Some further observation on, and from, Women, Work, and
Worship in Lincoln’s Country: The Dumville Family Letters from the University
of Illinois Press, which I review this week in “Old letters.”
The book’s editors, Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz, offer
the letters as lessons in American social, political, and cultural history, as essays on the comfort provided by religion during personal loss and national
conflict, as a comment on the roles of women, as a picture of the antebellum
Midwest, or as all of those things.” This they are, certainly, but it is the
dilemmas faced by women of the era that most impressed me.
The Dumville girls
grew up as mid-Illinois was being transformed by the telegraph and railroad and
newspapers. Suddenly their Morgan and Macoupin counties were part of a wider
world, and they (well, mainly Hepzibah, the youngest) were fascinated by the
agitations over slavery, the rise of the Republican Party and the Civil War.
The effects of this transformation were not, however,
entirely happy. Hepzibah in particular matured on the cusp of a new age, and
she never quite made up her mind about her proper place in this brave new
world. The Heinzes explain one reason why.
In early frontier
economies, the principal economic unit was the family, but as industrialization
and urbanization proceeded and the market economy developed, work formerly
performed within the home increasingly moved into the public sphere. When it did,
the roles of men and women became more distinct both in their work and within
their families. Home remedies for illness were replaced by doctors and
hospitals, and reading at the kitchen table was replaced by teachers and
schools. When these services moved outside the home and were
“professionalized,” the professionals were usually men. This was less
true of teachers and dressmakers than it was of doctors, cabinetmakers, and
tailors, but the work that was left within the home, the woman’s domain, became
less honored and was perceived as less consequential. For the most part, it
consisted of cooking, cleaning, and childcare, and these tasks were then
defined as “women’s work,” not a prestigious category.
Progress for women, in short, was in
some ways anything but.
In the end Hepzibah became one of the uncounted
millions of Americans whose energy and intelligence and virtue were wasted because of her
sex. The current Presidential campaign reminds us that the place of women in
this society remains unsettled. I wonder what Hepzibah might have made of the
likely election of a female as President of the United States.
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2016.
