Margaret Fuller was a pre–Civil War reformer and an intellectual, always ahead of her time. But in her mid-thirties, she seemed to accept the idea that her best days were over. “See a common woman at forty,” she wrote in her landmark work Woman in the Nineteenth Century. “See her, who was, indeed, a lovely girl, in the coarse, full-blown dahlia flower of what is commonly matron-beauty, ‘fat, fair and forty,’ showily dressed, and with manners as broad and full as her frill or satin cloak.” When people compliment such a lady, Fuller mused, she is “always spoken and thought of upholstery-wise.” The version of woman-at-forty that Fuller claimed to admire was exactly the opposite, featuring a “care-worn face, from which every soft line is blotted, those faded eyes, from which lonely tears have driven the flashes of fancy.” It was a more noble vision, but not one most people would look forward to achieving.
As unattractive as she made older women sound—either the fat and frilly ones or the ravaged ones with faded eyes—Fuller was unhappy about the way not-young people were elbowed out of American social life. “It is the topic of jest and amazement with foreigners that what is called society is given up so much into the hands of boys and girls,” she wrote angrily. “Accordingly it wants spirit, variety and depth of tone, and we find there no historical presences, none of the charms, infinite in variety, of Cleopatra, no heads of Julius Caesar, overflowing with meanings, as the sun with light.” (She knew many of the great intellectuals and artists of her era, but when she envisioned good party guests, she had to reach back a few millennia.)
Fuller, who was thin, dark, and moving into the old-maid danger zone, was probably imagining her own future, unwelcome at the best gatherings while the “boys and girls” held center stage. She was prescient about a great many things but misread the tea leaves on that one. Not long after her book was published, the New-York Daily Tribune sent Fuller—one of the first women to write for American newspapers—to Europe as a correspondent. She covered the Italian civil war and fell in love with a young marquis who was one of the leaders on the republican side. At age 40 she was sailing back to America with notes for a new book, her romantic husband, and their little son. Tragically, their ship ran aground off the coast of New York and all three of them were drowned. It was a terrible ending to her saga, but all the promise Fuller must have felt during the last part of her short life did come true for members of her generation. She died in 1850, when remarkable women were beginning to find new ways to have adventures and make an impact during middle age and later. Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw it coming.
“Courage Susan, this is my last baby and she will be two years old in January,” 40-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote soothingly to Susan B. Anthony. Stanton had just given birth for the sixth time, deeply discouraging Anthony, who was waiting for the moment when her friend could leave housekeeping behind and help her organize the women’s rights movement. “Two years more and—time will tell what! You and I have the prospect of a good long life,” Stanton predicted confidently. “We shall not be in our prime before fifty, and after that we shall be good for twenty years at least.”
This was in 1857, nearly 60 years after Elizabeth Drinker had theorized that the best time of a woman’s life was when childbearing days were behind her. Since then, the general attitude toward aging had gotten gloomier. But there was Stanton, reviving the best-is-yet-to-come theory, and in a new way. Getting older, to her, meant more than leaving behind the burden of reproduction. Stanton saw middle age as a time when life would really open up—when she could travel and give lectures and write books and enjoy a big, successful career pursuing the causes she cared most about. Aging would be the key to achievement, excitement, and power. It was a radical vision, but then Stanton was a pretty radical person.
Every time you run into a period in American history in which the whole female side of the country seems housebound and downtrodden, amazing people pop up and remind you that this, too, shall pass. The women’s world was already stirring around the edges in the early 1800s, but the new possibilities became more evident as time went on. While doctors were describing their menopausal patients in the bleakest terms possible, women who had gotten past that point in their lives were beginning to see its advantages. Perhaps it was true that motherhood was women’s greatest role, and that to carry it out properly they had to remain pretty much chained to the hearth. But once the children were grown, surely there had to be another stage—something better than that lithograph of the 80-year-old in her second childhood. Eliza Farnham, a social reformer, announced that the time when women bemoaned their loss of youth was “long since past for enlightened women” and that she personally had a sense of “super-exaltation” about her postmenopausal prospects.
