Elizabeth Cady Stanton spent 12 years on the lecture trail. Unsurprisingly, the strain began to take its toll. She injured her back when a wagon that was toting her between stops overturned. Then she contracted pneumonia. Eventually, at 65, she decided to devote herself to writing and limit travel to less challenging itineraries. She and Susan B. Anthony were camped out in Stanton’s home in Tenafly, New Jersey, working on a history of the suffrage movement, when the 1880 election rolled around. The friends marched together to try to vote at the local polling place, an effort that ended when an inspector refused to let Stanton put her ballot in the box and she threw it at him. (Anthony was an old hand at attempting to vote, having been arrested in 1872 and put on trial for, in the words of the district attorney, voting when “at that time she was a woman.”)
Stanton had promised Anthony their 50s would be terrific, but—irritation with the voting system notwithstanding—she was finding her 60s to be even better. She and her frequently estranged husband had reconciled, in a relationship that seemed to involve a good deal of affection but a minimal number of demands. She traveled through Europe. She was celebrated by the members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), though she was never really as beloved as the more hands-on Anthony. She was supporting herself by her writing, which was as feisty as ever.
Her good humor and unthreatening appearance still allowed her to get away with a never-dwindling radicalism, especially on matters like sex, which had brought down so many other female lecturers. “Stately Mrs. Stanton has secured much immunity by a comfortable look of motherliness and a sly benignity in her smiling eyes, even though her arguments have been bayonet thrusts and her words gun shots,” noted the novelist Grace Greenwood. Stanton herself began to feel that the motherly look could go too far. “I have one melancholy fact to state which I do with sorrow and humiliation,” she wrote a friend in 1888. “I was weighed yesterday and brought the scales down at 240.” She vowed to begin dieting almost immediately and added: “Yet, I am well; danced the Virginia reel with Bob. But alas! I am 240!”
On the occasion of her 70th birthday, Stanton was invited to deliver an essay on “The Pleasures of Age.” She said it took about a week “to think them up,” but by the time she had finished composing, “I was almost converted to the idea that ‘we old folks’ had the best of it.” Her research had not begun on a promising note. She told her audience that she had gathered a group of 70-plus friends for breakfast and challenged them to come up with examples of the brighter side of aging. One of her guests proposed that “perhaps one may find some pleasure in being deaf, as then you do not hear the nonsense of ordinary talk.” Another said blindness, too, might be a blessing, “as then your eyes are shut to many things you fain would never see.” It’s hard to believe such a conversation actually ever took place—but this was before the age when public figures’ remarks were vetted for accuracy.
Then Stanton quickly veered toward the positive: the ideal elderly woman spent most of her time in her library, where she would reread a favorite book or simply sit quietly in contemplation, reciting “inspiring sentiments in prose and verse” or playing “on some instrument.” In the evenings, although her own dancing days might be over, she could still enjoy watching the young ones on the floor. Stanton followed with an admonition about the importance of a sound health regimen. All in all, it seemed a particularly strange prescription for happiness coming from an unstoppable lecturer who would soon be bemoaning 240 pounds while reporting that she had recently danced the Virginia reel.
With that perfunctory bow to traditional visions of old age out of the way, Stanton moved on to her favorite theme: chiding women who believed that once their children had grown they had nothing to live for—when there was so much work to be done! All the energy that had been directed to courtship, marriage, and motherhood was just waiting to find new expression. If women were lucky enough to have no serious money problems, she concluded, “surely each of us may take up some absorbing congenial work to dignify the sunset of our lives.” It was a theme she would return to again and again in her seventies—that “on the shady side of fifty” middle-class women had the opportunity to start a whole new life, when they could turn their attentions away from family duties to fight for the family of man.
The controversial figures of the early women’s reform movement were beloved celebrities by the end of the century. The obituaries for the Grimké sisters, who died in the 1870s, skipped over the angry mobs who had tried to burn down the halls where Angelina was speaking and focused on their gentle charity. The Cincinnati Enquirer eulogized Angelina as “a pioneer in the anti-slavery movement and a friend to the poor and needy” when she passed away in 1879. A Leavenworth, Kansas, paper pointed out, under the headline “Sensible to the Last,” that Angelina had asked to be buried in an old dress so that all the good ones could be given to the poor.
Susan B. Anthony was a star—the woman who knew everyone, from presidents to African American heroes like Frederick Douglass to popular celebrities like Lillian Russell. The media, which had snarked about her spartan figure and wardrobe, now couldn’t get enough of her. When Anthony collapsed on a trip in 1895, reporters rushed to her home. One Chicago paper telegraphed its representative: “50,000 words if still living, no limit if dead.” No one seemed to have aged better than Anthony, whose real character the nation had finally learned to appreciate. “From being the most ridiculed and mercilessly persecuted woman, Miss Anthony has become the most honored and respected in the nation,” Stanton wrote in her memoirs. It was not that Anthony had changed; it was the country that had come around.
