Teaching and Single Life, 1827–1834
Throughout Betsy’s youth and teenage years, she watched her brothers and sisters make important life choices as they grew into adulthood. Her oldest sister, Sally, settled down with the town founder’s son in 1819, when Betsy was eight years old, and had four children. All her brothers pursued careers, married, and started families. Edwin Weed Cowles, her eldest brother, trained with local physician Dr. Orestes Hawley and became a doctor. He married Almira Mills Foote in 1815, and they had six children. Her brother William married Lydia Wolcott in 1827, had four children, and farmed in Austinburg. Cornelia’s twin, Lysander, married Rachel Cowles (no relation) in 1835 and served as a local merchant and justice of the peace. Lewis, the youngest brother, married Clarimond Root in 1841, but she died two years later. He remarried in 1849 and had four children. Betsy’s two remaining sisters—Martha and Cornelia—followed a different route. They chose to remain single and taught school during their teens and early twenties. This less-traveled path appealed to Betsy, who joined her unmarried sisters in the classroom. The three single sisters would become very close, though Betsy and Cornelia developed an especially intimate bond that lasted throughout their lives.
Betsy accepted her first teaching position in 1827 at the urging of her father, but she quit after a single week. She refused to return to the school despite her father’s pleadings. It is unclear what caused Betsy to abandon her position so quickly, though lack of self-confidence is a likely culprit. She was just seventeen years old, and this was her first job. Cornelia finished the school term for her little sister. This failure proved to be a turning point in young Betsy’s life. Instead of marrying or finding another source of income, she returned to the classroom within a year, determined to succeed.
Betsy lived in a region that valued education. This emphasis represented a desire for “civil society”—that is, those institutions, roles, and public spaces that gave citizens a sense of community and stability. For those living in the less populated West, civil society meant a continuing connection to the larger Republic. It gave parents faith that their children would have opportunities associated with education, including access to knowledge, social interactions, life skills, friendship networks, and new vocations. School taught young people about republican values—liberty, inalienable rights, and independence—and initiated boys and girls into the civil society that would be central to their lives.
By the third decade of the new century, Ohio had caught up with and even outpaced other states in its commitment to schooling. In the mid-1820s and early 1830s, it gave birth to nearly a dozen private colleges, including Kenyon, Western Reserve, Athenaeum, Xavier, Oberlin, Marietta, and the excellent Miami University in Oxford. Most of these institutions were linked to religious denominations, such as Episcopalianism, Presbyterianism, Catholicism, and Congregationalism. Betsy’s father helped found Western Reserve College in 1826. This “Yale” of the West included several Yale graduates among its faculty and focused on training young men to become evangelical Presbyterian ministers. Giles’s Yale degree and his long career as a Presbyterian missionary and minister deepened his passion for Western Reserve College. Through his involvement with the institution, Giles instilled in his children a passion for knowledge linked to religious commitment.
When Betsy was fifteen years old, Ohio followed the lead of other northern states and established a public school system. Although Ohio public schools were not adequately supported or financed, the system was a clarion call to young women looking for a vocation. New schools emerged across the state and needed bright, eager young people willing to work for little pay—women earned less than half their male counterparts—and to live in cramped and crowded conditions. Although some young men entered the teaching profession during this period, particularly in southern parts of the state, women crowded the field. By 1860, three-quarters of the teachers educating young people across the nation were women. Martha, Cornelia, and Betsy joined this enthusiastic group.
When Martha and Cornelia accepted their first teaching positions in the 1820s, they taught the “basics” to their young students. Having received only a limited education themselves, the Cowles siblings relied on their parents’ impressive library to supplement their knowledge and improve their skills. Many new teachers had only minimal qualifications. For the earliest teachers in the 1820s, this was because of the paucity of opportunities for college education available to women. Oberlin was the first college to admit women, but it did not open its doors until the mid-1830s, and although female seminaries had emerged, they usually offered only an advanced high school experience.
