A History of the Wife (43 page)

Women who were serious about their careers still had to decide whether to marry or work, for as Anna Lea Merritt put it in “A Letter to Artists: Especially Women Artists” (
Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine
, 1900): “The chief obstacle to a woman’s success is that she can never have a wife.”

Some women, especially those with careers or independent means, did have “wives” in what was commonly known as “Boston mar- riages”—a term used for an enduring union between two single women.
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Many of these women were professional pioneers, who sup- ported each other’s careers and social visions. The novelist Sarah Orne Jewett and her friend, the widowed Annie Fields, had such a relation- ship for almost thirty years. Mary Emma Wooley, the first female stu- dent at Brown University in 1891, shared her life with Jeannette Marks throughout Wooley’s long tenure as President of Mount Holyoke Col- lege. Before the theories of Freud had gained currency in America, these relationships were not considered sexually “perverse”—indeed, they were presumed to be asexual. Society tolerated lesbian partner- ships as long as they appeared to be devoid of physical intimacy.

Even in traditional heterosexual marriage, many American wives expected a greater degree of authority than that of previous generations. Often a late Victorian wife would find herself struggling for power not only against her husband and society, but also against herself. Although she wanted more say in the management of her person and family, she did not want to be associated with the “unsexed viragos” so frequently lampooned in cartoons and caricatures. A respectable middle-class woman believed in the institution of marriage, abhorred divorce, and would never embarrass her husband in public, but she also jockeyed with him in private for control over children, financial assets, and myr- iad other family decisions. Should they go to the seashore or her par- ents’ home for the summer? Would her husband invest in yet another dubious business venture? Would they have to move once again to a locale of his choice? Did they have money for another servant? Shouldn’t their daughter be educated as well as their son? Could she, the wife, join a women’s club, go alone to a spa, or visit a friend in another city? Did he object to her earning money as a sometime writer or baker of cakes? Privately, if not publicly, middle-class American women were less likely to accept a husband’s uncontested authority than their female forebears.

The life of Violet Blair Janin, retold on the basis of her letters and diaries by Virginia Laas, offers an example of an unusually strong-willed woman, who rejected submission in marriage and established with her husband Albert a peculiarly “modern” marriage.
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Having reigned for several seasons as the acknowledged belle of Washington society, and having rejected twelve marriage proposals (an impressive number, even for one with her beauty, intelligence, and fortune), Violet Blair married Albert Janin in 1874—the same year that Woolson made her remark- able pronouncement on woman’s right to exist as a noncontingent human being.

Six years earlier, at the age of twenty, Violet Blair had written in her diary: “I will never love & never marry—No man shall ever be my master—I will never promise to obey.” A year later, reflecting on her tenth prospective proposal, she wondered: “What shall I do? I am so wor- ried about all these men who are in love with me—I cannot marry them all & I don’t want to marry any of them.” Her diaries of 1870 registered the same anxieties: she admitted to herself, “I do not believe it is possible for me to love any man,” and declared, “I will be no man’s slave.”

Yet at the same time she found herself attracted to Albert Janin, an intelligent lawyer from New Orleans with progressive ideas. He encour- aged her interest in women’s rights, even to the point of bringing her relevant books and pamphlets. He respected her unconventional views and considerable knowledge of several languages, and, most of all, he was willing to submit to her need for domination. She wrote approv- ingly in her diary on October 27, 1871: “He obeys me.” Sometime that year she agreed to marry him.

The engagement remained secret at her request, and as she contin- ued her endless flirtation with other suitors, he became distraught. In one letter he cried out: “I am rendered almost frantic by the possibility of losing you. My whole emotional being seems merged in yours; robbed of you I should be poor indeed. Though sad and lonely now, I esteem myself rich and blessed with the promise of future happi- ness. . . .” This was but one of many crises in their courtship. While it was common for Victorian women to test their suitors, few (if any) were as outrageously demanding as Violet, as she herself admitted on several occasions. “Oh! Bertie,” she wrote, in 1872, “I may make your whole life miserable, a spoiled belle can’t make a good wife.” Finally, through dogged perseverance (“almost as faithfully as Jacob” in the words of one

of Violet’s friends), Albert succeeded in winning public acknowledg- ment of their engagement in the fall of 1872.

