Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [584]
“The Miseries of Mistresses,” cartoon views of the “servant problem” fromffaiper’s Netv Monthly Magazine of 1867. Among middle- and upper-class New Yorkers, the alleged foibles of Irish maids like “Bridget” and “Peggy” were a running joke. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
As women’s work expanded, it became less valued, in part because it was unpaid, in part because, as home was meant to be the antithesis of the workplace, labor there was not something to be acknowledged. Indeed the success of women’s work was often measured by its invisibility. The veiling of domestic labor’s contribution was accompanied by an insistence on women’s importance as civilizing agents. Home, one minister wrote, was the place where “fighters, with their passions galled, and their minds scarred with wrong—their hates, disappointments, grudges, and hard-worn ambitions—may come in, to be quieted and civilized.” Housewives, that is, were expected to instruct their husbands in matters of sensibility, in part by crafting an environment that exerted a refining and spiritualizing influence.
As women guided their husbands, so they molded their children, lavishing increasing nurturance on fewer offspring. It was the father’s duty to pay for formal schooling. It was the mother’s to impart the character traits, table manners, conversation styles, dress codes, and spiritual wherewithal required to retain and transmit the family’s position in the middle class. In shaping their children, it was argued, women shaped the country. Mothers, said one minister, would decide “whether we shall be a nation of refined and high minded Christians” or “a fierce race of semi-barbarians.”
Middle-class men were not entirely irrelevant to the civilizing process. They enrolled in literary discussion societies, went to concerts, and attended lyceum lectures, which in the mid-fifties almost surpassed theaters in popularity. Clerks flocked to talks sponsored by the Mercantile Library Association, which, still going strong, had over four thousand members by 1853. Formal associations were equally decorous. The International Order of Odd Fellows, which had once featured convivial gatherings in taverns, now forbade drinking and promoted individual self-improvement.
In physical pursuits, too, middle-class men hewed to respectable activities. Some exercised at gyms (by 1860 there were seven in operation). Others attended regattas, trotting meets, and pedestrian races. But it was on the new frontier of participatory sports that a handful of New Yorkers, in search of an appropriate after-work pastime, invented a game that would sweep the country, and eventually the world.
Cricket, played informally in the city since the Revolution, got organized, in a small way, with the formation of the St. George Cricket Club in 1839-40. The members were all Englishmen, mostly merchants and agents of English import houses, along with some skilled craftsmen. But the sport grew very slowly in the 1840s and 1850s. Despite the Times’s praise of it as a “manly, healthy and invigorating exercise,” its complexity, professionalism, and English associations limited its appeal.
In 1842, however, white-collar workers who lived near Madison Square and Murray Hill came up with an alternative. In a vacant lot at 27th and Madison Avenue they began playing a version of the children’s game known variously as one-old-cat, stool ball, bat and ball, base ball, or rounders—the latter being the others’ English forerunner. Popular since its arrival early in the century, rounders and its cognates involved four bases in diamond formation and a “feeder” who tossed balls to a “striker.” After several years of informal play, Alexander Joy Cartwright, a shipping clerk who later opened a bookstore and stationery shop, proposed to his fellows that they constitute themselves the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. The group—almost all of them businessmen, professionals, or clerks like Cartwright—drew up a constitution and wrote down a set of formal rules for the game. After being