#eleanor flexner

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Between 1839 and 1850 most states passed some kind of legislation recognizing the right of married women to hold property. In some cases this was due to the interest of large property owners in protecting their bequests to female legatees; in others it was due to the efforts of liberal-minded men aided and aberted by a few energetic women.

In 1836 the fist petition for a Married Woman's Property Law in New York reached the state legislature. It carried the signatures of six women and was the work of Mrs. Ernestine Rose, who had just arrived in this country. Although born in Poland, Mrs. Rose became one of the outstanding women orators of her day and was often called "The Queen of the Platform." She was also one of the first women to try to improve the position of her sex through legislative action, and she found the task a difficult one:

After a good deal of trouble I obtained five signatures. Some of the ladies said the gentlemen would laugh at them; others, that they had rights enough; and the men said the women had too many rights already . . . I continued sending petitions with increased numbers of signatures until 1848 and '49, when the Legislature enacted the law which granted woman the right to keep what was her own. But no sooner did it become legal than all the women said: "Oh! that is right! We ought always to have had that!"

-Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States

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The 1880’s and ‘90’s were a period of huge and rapid industrial growth. The founding of the Standard Oil Company was followed by more "trusts," at first in the distilling, sugar-refining, and lead industries, later in steel, tobacco, and elsewhere. Railroads spread north and south, in a network all the way to the Pacific Coast, spurred by such financiers as Henry Villard, James J. Hill, and others.

Cheap tractable labor was needed for these giant enterprises: in the decade after 1880, immigration from impoverished European countries topped five million. Women workers were in rising demand, always for the lowest-paying jobs; the 2,647,000 gainfully employed in 1880 grew to 4,005,500 ten years later, from 15.2 per cent to 17.2 per cent of the total working labor force.

Outside of the large number classified as housekeepers, stewards, hostesses, and family servants of all kinds, totaling almost a million, the greatest number were to be found in the same occupations they had carried on at home before the era of industrialization: making cloth and clothing, keeping these clean, and other so-called service occupations. . . .

Although the demand for labor appeared insatiable, soaring immigration enabled employers to keep wages down. The 1880's consequently saw the first really serious attempt to build a national labor organization. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 as a secret fraternal order, discarded the bulk of its ritualistic features in 1881 and began organizing working men and women on an equal basis. . . .

. . . Mrs. [Leonora] Barry herself admitted that in the face of such conditions as she described, the response of women to attempts at organization was disappointing, due to ignorance, apathy, hopelessness, and

the habit of submission and acceptance without question of any terms offered them, with the pessimistic view of life in which they see no ray of hope. Such people cannot be said to live, as living means the enjoyment of nature's gifts, but they simply vegetate like partially petrified creatures. Every effort has been made to perfect and extend the organization of women, but our efforts have not met with the response that the cause deserves—partly because those who have steady employment, fairly good wages, and comfortable homes seem to see nothing in organization outside of self-interest, and, because they are what they are pleased to term "all right," do not feel it incumbent upon themselves to do anything to assist their less fortunate co-workers. Again, many women are deterred from joining labor organizations by foolish pride, prudish modesty and religious scruples; and a prevailing cause, which applies to all who are in the flush of womanood, is the hope and expectancy that in the near future marriage will lift them out of the industrial life to the quiet and comfort of a home, foolishly imagining that with marriage their connection with and interest in labor matters end; often finding, however, that their struggle has only begun when they have to go back to the shop for two instead of one. All this is the results or effects of the environments and conditions surrounding women in the past and present, and can be removed only by constant agitation and education.

While this outburst reflects the bitterness of a woman who knew from her own experience that marriage was no guarantee against the problems of a wage earner, it also shows that Leonora Barry understood the source of such illusions. By and large the reluctance of women to join trade unions, and the difficulties encountered in trying to organize them, are still very much with us. In any case, attempts to organize them into the Knights of Labor came to an end when Mrs. Barry resigned her post in 1890, to marry a St. Louis printer, Obadiah R. Lake; she never returned to the labor movement.

-Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States

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Opportunities for women to teach advanced students while carrying on research themselves were largely limited, then as now, to women's and coeducational institutions. Having won the battle, albeit with difficulty, to go to college, they still encountered the same old obstacles to more advanced training. When M. Carey Thomas went abroad in 1879 to work for and win her doctorate in Germany, her mother wrote to her that family friends never mentioned her name, as she was felt to be a disgrace to her kin. The entire community considered plans for research and teaching as tantamount to relinquishing any hope of, or interest in, marriage; nor was there much possibility of advancing to the higher academic posts or being taken seriously as scholars and investigators.

-Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States

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Looking back from our present vantage point, we can see that the single most significant step away from the concept that women needed an improved education only to carry out their housewifely or teaching duties better came with the founding of Mount Holyoke in 1837. Generally regarded now as the oldest woman's college in the United States, it made no such claim at the time. It opened as a seminary, and there were other such institutions then in existence. Mount Holyoke did not achieve collegiate status until 1893, after Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, and Bryn Mawr; yet it opened the way for them all.

Its founder, Mary Lyon, followed the path charted by Emma Willard, but went much further; in the fifteen years between the first steps toward founding her school and her premature death at fifty-two, Miss Lyon established certain fundamental principles which succeeding institutions accepted as axiomatic: the schools must have adequate financial endowment; they must try in some degree to make education available to girls of all economic groups; they must offer a curriculum more advanced than that envisaged even by Mrs. Willard; and they must prepare their students for more than homemaking or teaching.

Miss Lyon succeeded in her ambitious undertaking because, in addition to an indomitable will and a mind which left its fiery imprint on all whom she encountered, her purpose was perfectly suited to both time and place. Hers was a New England in which wider horizons for women were becoming a household controversy: where women were already more than homemakers and pedagogues. They were working by the thousands in the red brick mill buildings springing up beside every creek and river. The year Mount Holyoke opened its doors, anti-slavery women were holding their first national convention in New York, and the Grimké sisters were touring Massachusetts, speaking publicly against slavery; the storm unleashed by their unladylike behavior was convulsing the churches. There was a ferment abroad which stirred even women in obscure villages to ideas and efforts undreamed of a few years earlier. To a person of Mary Lyon's gifts and determination, here were the soil and climate that she needed.

She was born on a marginal hill farm in western Massachusetts in 1797, and as a child already showed astonishing mental capacities; like Emma Willard, she soon reached the outposts of knowledge then accessible to women. Like Mrs. Willard, she began to teach, and in the process, to continue her own education, to extend the existing curriculum, and to reshape teaching methods. With Miss Zilpah Grant she ran a successful academy, first at Derry, New Hampshire, and then at Ipswich, Massachusetts, but she was not satisfied. She saw the price paid in poor health by Miss Grant and by her friend, Catharine Beecher, for their staggering labors. She saw good schools arise, and then vanish, if a wealthy supporter died or lost interest. Like Miss Beecher she was obsessed with the need for good teachers. Most of all, she brooded over the young women who, like herself, wanted an education they could not afford: "During the past year my heart has so yearned over the adult female youth in the common walks of life, that it has sometimes seemed as if there was a fire shut up in my bones. I would esteem it a greater favor to labor in this field than in any other on which I have fastened my attention." To her mother she wrote in the same vein: "I have for a great while been thinking about those young ladies who find it necessary to make such an effort for their education, as I made when I was obtaining mine. . . . I have looked out from my quiet scene of labor on the wide world, and my heart has longed to see many enjoying the privileges, who cannot for want of means. . . . Sometimes my heart has burned within me; and again I have bid it be quiet."

In 1834 she laid her plan for a new kind of educational institution for women before a number of businessmen and ministers, who finally assumed the responsibility of raising the $27,000 estimated as necessary to build and open the school.

Here lay one of the major obstacles to success. Miss Lyon was herself the heart of the enterprise; yet the proprieties required that she keep in the background. It was not even considered seemly that she be present at the trustees' meeting which voted to locate the school in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She wrote to Zilpah Grant: "It is desirable that the plans relating to the subject should not seem to originate with us but with benevolent gentlemen. If the object should excite attention there is danger that many good men will fear the effect on society of so much female influence, and what they will call female greatness."

But when it became apparent that the men hired as "agents" were unable to raise the needed funds in the face of not only public apathy but a gradually worsening economic situation which culminated in the panic and depression of 1837, Mary Lyon herself entered the field, carrying the green velvet bag which became famous all over New England. When her staunchest friends objected to her incessant traveling and appearances at public meetings to ask for money, as unladylike, she refused to compromise her dream for the sake of propriety:

"What do I do that is wrong?" she asked in a letter. "I ride in the stage-coach or cars without an escort. Other ladies do the same. I visit a family where I have been previously invited, and the minister's wife or some leading woman calls the ladies together to see me, and I lay our object before them. Is that wrong? I go with Mr. Hawks and call on a gentleman of known liberality at his own house, and converse with him about our enterprise. What harm is there in that? If there is no harm in doing these things once, what harm is there in doing them twice, thrice or a dozen times? My heart is sick, my soul is pained with this empty gentility, this genteel nothingness. I am doing a great work, I cannot come down."