But this did not mean that Violet was prepared to accept a conven- tional marriage, and certainly not one that would force her into sub- mission. Her terms were the following: “Nothing but absolute obedience can satisfy me. I reign now over my lovers & do you think I am willing to marry any man & bend my will to his. No! No! Never!... I was born to command not to obey.” Albert accepted all her terms, including her right to control her own property and live in Washington while he was in New Orleans several months of the year. Her statement on the subject of separate residences sounds very mod- ern indeed: “[You] would not be obliged to stay in the same city with me all the time.... You can always regulate your own movements & I mine.” Some three years after promising to marry him, Violet became Mrs. Albert C. Janin.

The marriage was to last for fifty-four years. Like many long-term marriages, it saw various stages, ranging from extremely happy to mostly miserable. During the early years, Violet discovered a capacity for love that totally surprised her. When Albert was away, her letters were forthright with passion: “Oh, if you were only here to take me in your arms—I do long for you so—My heart aches to be with you again, my own beloved.” Or again, “My own darling husband I don’t know what makes me so spoony this evening, but I am so, & I don’t mind telling you so.” Still, she was not about to relinquish the terms of their original agreement. She made it clear that he was loved “as both hus- band and friend, but not as master.”

They easily came to terms in financial matters. She was to invest her money as she saw fit, he to employ his as he deemed wisest. Unfortu- nately, Albert was almost never wise where money was concerned. He had a series of disastrous business and political ventures, all of which contributed to the erosion of their marital happiness. In addition, Vio- let’s one attempt at motherhood resulted in the death of a premature baby girl.

By 1880, they were living apart most of the time, Albert in New Orleans, Violet in Washington. When he suggested she join him, she answered furiously: “You cannot support me.... How in the world could you keep me in New Orleans?” It was more than a year before they were to meet again.

Throughout the 1880s Albert worked to get himself out of debt, and Violet undertook to translate documents for her brother-in-law to sup- plement her income. She devoted herself increasingly to organizations, such as the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Violet and Albert led very cordial, largely separate, lives. In 1891, she noted in her diary, “I wonder if there is another respectable woman in this city—so slightly married as I— . . . At least we do not bore each other & we make no scandals.”

There was a time, however, in the mid-eighties when Violet could have made a scandal. In 1883 she met the Austrian count William Lippe-Weissenfeld, and for several years enjoyed an extremely close friendship with him. She was clearly fascinated by the cultivated count, and did nothing to hide her fascination, even from her husband. But she did hide his twice-weekly evening calls to her home, confiding to her diary in 1886, “If people knew
that
I would have to stop it.” In the fall of 1887, Lippe was ordered to return to Austria. While the liaison does not seem to have been physically intimate (if we are to believe Vio- let’s diaries), it was deeply satisfying to both parties on an emotional and intellectual level. Violet suffered from his departure, and Lippe never married.

Without Lippe to fall back on, Violet became increasingly disillu- sioned with her husband, who was invariably impecunious and, by the mid-nineties, dependent on her for support. Resigned to her husband’s business failures and to the failure of their marriage, she wrote in her diary on December 31, 1897, a year-end summary statement: “My own marriage has not been happy, Heaven knows, but I have stuck to my bargain like an honest woman.” And two weeks later she added a con- soling note: “Bert at least does not meddle with me.”

Just when Violet had given up all hope, Albert surprised everyone by taking over a piece of family property, the Mammoth Cave in Ken- tucky, and promoting it into a huge success. Although Violet contin- ued to live on her own income and they were still separated most of the time, they found harmony and renewed affection in their later years. Albert wrote devotedly to Violet in 1905: “I have never known or seen any girl or woman who made upon me the slightest impression of the possibility of her being more desirable as a life companion for me than you with your superior charm of body and mind.” Violet was

to recognize their peculiar interdependence when she wrote in 1916: “As time goes on we need each other even more, I think. When are you coming?”

