800 Years of Women's Letters (21 page)

A hot bath, a tremendous walk & a great dose have succeeded but it is a warning. . . . I feel not too well which makes me idle.

[Edward to Henrietta, 10 November 1847]

I hope you are not going to do yourself any harm by your violent proceedings, for though it would be a great bore it is not worth while playing tricks to escape its consequences. If however you are none the worse the great result is all the better.

[Henrietta to Edward, 10 November 1847]

I was sure you would feel the same horror I did at an increase of family but I am reassured for the future by the efficacy of the means.

EDS. E.O. HELLERSTEIN
ET AL., VICTORIAN WOMEN
(1981)

Even women who were extremely carefully nursed could undergo difficult pregnancies. These letters are from Empress Eugénie (1826–1920) who married Louis Napoleon of France. She writes to her sister in Spain.

May 1, 1853. – Today I have been in bed for fourteen days without moving and God only knows how much longer I will be here. I was very ill for 17 hours. The pains gave me a cold sweat. Finally. M. Dubois told me that I now know what it is like to give birth. The sharp pains stopped and at the very moment I had begun to have some hope, I had the misfortune of learning that I had suffered much in vain. I had been delighted at the idea of having a beautiful baby like yours. And I was in despair, but I thank God that this accident did not occur later. I would have had even more trouble. On the other hand, maybe it is better for my health for me not to recover too quickly. But I can assure you, I already lack the patience to stay in bed.
Adieu
. Your sister who loves you.

May 3, 1853, – They tell me that the Medinaceli will come this year. Since they love to dance so much, I will give a few little dances if they come. God willing, you will be in a state to dance too; I was so sick that it scares me to know you are pregnant. However, I would be very happy to be so again; when I say that I don't like children, I suppose it's due to jealousy. Especially to have some like yours, I would cut off my arm.

May 9, 1853 – I admit that your stories of last year made me laugh; I also look back very often and I don't laugh during those moments, for I see all that I have given up forever. . . . In exchange I have won a crown, but what does that mean except that I am the first slave of my kingdom, isolated in the midst of everyone, without a woman friend, and needless to say without a male friend, never alone for an instant; an unbearable life if I didn't have, as compensation, a man near me who loves me madly, but who is a slave like me, who has no other motive, no other ambition than the good of his country, and God only knows how he will be rewarded; at this moment, my sister, I thank God for not fulfilling a hope that filled me with joy, for I think with terror of the poor Dauphin Louis XVII, of Charles I, of Marie Stuart, and Marie-Antoinette. Who knows what will be the sad destiny of my child! I would a thousand times prefer for my sons a crown less resplendent but more secure. Do not believe, dear sister, that I lack courage. . . . You see that my thoughts are not very gay, but remember that I have been in bed for 22 days, for being in the
chaise-longue
is not exactly what you would call getting up. Moreover, I just got into that yesterday for the first time. I am beginning to ache in all my bones. Today I wanted to stand up, but could not, so great is my weakness, resulting no doubt from loss of blood. You asked me about the cause of my accident. I swear to you that I don't know, nor does anybody else. It is true that I took a warm bath (not hot) but according to the two doctors, the misfortune had occurred earlier, for the child had already ‘come loose.' I suppose you understand, for I can't give you any more explanation. As for myself I don't attribute it to anything because I don't know. Some time back I fell, but I didn't feel anything. Another day, my squire's horse ran away at Saint-Cloud, and I thought this man was going to kill himself by falling down an embankment onto the railroad track, but fortunately he steered the horse in another direction and only skinned his face in falling, but I had a dreadful fright. You see that I don't know what caused it. It is useless to look for reasons, so I will say, like the Moors: ‘It was written.' Mama thinks it wouldn't have happened if she had been here. As if it were possible – I have been cared for as you can imagine and, besides, I have had a model midwife who has satisfied me perfectly by her diligence and devotion.

July 1855. – You know already that I will go to Biarritz toward the 27th of July. I really need that, although I am somewhat better, though far from being recovered. Would you believe that the doctors told the Emperor that, happily, they got there on time, but if I had neglected it much longer, I would never have any children. Jobert will cauterize me again tomorrow. Truly, I spend my life being sick. Who would have predicted this when I was sixteen?

LETTRES FAMILIÈRES DE L'IMPERATRICE EUGÉNIE, CONSERVÉES DANS LES ARCHIVES DU PALAIS DE LIVIA ET PUBLIÉES PAR LES SOINS DU DUC D'ALBE (1935)

Housekeeping has always involved organizational skills, in the ordering and making of provisions for groups of people. Poorer housewives had to eke out meagre supplies of vegetables from the tiny patches they cultivated, find kindling for fires on which to cook, and heat any water, often to be brought from a distance. (In Wales until the end of the nineteenth century, some crofters could not afford peat for necessary fires in winter, and so had to dig pieces of turf, which produced even more smoke than the central medieval hearth.)

The few records available from the Middle Ages indicate that wives were extremely competent managers. The largest groupings of people were in the lord's manor – or monastery and convent. Not only was everybody fed, washed, bedded and organized, the estates had to be run efficiently to provide wool for clothes, firewood, and drink in every season. Accounts were kept, which indicate that women were not only numerate, but skilled in many areas, such as herbal medicine and gardening, planting or spinning flax, etc. The propagating of the first seeds in the Stone Age and the developing of medieval fruit and flower gardens was often skilled female work.

We are fortunate in having medieval records in the family archives of the
Paston Letters
and the
Lisle Letters
. The letters of Margaret Paston show her ordering provisions from London, knowing precise prices, and supervising the entire work of the estate while her lawyer husband was at his practice. The letter included here indicates that she also managed the collection of money from tenants and competently used her employees to protect the house when under siege during the Wars of the Roses.