The great public issue was slavery, and it shattered the traditional middle-class division of labor in which men ruled in the dog-eat-dog outside world while women reigned in the home. White Americans were learning—particularly through Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hugely popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin—that slavery was all about families. Husbands and wives were separated, children torn away from their parents, innocent girls raped by their white overseers. So women, the guardians of the family, the keepers of the moral light, were drawn into the fight.
The more progressive side of the country warmed to the idea of letting abolitionist women into the public world—as long as the cause was high-minded and the women in question were older. Age opened some doors: young women were supposed to be home raising their children. And they certainly weren’t meant to be making public appearances while they were still attractive to men—like the radical lecturer Fanny Wright, who drew crowds to her speeches about slavery, women’s rights, and the plight of the American worker. But she also caused riots—and not many women yearned to be known as “The Great Red Harlot of Infidelity.” Maria Stewart, an African American pioneer lecturer, tried making speeches in Boston when she was in her 20s but got a negative response even from the black community. “I find it is no use for me as an individual to try to make myself useful among my color in this city,” she said in a farewell address after a three-year struggle to be heard.
The remarkable Angelina Grimké and her sister Sarah, abolition crusaders who were pioneers in giving speeches to audiences that included men, frequently ran into danger from angry mobs, sometimes carrying torches. Catharine Beecher, who had once been a friend, parted company with the sisters because of their speaking tours. Women, she said, should avoid politics and retire to domesticity, where they could triumph through “kindly, generous, peaceful and benevolent principles.” This from a woman who, you will recall, never kept a home of her own.
Angelina, the star speaker, was rather gaunt and already regarded as an old maid when she was relatively young. Then she stunned everyone by marrying Theodore Weld, a prominent abolition crusader himself. She was one of the nation’s first vocal advocates of women’s rights, and a public speaker, and past 30—and she found a husband! It was too much even for many reformers—one of Weld’s abolitionist friends told him “nature recoiled” at the prospect of such a union.
If people were going to accept being lectured to by women, it was generally easier to start with speakers who looked warm and maternal, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, well-dressed in a matronly sort of way, with her gray hair carefully arranged. Stanton—who had persuaded her husband, Henry, to ditch the word “obey” in their wedding ceremony—was a natural writer who could dash off a lecture or magazine article in the time most people would take to organize their desks. She had entered the reform movement when she was young, but she couldn’t travel or work for her causes the way her friends wished. She was still overwhelmed with her duties as a wife and mother, and Henry Stanton was not all that liberated when it came to the question of men sharing in household chores. In the end, there would be yet another baby after number six. “Alas!! Alas!!!!” wrote Anthony. “I only scold now that for a moment’s pleasure to herself or her husband, she should thus increase the load of cares under which she already groans.”
Eventually Stanton was able to leave her children in the care of relatives and begin to lecture and campaign for a sort of middle-aged-women’s liberation. Rather than question the popular conviction that a woman’s place was in the home, Stanton argued for stages: “the same woman may have a different sphere at different times.” You raised your family, and then you could take to the road. She pointed to her friend the reformer Lucretia Mott: “married early in life and brought up a large family of children.… Her children are now settled in their own homes.… Lucretia Mott has now no domestic cares.… Who shall tell us that this divinely inspired woman is out of her sphere in her public endeavors?”
Susan B. Anthony’s entry into the women’s rights movement was much like Stanton’s—minus all those children. It was inevitable that the two of them would get together. They had complementary talents—Anthony was tireless as a behind-the-scenes organizer and Stanton could quickly provide the speeches, essays, and petitions. They were spiritual twins but physical polar opposites: the round, jolly mother of seven and the spare, austere spinster. Anthony claimed she had never suffered during her arduous travels because she eschewed the kind of late suppers Stanton adored. After a lecture, Anthony said rather proudly, “I go straight to my rooms, take a bath and drink a cup of hot milk and eat a cracker.”
Much as the general public preferred a good meal to a cracker, Stanton got a more positive response on the lecture trail. Anthony tended to deliver rather boring speeches in a monotone. And her physical appearance also worked against her, thanks to the popular conviction that while young women couldn’t be too slim, those who reached middle age were meant to be rather round. “Susan is lean, cadaverous and intellectual with the proportions of a file and the voice of a hurdy-gurdy,” snarled the New York World. Unlike Stanton, she was also frequently indifferent to matters of dress. “That ancient daughter of Methuselah, Susan B. Anthony, passed through our city yesterday,” announced a paper in Kalamazoo—Anthony was 54 at the time—“[w]ith a bonnet on her head looking as if she had recently descended from Noah’s ark.”
