The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [60]
Still, that helpless gentility had to be overcome, in the minds of men, in the minds of other women, in their own minds. When they decided to petition for married women’s rights to own property, half the time even the women slammed doors in their faces with the smug remark that they had husbands, they needed no laws to protect them. When Susan Anthony and her women captains collected 6,000 signatures in ten weeks, the New York State Assembly received them with roars of laughter. In mockery, the Assembly recommended that since ladies always get the “choicest tidbits” at the table, the best seat in the carriage, and their choice of which side of the bed to lie on, “if there is any inequity or oppression the gentlemen are the sufferers.” However, they would waive “redress” except where both husband and wife had signed the petition. “In such case, they would recommend the parties to apply for a law authorizing them to change dresses, that the husband may wear the petticoats and the wife the breeches.”
The wonder is that the feminists were able to win anything at all—that they were not embittered shrews but increasingly zestful women who knew they were making history. There is more spirit than bitterness in Elizabeth Stanton, having babies into her forties, writing Susan Anthony that this one truly will be her last, and the fun is just beginning—“Courage, Susan, we will not reach our prime until we’re fifty.” Painfully insecure and self-conscious about her looks—not because of treatment by men (she had suitors) but because of a beautiful older sister and mother who treated a crossed eye as a tragedy—Susan Anthony, of all the nineteenth-century feminist leaders, was the only one resembling the myth. She felt betrayed when the others started to marry and have babies. But despite the chip on her shoulder, she was no bitter spinster with a cat. Traveling alone from town to town, hammering up her meeting notices, using her abilities to the fullest as organizer and lobbyist and lecturer, she made her own way in a larger and larger world.
In their own lifetime, such women changed the feminine image that had justified woman’s degradation. At a meeting while men jeered at trusting the vote to women so helpless that they had to be lifted over mud puddles and handed into carriages, a proud feminist named Sojourner Truth raised her black arm:
Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns…and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well…I have borne thirteen children and seen most of ’em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus helped me—and ain’t I a woman?
That image of empty gentility was also undermined by the growing thousands of women who worked in the red brick factories: the Lowell mill girls who fought the terrible working conditions which, partly as a result of women’s supposed inferiority, were even worse for them than for men. But those women, who after a twelve-or thirteen-hour day in the factory still had household duties, could not take the lead in the passionate journey. Most of the leading feminists were women of the middle class, driven by a complex of motives to educate themselves and smash that empty image.
What drove them on? “Must let out my pent-up energy in some new way,” wrote Louisa May Alcott in her journal when she decided to volunteer as a nurse in the Civil War. “A most interesting journey, into a new world, full of stirring sights and sounds, new adventures, and an ever-growing sense of the great task I had undertaken. I said my prayers as I went rushing through the country, white with tents, all alive with patriotism, and already red with blood. A solemn time, but I’m glad to live in it.”
What drove them on? Lonely and racked with self-doubt, Elizabeth Blackwell, in that unheard-of, monstrous determination to be a woman doctor,