Gender Imbalance and History

Randall Stephens

"Every so often, society experiences a 'crisis in gender," writes Kate Bolick in the new issue of the Atlantic Monthly ("All the Single Ladies," ht to Amy Wood). In a fascinating article on the state of marriage and the prospects for single women, Bolick muses on the ways that gender imbalance and social factors weigh on society.

Particularly interesting is her take on how this has played out through history:

Take the years after the Civil War, when America reeled from the loss of close to 620,000 men, the majority of them from the South. An article published last year in The Journal of Southern History reported that in 1860, there were 104 marriageable white men for every 100 white women; in 1870, that number dropped to 87.5. A generation of Southern women found themselves facing a “marriage squeeze.” They could no longer assume that they would become wives and mothers—a terrifying prospect in an era when women relied on marriage for social acceptability and financial resources.

Instead, they were forced to ask themselves: Will I marry a man who has poor prospects (“marrying down,” in sociological parlance)? Will I marry a man much older, or much younger? Will I remain alone, a spinster? Diaries and letters from the period reveal a populace fraught with insecurity. As casualties mounted, expectations dropped, and women resigned themselves to lives without husbands, or simply lowered their standards. (In 1862, a Confederate nurse named Ada Bacot described in her diary the lamentable fashion “of a woman marring a man younger than herself.”) Their fears were not unfounded—the mean age at first marriage did rise—but in time, approximately 92 percent of these Southern-born white women found someone to partner with. The anxious climate, however, as well as the extremely high levels of widowhood—nearly one-third of Southern white women over the age of 40 were widows in 1880—persisted.*

Certainly war takes a toll on society and on private lives in all sorts of ways that aren't imagined. Russia lost approximately 8-10 million soldiers in WW II and roughly 2 million in WW I. Talk about "marriage squeeze." Even in the United States--which, comparatively suffered far less in those conflicts--gender imbalance disrupted daily life and posed new challenges for the country.

Life magazine ran a photo essay on the troubled American family in 1948, lamenting climbing divorce rates and the breakdown of traditional families:

In the picture above an American family is shown in the sad process of breaking up. In city after city scenes like it are being repeated every day, each opening its own small cracks in our society, each a part of a cold statistical record which shows that last year 450,000 divorces were granted in U.S. courts, releasing a flood of children from these broken homes upon society. From such statistics emerges an unmistakable fact: the U.S. family, deep in the millrace of social and technological change, is itself deep in trouble.

American newspapers and magazines spilled gallons of ink on the family crisis and also worried about absent men. "The general fear of a shortage of eligible bachelors persisted even after the war," writes Kristin Celello in her Making Marriage Work: The History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (UNC Press. 2009). "As the average age of marriage dropped for both men and women, unmarried women as young as twenty or twenty-one often thought of themselves as 'old maids'" (77). In the Life story above expert opinion is trotted out to show the hazards of immature young couples getting hitched.

Those of us who teach in colleges and universities are well aware of the gender imbalance in our classrooms. And today, writers across the spectrum are wringing hands or celebrating the "decline" of the American male.

How will current trends shape the course of history? What will historians be saying about the topic in 50 or 100 years from now?

Women in World War II: A Photo Essay

Heather Cox Richardson

My mother was a WAC, so I’ve always paid particular attention to women’s participation in WWII. But this new photo essay in The Atlantic took my breath away. It shows female snipers, field workers, nurses, executioners, prisoners, and pilots, from a whole range of countries.

These photos are stunning. My patience is short for photo essays. I rarely make it past the first few images, but I’ve examined this essay in its entirety twice already. It’s worth it.

Aside from their individual significance, these photos together make a statement about women, history, and women’s history. The resistance fighters, condemned prisoners, harvesters, and so on, in these images are not shown as wives and mothers, or in any role that highlights their gender; they are integral actors in the wide range of extreme roles humans assume during wartime.

Seeing these photos begs the long-standing question of under what societal conditions we can study women separately from men. Surely, in these images, ideology, survival, and nationalism trump gender. But just as surely, gender trumps other social impulses at other times. Is there any reliable way to gauge gender’s relative importance compared to other factors? Or does it have to be studied on a case-by-case basis?

A Thank You to Our Troops—All of Them—on this Memorial Day

Heather Cox Richardson

Memorial Day came out of the Decoration Days held after the Civil War. This seems like a logical thing for me, a scholar of nineteenth century America, to write about today.

Instead, though, I’d like to talk about a group of soldiers that often gets forgotten when we remember our troops. I mean the WACs, the more than 150,000 women who served in the U.S. Army during World War II.