It was another example of the nation’s Old Maid fixation. To people who did not know her personally—especially the ones who disagreed with her politics—Anthony appeared to be all the things young women were trained to avoid like the plague. Stanton, in an effort to combat the stereotype, wrote that “Miss Anthony’s love-life” was expressed through her “steadfast, earnest labors for men in general. She has been a watchful and affectionate daughter, sister, friend, and those who have felt the pulsations of her great heart know how warmly it beats for all.” While Stanton understood how unfair it was to play the old maid card, she used it herself on occasion. She claimed Catharine Beecher, a longtime rival, might have been more humane if Beecher had “loved with sufficient devotion, passion and abandon any of Adam’s sons.”
The people who knew Anthony understood that she in no way resembled the bitter, disappointed stereotype that every girl learned to fear as her future. When she turned 50, her friends threw a party to express their affection. “The comments of the leading journals, next day, were highly complimentary,” Stanton later wrote, referring to articles like the one in the New York Sun, headlined “A Brave Old Maid.” All the stories, she said, “dwelt on the fact that, at last, a woman had arisen brave enough to assert her right to grow old and openly declare that a half century had rolled over her head.”
Stanton believed that menopause had redirected her “vital forces” from her reproductive organs to her brain. And she needed all the forces she could muster once she embarked on her speaking tour. Lectures were the chief source of entertainment for many Americans in an age before radio or movies, and Stanton quickly became a popular attraction. While she pursued the cause of women’s rights wherever she went, she used humor to win over the audience and often framed her talks around homely topics like “Our Boys” or “Our Girls.” She dressed carefully, in black silk, and curled her gray hair every night. Journalists compared her to Queen Victoria and—yes!—George Washington’s mother.
In an era when travel was still primitive and accommodations uncomfortable, the tours were grueling. Stanton claimed she needed the money to help support her family and pay for her children’s college tuitions. While this sounds a lot like Sarah Josepha Hale’s argument about feeding her fatherless babies, it was probably at least partly true—Henry Stanton had only fitful success in his work as a lawyer. But there must have been something in her that loved being on the road. She would hit 30 or 40 stops in a six-week stretch, speaking almost every day and twice on Sundays. She could sleep at will. In her 60s, Stanton could nap while sitting up on trains, or in hotel lobbies if emergency struck. It was a talent she attributed to all her experience with restless babies, and a gift that other famous older women, including Hillary Clinton, have enjoyed.
“Two months more containing sixty-one days still stretch their long length before me,” she wrote a friend. “I must pack and unpack my trunk sixty-one times… rehearse ‘Our Boys,’ ‘Our Girls’ or ‘Home Life’ sixty-one times, eat 183 more miserable meals… shake hands with sixty-one more committees, smile, try to look intelligent and interested in everyone who approaches me, while I feel like a squeezed sponge.” Still, she was having extraordinary experiences. She recalled speaking on behalf of a suffrage referendum in the Midwest, standing in a large mill one dark night with a single candle lighting her face, before an audience that was virtually invisible except for a vague glow from the whites of their eyes. She saw “all the wonders” of Yosemite Valley, even though she had to climb down a steep path after her horse turned out to be too weary to accommodate her. “The next day I was too stiff and sore to move a finger. However, in due time I awoke to the glory and grandeur of that wonderful valley, of which no descriptions nor paintings can give the slightest idea,” Stanton wrote in her memoir.
What happened to Stanton was not just that getting older released her from family responsibilities. It allowed her to have adventures—adventures that, in the mid-nineteenth century, younger women couldn’t enjoy. Her matronly appearance protected her from sexual predators, and the fact that she had seven children gave her audiences the reassurance that whatever she was saying must be respectable—even though Stanton was actually among the most radical voices of her era, particularly on hot-button issues like marriage, divorce, and sex. Both Stanton and Anthony were free to be themselves during their travels, living in ways a well-bred younger woman could never have gotten away with. Stanton killed the boredom on a train trip from Texas to New York by playing cards with some army officers. Anthony once delivered a talk from the top of a billiards table.