Both Martha and Cornelia ventured away from home when they began their short-lived teaching careers. Sixteen-year-old Cornelia traveled thirty-five miles southeast to Kinsman, Ohio, in the winter of 1823 to instruct pupils. Rural schools usually had two short sessions during the year as dictated by agricultural seasons. All hands, including school-age youth, were needed to help with fall harvests and spring plantings. A typical winter term lasted from December through March while the summer term might be in session from June through August. This allowed young women like Cornelia to experiment with teaching for only a few months, knowing the safety and security of home awaited them once they completed each term. Martha followed her younger sister into teaching a few years later. She began her career instructing students in the Catskills of New York, living with her cousins.
By the time Betsy made her second attempt at teaching in 1828, she was determined to become an excellent instructor. For the next few years she taught in a variety of classrooms around the Western Reserve. Although we have few sources from this period of Betsy’s life, it is clear that she used these years to hone her teaching skills and build a strong reputation for educational excellence among her students. Her teaching techniques resonated with the girls and boys who grew up in the same environment as she had. This was a very familiar audience, and Betsy learned how to reach her students.
In the spring of 1832, between teaching jobs, Betsy and sister Cornelia made a trip back east. This was their first long journey alone and their first to the East since they left the region as children. They traveled through Buffalo and witnessed the “power and majesty” of Niagara Falls as they made their way to visit cousins in the Catskills and also New York City, which had a population of 250,000 by this time. Betsy was awestruck by the dynamic, crowded metropolis. She complained to her Brooklyn cousin after returning to Austinburg that “the wilds of Ohio do not look as pleasant.” Her cousin replied that she envied Betsy’s quiet, rustic life compared to the cold, rude “manners and customs” of big cities, but Betsy remained fond of New York.1 Urban centers offered cultural opportunities such as concerts, lectures, and recitals that Betsy eagerly embraced. She must have been grateful, however, that she departed the city just days before a cholera epidemic took the lives of over 3,500 people in the city.
During this visit Cowles learned about a new teaching method being practiced and popularized by Joanna Bethune. Bethune’s mother, Isabella Graham, was a very influential reformer in New York City. Graham spearheaded one of the earliest and most successful benevolent groups in the nation, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children (SRPWSC), founded in 1797. This group revitalized the charity movement by creating a structured, well-financed, and forward-thinking organization. Although benevolent women like Graham often imposed their own ideas about appropriate behavior and good values onto the beneficiaries of their charity, the SRPWSC focused on empowering poor women with the skills, knowledge, and support to become independent. Educating children was critical to the overall strategy of this movement. Knowledgeable children would prevent a second generation from falling into poverty. Once Graham died, Joanna took over the organization. She continued to emphasize the importance of education, modernizing her approach by introducing “infant schools” for four- and five-year-olds. After reading the latest pedagogical theories about the importance of early education emerging out of England, Bethune organized the Infant School Society and quickly opened ten schools in New York City in the late 1820s. She also helped other advocates open schools across the nation.
