1853

 

Victorian era thinking begins to take hold in America (this date is not hard and fast, but an approximation).

 

Ruth Finley, writing in 1931, characterizes it this way:

 

Prudery – a modesty so false as to discourage women’s acceptance of masculine medical aid.

 

Piety – not religion, but a dogged adherence to such outworn dogma as that which fought anesthesia.

 

Sentimentalism – most apparent in the overwhelming flood of emotional writing.

 

Hypocrisy – manifested by an artificiality of manners, by an assumed, though of course never actual, suppression of natural instincts.

 

These four pretenses, breeding inhibitions that hampered in both their observance and their breach, are the “absurdities and errors” – so antagonistic to present-day realism.

 

Finley sees the queen’s own parental background as illustrating the “debauchery” her era was called upon to correct. Of the Prince of Wales, later George IV, she writes: “The Prince Regent’s private life does not adapt itself to detailed description. He had but a dull mind at best; yet he really was interested in three things, though only three – women, wine and revelry.” (117)

 

*

 

“Prejudice in Women Themselves.”

 

Hale repeatedly stood up for the idea that women could enter professions heretofore closed to them. In an editorial in January 1853, she defended the idea that women could be doctors. Male writers posed all sorts of questions, and Hale lost patience: 

Another says, “You will…drive men out of the medical profession, and even those now in it will starve.”

 

They may as well starve as the women. And if men cannot cope with women in the medical profession let them take a humble occupation in which they can. (101)

 

Finley writes, that in this endeavor to change minds, “the lady editor faced an obstacle very much resembling a stone wall.” (103) 

Her most difficult task was to overcome prejudice in women themselves. Other than for such superficial elements as “megrims” and “vapors,” women as a whole had little recourse to doctors. Home remedies, handed down from mother to daughter or exchanged by neighbors over the back-yard fence, were the housewife’s stand-by. Nauseous, indeed, where the doses thus concocted – “sulfur and molasses,” “lard  and turpentine,” “boneset tea.” There was no community but that boasted at least one woman reputed wise in the art of healing, and, in truth, not infrequently she was more to be trusted than the doctors, whose endless “bleeding” and “cupping” were prescribed for everything from a fractured skull to typhoid fever. There was some excuse for women shying away from medicine as it was then practiced.

 

In addition to this distrust, there prevailed an attitude of false modesty utterly incomprehensible to the modern mind. It is best expressed in the words of a physician of the times, Professor Meigs of the staff of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.

 

“The relations of the sexes,” he said, “are of so delicate a character that the duties of the medical practitioner are necessarily more difficult when he comes to take charge of any one of the host of female complaints. … So great indeed is the embarrassment that I am persuaded that much of the ill success of treatment may justly be traced thereto. … nevertheless I am proud to say that in this country generally … women prefer to suffer the extremity of danger and pain rather than waive those scruples of delicacy which prevent their maladies from being fully explored. I say it is an evidence of a fine morality in our society.” (102-103)

 

In 1850, Dr. Wendell Holmes, professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard convinced the faculty to admit women to the medical school. The undergraduates overruled the decision. Their resolutions were published in the Boston Transcript, copied widely, and “hailed with wide acclaim.” 

Resolved that no woman of true delicacy would be willing, in the presence of men, to listen to the discussion of subjects that necessarily come under the consideration of students of medicine;

 

Resolved that we are not opposed to allowing woman her rights, but we do protest against her appearing in places where her presence is calculated to destroy our respect for the modesty and delicacy of her sex. (103)

 

The Female Medical College of Philadelphia did open that year. Godey’s also hailed the work of Florence Nightingale and urged opening of nurses’ training schools for women. Not until 1873 were the first nursing schools established. As late as 1890, Finley writes, there were only 471 graduate-nurses in the United States. (105) 

Hale also published a new novel in 1853, titled Liberia. As Finley explains, Hale 

…set forth her idea of the solution of the great problem, which was first education of the slave for the responsibilities of emancipation, and then purchased freedom, the price to be paid either by the United States government or earned by the slaves themselves. Finally these freed exponents of a Christian civilization were to be sent to join the African colony of Liberia, that historic experiment, as benevolent as it proved impractical, which had been started by the American colonization society as early as 1820. Up to the Civil War itself many people hoped Liberia might solve the problem of “the African who,” to quote Mrs. Hale, “among us has no home, no position, and no future, since two races who do not intermarry can never live together as equals.” (176)

 

Finley’s use of “negro,” with a small “n” is telling in itself. Nor does she seem to question Hale’s premise.

The Liberian flag today clearly indicates American roots.

 

* 

A New York convention of women in 1853, was broken up by hoodlums who shouted, “Sit down,” “Get out,” and barked like dogs at Ms. Anthony. 

Anthony encouraged one desperate mother to kidnap her own daughter when her husband cruelly denied her any contact with the girl…completely legal in that era. 

“You stir up Susan and she stirs up the world,” a friend once explained to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. 

Susan B. Anthony remarks: “One half of American women are dolls, the rest are drudges, and we’re all fools.”

 

*

 

A yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans kills 7,000. (Finley, 129)

 

*

 

On a positive note, at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, a culinary revolution is brewing. George Crum (born George Speck), an African American cook is fuming.

 

Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon, has sent back a plate of food, complaining that the fried potatoes he ordered are too thick. According to Smithsonian, “Crum sliced some potatoes as thin as he could, fried them to a crisp, and sent them out to Vanderbilt as a prank. Rather than take the gesture as an insult, Vanderbilt was overjoyed.”

 

So were born “Saratoga chips,” history’s first potato chip. More than three decades later the New York Herald would call Crum “the best cook in America.”

 

American Heritage would label him, simply, “the Edison of grease.” In 2022, Smithsonian would note that American ate 1.85 billion pounds of potato chips annually, or 6.6 pounds per person. The market was worth an estimated $10.5 billion.