Stanton stayed on the lecture trail for up to eight months a year until she was 65, and Anthony traveled well into her 70s. During one stint, Stanton reported that after speaking in Iowa one evening she had an oyster supper, packed, took a short nap, and set off for Minnesota at two in the morning. She traveled through “a fearful snowstorm” on a small cart drawn by a mule. When she arrived at the station for the next leg of the trip, she discovered her train would be two hours late. So she “rolled my cloak up for a pillow, lay down on the bench and went to sleep.” Anthony once made a six-hour, seventeen-mile trip over frozen mud in a lumber wagon. It was an era when transportation was reliably unreliable. Boats ran aground, trains derailed, wagons broke their wheels. Dorothea Dix, another older woman from the Northeast who became a national figure for her reform work, once found herself stranded in Pennsylvania and wound up being ferried to her destination by “an old waterman, astride upon a drift log half under water.”
Black women had been on the road, lecturing, from the beginning of the century. Mainly they spoke about racial improvement, religion, and—obviously—abolition. In her autobiography, Jarena Lee, a minister, recounted one day in which she traveled on foot from Philadelphia “thirty miles to Downingtown and gave ten sermons while there.” Any difficulties a white woman might encounter were quadrupled for African Americans. The houses where they stayed were less comfortable, the transportation even less reliable. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the poet and anti-slavery orator, remembered when someone removed the linchpins from her wagon in the hopes of causing an accident. The sabotage was, happily, “discovered in time to prevent any injury to life or limb.”
Sojourner Truth, a former slave to a Dutch family in New York who became a popular anti-slavery speaker, was regularly heckled and threatened—the fact that she was in her 60s inhibited the crowds not a whit. When a mob in Indiana threatened to burn down the building where she was talking, Truth famously said, “Then I will speak upon the ashes.” On another occasion, hecklers claimed she was a man in disguise and demanded that she be physically examined by some of the ladies present. Truth bared her breasts to the crowd and, as an abolitionist paper reported, “told them that her breasts had suckled many a white babe, to the exclusion of her own offspring,” and that “it was not to her shame that she uncovered her breast before them, but to their shame.”
Harriet Tubman, at 43 a scout for the Union army, was traveling home to Auburn, New York, on a military pass when the conductor decided she didn’t belong in a car with white passengers. It took four men to move her; she spent the rest of the trip imprisoned in the baggage car, nursing injuries that would trouble her for months. During the war, Tubman worked behind enemy lines, setting up a spy network to inform the Union soldiers where useful targets were located and leading Union boats to spots where fugitive slaves were waiting to be rescued. While she was hardly given proper credit by the white press, one report from a Boston newspaper described her commander, a white officer named James Montgomery, as dashing into enemy territory, destroying millions of dollars in military supplies and cotton, and striking terror into the hearts of the confederacy “under the guidance of a black woman.”
While nobody else could do what Tubman was doing, there were lots of women helping move slaves north on the Underground Railroad. There was no particular age requirement for the job, but the volunteers tended to be older simply because they owned a farm or business or home where people could be sheltered. Henrietta Duterte, a Philadelphia undertaker, sometimes hid runaways in caskets or disguised them as part of a funeral procession when they had to make their escape. One elderly woman in the Midwest who was sheltering two escaped slaves in her barn threatened two bounty hunters with a knife, forcing them into a corncrib and holding them at bay while the fugitives made their getaway.
Stanton and Anthony amazed contemporaries with their ability to withstand the rigors of travel. But their travails paled in comparison to those of the women who went west during the pioneer era. The whole concept of getting in a coach and driving across empty plains, deserts, and mountains, past Indians who quite reasonably tended to be hostile, was not something that generally appealed to older people of either sex. Once they reached their destinations, frontier life was so exhausting that it appeared to create an instant class of elderly women out of the young ones who took up the challenge. “I am a very old woman,” wrote 29-year-old Sarah Everett from her family’s farm in Kansas. “My face is thin sunken and wrinkled, my hands bony withered and hard.”