Immediately upon Betsy’s return home, she sought opportunities to work with an infant school in Ohio. After garnering a letter of introduction from a friend, she found a position in Kinsman, Ohio, the same city where Cornelia had taught a few years earlier. She quickly became fully committed to this educational approach. The methods employed by infant schools would eventually become widely embraced. Instead of demanding straightforward memorization and repetition, infant school teachers used music and rhymes to teach, making education playful and accessible. Classrooms were redesigned to include beautiful, creative instructional aids such as hanging globes and solar systems. These methods proved successful, and Betsy taught in infant schools around Austinburg for the next several years. She admired and embraced infant schools because they reflected her priorities and personality. Her father once warned her “to avoid all unbecoming levity,” but Betsy loved unfiltered laughter.2 She wanted to harness the joy and playfulness of young children—qualities she admired—for learning. She recognized that education was most successful when it relied on curiosity and fun. It is no coincidence that her students grew very fond of her, and she would become one of the most influential and beloved teachers of her generation. “Oh, if I only had . . . someone to advise me and love me like you used to,” mourned one former student.3
Cowles proved to have a natural affinity for teaching. Her intelligence, compassion, and creativity made her highly effective. But teaching also offered Betsy many personal rewards. Teachers formed a tight network for exchanging knowledge, methods, complaints, and successes. They often shared information about openings at local schools, recommending and supporting each other as they moved from position to position. Teaching was an itinerant profession, requiring educators to move frequently. Because the school year was short and inconsistent, teachers could not rely on a single school to offer them adequate year-round support. They had to go where the work was. This frequent moving engendered loneliness. “I cried again and again Thanksgiving Day as I thought of you,” confessed Betsy to her brothers and sisters during a teaching stint in southern Ohio. With no family or friends in the vicinity, teachers were left with no one to turn to in difficult times. And the work was often endless. “My time is now so much occupied with the school that if I attempt to write it is generally in the time redeemed from sleep or some of my necessary avocations,” wrote a cousin to Betsy to explain her infrequent correspondence.4
Cowles developed close friendships with other women teachers. No one understood the challenges and dark moments she experienced as a single woman in a new community better than other teachers. Frustrations abounded among this group, especially among young women who were well trained to be demure and accommodating as “ladies.” Rowdy children, including teenaged boys who could be physically threatening, might make daily life a trial. Local parents sometimes failed to pay tuition, making a teacher’s salary unreliable. Local school boards sometimes closed schools with no warning. Finding safe and convenient accommodations in new communities often proved difficult. In a period long before the acknowledgment of sexual harassment, young women were sometimes vulnerable to emotional, physical, and even sexual abuse. If a teacher dared to violate racial norms, punishment often ensued. Mary Cheney, a young white abolitionist teaching African American children in Big Bottom, Ohio, in 1843, engendered deep hostility among local whites. A mob of “miserable whiskey drinkers, armed with guns, pistols, [and] dirks” tore down her school and verbally accosted her. “Repeatedly has word been sent to me, that if I [did not leave], they would come and take me out of the house, give me a dress of tar and feathers, and treat me in a manner too inhumane to mention.”5 This allusion to sexual violence reflected a fear that many isolated young female teachers confronted.
Informal professional networks became a form of social capital. These networks helped Cowles secure her position at Kinsman; indeed, most of her teaching opportunities came from her large collection of colleagues and friends. As she became more experienced, her network expanded. With this expansion came increased opportunities and accomplishments, making her career in education more satisfying. By the early 1830s, Betsy must have had a hard time envisioning a future outside teaching.
Cowles’s teaching career offered her a level of independence unusual for single women of her generation. Women’s opportunities for meaningful work outside the home remained limited in the 1820s and 1830s. While changes in technology and transportation meant more wage labor for women in factories, such work remained low paid and unstable. And these jobs were seen as temporary stopgaps for young, white northern women before they married. Even teaching was a career limited to single women. Wives were expected to focus on their families, leaving them little time to hold a job. Opponents to married teachers also worried that pregnant instructors might somehow taint the classroom with female sexuality. At a time when “passionlessness” and piety increasingly characterized notions of women’s sexuality, pregnant women represented visible signs of female ardor. Prior to the Revolution, women were commonly depicted as passionate and lustful. By the 1810s, however, this image had given way to one that envisioned respectable women as completely devoid of sexual desire. Only disreputable women remained sexual.
Cowles came of age during this time of transition in ideas about women’s sexuality, and perhaps this affected her own sense of sexual identity; we can only guess because she did not share her personal reflections on this intimate topic in any extant letters during her youth. We do know that as her teaching career developed, she chose to remain single. At the age of twenty-one, Betsy announced that she “wished there was no such thing as marrying.” When she learned of a friend’s impending wedding, she commanded her sister Cornelia to instruct the bride “to postpone her matrimonial exercises until after her visit to Ohio.”6 Presumably this would allow Betsy to talk her “silly” friend out of marrying. Betsy was not alone in her rejection of marriage. More and more young women made the conscious choice to embrace “single blessedness.” Although coined by William Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this phrase was commonly used in the early nineteenth century to describe the state of women who opted not to marry. Only about 1 or 2 percent of women remained single in the colonial period, but by the mid-nineteenth century, nearly 10 percent chose to eschew marriage.
