A History of the Wife (40 page)

If wives took on many male tasks during the journey, this did not mean that they shared equal authority with their husbands. The follow- ing incident told by Lavinia Porter illustrates the difficulty women had whenever they tried to challenge male leadership. Her husband had refused her request to veer toward a grove of trees half a mile away so she could gather firewood instead of buffalo dung. In a pique, she crawled into the wagon and told the men that “if they wanted fuel for the evening meal they could get it themselves and cook the meal also.” Then she cried herself to sleep. Although her husband tried to make amends by waking her later with a dinner he had prepared himself, their relations were strained for weeks. As John Faragher and Christine Stansell point out in their version of this story, the traditional Victorian division of labor and authority between husbands and wives remained

the backbone of marriage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, even if gender lines were more frequently crossed west of the Mississippi.
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A pioneer woman on the West Coast went into marriage with the same domestic expectations as her sister on the East Coast. Thus the relatively affluent fourteen-year-old bride, Bethenia Owens-Adair, mar- ried in Oregon on May 4, 1854, had a hope chest containing “four quilts . . . muslin for four sheets, two pairs of pillow-cases, two table- cloths, and four towels.” Her father gave her “a fine riding mare,” a cow, a calf, and a wagon and harness. Her mother gave her “a good feather bed, and pillows, a good straw bed, a pair of blankets and two extra quilts.” Moreover, on the afternoon of her wedding day, the ceremony having taken place in the morning, she purchased on her father’s account a full supply of groceries, cooking utensils, a churn, a washtub and board, a thirty-gallon iron pot for washing, and a water bucket and tin dipper. Her husband’s possessions were a horse and saddle, a gun, and the small log cabin, twelve by fourteen, without floor or chimney, to which he brought his bride.
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In pioneer homes, a wife still had primary responsibility for the care of house and children, no matter what her other duties might have been. A husband would sometimes put a pot on the fire, but no one expected him to take charge of the household, even when his wife was sick or recuperating from childbirth. If he had to, for example when widowed, his very first thought was to procure another wife. Another question revolves around the spousal relationship as buttressed by two major patriarchal institutions—law and religion. This, too, varied greatly. If some women, notably Southern ones, expressed the view that they were happy with the status quo, indeed welcomed their domina- tion by men, this was surely not the attitude of all women, even those in the South. Many wives found ways of subverting a husband’s will, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly.

One pioneer bride offered this analysis of her personal situation. “I already had ideas of my own about the husband being the head of the family. I had taken the precaution to sound him on ‘obey’ in the mar- riage pact and found he did not approve of the term. Approval or no approval, that word ‘obey’ would have to be left out. I had served my time of tutelage to my parents as all children are supposed to. I was a woman now and capable of being the other half of the head of the fam- ily. His word and my word would have equal strength.”
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Such, we

imagine, was the position of many women, who chose their husbands for love and hoped for egalitarian unions.

Though many women in the North, South, Midwest, and West left enduring records of happy marriages, many others suffered through years of marital conflict that sometimes ended in desertion or divorce. Husbands left their wives and children for other women or because they drank or became depressed or were simply shiftless. Sometimes it was the wife who deserted, as evidenced by the newspaper ads for “runaway wives” that appeared in the “Missing” newspaper classifieds. Or she might petition for divorce, especially in the frontier territories, where the divorce code tended to be relatively liberal.

Often husbands and wives simply separated and did not bother with divorce proceedings unless one of the parties wanted to marry again. And even then, in a country as vast as the United States, it was easy enough to disappear into a new territory and create a new union with- out legally ending the old one. Bigamy seems to have been “a common social experience in early America.”
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Few wives had the parental and internal resources to fall back on that helped Bethenia Owens-Adair leave her ne’er-do-well husband in Oregon. After four years of marriage, aged eighteen and the mother of a small child, Bethenia returned to her parents’ home and filed for divorce. When an older woman asked why she had left her husband, Bethenia answered, “Because he whipped my baby unmercifully, and struck and choked me.” At this dark moment, her difficulties seemed insurmountable—“a husband for whom I had lost all love and respect, a divorce, the stigma of which would cling to me all my future life, and a sickly babe of two years.”
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Yet a truly remarkable life was ahead of her. First she went back to school to complete her primary education. Then she recruited sixteen pupils, whom she taught for a fee of two dollars each over a three- month period. When she and her son moved out of her parents’ home, she pieced together a living out of teaching, doing laundry, and picking blueberries. For several years she ran a dressmaking and millinery busi- ness. By 1870, she was able, with her own money, to place her son in the University of California at Berkeley.

