Reading from the ‘Lady’s Book’

By Martha Allen
Inspired by Keene’s bicentennial year, I consulted some old “lady’s books” — compilations of women’s magazines — to get a sense of what life was like in the 19th century. This year, when a woman is running for president of the United States, it is instructive to read from Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1852, what Alice B. Neal had to say on the subject of women’s employment.

“Public opinion would seem to have decided that but two classes of employment are legitimate to our sex — teaching and the needle.”

She quoted public opinion: ‘Women are not intended to be occupied out of the domestic circle. The cares of the household are her proper sphere... Our mothers, our sisters, our wives, how much we owe to them! We love them all the more for their beautiful dependence. We pity those who have been deprived of their natural protectors, and are obliged to labor for themselves. How fortunate that to them two such avenues are open! Teaching is at once so respectable and proper; the needle, to those who are not qualified for the school room, is a certain and never-failing support.’ And so public opinion turns to the discussion of some new theme, with folded hands and a satisfied conscience.”

Peale herself, however, was careful not to overstep her bounds. In fact, she was so PC for her day that it is difficult to ascertain where she stood on the issue of women’s employment. The fact that she was herself a published authoress, however, is in itself a clue.

“Go through our crowded courts and swarming alleys,” Peale wrote, “and you will find many girls and women who have never received any education, the daughters of the poor.

“Life-long labor for a scanty fee is not in itself attractive, and therefore marriage is set before them as the end and object of their existence. This one false motive is suffered to take root” even in wealthy families, in which young women are trained to subdue “every warm heart-impulse” in seeking a husband who is socially and financially suitable.

How much better, she continued, if a woman could take her time to find “the simple strength of love, the union of reciprocal tastes and excellent qualities ...this holiest emotion of the heart ...qualities of mind and soul as would ensure sympathy, strength and forbearance” in marriage.

But, she conceded, not every woman could afford to hold herself above “the marriage of convenience.” While some must provide for themselves and family, “Work they cannot, and to beg they are ashamed ...public opinion washes its righteous hands of the matter. And why? Because it has guarded so many avenues of employment; because it has shut out all choice and variety: ‘so far shalt thou come and no farther,’ in the broad world of human effort and ingenuity, is the voice that has condemned every effort to a wider range of thought and action.”

You might surmise that Ms. Alice B. Peale was about to burst out here and champion women’s rights, but no; the natural timidity of her sex, or perhaps fear of losing the scanty fee which her pen afforded her, caused her to backpedal.

“Not that we would enter into the contest of the present, and soil our lips with the war-cry for ‘female emancipation;’ we claim for our sisters only liberty to use the properties of strength, both of body and mind, with which Heaven has seen fit to endow them. Every woman who comes before the world as a public teacher or leader seems to lose a part of her birthright of purity and delicacy. The pen can send forth its gentle influence from the retirement of the home circle; but we ask no place in the lecture room or the arena of public strife — nothing that could disturb ‘That stillness which best becomes a woman, calm and holy.’”

She went on to extol the admirable women who worked in the United States Mint for $4.50 a week, which may or may not have been a scanty fee at the time.

“You are fond of crocheting, dear ladies; you like the grace of the silken purse, the shining glitter of its well-filled compartments.” The women at the Mint actually made this glittering money!

Meanwhile, in Keene, I hear, year-round women cooked, cleaned, and performed whatever other tasks were necessary to live, probably without worrying too much about the niceties of Godey’s Book of “public

opinion.”

Have a good week.