Though an increasing number of women, like Cowles, remained single, they were still a small minority of the general population. Most northern white women, whether urban or rural, saw marriage as a natural life stage, not a choice. They married in their mid- to late twenties and quickly started families. But these early-nineteenth-century marriages began to differ from those of their parents’ generation. Unions like that of Giles and Sally Cowles, who wed in 1793, were built on the patriarchal notion of coverture. A woman lost her legal identity when she married because she was “covered” by her husband. Husbands ruled the household, and wives and children were expected to obey. In 1816, when Betsy was six years old, legal expert Tapping Reeve published a treatise on marriage that reinforced this notion of women’s subordinate status but also recognized that wives should be adequately supported. While the husband still held legal, financial, and physical control over his wife and children, he should use his power with kindness and due regard for his family. The relationship between husband and wife became increasingly characterized by mutual respect and love instead of obedience. New courtship rituals designed to illuminate the potential for romantic love emerged among young people. Young women were encouraged to hold out for a husband who could be a life partner and lover.
Young Betsy reached the customary age of marriage right around the time these new ideas were budding. As she began to consider all these trends, friends and family offered advice, encouragement, recommendations, and warnings. But one of the most important people in her life had no voice in the matter. When Betsy was twenty, her mother died. We can only guess at how this loss affected her because we have no written record of her reaction. The fact that she was surrounded by her remaining family, including her father, who would live another five years, probably helped her to cope with the emotional distress. Her mother’s absence meant that Betsy’s family and friends probably felt a stronger inclination to share their input regarding courtship and marriage.
Among those close to Betsy, many wanted her to find a suitable husband and settle down. They grasped any small piece of news as evidence of impending nuptials. “Shall I hear that you too are a worshipper at the Shrine of [matrimony]?” inquired one friend. Another congratulated her upon her supposed engagement to a “Reverend Mr. Sanders.” Martha and Cornelia encouraged their younger sister to find a good husband and choose a traditional path. Well acquainted with the difficulties of single life, they worried that Betsy was making a mistake in choosing to forgo marriage. Cornelia warned Betsy, “Unless you make up your mind to lead a life of single blessedness don’t you refuse Brother S[anders].” Sounding like a matchmaker, Cornelia regaled Betsy with the young man’s excellent reputation in the community: “Louisa says that of all the men of her acquaintance there is none that she would prefer to him.” Perhaps reflecting her own ambivalence and frustration with single life, she concluded with an admonishment “not [to] be foolish about matters.”7
A year later another friend suggested the dashing and charming Dr. Harry Wadsworth as marriage material. A few years younger than Betsy and well known for his medical skills and generous nature, Wadsworth was a distant relative who moved in with the sisters in the mid-1830s. Betsy apparently considered Wadsworth, a family favorite, more a brother than a potential mate. But that did not keep her friends from hoping. When Betsy was visiting the Catskills in 1837, she received a letter from a friend predicting that Harry would soon propose. “He wants his cousin Betsy.”8 We do not know if he ever asked for her hand or how Betsy may have responded.
Others discouraged Cowles from marrying, including longtime family friend Sibbel Austin: “You ought not get married until you are forty years old.” After all, she reminded Betsy, independence offered many rewards. “You ought to spend your time in teaching & doing good. If you marry now, you will not be as happy as you are single.”9 Austin’s opinion about the benefits of single life represented a reversal in popular thinking about single women. Before the Revolution, women who chose to remain single were considered eccentrics who defied the God-ordained sanction that everyone should marry. Young women were taught to fear becoming a cranky and spiteful “old maid.” In the early nineteenth century, single women earned a new, improved reputation. As women’s moral responsibility increased, single women were expected to dedicate themselves to a higher cause. “Single blessedness” now appeared virtuous and desirable. Women who chose to eschew marriage were considered self-sacrificing because they gave up the joys of motherhood to “do God’s work” through charity and volunteering. With this new, positive spin on single life, increasing numbers of young women chose to delay and sometimes altogether reject marriage.