No one in Anthony’s generation of reformers seemed to be planning on retirement. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first woman to be ordained a minister in a mainstream Protestant faith, celebrated her 70th birthday with her first visit to Europe. When she returned, she wrote to Anthony, “I plunge again into work,” with hopes that she could last at least another two decades: “Life is too short for all we would like to do but we will keep busy till the end.” She had her wish. A friend described Blackwell at 90, still stalking off every morning for two or three hours of vigorous hoeing in the garden. The Boston Globe called her “in many respects the most remarkable woman in the country.”
When Catharine Beecher was in her 70s she decided she wanted to go to college—specifically, to take a course at the elite Cornell University. The horrified president told her the classes were all male. “In fact, I prefer to take it with men,” she replied serenely. Everything seemed to have worked out for Beecher, who preached the glories of domestic life without ever having one of her own. “I have been for many years a wanderer without a home, in delicate health, and often baffled in favorite plans for usefulness,” she wrote. “And yet my life has been a very happy one, with more enjoyments and fewer trials than most of my friends experience who are surrounded by the largest share of earthly gratifications.”
Catharine and Harriet, still plumbing the profitable domestic arts market, wrote The American Woman’s Home, which tackled the aging issue, noting that for housewives “and still more to those who in public life have been honored and admired, the decay of mental powers is peculiarly trying.” The remedy, the sisters wrote, was for their near and dear to pay “courteous attention to their opinions” and avoid any temptation to argue “or make evident any weakness or fallacy in their conversation.” Perhaps it was a warning to their relatives.
Basically, the sisters argued that the most important job of the old was inspiring others with their patience and acceptance. It was an echo of the lectures by colonial ministers: when you don’t feel you have any role to play in the world, you can still set a good example by not complaining. When the book was published in 1869, neither of the authors was preparing to follow that advice anytime soon. Harriet, about to enter her 60s, was on a manic series of speaking tours, and Catharine would soon be on her way to Cornell.
Lydia Maria Child had started a serious trend when it came to books on aging. They were very big sellers in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Most of them tried to be upbeat in the extreme. A prominent minister’s wife produced a version in 1888 that included an elegy to gray hair: “beautiful in itself and so softening to the complexion and so picturesque in its effect that many a woman who has been plain in her youth is, by its beneficent influence, transformed into a handsome woman.” That was a heck of a lot more encouraging than Lydia Child’s promise back in the 1860s that as long as people maintained good temper and sincerity, they were unlikely to be “repulsively ugly in person after middle life.”
Learning to love your gray made sense since hair color was still frowned upon—at minimum, it was regarded as an example of trying too hard. Also, women were expected to act their age when it came to dress. That basically meant really boring clothes. “We put bright colors upon our little children,” explained an 1877 etiquette book. “We dress our young girls in light and delicate shades, the blooming matron is justified in adopting the warm, rich hues which we see in the autumn leaf, while black and neutral tints are declared appropriate to the old.” The distaste for women trying to look young wasn’t restricted to social arbiters. Sojourner Truth—who seemed to have a particular loathing for the fashion of big, feathery hats—complained about her fellow reformers: “… mothers and gray-haired grandmothers wear high-heeled shoes and humps on their heads.… When I saw them women on the stage at the Woman’s Suffrage Convention, the other day, I thought, What kind of reformers be you, with goose-wings on your head, as if you were going to fly, and dressed in such ridiculous fashion, talking about reform and women’s rights? [’]Pears to me, you had better reform yourselves first.”
Older women had left caps behind, but they did wear wigs, mainly to disguise a loss of hair. There’s never been an age when women were eager to let the world know they were balding, but in the nineteenth century it was also seen as a sign that a parent or grandparent had suffered from syphilis. Hairdressers who fitted clients for wigs tended to do so in deepest secrecy, shooing even their assistants from the room. The nation also still frowned on the idea of older women using cosmetics to disguise their years, although that sort of thing did happen. In the cities, the well-to-do and daring could go to an “enameling studio” where their wrinkles were erased under a mask of wax and paste. “The hygienically furnished, well-kept beauty parlors have come to stay, and there are few women who will not feel better for visiting them occasionally as a supplement to their home treatments,” decreed The Woman Beautiful.
At home, women would use ground starch or rice to whiten their skin. A pale complexion was the most sought-after beauty goal, and there were plenty of new products on the market that promised to help. Beauty experts were new favorites on the lecture trail. “Madame Yale” traveled the country talking on “The Religion of Beauty, the Sin of Ugliness” and selling her catalogue of antiaging products. Flouncing her thick mass of blond hair, she demonstrated exercises in a pink satin gym suit. “It would be hard to describe her form as anything but just ‘perfect,’” hyperventilated a paper in Pittsburgh. But even the smitten writer seemed to have a little difficulty accepting Madame Yale’s biggest selling point—she claimed to be 50 years old.