And it was at this point that her life took a dramatic turn. She got it in her head to study medicine. Borrowing a copy of
Gray’s Anatomy
from a doctor, she taught herself the body’s workings and arranged to

enter the Eclectic School of Medicine in Philadelphia. Since women were not accepted in most reputable medical schools and since medi- cine was not considered a profession for women, her family felt “dis- graced.” Yet she managed to complete her medical training, not only at the Eclectic School, but also at the University of Michigan—one of the first universities to grant medical degrees to women. She received hers in 1880 at the age of forty, and went on to become a legendary “lady doctor” in her native Oregon for the next twenty-five years.

Bethenia Owens-Adair was fortunate to be an adult at a time when the patriarchal mold surrounding the lives of American and English wives was beginning to show its cracks. The legislation enacted in En- gland from 1857 to 1882 and in America beginning in the 1840s granted married women greater measures of freedom, and new educa- tional and work opportunities offered single and divorced women real- istic alternatives to the career of wifehood.

S E V E N

The Woman Question and the New Woman

I
n the third act of Ibsen’s play
A Doll’s House,
husband and wife Helmer and Nora have an extraordinary encounter. He says to her: “Before everything else, you’re a wife and a

mother.” She responds: “I don’t believe that any longer. I believe that before everything else I’m a human being—just as much as you are... or at any rate I shall try to become one.”
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When the play had its first production at the Copenhagen Royal Theater in December 1879, it caused a scandal. The idea that a respectable woman should renounce her role as wife and mother, leave her husband and children, and strike out on her own was seen as an insult to society’s most cherished values. In Ibsen’s Norway, where the work was published a few weeks before its Danish premiere, his con- servative enemies had found a perfect target. Although Ibsen usually reveled in adverse criticism, this time he was taken aback at the excep- tionally vehement reactions throughout Scandinavia. For the German production, he even bowed to protest and changed the ending. In that version, Nora does not walk out of the house slamming the door behind her. Instead, she is forced by Helmer to take a look at her sleep- ing children, and, sinking to the floor before the curtain falls, she cries out: “Ah, though it is a sin against myself, I cannot leave them.”

It was, of course, the original version that earned Ibsen the applause of progressive thinkers. Nora’s struggle to break free from the “doll’s house” where she had been only a “doll-wife” (and before that, her

Papa’s “doll-child”) reflected the struggle of many women to assume full citizenship in the human community. Almost immediately, Nora became synonymous with the conviction that a female person had the right to an autonomous existence, even if that meant denying the claims of wifehood and motherhood.

Like most literary masterpieces,
A Doll’s House
speaks for its age and all ages. The protagonist, Nora, is simultaneously an upper-middle- class Norwegian wife bound by the social conventions of her time and place, and any woman of any age seeking personal fulfillment. Her par- ticular story could have occurred only when it did, yet it is Every- woman’s story.

Consider the times. During the second half of the nineteenth cen- tury, Scandinavia, like the rest of Europe, was embroiled in the Woman Question. The Norwegian novels of Camilla Collet (1813–1895) and the Swedish novels of Frederika Bremer (1801–1865) contributed sig- nificantly to an awareness of the one-sided privileges enjoyed by men. Did an unmarried woman have to leave all initiative to the male, wait- ing until he declared his intentions before she could express her love? Did marriage have to be a patriarchal institution that forced a single woman to exchange autonomy for protection? Did a wife have to be a minor in the eyes of the law, subject to her husband’s guardianship? Did a woman have to give up all economic rights, except the right to the “lock and key,” which meant responsibility for the care of the home? Did she have to marry at all?

