Lydia Maria Child, who had given so much advice to young women in her cookbooks, found another lucrative subject in older people. She had already cobbled together selected readings for children, and it seemed natural to move on to the other out-of-the-mainstream part of the population. Looking Toward Sunset, a collection of poems, short stories, and essays about aging, became a bestseller in 1865. That was particularly impressive given the size of the target audience—only about 3 percent of the country was over 65.
A modern reader would probably find the book treacly in the extreme. There are short stories about spunky Old Aunty and wise Old Uncle Tommy, both beloved by the little people in their neighborhood. (“Oh, Uncle Tommy, I believe we should always be good children if you could only be along with us all the time.”) There were “moral hints” and “hints about health.” (“Never step from your bed with the naked feet on an uncarpeted floor. I have known it to be the exciting cause of months of illness.”) Plus many poems and essays about looking forward to a heavenly reward. (“Having arrived at this state of peacefulness and submission, I find the last few years the happiest of my life. To you, my dear friend, who are so much younger, I would say, Travel cheerfully toward the sunset!”)
These were all familiar messages. But Child pushed things a bit further. Happiness in old age, she wrote, comes with thinking about something other than yourself—whether it was by fighting for political causes, knitting socks for the poor, or just memorizing a nursery rhyme to entertain the neighbors’ kids. Child was clearly hoping her readers would “take an interest in some of the great questions of the age,” listing possible topics from slavery to Indian rights to “improvements in architecture.” Still, she needed every reader she could get, and she was willing to settle for just about anything, sock knitting included.
It was an important step. In the colonial era, women who were too old—or wealthy—to work were expected to spend their later years praying and contemplating the next life. Now they were warned that if they really wanted to be happy when their child-rearing years were over, they had better start getting beyond their sitting rooms.
Lydia Maria Child took her own advice. In 1833, she published the path-breaking An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, which not only called for the immediate liberation of all slaves in the South but also denounced the racism and discrimination the free black community encountered in the North. It was shocking to a public that was used to thinking of her as the nice lady who knew how to remove laundry stains.
Child was actually an important member of the Boston reform community, and while some of her intellectual friends sneered at her stories about wise Uncle Tommy, none of them had written anything nearly as daring as An Appeal. She might have been in the center of the public world—a civic star—as the nation marched toward abolition and women’s rights. But the demands of her ailing and difficult father drew her away from everything she found bright or exciting. “All my dreams have settled into a stoical resignation to life as it comes,” she wrote to a friend.
That was the catch: the world might be willing to accept older women taking greater roles in public life. But nobody thought they should dodge the responsibility of caring for aged relatives. So a lot of gifted, ambitious women wound up getting stuck. Child was hardly the only one who broke through the barriers to national achievement in midlife and then had to retreat to tend an ailing parent. Louisa May Alcott was famous in her 30s when her novel Little Women captured the hearts of generations of schoolgirls. When she went out in public, she would be rushed by her fans—at one event, when Alcott was too ill to speak, she agreed to stand and turn around on the stage so the hundreds of girls in the audience could at least look at her. Then things went downhill. She wrote Little Women sequels, which she loathed, but which provided money to help support her impecunious family. Then she went home to tend her mother, and later, already in bad health herself, she was caught up with the care of her father. Alcott wrote in her diary that she would “never live my own life.”
Lydia Maria Child was stoically caring for her demanding family members when an old friend from the abolition movement, Senator Charles Sumner, was attacked on the floor of the Senate by a cane-wielding congressman from South Carolina. The crisis roused Child from her resigned torpor; she returned to writing essays and began meeting with her old associates at the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. Following her own advice, she was worrying about something much larger than her own life.
If Child never found the kind of happiness her Looking Toward Sunset readers might have imagined, it was probably because she was so much ahead of her time. After the war, she produced a book of poems and essays for former slaves, to help their transition into new lives. It was another version of her collections for children and old people, but this time there was no expectation of a bestseller. Just to get The Freedmen’s Book published, Child used the profits she had saved from her other work. She also scrounged up another $200 toward the cause by foregoing new clothes and skimping on butter, sugar, and tea. “Her dress is usually plain, not even neat,” complained Edgar Allan Poe, who visited Child in her later years. While she “has always been distinguished for her energetic and active philanthropy,” he concluded, she was “anything but fashionable.”