The end of the nineteenth century brought older Americans something more important than any skin whitener—teeth! “Perfectly fitting false teeth have done more to postpone age than any one physical cause,” declared Harper’s Bazar (the publication’s original spelling) in 1885. A new kind of moldable rubber base made dentures much more comfortable—it had been around for a long time, but since the inventor was extremely litigious, it wasn’t used widely until his patent expired in 1881. And even the strictest critic of artificial beauty enhancements had absolutely no problem with artificial incisors. Harper’s celebrated false teeth and “the more uniform heating of houses” as improvements that “might almost have made age young again.”
As America left the Civil War era behind and started flinging itself full tilt into economic expansion, conspicuous consumption, technological progress, and scientific inquiry, the medical profession began paying more attention to the effects of aging on female anatomy. Not all of their inquiry was helpful. The more scientists investigated the way women’s bodies worked, the more they concluded that ovulation was pretty much the only game in town. (“Women’s reproductive organs are pre-eminent.”) Physicians regarded menopause as a shutting down of female energy that required rest and an extremely quiet lifestyle. One activity that was rigorously ruled out was sex—doctors thought it could be fatal for older women. The influential English physician Edward Tilt warned that any sexual desire in menopausal women was due to “a morbid impulse” and urged single middle-aged women to avoid taking a husband “without having obtained the sanction of a medical man.” Psychiatrist Forbes Winslow worried that menopause might turn a woman who had never borne a child into an “ovarian manic” with “immodest sexual appetites.” Possible remedies included “injections of ice water into the rectum or vagina, or leeching of the labia and cervix.”
The vision of menopause as a truly unpleasant dead end started out in England, but it quickly spanned the Atlantic. John Harvey Kellogg, the cornflakes inventor who had tried corseting his wife’s collie, produced a popular advice book in 1881 that decreed, “Sexual life begins with puberty, and, in the female, ends at about the age of forty-five years.” If a woman insisted on retaining her erotic side, he added, “disease, premature decay, possibly local degenerations, will be sure to result. Nature cannot be abused with impunity.” Kellogg had a lot of theories about menstruation, one of which involved the danger of having it begin too soon: “Females in whom puberty occurs at the age of ten or twelve, by the time their age is doubled, are shriveled and wrinkled with age. At the time when they should be in their prime of health and beauty, they are prematurely old and broken.”
Middle-aged women in the later nineteenth century who complained about feeling ill were less likely to brew a home remedy and more likely to consult doctors, who were in turn very likely to tell them that their problems were all related to menopause. Sex was not the only thing menopausal women were being told to avoid. Tilt and other physicians warned them against risky behavior like reading novels, dancing, or going to parties. And you couldn’t start preparing too soon. “We insist that every woman who hopes for a healthy old age ought to commence her prudent cares as early as the fortieth year or sooner,” said an 1871 medical advice book. “She should cease to endeavor to appear young when she is no longer so and withdraw from the excitements and fatigues of the gay world even in the midst of her legitimate successes, to enter upon that more tranquil era of her existence now at hand.”
Obviously not everyone agreed. Plenty of postmenopausal women had embraced the theory that the best days were still ahead and getting to them might require a good deal of moving around.
In 1895, Frances Willard published A Wheel Within a Wheel, a book about how at “the ripe age of fifty-three” she learned to ride a two-wheeled bicycle.
Willard was one of the great female leaders of the nineteenth century. Her political vehicle was the temperance movement, a cause we don’t tend to think of as particularly liberating. But feminists of her era saw drinking as something that separated husbands from their families. Wealthy men went off to their private clubs, and the working class flocked to saloons—in Chicago in 1897, the saloons outnumbered the total of grocery stores, meat markets, and dry goods stores combined. While they were a source of friendship and support for many men, saloons existed mainly to encourage their clientele to drink as much as possible, as fast as possible. Left behind in the wreckage were the wives and children, and many middle-class reformers saw banning alcohol as the best way to solve the problem.
Willard was definitely a true believer in the cause. But she also wanted to build temperance into a huge political movement, with women at its head, working on “everything”—from suffrage to prisons to health reform. And health reform included lots of exercise. There were still holdouts in the general population—in Baltimore, a doctor claimed that putting female students in schools where they had to climb stairs “would affect future childbearing.” But the tide was turning. Reformers were championing physical education classes for girls, and women’s magazines extolled brisk walks or toe touching for their readers. Willard’s doctor recommended bike riding as therapy for her severe case of anemia. She embraced the idea even though she needed friends to help support her—literally—during a long training period. In her 40s, Willard confided to her readers, she had tried her niece’s three-wheeled bike, fell off, and broke her elbow.
But she got back on the saddle and bonded with her bicycle, which she named Gladys—“the most remarkable, ingenious and inspiring motor ever yet devised upon this planet.” It had been a struggle, but Gladys was worth it, Willard told her readers. Then she explained why she had persisted:
• She was hoping husbands and wives might go biking together: “the more interests women and men can have in common, in thought, word, and deed, the happier will it be for the home.”
• She liked the idea of “acquiring this new implement of power and literally putting it underfoot.”
• “Last but not least, because a good many people thought I could not do it at my age.”
The book was a bestseller.