One contemporary, Ellen “Nelly” Wheeton, was caught with the contraband: a journal hidden beneath some papers in a drawer. In it, she had apparently expressed disdain for the married state. As she managed later to write: “[Mother] found it necessary to prohibit the use of pen and ink, or slate and pencil, except while receiving instruction from her or the writing master. My brother was made to spy upon my actions… he often threatened to tell mother when he had seen me writing upon the wall with a pin, which I sometimes did when I had no other resources.”
But could such a young woman have simply moved in with like-minded female friends? Consider it: a house, a self-sustained universe, where women could live happily among themselves, refusing marriage and, more important, childbearing. The idea was blasphemous. It was as if Herland, the utopian 1915 novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, had sprung to life. (In this work, serialized in the author’s own magazine, a British expedition sets out to find a hidden country populated solely by genius women warriors; as they discover, men of all classes have been extinguished.) In short, the idea of an all-female house incited alarm.
Yet there was a long tradition of communal living among single women. In Great Britain it dated to A.D. 385 and the founding of the Ursuline and Pauline orders, religious communes that were actually more like early social-work agencies. Lone girls from all over England arrived daily so desperate and grateful that, from the descriptions, it’s not hard to imagine them standing on the steps and shouting “Sanctuary!” These groups—and there were constantly new ones—quickly earned the title “bastard flocks,” for their loose approach to devotional life. Without quite meaning to, they had devised the only viable escape for unwed women stuck at home: an unquestionably proper religious setting in which girls could learn something useful. In fact, to claim a religious calling—whether fantasized or cleverly invented—would become the means for many determined single women to break free. Florence Nightingale, for example, claimed that she’d had an epiphany as opposed to a rebellious fit and this calling, this quasi-religious mission, allowed her slowly to extricate herself from her controlling family.
But the conventual life was a hard one. The novitiates, or the new girls, spent a year working through strictly regimented days on the grounds. After that they were trained to perform charitable works for the poor. These works—nursing, child care, housecleaning, cooking—were physically draining and carried out in places so run-down, in weather so bad, few girls told their parents just what they did. (One communard, a nurse trainee, returned home, told her family what she did, and found that no one would come near for fear of disease.) But the rewards! A justifiable life outside the house! A job, a place, procured on her own! Most thrilling was the chance to be judged for one’s skills and bravery and not one’s ability to please a man.
Some communards were tremendously influential. Annie Macpherson, a young Scottish woman, established a fund to take in Arab street kids who’d been abandoned all over London. Working with a small team, she arranged for their safe transport and adoption by families in Canada. That’s how I describe her achievement. One of her male contemporaries saw it differently. Here was yet another woman blindly ignoring her responsibilities. Instead of marriage she was determined to “explain the world to swarthy students.”
She had her American counterparts. Single abolitionist Fanny Wright, along with her spinster sister, established an all-women commune on some uncleared land in Tennessee and called it Nashoba. Their goal was to educate freed slaves, but the effort was cut down by charges of free love and unfair labor practices; poor finances ultimately forced the school to close. As if in penance, Wright at thirty-six entered a loveless marriage.
But another sort of British commune, this one originally male, would have a serious and lasting impact on American spinsters. That was the settlement house, a social-work institute set down in the worst parts of major cities and, in America, run by corps of women, often college friends who then lived there together for the rest of their lives. Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago, and Lillian Wald of New York’s Henry Street Settlement are the most famous, and their “houses,” of course, are still in business. But there were many others that did the same—offered to poor women, and especially immigrant women, necessary services, whether medical referrals, English-language classes, or specific items such as blankets, food, and clothing.
And their sights were set higher. Senior staff trained young women “of promise” (meaning girls with a clean appearance, a serious demeanor, and a college diploma) and sought out others with political backgrounds. House leaders formed alliances with one another to construct what scholar Carroll Smith-Rosenberg calls “a delicate web of interlocking social justice organizations.” Over time, settlement leaders and their allies campaigned for child-labor legislation, women’s unionization, and the founding of the NAACP (despite all the justified charges of early white feminist, specifically suffragist, racism). And many settlement causes, suffrage for one, eventually became U.S. law. Some of their residents would later move into positions of power, especially during the 1930s, when Eleanor Roosevelt tapped them to run New Deal agencies that dealt with women.
As professionals, these women had a uniform, similar to that of academics: shirtwaists, high-collared white blouses that buttoned down the back and stood up stiffly, worn with long skirts, hair pulled back from the face in a bun. Spectacles, keys, crucifixes hung like necklaces. It was a presentation of self that read: I am serious, not girlish and frilly but so somber, so plain I can mean nothing to you sexually; I have a cause. This warrior wear may be viewed as the sartorial ancestor of the early dress-for-success professional gray-out.
Using their somber appearance, their impressive credentials, and their emphasis on feminine good works, the settlement women gained national respect. The causes they worked for did not have anything to do with the rights of women to live alone or in groups. But their group-house experiment, so exotic and yet so sensible, influenced thousands of girls to sign on. Thousands of parents and would-be fiancés dissolved in panic.
THE GIRL GROUP AS TERRORIST CELL
Suspicion of women living in groups shows up in the earliest of Western mythologies. In the Greek myths, we find the Graeae, three eerie spectral sisters, who lived in some indefinite realm beyond the space and time of the human world. The Graeae shared among them one eye, which they passed to one another at regular intervals. It was this eye that Perseus stole to use in his search for the Gorgons, a sister band of outcasts. The eye revealed the group and his special prey: Medusa, whose phallic snakey head he then chopped off and paraded as proof that the world was safe once more for men. (Medusa, of course, could turn any man to stone just by looking at him.)
Not so easily defeated were the Amazons, a ferocious band of warrior women who lived on a mysterious island, hidden from the world, where they practiced their “arts…. To draw the bow, to hurl the javelin.” According to Herodotus, each Amazon cut off a breast to make it easier for her to handle the weaponry. Eventually, Theseus, king of Athens, waged a severe, relentless battle and won their queen as his wife. Another select group of single women, the Muses, daughters of Zeus, watched over male lives. Each had the power to give to men specific artistic or intellectual gifts; they also possessed control over men’s imaginations, their ability to love and remember, although they could not directly affect a man’s destiny. That was left to the most feared female gang of all—the three Fates, those morbid shrouded beings who rolled out the string of life, stretched it, and raised the knife.