As much as they struggled financially throughout their lives, Child and Alcott were still among the very few middle-class women of their era who supported themselves. Writing was an acceptable calling, since it could be done within the confines of the home, but the number of writers who made money was tiny. There weren’t really any nonliterary professions for women. Even in 1870, almost all the women who worked for wages outside the farm were either domestic servants or laborers in factories. We can presume that most of them weren’t looking forward to continuing their employment into old age.
So the fate of older women depended mainly on whether they were married. If they were, and their husbands were good earners, they devoted themselves to the glorious sphere of domesticity that the magazines kept extolling. Some may have found it less than glorious, but it was at least a sphere, and it was theirs. Except for the lucky few with inherited wealth, women who weren’t married were stuck. They were almost inevitably going to wind up living with a relative’s family, staying in the background and performing all the chores no one else wanted to handle. Anna Bingham of Tennessee was just such a person, and her letters catalogue a rather monotonous life of spinning and weaving and nursing. “Between [caring for] old people, puny children, and clothing all, besides attending to other things, we are busy old maids,” she wrote with a marked lack of enthusiasm. Magazine readers could find a lot of paeans to these virtuous aunts or aging daughters, but nobody really looked forward to becoming one.
Teaching was the way out. “Generally speaking, there seems to be no very extensive sphere of usefulness for a single woman but that which can be found in the limits of a school-room,” said Catharine Beecher. So far in our story, Beecher hasn’t been all that inspiring a figure. But we’re now going to talk about her as the woman who helped make teaching a socially acceptable profession. It was still regarded as a man’s job in the early nineteenth century—colonial women had run “dames’ schools” in their homes, but they made very little money. The real schools wanted male teachers, mainly because of the prejudice against working women.
That gradually changed as public schools expanded. Administrators realized women were better able to handle the children… and cheaper. Much cheaper. In the period between 1860 and 1880, a female teacher in a city made an average of $8.57 a week, which was lower than the salary of a male unskilled laborer. Beecher, for all her interest in promoting education as a career for unmarried women, was also a school owner and very keen on the idea that teachers would not get much money: “To make education universal,” she decreed, “it must be moderate in expense.” And the prestige wasn’t necessarily higher than the salaries. In 1865, Harper’s New Monthly published a short story told from the view of a teacher, Milly, whose brother Tom has flunked out of college. Milly suggests he might try tutoring some of her students to put some savings away. Tom tells her he’d rather commit suicide.
The people running the schools were almost invariably men. Susan B. Anthony was a 28-year-old teacher in charge of girls’ education at a private school in upstate New York when the supervisor retired and was replaced by a 19-year-old male who immediately started arguing with Anthony about discipline. It was this sort of thing that propelled her into a career in women’s rights. Besides the tiny salaries and the bossy men, teachers also had to wrestle with huge classes—60 students wasn’t at all unusual.
Cynics might conclude that Beecher and education reformers like her had merely opened the door to low-paying, low-prestige, stupendously stressful employment that might make sitting fireside at some relative’s home mending the family’s clothes seem kind of attractive. It doesn’t sound like much of a leap forward. Yet historically speaking, it was. Single women now had a path toward economic independence—in a professional job they could pursue into old age. Granted, in the early days the salary wasn’t enough to support them, unless they lived at the school or roomed with the families of their pupils. Who sometimes stuck them in a room with the children. Or skimped on their food. Or spied on them to make sure they weren’t pursuing any forbidden activities like taking a ride with a young man or patronizing the local ice cream parlor. But you’ve got to start somewhere.
A few entrepreneurial women tried expanding their horizons by opening their own schools. It seemed like a perfect ambition—usefulness, control, and income all wrapped up into one respectable package. But the going was very, very rough. Catharine Beecher’s Western Female Institute went bankrupt six years after it opened in Ohio. Sarah Mapps Douglass, a black educator in Philadelphia, opened an academy for African American girls that seemed to be going well at first. “The school numbers over 40, selected from our best families,” a visitor reported. But in 1838, she had to admit that she couldn’t make enough money to continue, and the Female Anti-Slavery Society agreed to take it over as a charity. Clara Barton opened the first public school in Bordentown, New Jersey, and ran it so well that the town voted to build a much larger schoolhouse. On the day it opened, Barton discovered that she was no longer principal—the job had been given to a man, at twice her salary.