The army had an existing Army Nurse Corps, but in 1941, Massachusetts Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers introduced a bill to establish an Army women’s corps, distinct from the Nurse Corps. During WWI, women had worked with the Army overseas, but because they were contract employees they got no housing, food, protection, or benefits. Rogers wanted to be sure that the same did not happen again.

Army leaders objected to permitting women to join the army directly, so officials hammered out a bill that created the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (the WAAC). This group was to work with the Army and receive some of the benefits of military service, but not all. The Army would provide up to 150,000 women with food, housing, uniforms, and pay—although at a lower scale than men. Women could serve overseas, but they would not get overseas pay, life insurance, or veterans medical and death benefits.

Even with these limits in place, the bill went nowhere until Pearl Harbor. Then Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall threw his weight behind it, recognizing that using women to type and run switchboards would free men to fight. “Who will then do the cooking, the washing, the mending, the humble homey tasks to which every woman has devoted herself; who will nurture the children?” wailed one congressman. The need to mobilize for war outweighed the strong cultural objections to the new plan. On May 15, 1942, President Roosevelt signed it into law.

The Army Air Force was especially eager for WAACs to work in weather operations, as cryptographers, radio operators, parachute riggers, and to keep track of personnel records (on the statistical control tabulating machines that led to modern-day computers). Some also flew planes for the AAF.

WAACs also worked for the ground Army, processing men, issuing weapons, tracking supplies, analyzing maps, dispatching boats, servicing equipment, calculating bullet velocity, and operating radios.

So successful were they that five days after the invasion of North Africa, Lt. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower requested five WAAC officers—including two that spoke French—be dispatched to Allied headquarters to become executive secretaries. The ship carrying the women was hit by a torpedo. Pulled out of the water by British destroyers, the women survived and served on Eisenhower’s staff for the rest of the war.

The WAACs had proved so useful that it was a crisis for the Army when recruiting fell off dramatically in 1943. As much as Army officers liked WAACs for freeing men to fight, the men fighting—and their female relatives—resented the women whose service took the men from typewriters and put them on the front lines. Popular images of the WAACs were that they were loose women who cast off traditional roles and joined the service to get men. Suddenly, “nice” girls did not join the WAAC.

Here the Army stepped in to convert the WAAC into part of the regular Army: the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). This would not only undercut the tarnishing of the women who wanted to serve their country, it would enable the Army to offer the same protections to women serving overseas as it did to men. In July, Congress created the WAC. The War Department quickly stepped up recruiting.

Immediately, WACs went to the overseas theaters. 300 WACs with the SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) translated reports from the French underground and compiled files on the German officers. They kept the situation maps current. Other WACs followed the Army to Normandy and took over the switchboards abandoned by the Germans. In the Southwest Pacific Theater, WACs arrived with standard-issue clothing, including ski pants and heavy coveralls. They developed skin diseases from the heavy clothing—the dreaded “jungle rot”—and malaria because they shed their heavy clothes in desperation, leaving themselves vulnerable to mosquitoes. Women in this theater had to be locked in a barbed wire compound at all times to protect them from the male troops.

Like the men, women demobbed after the war ended. By the end of 1946, only 10,000 women were still in the Army, and they hoped to stay. Earlier that year, Army officials asked Congress to make the WAC permanent. Congress did so in 1948, and the WAC remained part of the Army until 1978, when women were integrated into the regular Army in all branches except combat.

The tens of thousands of women who had served in the Army during WWII braved social ostracism to serve their country. In the process, they proved that women could perform every bit as well as men, even in that bastion of males: the Army.

Those women went back to their homes across America. When they married and had children, they made sure their daughters knew that they could grow up to be anything they wanted.

Thanks, Mom.

Happy Memorial Day.

A New Old Look at Mother’s Day

Heather Cox Richardson

While I’m as happy as the next mom to get chocolate on Mother’s Day—or on any other day, frankly—I can’t help pointing out that “Mother’s Day,” did not originate as a way to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s empowerment and social reform in the late nineteenth century. Rather than starting in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother, it was an impassioned effort by women in the late nineteenth century to end war forever.

The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what carnage meant in a modern war. Soldiers who had marched jauntily off to war discovered that long-range weapons turned the inaccurate volleys of the past into murderous waves of death. Their romantic notions of brave battle and either a victorious return or a clean end died even before the men did. They saw their friends trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, turned into emaciated corpses after dysentery had drained their lives away.

The women who had sent their men off to war were also haunted by its results. They lost fathers, husbands, sons. If their menfolk did come home, they brought scars: wounds, missing limbs, and psychological trauma.

Modern war, it seemed, was not a game.