In Sweden, to which Norway was united under a common sover- eign, lively parliamentary debates on the Woman Question resulted in the law of 1874, which substantially changed the position of women. For the first time, married women were given some control over their private property. Wives who had been the recipients of sizable dowries or parental inheritances were almost always members of the upper ranks, wedded to men of their own class; yet whatever their social sta- tus, before 1874 they had no say whatsoever about the use of the prop- erty they might have brought into the marriage. The Scandinavian changes effected in the 1870s made it possible for Nora in
The Doll’s House
to negotiate a bank loan without her husband’s knowledge—a transaction that her confidante greeted with surprise. (She would have been even more surprised had she known that Nora had acquired the loan by forging her dying father’s signature on a security note.)

The law of 1874 also permitted wives to possess their own earnings. This provision had special meaning for working-class women, many of whom were self-supporting in their premarital years. These women often delayed marriage until they had acquired a dowry on their own and were able to pay for a wedding—a costly ceremony that always devolved upon the bride or her family. During this “engagement” period, which could go on for years, Swedish working-class women often cohabited with their men, and even became mothers—practices that were unthinkable for middle- and upper-class women. Premarital cohabitation, practiced by an estimated 40 to 50 percent of all work- ing-class couples, gave rise to the expression “Stockholm marriage” for individuals living together without the blessings of church or state.
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Like priests’ wives in the Middle Ages, lower-class women in “Stock- holm marriages” were generally accepted by their communities, even if the clergy (predominantly Protestant) disapproved of such arrange- ments. Sometimes cohabiting men and women tried to camouflage their situation by pretending to be tenants in their partners’ house- holds, especially for official purposes like a census. Eventually most of these couples wed, and, if they had children, these were legitimized by their parents.

What we know of “Stockholm marriages” suggests that the women in these unions could be remarkably independent. Because they were not legally married, they were never under a husband’s guardianship: they controlled their own earnings and were not dependent on the eco- nomic support of their partners. Throughout history, the independence of women seems to increase whenever they have access to money, either earned themselves or inherited. This economic independence has always made some men very nervous. Those who believe that soci- ety’s ills in the late twentieth century derive from married women’s work outside the home should take a good look at the late-nineteenth- century debate on the Woman Question. It is filled with many of the same concerns we still face today.

The European lineup in favor of progressive change for women included such literary luminaries as Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in Norway; Frederika Bremer and Ellen Key in Sweden; the Russian-French diarist Marie Bashkirtseff; the French activists Marie Maugeret and Nelly Roussel; the South African novelist Olive

Schreiner; the Irish playwright Bernard Shaw; and the Austrian social critic Bertha von Suttner. In the opposing camp were equally formida- ble figures—the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, the Russian novelist Tolstoy, and a slew of Frenchmen. But no one probably had greater influence than Pope Leo XIII, who believed that married women should remain securely in the cage that patriarchy had always provided for them. His 1891 encyclical asserted that “a woman is by nature fitted for homework, and it is that which is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty, and to promote the good bringing up of children and the well-being of the family.”
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Cartoonists had a field day with the New Woman as wife, and with her presumably downtrodden spouse. Following a long tradition of graphic satire aimed at the henpecked husband, they mercilessly ridiculed the idea of role reversal in marriage. An American version of the same theme, inspired by the idea of woman’s suffrage, shows an ele- gantly dressed woman entering a carriage “manned” by two other women, while the husbands stay at home to mind the baby and do the laundry. A German picture from 1900 titled “Modern Marriage” (
Mod- erne Ehe
) shows a scowling woman in pants brandishing a threatening shoe, while her husband, in a dress and bedroom slippers, holds the baby in one arm and a bottle in the other. The caption reads: “She’s wearing the pants” (
Sie hat de Hosen an
).