After the Civil War, Harriet Tubman kept up some of her Underground Railroad skills—she could drop from her rocking chair and flatten herself against the ground, then quietly slither up behind an unsuspecting friend or relative. It was, as it turned out, an excellent way to entertain her granddaughter.
Tubman had returned to her farm in New York, which also became home to any number of needy relatives, orphans, and indigent old people. She married one of her boarders, a former slave and veteran named Nelson Davis, who may have been more than 20 years her junior. (His age was a little fuzzy, as was Tubman’s; the critical thing was that they seemed to be a happy couple.) Always short on money, Tubman battled a long time to get a veteran’s pension from the government. “You wouldn’t think that after I served the flag so faithfully I should come to want under its folds,” she said. After her husband died, she finally did get a pension—but it was as his widow, not for her own service.
Sojourner Truth was never very clear on her age, either, but she was probably in her early 70s when, after the war ended, she began a new battle with the streetcar system in Washington, DC. African Americans had the legal right to ride with the white passengers, but it was a rule the conductors usually ignored. She was dragged behind one car after the conductor refused to wait for her to board. On another occasion, when a streetcar was about to pass her by, Truth shouted, “I want to ride!” and stopped both the car and the surrounding traffic while she climbed on. The conductor threatened to throw her back off, but Truth stood firm and the other passengers began laughing and declaring her the winner of the encounter. Things didn’t always end so well. One conductor twisted her arm when she resisted being evicted from his car. Truth did manage to get him convicted of assault and battery, but the incident left a pain in her shoulder that lingered for the rest of her life.
Then Truth moved north, back on the lecture circuit, raising money to resettle the newly freed slaves. “I have been hoping that somebody would print a little of what I am doing,” she complained, “but the papers seem to be content simply in saying how old I am.”
Like many women of both races, Truth was shocked when Congress marked the end of slavery by giving the right to vote to male blacks but not women. She had predicted that “if colored men get their rights and not colored women theirs, the colored men will be masters over the women and it will be just as bad as it was before.” But the reaction of many white feminists went much further—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others began complaining about well-educated white women being disenfranchised while “ignorant negroes and foreigners” got to vote.
This is a good time to point out that virtually all the nineteenth-century white heroines we’ve been applauding were also, undeniably, racists. When the first national gathering of women’s anti-slavery societies convened in New York in 1837, there was a lengthy debate about whether black members could be admitted. After the war, the suffrage movement made seamy alliances with racist politicians who were trying to disenfranchise the new black voters. So did temperance leaders, who feared blacks would oppose outlawing the sale of alcohol.
That’s why one of the best stories of the post–Civil War era involves the Grimké sisters, who were living in semiretirement when Angelina read a story about a young African American man named Archibald Grimké giving a lecture in Pennsylvania. She wrote to him, introducing herself and asking about his background. Archibald responded that he was the son of her brother, a South Carolina slaveholder. It was a sad but typical story: Archibald’s mother, Nancy, had been a slave in the home of Henry Grimké and became his mistress after Grimké’s wife died. They had three children, and Henry had asked they be provided for in his will. But his white son and heir had ignored the request and tried to take the family as his slaves.
“I am glad you have taken the name of Grimké—it was once one of the noblest names of Carolina,” replied Angelina, in a long letter that expressed her intention to visit. It was probably more than Archibald had anticipated. As Grimké biographer Gerda Lerner pointed out, in that situation most white abolitionists would not have gone further than a pleasant, but brief, exchange. The sisters had other ideas. They instantly adopted their black nephews as part of the family. Although Angelina, Sarah, and Theodore Weld spent their lives teetering on the verge of penury, they provided financial support for their new relative’s college education. To do it, Angelina directed all her earnings to the cause and Sarah gave up whatever very modest extras she had ever treated herself to. Archibald Henry Grimké became a nationally prominent leader, who told people it was his aunts who made him “a liberal in religion, a radical in the woman suffrage movement, in politics and on the race question.” One of the last letters Sarah wrote before her death in 1873 concerned her efforts to raise money for “Archie,” who was then studying at Harvard Law School and who, she noted proudly, seemed to “far exceed in talents” any of her white Grimké nephews.