If Cowles was not completely convinced by Sibbel Austin’s assertion that single women were happier than married women, she probably knew that single women had more rights than wives. Only single women could bring suit, control their property, and fully manage their lives. Choosing a mate, therefore, was important and risky business. What if he could not support the family? Or drank too much? Or became abusive? Divorce was difficult and brought shame to the family. Was it not better to stay single than endure a miserable marriage? With increased access to education, young women like Cowles began to crave the autonomy that remaining unwed offered.
While concerns over finding a suitable partner and the emergence of a more positive vision of single life influenced Cowles and others to opt out of marriage, there were other trends as well. Betsy expressed interest in travel and learning. She knew that the world was changing and that opportunities for single women were expanding. Her mother came of age when there were few vocational models for women. Some women kept taverns, farmed, or sewed for a living, but these choices were unusual. Marriage, raising a family, and keeping a household were Sally’s vocations. She constructed an independent and useful life for herself due to her husband’s constant travels and absences, but she did not develop a meaningful career outside the home. As Betsy grew older, she witnessed other models of womanly pursuits besides her mother’s. She met women who taught in their own schools, labored in textile factories, served as nannies to large families, became seamstresses, or wrote for an income. These occupations attracted thousands of young women who took pride in their ability to find employment and succeed in their jobs. The money they earned became an important part of the antebellum economy. Parents relied on single daughters’ contributions to the household income. For example, Louisa May Alcott helped keep her family afloat by working as a governess, teacher, and author. Her book Little Women became a best seller and included several women characters who worked outside the home. Though Alcott was younger than Cowles, they both came from deeply religious families with a strong commitment to social activism. While most women who labored for wages did so only for a few years before marriage, an increasing number opted for lifelong employment.
For those who chose single life, one motivating factor may have been fears about pregnancy and giving birth. During Cowles’s Ohio excursions and her trip back east, she learned firsthand of the difficulties and dangers of bearing children. While Betsy’s mother was fortunate to give birth to nine healthy babies, many other women experienced life-threatening pregnancies and traumatic deliveries. A woman went into labor with legitimate fears about whether she and her baby would survive. Husbands and siblings worried that each new baby could mean the death of their wives and mothers. Potential brides had to consider the possibility that marriage and pregnancy put their lives at risk. When Cowles was twenty-two she learned that a young pregnant woman she met during her New York trip had passed away during childbirth. “As soon as she was delivered she went into a fit and died in about 5 minutes,” explained Betsy’s cousin Sally Montross. “The shock was very great to us all.”10 Montross herself was a widow with a small child—another compelling example of the potential pitfalls of getting married and having children. Even more close to home, Betsy’s sister-in-law Clarimond died in childbirth in 1843, leaving Betsy’s brother Lewis bereft.
As Cowles moved into her mid-twenties and the pressure to marry continued, her father reminded her of the important role that single women could play in the community. He impressed on Betsy her significance as a role model in her teaching position. “It is my wish & prayer, that your conduct may be such, as will be pleasing to God.” For Giles and many Americans, teachers modeled Christian behavior, commitment, and charity for their students. “You know that professors are like a city . . . on a hill, & that their conduct will be critically noticed by the world.”11 Teaching allowed Betsy to demonstrate Christian usefulness and morality by living up to her God-given potential. If she married she would have to abandon her teaching and would thereby fail to fully utilize her talents. Remaining single allowed Betsy to embrace the profession she loved and serve as a Christian guide to her students, encouraging them to become respectful, dutiful, and pious citizens.