Miss Lyon herself raised the first $1,000 with which to launch the campaign, primarily from her former Ipswich students and teachers. Next she won support from men of means whom she visited under the escort of one or more of her trustees: there were two donations of $1,000 each, one of $640, one of $500. But in the last analysis the greater part of the money was raised because Mary Lyon, sometimes accompanied by a gentleman but very often alone, went to as large a cross-section of the population of New England as she could reach.

The greater portion of the total sum was raised from farmers and small townsfolk—men whose livelihood did not come easily, and women without any source of income except their handiwork, or what husbands or fathers might give them. In the old ledgers there are eloquent entries of five dollars, ones and threes, fifty cents, and one gift of six cents. Much of this money was raised at church meetings, small parlor gatherings, and sewing circles. There was a young girl in a sewing circle at West Brookfield who was making a shirt to help a young man through theological seminary, and whose thoughts as she listened to Miss Lyon have come down to us: “Among those who had sewed and spent time, strength and money to help educate young men, one dropped the needle and that toil and said: ‘Let these men with broader shoulders and stronger arms earn their own education while we use our scantier opportunities to educate ourselves.’ She never picked up the shirt again.” Her name was Lucy Stone.

-Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States

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In one of the wagon trains reaching Oregon in 1852 was a seventeen-year-old girl who, as Abigail Scott Duniway, was to lead the fight for woman suffrage in the Northwest, and in her seventies, write the woman suffrage proclamation for the state of Oregon, just sixty years after her arrival in the Oregon Territory. Her mother, weakened by childbirth a few months before the family left their home in Illinois, died of cholera in the Black Hills of Dakota, a circumstance her daughter never forgot. Grown up and married, Mrs. Duniway lived, not in isolation like Mrs. Walker, but in a pioneering community, which brought its own problems with it:

It was a hospitable neighborhood composed chiefly of bachelors, who found comfort in mobilizing at meal times at the homes of the few married men in the township . . . I, if not washing, scrubbing, churning or nursing the baby, was preparing their meals in our lean-to kitchen. To bear two children in two and a half years from my marriage day, to make thousands of pounds of butter every year for market, not including what was used in our free hotel at home; to sew and cook, and wash and iron; to bake and clean and stew and fry; to be, in short, a general pioneer drudge, with never a penny of my own, was not pleasant business for an erstwhile school teacher.

Mrs. Duniway also learned the hard way that, although they had no legal rights of their own, married women were jointly liable for commitments made by the husband; the farm into which she had put as much work as he did was lost because he signed three notes for a friend, and then had to meet them. During the years she was raising a family of six and also supporting them (for Mr. Duniway became incapacitated by an accident), she absorbed a mulitude of such bitter lessons; at the age of thirty-six she was ready to make woman suffrage her life work.

-Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States

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Even in their relatively primitive state a hundred years ago, the professions required of a woman wishing to enter one of them that she be creative in more than the biological sense with capacities greater than those involved in "attending to the mechanism of a pudding," as Mrs. Murray put it. The idea that women might possess creative intellectual powers was an explosive one, and accounted for the reaction described by Jane Swisshelm with her usual verve:

It is well known that thousands, nay, millions of women in this country are condemned to the most menial drudgery, such as men would scorn to engage in, and that for one fourth the wages; that thousands of them toil at avocations which public opinion pretends to assign to men. They plough, harrow, reap, dig, make hay, rake, bind grain, thrash, chop wood, milk, churn, do anything that is hard work, physical labor, and who says anything against it? But let one presume to use her mental powers—let her aspire to turn editor, public speaker, doctor, lawyer—take up any profession or avocation which is deemed honorable and requires talent, and O! bring cologne, get a cambric kerchief and feather fan, unloose his corsets and take off his cravat! What a fainting fit Mr. Propriety has taken! Just to think that "one of the deah creatures"—the heavenly angels, should forsake the sphere woman's sphere to mix with the wicked strife of this wicked world!

-Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States

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[The final paragraph struck me. Interesting that girls and young women were often fighting not only their fathers but also their mothers for the right to a complete education in early US history.]