The Grimkés were ahead of their time on dozens of fronts. Another was health reform. The sisters were followers of Sylvester Graham, who advocated a diet of no meat or spices and very sparse use of dairy products or stimulants like coffee and tea. Since the sisters also disliked cooking, their regimen often consisted of raw fruit for breakfast, stewed beans at lunch, and more fruit at the end of the day. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who visited Angelina often, enjoyed every part of the get-togethers except the meals.
Most American women had been taught—with the help of all those magazines like Godey’s and the self-help books that were pouring off the presses—that the keys to having a pleasant and rewarding old age were good works and trust in God. But in the mid-nineteenth century, people began to talk about more physical strategies. Mary Gove Nichols, a popular lecturer on health issues, told her mainly female audiences that they needed to stop regarding illness as a visitation of God’s will: “Many seem to have no idea that there are established laws with respect to life and health, and that the transgression of these laws is followed by disease.”
The victim of a bad marriage to an indolent husband, Nichols attempted to support her family by starting—what else?—a school. In her free time, she prowled through medical books, trying to understand why she suffered from such indifferent health. She saw the light when she attended a lecture by Sylvester Graham, who preached the glories of vegetarianism, temperance, and whole-grain crackers. She put her students on a strict Graham diet. The school didn’t last much longer, nor did the marriage. But Nichols became nationally known for her health lectures to women—which included then-shocking descriptions of female anatomy—and for her writings in magazines like the omnipresent Godey’s. Most of her recommendations were similar to other health reformers’: a well-balanced, meat-free diet; frequent baths; clean air and good ventilation. Follow those rules, she said, and anyone with a normal constitution would live to a happy and healthy old age—“accidents and the evil influences of others excepted.” Like Graham and many other health reformers, Nichols believed that “stimulants” were to be avoided, whether they were spices or sex. In 1839, she published a denunciation of masturbation titled Solitary Vice: An Address to Parents and Those Who Have the Care of Children.
The health reformers weren’t exactly taking over the nation, but they did attract a following, mainly among the growing urban middle class. And they marked an important shift of thinking about aging—the idea that people were responsible for how long they lived and how robust they were during their later years. Decrepitude was no longer a misfortune to be endured patiently; it was a sign you had not made the proper effort. William Alcott, a relative of Louisa May and an influential writer on health issues, said that in the future, a child who was a good Christian would live to be 100, but the wicked would be lucky to make 50. The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Catharine and Harriet’s famous brother, preached that every person was meant to live to be at least 80—unless that person screwed up. “You may sin at one end, but God takes it off at the other,” he warned.
Beecher was the pastor of the big and very prominent Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, where thousands of people tried to cram into Sunday services to hear him speak. Rejecting the stern old theology of the Calvinist past, he offered the public a God who was kind, forgiving, and all about love—the heavenly kind. But in 1872, he was in trouble over another version. Victoria Woodhull, the women’s rights advocate and proponent of “free love,” announced that Beecher was having an adulterous affair with a parishioner, Elizabeth Tilton. One of Woodhull’s arguments against monogamy was that when husbands and wives promised to be sexually faithful to each other, only the women ended up following the rules. Beecher, she said, was an excellent case to prove her point.
All this turned into a sex scandal that seemed to involve virtually every famous person in the country. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the one who first told Woodhull about the Beecher gossip.) It’s of interest to us because it was the classic tale of an older married man—Beecher was in his 60s—betraying his aging wife with a younger woman.
Elizabeth Tilton was 40 herself but small and fragile. She looked, a newspaper reporter said, “more like a school-girl of 18.” Her husband, Theodore, worked with Beecher on an abolitionist newspaper. The two men were great friends, and Henry spent a lot of time at the Tilton house, with one or both of the younger people. All three of them were extremely emotional, given to a lot of hugging and kissing. After Woodhull made her charges, Tilton claimed Beecher had indeed slept with his wife. Beecher denied it. Each man was badgering Elizabeth to tell the world that his story was right. The poor woman, who was clearly not the sturdiest possible character, confessed that she’d had sex with Beecher, then retracted the confession.
Theodore Tilton eventually sued Beecher for alienation of affection, and the ensuing trial was a long parade of front-page headlines. One New York newspaper claimed it was the biggest story since the Lincoln assassination. Crowds stood in line to get seats in the courtroom, and the rest of the nation talked about it over the dinner table. Catharine and Harriet took their brother’s part, while their sister Isabella, a prominent women’s rights advocate, sided with Theodore Tilton. (Like many women of the era, Isabella was a spiritualist who believed she could communicate with the dead, and much later, after her siblings had passed away, she revealed that she had conferred with them in the spirit world and they had forgiven her.)
