Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [17]
THE MAKING OF A FEMALE COMMUNE
There was no precedent for group life among American single women who were not nuns. Most unmarried women ended up back where they’d started—at home, tending to the usual family crises: illnesses, pregnancies, and the usual miserable complaints. Poet Lucy Larcom put it this way: “I cannot think my own thoughts in the thick of other people’s lives.”
Louisa May Alcott echoed the sentiment in 1868: “I want to realize my dream of supporting the family and being perfectly independent. Heavenly hope!” This she is said to have written in her journal, so we may assume she wrote it in secret, separate from the diary her relatives would have seen. In many households anything a family member wrote, any letter received, was considered open for reading or recitation. This passed the time and served also as a means—especially in houses occupied by teachers or writers—for exercising one’s critical faculties. Or just for criticizing. (Louisa May Alcott’s father, the famed preacher and educator Bronson Alcott, noted that, of his daughters’ journals, “Anna’s was about other people. Louisa’s is about herself.”)
One contemporary, Ellen “Nelly” Wheeton, was caught with the contraband: a journal hidden beneath some papers in a drawer. In it, she had apparently expressed disdain for the married state. As she managed later to write: “[Mother] found it necessary to prohibit the use of pen and ink, or slate and pencil, except while receiving instruction from her or the writing master. My brother was made to spy upon my actions…he often threatened to tell mother when he had seen me writing upon the wall with a pin, which I sometimes did when I had no other resources.”
But could such a young woman have simply moved in with like-minded female friends? Consider it: a house, a self-sustained universe, where women could live happily among themselves, refusing marriage and, more important, childbearing. The idea was blasphemous. It was as if Herland, the utopian 1915 novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, had sprung to life. (In this work, serialized in the author’s own magazine, a British expedition sets out to find a hidden country populated solely by genius women warriors; as they discover, men of all classes have been extinguished.) In short, the idea of an all-female house incited alarm.
Yet there was a long tradition of communal living among single women. In Great Britain it dated to A.D. 385 and the founding of the Ursuline and Pauline orders, religious communes that were actually more like early social-work agencies. Lone girls from all over England arrived daily so desperate and grateful that, from the descriptions, it’s not hard to imagine them standing on the steps and shouting “Sanctuary!” These groups—and there were constantly new ones—quickly earned the title “bastard flocks,” for their loose approach to devotional life. Without quite meaning to, they had devised the only viable escape for unwed women stuck at home: an unquestionably proper religious setting in which girls could learn something useful. In fact, to claim a religious calling—whether fantasized or cleverly invented—would become the means for many determined single women to break free. Florence Nightingale, for example, claimed that she’d had an epiphany as opposed to a rebellious fit and this calling, this quasi-religious mission, allowed her slowly to extricate herself from her controlling family.
But the conventual life was a hard one. The novitiates, or the new girls, spent a year working through strictly regimented days on the grounds. After that they were trained to perform charitable works for the poor. These works—nursing, child care, housecleaning, cooking—were physically draining and carried out in places so run-down, in weather so bad, few girls told their parents just what they did. (One communard, a nurse trainee, returned home, told her family what she did, and found that no one would come near for fear of disease.) But