In 1819 . . . Governor De Witt Clinton of New York (of Erie Canal fame) received An Address to the Public; Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education; it was the work of Mrs. Emma Willard, who had been quietly carrying out some novel pedagogical ideas which were to prove a turning point in women's education.

Born in Berlin, Connecticut, Emma Hart had been fortunate in her father; he wanted the best possible education for a lively-minded daughter who enjoyed grappling with mathematical problems for the sheer delight of mastering them. But her pleasure was spoiled when she discovered that most women were deprived of the study of higher mathematics because their brains were not considered equal to the strain. Slowly she came to the realization that women would not be able to overcome such prejudices without the knowledge and the discipline afforded by a systematized course of study.

Mrs. Willard, by then married to a physician in Middlebury, Vermont, where she taught in a female academy, requested the privilege of attending the men's examinations at the University of Middlebury, in order to familiarize herself not only with the subject matter but also with teaching methods and standards in the fields barred to herself and her pupils. Her request being denied, Mrs. Willard set herself to evolving her own teaching methods and training her own teachers. As a prerequisite she had to study each new subject by herself. "I spent from ten to twelve hours a day in teaching and, on extraordinary occasions such as preparing for examination, fifteen; besides having always under investigation some one new subject which, as I studied, I simultaneously taught a class of my ablest pupils."

She did not stop with algebra and geometry, but went on to solid geometry (which, lacking textbooks, she taught with the aid of pyramids and cones carved out of turnips and potatoes), trigonometry, and conic sections. She taught geography, not by having her pupils memorize the distance between Peking and London, but by drawing maps; history was presented as a living process rather than a list of names and dates.

Since her pupils not only survived such rigorous fare, but responded with gusto, she was encouraged to present her Address to Governor Clinton. Her goal was a seminary whose curriculum would also include natural philosophy (science) and domestic science; she sought not only a charter but financial endowment. Mrs. Willard spent much time in Albany, pressing her ideas on members of the legislature. Decorum did not permit her to appear publicly, but she did read the Address to several individuals and to at least one larger group. Her biographer, Miss Alma Lutz, has suggested that she was probably the first woman lobbyist.

Although Governor Clinton gave her his support, and the legislature voted her a charter for a seminary in Waterford, it balked at the idea of a subsidy. Mrs. Willard then turned to the prosperous town of Troy, just across the Hudson River from Albany, where she aroused the interest of some substantial citizens. The Town Council voted to raise $4000 for a building by a special tax, and additional funds for maintenance and staff by private subscription; in 1821, the Troy Female Seminary, the first endowed institution for the education of girls, opened its doors.

Here Emma Willard continued to introduce innovations into her course of study, the most daring being the subject of physiology, at a time when any mention of the human body by ladies was considered the height of indelicacy.

Mothers visiting a class at the Seminary in the early thirties were so shocked at the sight of a pupil drawing a heart, arteries and veins on a blackboard to explain the circulation of the blood, that they left the room in shame and dismay. To preserve the modesty of the girls, and spare them too frequent agitation, heavy paper was pasted over the pages in their textbooks which depicted the human body.

-Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States

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The slave society was shattered by the war itself, the Emancipation Proclamation and the succeeding constitutional amendments. It took infinitely longer for the image of the "southern lady" to dissolve and for male attitudes toward women to change correspondingly. At a time when social and economic dislocations were shaking large numbers of white women from any illusory or nostalgic dependence on past circumstances, and they were beginning to turn their minds to jobs, education, even the vote, it seemed as if many southern men were trying to cling to the past through an image of "white womanhood" which had never really corresponded to reality, and was now increasingly at variance with it.

But if the southern white woman faced the future hobbled by her own past and the intransigency of male prejudices, the lot of the black woman was infinitely more difficult. The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had ended slavery; families could no longer be broken up by the slave traders. But how the newly freed slaves were to exist, become educated, make a living, and exercise the ordinary rights of an American citizen, what kind of freedom was to be the lot of the black American—these questions were left unanswered; few individuals even admitted their existence, much less addressed themselves to their solution. Meanwhile—black children were born, families had to be fed, homes provided. The mother of a family as well as its father were left facing an economic vacuum which suddenly came into existence when "Master" no longer had to feed his slaves and "Missus" look after their welfare. Once again, the black woman faced problems which set her apart from even the poorest white woman, South or North. Yet her chronicle remains part of the struggle for equal rights and opportunities for American women, and must be recorded, though the task is made difficult by lack of records during some of the most crucial years.

-Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States