Of course, the fact that life in the West was exhausting and often dangerous didn’t dissuade adventurous spirits from giving it a try. Tabitha Moffat Brown headed for Oregon at 66 with her brother and two of her adult children. The little company wandered hundreds of miles off track into the Utah desert and ran out of food during a mountain crossing through the snow. When Brown did make it to her destination, she instantly took a six-and-a-quarter-cent piece she’d found and used it to start a small business sewing buckskin gloves. Within two years she’d managed to open a school for pioneer children and orphans, which eventually grew into today’s Pacific University. It’s an extraordinary story—in 1987, the state legislature named Brown “The Mother of Oregon.” But it does also underline the fact that pioneering spirit did not come easy.
The early West was like the early South in the opportunities it offered women who would never have gotten them in more well-populated places. Older women worked at everything from taxidermy to running houses of prostitution—establishments that were arguably a necessary evil in a world where men could outnumber women 33 to 1. There were several legendary drivers, like “Stagecoach” Mary Fields, a six-foot-tall African American who was one of the first female U.S. mail carriers. Fields was past 50 when she moved to a Catholic mission in Montana, where she helped out by hauling supplies. She later got a job driving that coach and was legendary for her strength and endurance—when the snow was too deep for the horses, she delivered the mail on foot in snowshoes. At 69, she sort-of retired and opened a laundry. One of the stories about her holds that she was drinking in the local saloon at age 70 when one of her laundry customers walked in and declared he was refusing to pay his bill. Fields followed him out the saloon door, decked him with a single punch, then walked back in and announced, “His laundry bill is paid.” She was extremely popular in her hometown of Cascade—when Montana passed a law barring women from saloons, the mayor granted her an exemption. And when her laundry was destroyed by a fire, the townspeople rallied together to build her a new one.
By the time she hit her mid-40s—the age when women like Stanton were just beginning to take to the public stage—Fanny Wright, the sexy, riot-inducing lecturer of the early 1800s, was worn down. Still, she crossed the Atlantic seven times in her last 13 years, visited Haiti—where she had once helped relocate former slaves—and traveled continually up and down the Mississippi River. In 1852, when she was 56, Wright slipped on the ice and broke her hip, an injury that would lead to her death. She suffered terribly—but not too much to fail to notice the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and request a copy.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin wouldn’t thrill many African American readers if it came out today—there was a reason why, during the civil rights movement, black men who seemed overly deferential to white opinion were called “Uncle Toms.” But it defined an era, particularly for the middle-class white women in the North who were drawn into the fight against slavery by the novel. None of the other female speakers or writers or magazine editors of the period could match the fame of Uncle Tom’s creator, Harriet Beecher Stowe. The first publishers she had approached with the book proposal turned her down, theorizing that women novelists should be writing about shipwrecks and heartbreak, not something like slavery. They went down in the historical pantheon of bad guessers. It became a national and international sensation. Stowe made $10,000 for her share of the sales in the first three months alone—the equivalent of more than a quarter of a million dollars today and a literary record at the time.
Stowe was a long-married mother of seven who described herself in a letter to one of her admirers as “a little bit of a woman—somewhat more than forty—about as thin & dry as a pinch of snuff; never very much to look at in my best days—& looking like a used-up article now.” Everybody wanted to hear her speak, but Stowe felt it was improper for a woman to address a mixed audience of men and women. In her equivalent of a book tour, she sat in a box in the audience while her husband, Calvin, read her remarks. Then things changed and women lecturers became so common that even 61-year-old Harriet Beecher Stowe felt comfortable taking to the road. She loved it. “So far my health has been better than any autumn for several years,” she wrote to her family. “The fatigue of excitement & all lessens as I get accustomed to it & the fatigue of railroad travel seems to do me good I never sleep better than after a long day[’]s ride.” After a very rough rail trip from Chicago to Cincinnati, her daughter wrote that she was not sure she had ever seen her mother “so utterly used up worn out and exhausted.” But Stowe fortified herself with a day of rest, a massage, and a pick-me-up of raw eggs beaten with sherry, then went on to do another successful performance.