The intense devotion of many a smash is revealed in girls’ most secretive correspondence. One girl wrote of “the thrill of our pet dovey times” and a “burning sensation, both when I am with you—as you will know—and when I am alone and imagining back.” Studies made in 1900 of twenty thousand “Boston marriages”—two women who lived as sisters or lovers—and of numerous smashes revealed episodes of mutual masturbation. Other couples give no hint of overt sexual activity—or what we’d consider overt sexual activity—but were, rather, said to be playful and affectionate.
Whatever the precise nature of the bond, smashed girls likely remained friends for life, whether or not one of them married. “My every nerve springs forward at attention when I hear the post arrive!!” wrote a married friend to another who was far off and unwed. In long letters illustrated with ink drawings—self-portraits, fancy matching gowns, two women out strolling—they reaffirmed their feelings for each other and helped each other negotiate the requirements of married life. One engaged New Englander revealed to her dearest friend in 1782 a shocking decision: she would never change her name. “I think it a good [name] and am determined not to change it without a prospect of some great advantage. I am sure to confront a tribunal.”
Threatened by these connections, some men called them immature, proof that women underneath were really children who could not put away girlish toys and dolls and sit properly alongside their mates. As far back as 1847, a visitor to the United States, one Domingo Sarmiento, concurred: “Americans have developed customs which have no parallel on this earth—the unmarried woman flies about with her friends as if it were a butterfly.”
The more unusual man found beauty in these friendships, sometimes collecting and reading aloud women’s letters to one another. For this odd connoisseur, female love letters were refined works of sentimental expression, the prose equivalent of a hand-carved miniature or cameo. Scholar Carroll Smith-Rosenberg writes that Goethe published the love letters sent between his fiancee, Bettina, and a countess she was deeply attached to; Margaret Fuller, respected New England intellectual, found a U.S. publisher for the volume. To underscore how important these bonds were in the young (and older) female life, consider the life span of one early study on the subject,
It was obvious still that to marry was to win at the era’s female lottery—if not necessarily hit the jackpot— but the point is that a few women actively, and without trace of pathos, had begun to question the contest. In articles entitled “A Loyal Woman’s No,” and “The Difficulties That Accrue to Our Sex from the Marriage Bond,” they argued for allowing some female lives to evolve on their own terms, possibly with their own chosen friends or family. As one midcentury woman, a self-styled biological researcher, wrote to her “dearest dear”: “I cannot wait these days to turn 30! Then I may put away all pretense of being marriageable and concentrate on my interests.”
SEND ME NO FLOWERS
Starting in the 1870s, the marriage rate among educated women plummeted to 60 percent, compared with 90 percent of all women in the general population, and the figure would remain low until 1913 or ’14. Remember that these women lived in an era that celebrated feats of daring and genius in the visual and dramatic arts, social and physical sciences, transportation, politics, and archeology. Explorers, doctors, even realist novelists were heroes, secular gods lauded for their intellectual gifts and their bravery. A talented woman would have been acutely aware of her potential.
And she also would have been acutely aware that marriage carried with it specific dangers. One in every thirty women died in childbirth. And there was plenty of opportunity to witness a live unanesthetized birth before marriage, an experience that Susan B. Anthony herself called “a very nasty business.” (The entire nature of the business would become far nastier in 1880, when the U.S. government declared abortion and the few extant forms of contraception illegal—a ban on all abortions that would remain in place until the 1973
Then one had to contemplate husbands.
Even the loyal and genuinely loving ones couldn’t help but domineer, and many of them, even the very best, were likely to drink. In fact, it was widely accepted that all men drank, just as all men used spittoons and knew their way around a rifle. (Some even claimed drinking was healthy. Midcentury it was often argued that whiskey was cleaner and safer to drink than New York City public water.) Earlier in the nineteenth century the little-known but remarkable Women’s Moral Reform Society had railed against alcohol as the primary cause of spousal battering, rape, and the use of prostitutes. There were always pious groups who specialized in social cleanup, “municiple housekeeping,” as it was called. But none had made the explicit link between male drinking and male abuse of women. In its women-run newspaper,
That’s not to say that the singly blessed used terms such as “The Destroyer” or that they refused to hear marriage proposals. Many young women had simply learned to reject them—no matter how often they were repeated.
In one famed case, a Boston woman refused the same man sixteen times; another allegedly turned down twenty-six different men. Poet Lucy Larcom, who worked for years as a mill girl in Lowell, Massachusetts, reported that her first proposal left her with hives for a week. Florence Nightingale seems to have turned them down weekly, pausing to consider just one man so exceptional, famed, and intelligent that only the most beautiful and brainy of the famed Nightingale girls would do. She spent six months writing furiously in her journals to explain her refusal, a grueling narrative alternating between rage and self-loathing, a suspicion of mental illness, and a tenuous pride in following the secret pledge she had made to her herself about her duties. My favorite terrorized-fiance story belongs to Jane Austen, a young woman said by one of her closest friends to “shift,” to be charming and decorous and yet to possess “eyes the color of a viper’s.” Once, while visiting friends, she listened warily as a young suitor made so passionate a case, she stunned herself by accepting, then left for home. But not long into the ride she began to feel queasy. One hour later, she had her driver turn back, despite bad weather, to rescind her agreement. After seven hours of additional traveling she arrived home physically ill but relieved.
As more unattached women seemed to be working, giving speeches, or just out walking around at odd hours, the Massachusetts governor once again proposed direct action. This time he hoped to ship the state’s twenty-one thousand redundant women to Oregon or California, where wives, as always, were in short supply. (As historians would later point out, so were prostitutes, although this particular need the governor did not publicly address.)
The proposal died, but not the paranoid views of single women. What seemed to be changing was the way some single women, the “blessed” in particular, responded. In public situations, even the youngest had been trained to ignore nasty epithets and walk proudly. College women took an eager part in debates, for example, at Oberlin, “Is Married Life More Conducive to a Woman’s Happiness than Single?” or “Is the Marriage Relation Essential to the Happiness of Mankind?” True, for girls at coed schools it was hard, in almost any situation, not to run off crying. But there are records of girls who braved the taunting (“The Co-ed leads a wretched life/She eats potatoes from a knife!”). In an 1863 diary one college girl remarks that she is developing “a natural armor, which seems attached and fastened tight on to my body and brain. I hope someday I may step out of it.”
Professional women out on the road needed an even stronger suit of armor and perhaps a sword. The original abolitionists were typically booed off stages. Men called them hags who’d never had men and wanted to free the black “species” only so they could snag themselves a black male. Social workers and nurses typically slept in the worst parts of a city, sometimes among people who had contagious diseases. Others, traveling for pleasure, to see friends who’d married or gone to teach at far-off schools, suffered nasty comments along the way. Still, a trip for the single woman was a test, an adventure that would have been unimaginable to her as a girl; some stayed on the road for up to six months. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founding feminist and the mother of seven, once wrote jokingly to her single and suddenly absent colleague, Susan B. Anthony: “Where are you? Dead or married?”)
Back at home, Theodore Roosevelt, an up-and-coming public figure, accused them of committing “race
