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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN March 30, 2003 Issue 
Wild Women by Autumn Stephens 
Some of History's Notable Warriors Were Women Operation Iraqi Freedom! A grandiose phrase that brings to mind images of freedom fighters as well as questions about the possibilities of Western-style freedom for non-Western mentality, especially freedom for the Muslim women in that war-torn part of the world. There is a sense, or an appearance that at least many of the women of the Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman civilization, have come a long way on their ascent up the hill of equality - a fitting topic for reflection at the end of March, National Women's History Month. The climb, no rather the crawl - up the hill is strewed with the discarded reputations, petticoats, virtues and corsets of the women crawling up. Many young women today know neither about the wars waged for women's equality, nor about the warriors up that hill, their valor or the obstacles they had to overcome. A panorama of women rebels tumbles out of Autumn Stephens' book "Wild Women: Crusaders, Curmudgeons and Completely Corsetless Ladies in the Otherwise Virtuous Victorian Era." The light witticism reminiscent of Victorian expressions belies the depth of research that has gone into capturing in just two or less pages the personality and spirit of each woman. In "A Word to the Reader" Stephens describes succinctly yet poignantly some of the absurd and irrational rules and codes that have kept Western women in chains on a fictitious pedestal. "Woman should not be expected to write, or fight, or build, or compose scores, "Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1841. Godey's Lady's Book proclaimed in 1844: "There is nothing more dangerous for a young woman than to rely chiefly upon her intellectual powers, her wit, her imagination, her fancy." And Queen Victoria advocated for everyone to "join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Woman's Rights' with all its attendant horrors on which her poor feeble sex is bent." It was somewhat easier for women to break through the mold in the unique American environment of raw and brutal survival of the fittest. It seems that being American in itself had emboldened the 150 wild women described in this book. Many of them are unknown, others marginally so and only a handful are well known historical personages. Victoria Woodhull (1838 -1927) claimed to be "a free lover" and believed in "pleasure without procreation, sex without spouses, and prostitution without imprisonment." In 1872 she became the first woman to run for president of the United States. Lucy Stone (1818-1893) was one of the earliest American women to refuse to take her husband's name at marriage. "My name is the symbol of my identity and must not be lost," she maintained. In 1858 she refused to pay taxes on a New Jersey home because she said, not being a voter constituted "taxation without representation." Gold digger Ann Eliza Young (1844 - 1908) was the twenty-seventh bride of "geriatric groom" Brigham Young. She may have sunk into oblivion had she not sought divorce on the grounds of neglect and lack of support. Thus, she made not only a name for herself but a fortune as well by lecturing across the country on "Life in Mormon Bondage" and "Polygamy As It Is." She called herself "Rebel of the Harem". It was not so much her rebellion-inciting words that caused criticism of feminist Amelia Bloomer (1818 -1894), as was her invention of the bloomers. "The Bible is against bloomers," protested a virtuous contemporary. And Harper's magazine wrote in 1857, "we believe in the petticoat as an institution older and more sacred than the Magna Carta." In 1849 Dorothy Scraggs of Marysville, California placed in a local newspaper what may very well be the first personal ad: "A Husband Wanted By A Lady who can wash, cook, scour, sew, milk, spin, weave, hoe, cut wood, make fires, feed the pigs," etc. "There must be $20,000 settled on her before she will bind herself to perform all the above." George Sand was not the only woman to don trousers and take on a man's nom de plume in order to succeed. Many women did this in America in spite of the fact that for women to "masquerade in men's clothing was a nineteenth-century misdemeanor." Although Elizabeth Blackwell (1821 - 1910) succeeded to become the first woman to graduate from an American medical school without the trousers, it was entirely different for Dr. Mary Walker (1855 M.D. from Syracuse Medical College), the Union Army's assistant surgeon. It took an act of Congress for Mary, a nonpareil surgeon, to be allowed to wear the army uniform. In 1879 brilliant Belva Lockwood (1830 -1917) was the first woman to be sworn in as a lawyer by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Court of Claims, after her five-year fight for Congress to pass a bill "guaranteeing that no citizen would be excluded as an attorney ...from any court of the United States on account of sex". Red stockings notwithstanding, Lockwood ran for president of the U.S. in 1884 and in 1888. Amongst the more familiar female writers included in the book are also two of America's most outstanding women writers of the nineteenth century - Kate Chopin (1851 - 1904) and Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850). Ignored for more than a century by literary scholars, it was only in the late 1970s that their talents began to be recognized and then, only begrudgingly. Chopin's tender and lyrical novel "The Awakening" (1899) scandalized her contemporaries and was banned from libraries including that of her hometown St. Louis. Margaret Fuller's hubris surpassed that of her formidable contemporaries - the male Boston Brahmins. "I now know all the people worth knowing in America," Fuller decreed, "and I find no intellect comparable to my own." Her literary salon was one of her many impressive literary achievements. She fancied herself the supreme saloniere, superior even to the fabled Madame de Stael. Reading about these remarkable women, one gets the impression that indeed, great strides have been made towards equality of the sexes. But in reality, the percentage of women in the world who have reached some sort of equality is minuscule. For in many parts of the world women are still the beasts of burden, still in the power of male relatives and/or spouses. "Wild Women" inspires and imbues courage, but the ubiquitous and omnipotent censor would always prevent the women who most need its inspiration and courage from reading this book. The future of these women, Iraqi Freedom or not, for now, seems bleak. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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