In his very last years, Albert became somewhat senile and often irasci- ble. Nevertheless, Violet took over his care for months at a time in Ken- tucky and then loyally nursed him during his last year, in Washington. After his death in May 1928, she sold the Mammoth Cave for the sub- stantial sum of $446,000, and turned over many of her assets to the Washington National Cathedral, before she died in January 1933. It had been, to say the least, an unconventional marriage. And yet, as her biog- rapher has written, it was in many ways “a common story writ large.” Her particular marriage magnified the tension between female autonomy and traditional wifehood that surfaced in the late nineteenth century, and that has by no means disappeared from our own era.

By the 1890s, it was impossible to ignore the many changes that were taking place for both single and married women in the urban middle class. The new women’s colleges including Smith, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and Vassar, the plethora of women’s clubs and organizations, the acceptance of work for single women and, to a lesser extent, for wives, the belief that marriage did not have to put an end to a woman’s interest in books, music, or sports (most notably tennis and bicycling)—all contributed to a heady atmosphere of female freedom and expectation.

The foremost symbol of women’s liberation was the bicycle, its ubiq- uitous image appearing on posters and ads that lauded one brand over an other as “perfectly adapted for use by women.” Victoria Bicycles pro- moted its “tilting saddle” for “those who experience difficulty in mount- ing,” while Duplex Saddle Co., playing on women’s anatomical fears, announced that “A WOMAN MUST NOT RIDE the ordinary bicycle saddle,” according to the Boston Obstetrical Society of April 1895, and should purchase its own cushioned “safety saddle,” whose indented pommel “does not even touch the body.” The mother who may or may not have learned to ride a bicycle herself was instructed by such maga- zines as
Ladies’ Home Journal
on the art of confectioning a riding outfit for her daughter.

Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Good Housekeeping,
both founded in the mid-1880s, kept women abreast of the latest fads and fashions. If in

August 1884 the
Journal
could blandly assert that “the happiest women are those who lead the ordinary home life,” a decade later it was responding more and more to the yearnings of married women for less ordinary lives. Articles titled “When Work Fits Woman,” “Men as Lovers,” and “Women and the Violin” (February 1896) extended the range of reading beyond traditional housekeeping hints and sugges- tions for married homemakers.

This is not to say that the basically conservative
Journal
had aban- doned its glorification of the wife, mother, and housekeeper. It was simply obliged to recognize changing mores, often regretfully. Thus various articles bemoaned excessive talk “about the woman who never marries,” the sensational publicity lavished upon divorces, and the frenzied activity of married women outside their homes. Ruth Ash- more, in her column “The Conservative Woman,” offered the following picture of the perfect wife and mother—one that recapitulated the con- ventional Victorian ideal.

She is the woman who with her husband and her sons is the best companion. She surrounds herself, unconsciously, with a spiritual atmosphere that is a rest to the weary, especially to the weary man. . . . Keeping always and ever in a man’s heart a fresh spring of spirituality great enough to flood his whole system and worldliness and make him wholesome and clean is woman’s noblest work. (February 1896)

Similarly, columnist Mrs. Lyman Abbott, responding to letters from her readers, clung to the view of marriage as a lifelong, sacred commit- ment, and considered divorce a “contagion” that had spread beyond the rich to people of moderate income (March 1896). When she was asked to comment on subjects that were clearly outside the domestic arena, Mrs. Abbot still managed to remind her readers of their feminine obli- gations. For example, she published a letter concerned with tax reform from a correspondent who was quick to state that she was “not a New Woman,” but nonetheless believed women should concern themselves with such issues, because “the vote of the country can be swayed more readily by the influence of earnest, intelligent women well beloved by men, whether as mother, wife, sister, sweetheart or acquaintance, than by the votes of the same women at the polls.” It was a portrait of female contingency that corresponded exactly to Mrs. Abbott’s own conserva-