I would have made a terrible nineteenth-century middle-class white woman. All that nurturing and supporting and caring for parents, husband, children, and home would have made me permanently resentful, not to mention grumpy, and you can just forget gracious. I like to think I would have channeled my anger into feminist activism, a la Elizabeth Cady Stanton (post on Sex Wars coming up, perhaps folded into the long-promised [and eagerly awaited only by Libby and Jenny] post on neo-Victorian novels), but probably not. Nor, I think, would I have had the courage to go invalid, like Sophia Peabody who had ghastly migraines and pains and took to her room for months at a time, refusing to see anyone, which Megan Marshall argues, in The Peabody Sisters, was a strategic refusal of domestic obligation (now The Peabody Sisters is just a great book, so much better than Sex Wars that really I shouldn't even talk about Sex Wars, especially alongside it [and the reason I am mentioning the two in the same parenthesis is that both address nineteenth-century American women's history, albeit the one biographically and the other fictionally).
No, if I were a nineteenth-century middle-class white woman, probably I would have just bitched and whined and yelled, and everybody would have pitied my poor husband for having to put up with such a she-devil. And then probably I would have died in childbirth, and everyone would have breathed a sigh of relief.
[Post inspired by a weekend spent shopping and cleaning and cooking and driving people around and taking care of my kids and taking care of my dad, and in the very little time that I wasn't taking care of other people and their needs, I was working, which I suppose would not have been the case in the nineteenth century, when maybe I would have gotten to do a little embroidery or something, which might have made me feel better, but I doubt it.]
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3 comments:
I, myself, would have had the vapors a lot and been required to lie frequently in a darkened room, alone. And everyone would have pitied me and whispered about my delicate constitution while I lay there contemplating suicide.
I always feel guilty when I read the Little House books because I would have been way more Mrs. Brewster (the woman with the knife who wanted her husband to take her back East) than Caroline Ingalls. Way more. Heck, I'm like that now when Brett doesn't empty the dishwasher.
I'm so glad to find fellowship here--I sometimes find people expect me to be nostalgic about the nineteenth century because it's my academic specialty, but I think I study it because I find it so profoundly awful! I always wanted to think I would have been like Jo March/Louisa May Alcott: a cranky spinster writer. But probably really I would have taken to my bed like Beth, and then just died, or married the first guy who asked like Meg and then freaked out over the responsibilities. Sigh.
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