But what about the betrayed wife? Eunice Beecher had been married to Henry 34 years at the time of the scandal. She was slightly older than her husband and definitely not a romantic figure. She was apparently never invited to those hug-heavy evenings; nobody seemed sure whether Eunice had resented the enormous amount of time her husband spent hanging around with the Tiltons, who were young enough to be his children. But she apparently never complained, and during the scandal she stood firmly behind Henry, whom she described to her family as simply a “dear guileless simple-hearted man.” And since she maintained his innocence, she accepted Elizabeth’s as well, talking to her in the courtroom and counseling her, at one point, to abandon Theodore because of his own admitted past affairs. One newspaper reported that Eunice said “she would not live a day with a man who was guilty of Tilton’s crimes against marital fidelity.”
The jury failed to reach a verdict. That seemed, at first, like a fatal blow to the minister, who couldn’t convince 12 citizens that he was innocent. But he won in the court of public opinion—if this had been a normal small-town scandal we might have said that the neighborhood decided to stay friends with Henry Beecher and snub Theodore Tilton. In the process, the press turned Eunice Beecher into the heroine. Reporters noted that she came to the trial every single day, sitting stonily while Tilton reported that Henry “used to pour in my ears unending complaints against his wife.… He said to me one day: ‘O Theodore, God might strip all other gifts from me if he would only give me a wife like Elizabeth and a home like yours.’”
“[A]nd there she remains,” one paper said, admiring the way Mrs. Beecher stayed at her husband’s side, “grimly, unflinchingly, inflexibly.”
If the concept of grim, unflinching, and inflexible also seemed to fit Mrs. Beecher in life beyond the courtroom, the stories never hinted at it. “A Remarkable Woman,” said the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. A Chicago paper noted that until the trial, Eunice had never appeared in the public eye, but the recent unfortunate events had “brought her prominently to the front, and in a light which, even her enemies must concede, is most favorable.” It was the conclusion the world apparently wanted to hear. The charismatic celebrity survived, slightly humbled, and the faithful older woman won the day.
After the trial was over, Beecher went back to his adoring congregation. He had to scramble to repair his ruined finances, but the church generously raised his salary to lend a hand. He also appeared in a Pears’ Soap ad, announcing, “If CLEANLINESS is next to GODLINESS, soap must be considered as a means of GRACE, and a clergyman who recommends MORAL things should be willing to recommend soap.” The Tilton marriage ended, and Theodore wandered off to Paris. Elizabeth remained in the congregation until she felt compelled to once again change her mind and announce that she really had committed adultery with the pastor. After that, she faded out of history.
Eunice, meanwhile, embarked on a post-trial career as the author of domestic help books. One was titled All Around the House; or, How to Make Homes Happy.
Given all the action in the Beecher family, it’s no wonder that Catharine and Harriet needed a little relief. They’d become big fans of hydrotherapy—or “the water cure”—a middle-class answer to everything from nerves to dyspepsia to fainting fits. It was a respite that particularly appealed to older women, based on constant immersion in steam, baths, and wet compresses. Harriet’s husband, Calvin, complained that when he visited her at a spa, he was denied sexual relations because she was swaddled in cold towels day and night.
Some of the therapy involved more stimulating liquids. When Harriet was trying to recover from a bout of cholera, she went to a spa in Brattleboro, Vermont, where the treatment included brandy—patients got up to five shots a day. You weren’t supposed to think of this as drinking. Home remedies laced with alcohol were common around the country. Another popular medication that the Stowe family took frequently was calomel, a kind of mercury. It’s possible that some of the ailments Harriet was trying to cure—headaches, loss of control of her hands, and confusion—were symptoms of mercury poisoning. There was a lot of that going around. Louisa May Alcott may have suffered from mercury poisoning after receiving calomel as a wartime volunteer at the Union Hotel Hospital. Her life was increasingly dominated by trembling, weakness, a fluttering pulse, and leg and arm pain so severe that she sometimes could not write. “The hospital experience was a costly one for me,” she said. “Never well since.”
