Made In America - Bill Bryson [199]
The tiniest deviation from conventional behaviour earned the rebuke of newspapers. In 1881 the New York Times editorialized against the growing use of slang by women, with the implication that it bespoke a dangerous moral laxity, and cited as an example the shocking expression ‘What a cunning hat’.24
Yet – and here is the great, confusing paradox of the age – at the very time that these repressive currents were swirling around, many women were stepping forward and demanding to be heard with a vigour and boldness that would not be repeated for a century. The women’s movement of the nineteenth century grew out of a huge thrust for social change that gripped America like a fever between about 1830 and 1880. Scores of new ideas seized the popular consciousness and found huge, fanatical followings: utopianism, spiritualism, populism, vegetarianism, socialism, women’s suffrage, black emancipation, tax reform, food reform, communalism, mysticism, occultism, second adventism, temperance, transcendentalism. People dipped into these social possibilities as if pulling sweets from a bag. One group called for ‘free thought, free love, free land, free food, free drink, free medicine, free Sunday, free marriage and free divorce’. Another, styling itself the Nothingarians, rallied behind the cry ‘No God, no government, no marriage, no money, no meat, no tobacco, no sabbath, no skirts, no church, no war and no slaves!’ As Emerson wrote to Carlyle in 1840: ‘We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket.’
Typical of this new spirit of experimentation was a commune called Fruidands started in 1843 by A. Branson Alcott and some followers. For various fashionable reasons, the members of the Fruidands community rejected meat, cheese, tea, milk, coffee, rice, woollen clothing, leather shoes, and manure. One particularly zealous adherent refused to eat any root that pushed downwards ‘instead of aspiring towards the sun’. The colony lasted less than a year. Things went well enough during warm weather, but at the first sign of winter frost, it broke up and the members returned to their comfortable homes in Boston.
For women, the social ferment presented an opportunity to take part for the first time in public debate. It began with a few lectures, usually to other women in private homes, on subjects like abolition and education. By mid-century women were appearing on public platforms and speaking not just for abolition or vegetarianism or transcendentalism, but for their own interests.
Two of the most outspoken were the sisters Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Claflin Woodhull, who jointly ran a successful New York stockbroking firm and published a popular magazine, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, which espoused a variety of utopian schemes and engaged in an early form of ‘outing’ when it exposed the affair of the preacher Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of one of his parishioners. Curiously, they didn’t attack him for this, but praised him for his ‘immense physical potency’ and ‘amativeness’.
Woodhull was particularly – and in the context of the times breathtakingly – forthright in her demands for free love. ‘If I want sexual intercourse with one or one hundred men I shall have it,’ she thundered. ‘And this sexual intercourse business may as well be discussed ... until you are so familiar with your sexual organs that a reference to them will no longer make the blush mount to your face any more than a reference to any other part of your body.’25
As a way of asserting their new-found sense of independence, many women took to wearing bloomers, an article of clothing named for Amelia Bloomer, a postmistress in upstate New York and a leading temperance lecturer. Bloomer did not invent bloomers but merely popularized them. Bloomers could hardly have been more modest. They were a sort of voluminous pants, not unlike those worn by modern baseball players, worn under a short skirt or smock – ‘like a stratosphere