The letter to Lady Lisle describes the many areas which women had to supervise, from unlawful fishing of the estate, to immoral behaviour of the local vicar with his ‘harlot'. Twenty years later a housewife's work was prescribed in detail in the (ironically) named
A Boke of Husbandrye
by Sir Anthony Fitzherbert:

First set all things in good order within thine house, milk thine kine, suckle calves, strain the milk . . . Get corn and melt ready, bake and brew [women usually made the beer, as we know from the word ‘brewster']. Make butter and cheese, serve thy swine both morning and evening. Every month there are especial chores: In March sow flax and hemp, to be weeded, pulled, watered, washed, spun and woven. . . .

Obviously such husbands obeyed the church dictate that idleness was a source of evil.

This chapter offers a comparison between late medieval and nineteenth-century housework. Medieval wives of important men often wielded great power in the absence of their husbands, yet the tone of the letters suggest that they saw (or presented) themselves as understudies. Nevertheless these were powerful women, though their remit remained narrow.

Hildegard of Bingen, in the twelfth century, proved an extremely competent manager, setting up her own convent in order to be free of the dictates of male churchmen. Saint Teresa of Avila, in the sixteenth century, travelled around Spain setting up convents. She saw to many aspects of the running of the large household constituted by a convent, stating ‘God walks among the cooking pots'. Nuns demonstrate the capacity to take patriarchal roles.

At the end of the eighteenth century Wollstonecraft wrote of the need for greater equality and respect. Unfortunately the backlash after the French Revolution led to a consolidating of middle-class division of the world into public and private spheres which had not been expressed in this way in the Middle Ages. The influential Hannah More considered that women occupied separate spheres by nature as well as by custom. It is now women who were keeping women in their place by accepting the male division of men into ‘occupations' while women supported male status by the well-regulated ordering of their households. The instructions given to women are detailed, both in letters and in new journals such as T
he Magazine of Domestic Economy
, begun in 1835. They suggest God-given authority and knowledge in their epistolary advice to fellow women on ‘women's mission'.

Women from the provincial middle class wrote increasingly on the place of women, which was dignified by the ‘secret influence' of the moral ‘angel in the house'. Only in private letters do we read of the tension between subordination and influence, moral power and political impotence. The country house, and town home, is now organized around sexual difference, unlike the medieval manor.

Women had no property rights in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though they had possessed some in Anglo-Saxon Britain. The ownership of property produced the concept of the ‘heavenly home'. This trapped women because their relegation as home-makers was underscored by religious preaching, just at the time when some middle-class women might have been able to make more fulfilling use of their leisure. Mrs Gaskell, wife of a Unitarian minister, agreed with this view, despite her important, successful work as a writer, as she wrote to her friend Eliza Fox in 1850: ‘Women must give up living an artist's life, if home duties are to be paramount.' She respected her husband, and did not object that her royalties went to him. Others, however, were torn between motherhood, felt as both drudgery and religious vocation, and the desire to write.

A Mrs Taylor wrote prolifically on running a household, managing a business and bringing up children. In books such as
Correspondence between a Mother and Daughter
(1817) and
Practical Hints on the Duties of a Wife, a Mother and a Mistress of a Family
(1815) she preached: ‘A house is only well conducted where there is a strict attention paid to order and regularity. To do everything in its proper time, to keep everything in its right place, is the very essence of good management'. Her example inspired her daughters to take up writing. Though both prolific when young, they changed once they produced large families. With eight children, Ann voiced the tensions which make creative writing at home so very tough for mothers:

every hour I devote to writing now is almost against my conscience, as I have not time to spare. My mind is never in that composed careful state which I have always found necessary for writing; my ear is waking perpetually to the voice or cry of a dear child, and I am continually obliged to break off at a moment's notice to attend to him.

She envied her sister Jane who had no children and was able to concentrate. This letter of 1817 expresses the contradictory longings of many creative mothers:

Dear Jane,

If your fame, and leisure for the improvement of your mind, could be combined with the comfort and pleasures of a larger domestic circle; and if, with a husband and children, I could share a glimmer of your fame, and a portion of your reading, we should both perhaps be happier than it is the usual lot . . .

Alice Walker took these longings into the epistolary
The Color Purple
and allowed her protagonist to build a cottage industry, sewing, while waiting for her children to be restored to her, offering a symbolic possibility to mothers outside the capitalist system.

Hard work was a necessity for the lower middle class unable to afford much help. The three letters from Mary Abell in 1870s America reveal the difficulties of a mother forced to turn her hand to every household task, from emptying the excrement, and nursing a sick husband while trying to entertain children, to cooking in a tiny room. She was an educated woman married to a preacher (who was also a farmer) but she expresses the difficulties of many working-class mothers.

The poet Marina Tsvetayeva in twentieth-century Russia describes the painful attempts of a mother to find enough food for her two small daughters. Her husband was ‘missing', she was their sole support, a situation undergone by so many mothers in war-time.

The really hard labour of domestic servants has rarely been communicated in letters. It was Arthur Munby who asked the servant he loved to describe her working life to him, with its dirt and small joys.

Women's lives have been unnecessarily restricted for centuries. Yet, in the last section of this chapter, we have much evidence of their making the most of their limited existence. A letter from Mrs Delany, a friend of Fanny Burney, recounts her enjoyment of aristocratic entertainments, attitudes and dress. Burney expresses the pleasures of everyday occupations during a visit to friends in the country. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu goes much further and builds an almost ideal garden for herself in Italy. She had gone there hoping to live with her lover. When he let her down, she decided to remake her life beside the beautiful river Oglio. She plans fulfilling days, supervising her smallholding, reading in her retreat, ‘where I enjoy every moment that solitude can afford'. Her positive approach to apparent limitations is also echoed in the more recent final letter in this section.