Doctors had been drugging their patients since colonial days, prescribing opium for everything from diarrhea to painful menstruation. They were also still using leeches well into the nineteenth century, applying them everywhere, including inside the nose and in a woman’s vagina. It was no wonder people complained of feeling terrible. Laudanum, a form of opium, was a popular cough medication, and it was easy to obtain even without a doctor’s assistance.
Women self-medicated as a matter of course. One manual helpfully suggested that even while traveling, they keep a “small box” of health care aids, such as “absorbent cotton, sticking plaster, bandages of muslin or flannel, thread and needles, pins, Vaseline, aromatic spirits of ammonia, tincture of asafoetida, oil of cloves, Hoffman’s Anodyne, syrup of ipecac, laudanum, magnesia, mustard, paregoric, spiced syrup of rhubarb, turpentine,” adding that “to these may be added camphor-water, essence of ginger, lime-water and sweet spirits of nitre.” God knows what was supposed to be stocked in the medicine cabinet at home.
The less creative simply turned to patent medicines, which were often largely alcohol. Somehow this also didn’t seem to count as drinking—activist Abby Hopper Gibbons regarded herself as rather unique among the temperance reformers for refusing to medicate herself with brandy. Lydia Pinkham’s tonic, which was enormously popular among women in the late nineteenth century, was a mixture of herbs, roots, and alcohol that came in a bottle bearing a portrait of the 60-year-old grandmother who, the company said, had created the recipe. She was, to her fans, the epitome of all those mothers, aunts, and grandmothers who knew just what to do when a member of the family had a health complaint.
“There’s a face that haunts me ever,” sang college students at Dartmouth in the 1880s.
There are eyes mine always meet
As I read the morning paper.
As I walk the crowded street.
Ah! She knows not what I suffer;
Hers is now a world-wide fame,
But till death that face shall greet me.
Lydia Pinkham is her name.
One thing almost everyone, from physicians to health reformers to women’s rights advocates, agreed on was that corsets were bad. They were so tight that many believed they literally rearranged the wearers’ ribs and internal organs. “That pulmonary disease, affections of the heart and insanity are in its train, and that it leads some of our fairest and dearest to fashion’s shrine to die, is placed beyond a doubt, by strong medical testimony,” wrote the poet Lydia Sigourney in her advice book. Critics did tend to get carried away, but at minimum the corsets made life uncomfortable and limited women’s movements, particularly when combined with petticoats and heavy skirts that trailed close to the ground. In wintertime, a woman might leave her house underneath about 37 pounds of clothing. And, of course, the discomfort was greatest for older—and often larger—women. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a dietary reformer and cornflakes inventor, once corseted his wife’s collie to study the effect on the dog’s breathing ability. The animal, taking advantage of Kellogg’s belief in fresh air, jumped out an open window and ran home to take refuge with Mrs. Kellogg, unceremoniously concluding the experiment.
The recalcitrant collie was perhaps an omen that dress reform was going to be harder than some of its advocates imagined. The movement found its most famous remedy in bloomers, an outfit consisting of a tunic and pants that somewhat resembled a costume in a Turkish harem. It did allow the wearer to move around naturally and sit without gasping for breath. But the idea of women in pants drove the establishment crazy. Newspapers claimed bloomer advocates were plotting an end to the traditional family. Editor Sarah Hale was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a fan. “Does it make any sense to sacrifice not only your social enjoyments but also your usefulness for the purpose of making an ineffectual attempt to change a fashion under which so many people have lived in health and comfort that it would be difficult to persuade them it is injurious?” Godey’s asked, rather rhetorically.
Mary Gove Nichols, who was once hit by a rock when she wore bloomers in public, solved the problem by moving to a utopian commune in New York when she was in her 40s. There, a visiting reporter revealed in awe, the women not only wore pants; they asked men to dance at the commune parties. The Grimké sisters wore bloomers at their progressive school, and it’s nice to think of them bustling around the dining room in their Turkish trousers, serving their students unseasoned vegetarian meals. But even Angelina and Sarah didn’t stay with the costume indefinitely. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had been sure that she would wear bloomers forever, retreated when she got letters from her sons at school, denouncing them. The bloomer cause was certainly not helped by the fact that the billowy pants were unflattering to most figures. It would be a long time before women of all ages would feel comfortable wearing pants in public.