If Betsy worried that choosing a career over marriage would leave her pining for a family of her own, she only had to glance around at her siblings. Although Martha and Cornelia pushed their little sister toward the conventional married life, Betsy heeded their actions more than their words. It is no coincidence that these three siblings all chose to remain single. Historians have found clusters of single women among sisters in this period. Siblings shared biology, family, and cultural experiences. Sisters in particular developed bonds of love and intimacy that proved extremely powerful and influential. Older sisters often cared for younger sisters as they grew up, and this parental relationship sometimes lasted throughout their lives. They also modeled behavior, vocational choices, and social activities. In times of family crisis sisters often worked as a team to solve problems. The entrepreneurial sister duo of Harriet and Sarah Hunt, for example, opened a school in Boston in order to support their family when their father unexpectedly passed away. When Sarah became deathly ill, Harriet nursed her back to health, and the two studied medicine and opened a practice together. Only Sarah’s marriage disrupted their partnership. When Sarah left with her new husband, Harriet felt like a “widow” and mourned the absence of her most intimate companion. Indeed, among close sisters who remained single, the death or marriage of one of those sisters could cause deep emotional pain.
The death of parents also created a special bond among sisters, as was the case in the Cowles family. By 1835, both Sally and Giles were gone. In response, the single sisters created a new type of domestic life. Although Martha, Cornelia, and Betsy had each spent some time traveling and working outside Austinburg, they decided to make their family home a sanctuary where they could always find a loving sister and a warm bed. The beautiful, white frame house where they grew up continued to provide intimacy, safety, and comfort in single life. Although their eldest sister Sally married and initiated her own family life, she remained in Austinburg as well.
The three Cowles siblings approached single life as a unit. Each sister accepted responsibilities and duties based on her talent, skill, and inclination. Although their father followed traditional notions of inheritance and left two-thirds of the family estate to son Lysander and one-third jointly to Betsy and Cornelia, the women took charge of the home. With the help and blessing of Lysander, Martha remained at the homestead, providing her two wandering sisters with a foundation from which they could launch their various travels, activities, and labors. Cornelia was thus able to pursue her professional singer career. She traveled across the North giving voice lessons, performing, and teaching. Although the life of a professional artist proved exhausting and not very lucrative, Cornelia was delighted to have the opportunity to labor in a field she loved. Betsy also pursued her dreams, though the path she took was winding and sometimes full of hidden obstacles. Because Betsy and Cornelia shared a preference for travel as well as an ambitious character, they developed an especially close friendship. They worked to see each other as often as possible despite their travels. When apart, they missed each other terribly. “Your departure was like a death knell to me,” Betsy spluttered to Cornelia after one separation. As intimates often do, they also bickered and complained about one another, revealing the depth of their love: “Send a letter without fail,” demanded Betsy. “I shall be disappointed if you do not.”12
As Betsy reached young adulthood, she appreciated her independence and freedom. With no children or husband to tie her down, she chose where to work, whom to socialize with, and how to spend her time. She elected to remain single at an early age, and she never appeared to question this decision. The three sisters created a family foundation that served them all well. Austinburg was home to most of the Cowles siblings and eventually to all their children, who were fairly close in age to Betsy. Because Betsy had no children of her own, she had the time to develop warm relationships with most of her nieces and nephews, especially Edwin and Almira’s children. Their daughter Helen was deeply fond of her Aunt Betsy, as was their son Edwin, who became publisher of the Cleveland Leader, and Alfred, who became the publisher of the Chicago Tribune.
Unburdened by the time-consuming duties of raising a family and strongly influenced by her clergyman father, Betsy had the freedom and opportunity to actively address some of the moral challenges facing the community and nation. One such issue was slavery. As she traveled around Ohio, she began to see evidence that slavery was not limited to the South. It penetrated into the North through racial inequality. These issues often affected her work as a teacher. When she stepped into her classroom, she saw only white faces. African Americans were excluded from access to public education. Prejudice permeated all aspects of American society, and the public school system was no different. As Cowles became increasingly involved in the movement to end slavery in the 1830s, she found ways to combine her abolitionist sentiment with her teaching. Indeed, antislavery and education would become two of the most important commitments of her life.