Out of the war came not only the horror of war, but also a new sense of empowerment for Union women. During the war, they had bought bonds, paid taxes, raised money for the war effort, managed farms, harvested fields, worked in war industries, reared children, nursed soldiers. When the war ended, they were eager to continue to participate in national affairs. Resenting that the Fourteenth Amendment did not establish that women, as well as African-American men, were citizens, women in 1869 organized the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and the American Woman’s Suffrage Association to promote women’s right to have a say in the direction of the country.

Julia Ward Howe was a key figure in the American Woman’s Suffrage Association. She was a Boston lady drawn to women’s rights because current laws meant that if she broke free from her abusive husband, she would lose any right to see her children (a fact he threw at her whenever she threatened to leave him). She was not a radical in the mold of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Rather, she believed strongly that women, as mothers, had a special role to perform in the world.

For Howe, the Civil War had been traumatic, but that it led to emancipation might have justified its terrible bloodshed (a theme she developed in her “Battle Hymn of the Republic”). The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 was another story. As she remembered:

I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?” (Julia Ward Howe, Reminiscences, pp. 327-328)

Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down immediately and wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” Men always had and always would decide questions by resorting to “mutual murder.” But women did not have to accept this state of affairs, she wrote. Mothers could command their sons to stop the madness.

Arise, women! Howe commanded. Say firmly:

We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” (Laura E. H. Richards, et al., Julia Ward Howe, vol. 1, pp. 302-303)

Howe had her document translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish, and distributed it as widely as her extensive contacts made possible. She believed that her Women’s Peace Movement would be the next great development in human history, ending war just as the anti-slavery movement had ended human bondage. She called for a “festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines” to be held around the world on June 2 of every year, a date that would permit open-air meetings.

Howe organized international peace conferences; American states developed their own Mothers’ Day festivals. But Howe quickly gave up on her project. She realized that there was much to be done before women could come together on such a momentous scale. She abandoned her grand vision of world peace and turned her attention to women’s clubs “to constitute a working and united womanhood.”

Perhaps Anna Jarvis remembered seeing her mother participate in an original American Mothers’ Day, and decided to honor her own mother’s idealism. In moving the apostrophe to turn Mothers’ Day into Mother’s Day, though, she changed the meaning of the holiday profoundly.

While we celebrate Mother’s Day, it’s worth also remembering Mothers’ Day, and Julia Ward Howe’s conviction that women must make their voices heard in politics.

The Importance of Studying Ordinary Lives: An Interview with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

The forthcoming issue of Historically Speaking (April 2009) includes an interview with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University and president of the American Historical Association. Ulrich is the author of a number of influential books and essays on colonial history, material culture, social history, and women’s history. Her Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (Random House, 2007) examines the appeal of that phrase and describes the life and work of women who “turned to history as a way of making sense of their own lives.” The following is brief excerpt from the interview.

Randall Stephens: In Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History you write: “History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible.” What have those barely audible voices said to us, and why do they matter?

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: What does Martha Ballard’s diary tell us that the papers of George Washington don’t about the same historical period? In my view, plenty. For instance, Martha Ballard’s diary turns on its head the conventional narrative of the rise of modern medicine, which charts the progress from primitive lay healers to scientific healers, championing the superiority of the latter. But when you compare Martha Ballard’s diary with the records of 19th-century physicians, you get two different pictures of childbirth. The physicians’ account books reveal a succession of dangerous cases. Yet when I go to Martha Ballard’s diary, I realize that dangerous cases were rare. Doctors and their tools were making childbirth more dangerous, not less so.

Another example: economic history. The conventional narrative says that late 18th- and early 19th-century America was in the throes of a consumer revolution. And, indeed, storekeepers’ accounts from Martha Ballard’s time and place portray an economy in which local inhabitants exchanged lumber for the manufactured goods brought in on ships. But Martha’s diary reveals that she and others were constantly spinning and weaving, making their own clothes. According to storekeepers’ accounts, a consumer revolution wiped out local production. Yet an ordinary woman’s diary shows that local production was still very important, as well as interwoven with the commercial marketplace. By studying Martha Ballard’s diary, you can understand the difference between a calico dress, which Martha’s daughter had, and all the other clothing and bedding that was made at home.

One more example: If you studied that period through legal records, you would think that the society has gone from policing private behavior, à la Puritan New England, to dealing only with economic behavior. That is the classic picture we got from historians who worked on court records. But go through Martha Ballard’s diary and you’ll see in action the old 1680 law about the midwife taking testimony at the height of labor in order to hold someone accountable for paternity. So I don’t think anonymous people need to be included in the historical record just because of fairness or justice. Studying them carefully makes for more accurate history.