Day Twenty Nine
It has been a good weekend so far, but I never assume that will last. Let’s hope it does; I could use the break from crises and disasters. Meanwhile, my husband and I have gone to two plays this week, both of them old favorites. The one we went to this afternoon led to the subject for tonight’s post.
ON MANNERS
Thanks to going to a production of Guys and Dolls, I’ve been thinking about the advice given to women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There is a scene where one of the women, Adelaide, is reading from a psychology text, which is as amusing as it is archaic. The text suggests that women will get physically sick if they remain unmarried. So I decided to dwell a little on the advice once given to young ladies. I will begin with my own experience, though I was not alive in the early twentieth century. I came to it through my grandmother, primarily, though my mother indulged in her fair share of archaic advice.
First of all, one of my grandmother’s favorite ideas was that ladies don’t sweat. Horses sweat. Men perspire. Women glow. Well, I’ll tell you, I glowed very profusely while I was doing research for my dissertation on a Texas prairie in July!
There were also innumerable rules about dressing, which extended way beyond making sure you had on clean underwear in case you were in an accident. I don’t pretend to remember all of them. The main one I remember is that you never wear white before Easter or after Labor Day. Wearing black for Easter was also verboten, not to mention wearing black for a wedding. A lady didn’t wear red…obvious reasons, right? Red is the sign of a scarlet woman.
A woman should not sit in a man’s lap if they were not married. They should not dance close together. Birth control was to be managed by keeping an aspirin between your knees and making sure the aspirin never fell out. That would make it hard to walk, but a mincing, small walk was at one time considered quite ladylike, so I guess that doesn’t matter.
Other rules I learned and ignored: a woman must never initiate a romantic meeting. A woman must speak small, and never talk before a man does. A woman must not win at games, unless they are specifically ‘women’s games’. If you should forget and beat a man at a game, you must make yourself small and pretend it was just luck. A woman must never call a man. A woman must not question a man’s authority.
Another biggie was crossing your legs. I don’t know if it was the norm, but we were encouraged to keep our legs crossed so men couldn’t look up our skirts. The legs should be very demurely crossed, but crossed they must be. I thought it made more sense to just wear pants; men can’t see very much by looking up your pants. And if I wore skirts as long as my mother insisted, men couldn’t look up my skirt without lying on the floor. I guess this was one of those things where you have redundancy just in case one thing fails to work.
There are also guides on the internet, showing us what was being advised back then. I found a couple, and they are quite amusing, though not written intentionally as comedy for future generations. First let’s look at dating tips, since any single woman would of course not want to remain single for long. She needed to know how to attract a man. First off, she should never sit in an ‘awkward’ position (what is an awkward position? I can think of several, and the term isn’t all that descriptive). Don’t look bored, even if you are. Great. Then you might attract a boring man, and be bored for the rest of your life. Not appealing.
We are told that you should not talk while dancing, because a man wants to dance while dancing, not hold conversations. No open affection should be expressed in public places, because it will embarrass and humiliate him. At the same time, we are told that men desire, and deserve, our entire attention. We are also to flatter and please him by talking about things he likes talking about. What if all he likes talking about is football? Or fishing? You might be into those things, but you might not. And it’s not to be made a problem if all he wants to talk about is himself, because we are advised to talk to him about him.
Another guide advises us to avoid everything masculine. I presume they include thinking rationally in that advice, since men have long been put forward as the rational sex. We are not to be seen too often in public. How often is too often? I don’t know. Maybe once a week is okay? Or is that too often? And what constitutes being seen in public? Can we not count going to the grocery store, since that is supposed to be a woman’s place? Or must we drop another public spotting if we go to the grocery store? I’m getting quite confused.
We are to consult only our own relations. Okay, but what if my relations have no experience in the area where I need advice? What if I don’t like my relations? What if…I can think of a number of problems with this, but I’m sure the advice-givers of the time would have answers for all of them. We are also not to form any friendships with men. That’s unfortunate. To put limits on friendship seems a mistake, but then, I have a bad habit of not taking such advice seriously, so what do I know?
The advice that if we talk in society, talk only about those things we know doesn’t seem like all that bad of advice, but most men I know need to follow it at least as much as women. Many men are quite fond of talking about things they don’t know about. And I know quite a few things I could talk about, including science, theatre, and other things I’m sure were not intended for women to talk about by these advice writers. And if you never talk about things you don’t know, how will you learn? Might as well keep us all babies, murmuring and cooing. In fact, I suspect there are some who would prefer that.
Perhaps the worst area for women was the new and developing field of psychology. Whole words were invented just to describe women. One of the key ones was ‘hysteria’, something men felt applied only to women. Since it refers to a ‘wandering womb’, it would likely only happen to women, if it ever happened to anyone. Since wombs don’t wander, we have sort of quit talking about that, but it was once taken seriously, and believed to be the source of most female ailments. This led sometimes to treatment as serious and invasive as hysterectomies, to treat ailments that have nothing to do with the uterus at all.
The ‘womb’ was an absolute obsession with psychologists (all of them male) during this period. It was believed that too much reading and intellectual pursuit would cause our ovaries to dry up. In the case of hysteria, women were advised to abstain from sexual activity, but to maintain a healthy uterus, they were advised to engage in sexual activity and procreation. So which is it? Abstain or indulge?
Most of the advice to women from psychologists of the time was focused on maintaining women’s ‘proper’ roles. They were advised to focus on domesticity, put all their attention on their family, and not pursue intellectual pursuits. Women were discouraged from thinking. It was also believed that menstruation led to mental incapacity. This is a strange belief to modern ears; it sounds to many of us about as sensible as saying ejaculation leads to mental incapacity. Women were accepted by many psychologists to be mentally inferior to men.
So how were women treated for these conditions? Some physicians performed pelvic massages, using clitoral stimulation with vibrators to induce orgasm. Forgive me if this sounds more like something for the (male) physicians than for their female patients, giving men a way to cop a feel without being considered out of order. Another possible treatment was leeches, usually applied to the abdomen, to draw out blood and balance the ‘humors’. Yes, there were still beliefs in the humors into the twentieth century.
Marriage was advised as a treatment for hysteria. Many doctors…and non-medical people, as well…felt that marriage and a family would cure hysteria by providing a woman with a sense of purpose and stability. That might be so, but wouldn’t having a job do the same thing? I know my brother was often told he would have a better sense of purpose and stability if he would get a job…and keep it. Why wouldn’t that work for a woman? I guess I’m just being too modern, right? But people believed, since the time of the ancient Greeks, that women’s problems stemmed from not fulfilling their womanly duty to marry and bear children, and work tends to get in the way of this, at least in the minds of some people (not those of us who have done both successfully).
If you were diagnosed with hysteria, you might be hung upside down, and maybe they would shake you. This was believed to return the displaced womb to its proper position. If you passed out, I suppose, that would mean the treatment worked. It is hard to be hysterical and comatose at the same time!
It is often said that men don’t understand women. If the above doesn’t provide solid evidence of the truth of that claim, then nothing will. It is the case, however, that men don’t seek very hard to understand women. Instead, they make up diagnoses and treatments, they generalize one behavior to all women, and write important sounding papers about women that show they aren’t paying any attention to their own data, or to women at all. Things are getting better, but we have a long way to go, and right now they seem to be heading in the wrong direction.