in 1620, and framed a compact that every man in the colony should have an equal share in the government, soon assembled to promote the general welfare by encouraging industry in the young.
In 1642, the General Court of Mass. Bay Colony charged itself with “taking account, from time to time, of all parents and masters concerning the calling and employment of their children, especially of their ability to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country.”
In 1647, says the record, “It being one cheife piect of yt ould deluder Satan to keepe men from the knowledge of ye Scriptures ... by psuading them from ye use of tongues, that so at least ye true sense and meaning of ye originall might be clouded ... and that learning may not be buried in ye graves of our fathers.... It is therefore ordered tht evry township in this jurisdiction, after ye Lord hath increased ym to ye number of 50 householders, shall therforthwth appoint one to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid eithr by ye parents or mastr, or by ye inhabitants in generall.... It is ordered yt where any towns shall increase to ye number of 100 familis or householders, they shall set up a gramer schoole, ye mr thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for ye university.” A penalty of £5 was fixed for violation of this order.
As early as in 1636, the Court “agreed to give £400 toward a school or college,” to which, in 1638, John Harvard left, by will, half his property and his library. In 1642, the Court gave to the college “the revenue of the ferry from Charlestown to Boston.”
1644, “It is ordered vt ye deputies shall command it to ye severall towns (and ye elders are to be desired to give their furtherance hereto)” ... that “Evry family alow one peck of corne, or 12d. in money or other commodity to be sent in to ye Treasurer, for the colledge at Cambridge.”
1650, voted that, “Whereas, through the good hand of God, many have been stirred to give for the advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences in Harvard Colledge—and for all other necessary pvsions that may conduce to the education of ye English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godlynes, ordered—tht a corporation be formed, consisting of seauen psons.”
Revenues of the college and of the president to the extent of 500 were exempt from taxation, while special exemptions from rates, and military and civil duties, were made to officers, fellows, scholars, and even the servants of the college.
This oldest college of the country was, as thus appears, the child of the State, and while it was the recipient of private benefactions, drew its sustenance, substantially, from the labors of the people.
1683, voted that, “Every towne consisting of more than five hundred families shall set up and maintayne two grammar schools, and two wrighting scholes to instruct youth as the law directs.”
So cordial was the interest felt in education among the colonists, that many towns had established free schools before it was required.
Within a year of the founding of Boston, in 1635, the citizens in town meeting assembled, voted to call a schoolmaster, and “Philemon Purmont was engaged to teach the children.” Dorchester, Naumkeag (now Salem), Cambridge, Roxbury, and other towns soon took the same course. Salem established a grammar school as early as 1637. Thus, within twenty years from the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, the foundation of the free-school system may be said to have been laid. It was frequently stipulated in the action of town meetings, that the poor should be provided for, and in Boston, at least, Indian children were freely taught. But in the provisions for “free schools,” “schools for the people,” and the “children,” it is not to be understood that girls were included. The broad terms used in the acts of the colonies and the votes of town meetings might mislead, in this respect, if history did not record the periods, long subsequent, when girls were admitted even to the “free schools” under restrictions, usually with great opposition.
This long hiatus, during which girls went, practically, without free-school opportunities, picking up what they might at home, or by aid of the parish minister, was about a century and a half long, though in 1771, Hartford, Conn., opened its common schools to every child, and taught even the girls reading, writing, spelling, and the catechism, and, rarely, how to add. The boys, meantime, studied the first four rules of arithmetic.
The hiatus between the foundation for the college for boys and even the seminary, or the academy, for girls, extended over a long century and a half; and that between colleges for males and those for females was, in Massachusetts, two hundred and thirty-two years long. A prime motive to the encouragement of education in America was that the Scriptures might be properly interpreted. This appears in the preamble to the vote of 1647 establishing schools, which were necessary as tributary to the college, and in the motive which led to the foundation of Harvard and of Yale, “the dread of having an illiterate ministry to the churches when our ministers shall lie in dust.”
It has been noted by Charles Francis Adams that “the records of Harvard University show that of all the presiding officers, during the century and a half of colonial days, but two were laymen, and not ministers of the prevailing denomination; and that of all who in the early times availed themselves of such advantages as this institution could offer, nearly half the number did so for the sake of devoting themselves to the service of the gospel. But,” he continues, “the prevailing notion of the purpose of education was attended with one remarkable consequence,—the cultivation of the female mind was regarded with utter indifference; as Mrs. Abigail Adams says in one of her letters, ‘it was fashionable to ridicule female learning.’”
This discrimination between the intellectual needs of the two sexes should not, perhaps, be matter of surprise, when we consider that the English system of public schools for boys, extending from the “Winchester School” to “Rugby,” had been in existence for two centuries, and that of the six hundred who first landed on the coast of Massachusetts, one in thirty was a graduate from the English University of Cambridge, while both the men and the women were heirs to the prevailing sentiment of disrespect for womanly intelligence and education, which marked the demoralization of the reign of the Stuarts in England.
The time of Queen Elizabeth has passed, in which the noble Lady Jane Grey, being asked by Sir Roger Ascham why she lingered to read Plato in Greek while the lords and ladies of the Court were pleasuring in the park, replied, “I wist all their sport in the park is but a shadow to the pleasure I find in Plato. Alas! good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meaneth.”
Lady Mary Wortley Montague truly portrayed the time, when she wrote, early in the eighteenth century: “We are permitted no books but such as tend to the weakening and effeminating our minds. We are taught to place all our art in adorning our persons, while our minds are entirely neglected.”