While etiquette books and women’s magazines continued to warn women against hair dye, it appeared that men used it rather regularly. In the run-up to the Civil War, there were lots of jokes about men suddenly deciding to stop washing away gray when they realized a youthful appearance could lead to a summons from the draft board. A story from Tennessee described an older man who was coloring his hair in order to woo a “fair, fat and forty buxom widow.” (Apparently some people found the description more favorable than Margaret Fuller did.) But, the paper reported, when the imposter found himself called up before the draft board, he quickly confessed he had been trying to trick the widow into thinking he was only thirty-eight: “I wanted to get married,” he explained. Then, the paper claimed, “the widower’s hair dye was washed away, his false teeth had been removed, his form was bent by the immense pressure of mental anxiety,” and observers concluded he was closer to eighty.
Okay, possibly an apocryphal story. But the legend of men giving up their hair dye in order to avoid conscription was so popular, there must have been something behind it. The New-York Tribune claimed that the men’s fashion industry was in a tailspin: “Nobody, except some ancient female, has used hair dye since the call was made for all men ‘under 45 years of age.’”
It’s hard to know if there were really all that many “ancient females” using dyes, either. There was a lot going against the practice: it was looked down upon socially, the results generally weren’t convincing, and it was dangerous. Stories about people collapsing or being driven mad by the lead in their hair dyes showed up repeatedly in papers around the country. Neither health standards nor journalism standards were particularly high in the middle of the nineteenth century, so it’s hard to tell how much of this was exaggerated, but a report to New York City’s Board of Health in 1870 did find that all hair treatments it tested contained lead, or nitrate of silver.
Some of the reported victims were women, like “a lady in Fauquier county, Va.,” who was “paralyzed a few days ago from excessive use of hair dye containing sugar of lead.” But most of the alleged fatalities were male. In 1869, several news outlets reported an investigation into the death of one Dr. J. M. Witherwax, which concluded that the good doctor had perished from lead poisoning, thanks to a hair dye he had applied every day for four years. A few years later, a former governor of Pennsylvania, John Geary, died suddenly while he was fixing breakfast for his son. Some observers attributed his unexpected demise to an old war wound, but others thought Geary had been poisoned by a dye he used to cover his gray beard.
Once the war was over, the nation had a bit of a let’s-party mentality, and it did appear that more and more members of both sexes used hair coloring to eliminate gray. Henry Ward Beecher wrote about whether “to dye or not to dye,” giving men a pass while throwing all the blame on their women: “If his wife will love him the better, or if she will be made happier, in the name of love, let him dye.” As for the wives themselves, Beecher preferred those who abstained but graciously added that “if her happiness may be promoted by hiding the early gray, we see no reason for criticism.” Other parties were far more judgmental. A Boston paper in 1872 lashed out: “Ladies who are so unscrupulous as to heighten their natural charms by the use of paint and hair dye have a great deal to answer for. Not only do they sail under false colours, but they destroy that confidence which weak man is naturally disposed to extend to them without limitation, and they cause him frequently to mistrust complexions and heads of hair innocent of any paint but that bestowed by nature’s brush.”
Sarah Josepha Hale was 89 when she retired from Godey’s in 1877, after 50 years as editor. She apparently kept writing, at least in private. For her 90th birthday she read her family a poem she had composed for the occasion:
Growing old! Growing old! Do they say it of me?
Do they hint my fine fancies are faded and fled?
That my garden of life, like the winter-swept tree,
Is frozen and dying, or fallen and dead?
Is the heart growing old, when each beautiful thing,
Like a landscape at eve, looks more tenderly bright
And love sweeter seems, as the bird’s wand’ring wing
Draws nearer her nest at the coming of night?
Three of her five children had predeceased her. That was an old story in American family life, but it was beginning to be more unusual. Infant mortality had been plunging, and it was no longer as common for young adults to be carried off by a sudden fever. Families in poor neighborhoods were still ravaged by the effects of bad sanitation, unpasteurized milk, and poor nutrition. But in the middle class, the newer generation was beginning to regard death less as an unpredictable bolt of lightning and more as something that happened to old people.
As for Godey’s Lady’s Book, it would endure for a while longer, but it would never have the influence that Hale wielded in its glory days before the Civil War—an event she managed to avoid ever mentioning while the conflict was under way.