Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [637]
Much as many bourgeois women may have appreciated the provision of such accommodations, and others may have found honor, dignity, even a modicum of power in presiding over their sphere, others felt increasingly restless and constricted. As they watched male fields of action expand so dramatically in the boom years, the balance between the gender spheres was coming to seem increasingly unequal, even unjust.
“THE UTTER IDLENESS OF THE LADY CLASS
Nowhere was this new sensibility more in evidence than in the separate sphere of women’s literature that had emerged, in the 1840s and 1850s, with such astonishing rapidity. The books that hundreds of thousands of female buyers boosted to bestseller status (dwarfing Dickens’s sales) included domestic novels that explored the pleasures and trials of running a modern household (including struggles with servants and husbands), dreamy romances that celebrated decked-out and adored young heroines, weepy tales of dying children, and illustrated guides to the latest fashions. Much of what made it into print accepted, even glorified, the sentimental stereotypes of female passivity. Susan Warner’s 1850 blockbuster The Wide Wide World urged readers to seek spiritual strength in submission and obedience, and that same year author Grace Greenwood defined the feminine genius as “timid, doubtful and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood.”
Yet what was most striking about the new women’s literature was how angry much of it was, how full of complaints about what one 1856 novel called “that living death to which it is the fashion to consign females of the wealthy middle-class.” “I feel like rushing out,” said a character in Charlotte Chesebro’s Children of Light (1853). “But here I am, only a woman—a housekeeper . . . to be kept in my ‘proper sphere’ and ‘place,’ and never to stir an inch out of it in any direction, for fear that all creation would turn against me, and hunt me down, as they would a wild beast!” Many novelists fumed at men they saw as jailers. A host of masculine villains paraded through their plots—neglectful fathers, cruel husbands, and assorted gamblers, alcoholics, philanderers, failures, or murderers—with whom courageous and creative women did combat or from whom they fled.
Authors ritually agreed that the “Home” was “woman’s empire” and that the work women did there raising republican children was indispensable, but in go-ahead New York City, the action was patently elsewhere. Urban society celebrated producers—the men who made ships, built railroads, traded stocks and commodities, got on with business. Some New York women, too, were censorious of what one British visitor called “the utter idleness of the lady class.” Novelist Catharine Sedgwick found her peers as little trained for the actual business of life “as if we had been born in the royal family of Persia.” Women didn’t choose idleness, insisted Lydia Maria Child, they were pressed into it.
What particularly galled writer and editor Child was the dictum that women “must not study, because gentlemen do not admire literary ladies.” Worse, the conventional male assessment (particularly that of medical “experts”) held that mental acuity wasn’t really possible for women, driven as they were by their wombs, not their heads. But growing numbers of women were in fact receiving rigorous intellectual training at institutions around the metropolitan area. The Brooklyn Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies insisted its charges be educated “as carefully, as substantially, and as liberally” as men, and the Rutgers Female Institute, incorporated in 1838, taught belles lettres, history, mathematics, and philosophy. Such academies were not intended to prepare graduates for careers or roles in the public realm, to be sure, but rather to help them attract and later assist the right kind of husband. Yet without denying their special responsibilities to home