alternative treatment systems began to blossom in the nineteenth century

1. alternative treatment systems began to blossom in the nineteenth century • some of them bearing names we now associate with items in the kitchen cupboard – Sylvester Graham, John Harvey Kellogg.

2. Hydropaths believed in the curative powers of water. • Homeopaths stressed natural remedies, and the administration of very tiny bits of medicine, diluted in great amounts of water • The Botanical Movement • taught that laypeople could treat themselves better than physicians • founded by Samuel Thompson after six doctors called in to help his seriously ill wife prescribed six different treatments

3. All the movements celebrated healthy, robust womanhood and decried the: • “silly fashion of appearing frail even to the point of invalidism.” • Stressed • exercise • sunlight • Temperance • sensible dress. • William Alcott, reformer advocated a diet restricted to vegetables and water • Also urged women to found anti-corset societies

4. Health reformers shared belief that people had a finite amount of “vital force” or energy • Often promoted celibacy, or at least a restricted sex life • These theories might have been eccentric but, • helped women convince their husbands to limit the size of their families

5. Many prominent American women favored taking “the cure” in retreats the health reform movements set up around the country. • Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe both favored the hydropaths • visitors soaked in hot tubs and then • leaped into cold ones • Also being massaged in a “wave-bath”

6. It may have been the healthful lifestyle of the resorts that rejuvenated the patients • or simply the chance to get away from home • Harriet Beecher Stowe spent ten months at a cure in 1847 • While husband Calvin tended their large brood of children

7. “I wish you could be with me in Brattleboro, and coast down hill on a sled, go sliding and snowballing by moonlight!” she wrote her husband • who undoubtedly wished the same thing. • When she returned home • Calvin came down with ailments that required a fifteen month stay at the spa

8. William Baxter • a visitor from England • noted that all the women did at health resorts, was sit in rocking chairs.

9. “They would regard anyone who proposed vigorous physical exercise as a madman” • Excellent reason why they didn’t move around more • they were immobilized by their clothes. • Women were encased in rigid, ribbed underwear and restricted by dresses with arms that were either long and tight or huge and full of flounces. 

10. They were also half blinded by extended bonnets and caps that eliminated all vision These two satires show the styles

11. Weighted down by floor-length skirts made of heavy fabrics, over multitudes of petticoats • Women wore “cages” to give their skirts volume. • Over the cages, skirts swung gracefully as wearers walked • sometimes revealing ankles that had not been displayed for decades

12. Their lightness must have been a relief after the stiff petticoats they had worn before, they were unwieldy. • They • got stuck in carriages • caught on fire and even • it was alleged • blew their owners off of cliffs • Worst of all was the corset

13. Corset worn everywhere from the breakfast table to the ballroom • In perpetual and generally hopeless pursuit of the ideal waist • Preadolescent girls wore corsets • old women wore corsets • mothers to be wore corsets even in the advanced stages of pregnancy • Women’s tiny waists defined them as members of the leisure class • wives and daughters so well taken care of that they were never required to take a deep breath

14. Young women of courting age were laced to rib-cracking tightness.

15. One commentator claimed that it was not unusual to see • “a mother lay her daughter down upon the carpet, and placing her foot on her back, breaks half a dozen laces in tightening her stays.”

16. Industrial revolution made corsets available for almost everyone • factory girls and servants also began wearing undergarments that were as tight as their occupations allowed • Catherine Beecher wrote against corsets • Highlighting the damage that could be done

17. Comparisons to Chinese footbinding were rife • stories were passed around about deformed babies born with corset lines imprinted in their flesh. • Virtually every clergyman, doctor, and magazine editor decried the custom of tight corsetry

18. In an age when medical experts found everything from education to meat-eating dangerous to the delicate female sensibility • Corset was blamed both for problems it really did cause • like shortness of breath or miscarriages • and those that it didn’t • like curvature of the spine and cancer

19. Virtually everything women read told them that corsets were bad • But, everything they saw stressed how essential they were • Magazines pictured women with • tiny waists • dresses that sported long, tight sleeves • heavy fabrics • huge skirts

20. Fathers sometimes urged their daughters to consider their health before appearance • Mothers often sided with the forces of fashion • Southern woman to her daughter in 1818 • Noted with alarm that she had heard rumors the girl made her undergarments large enough to slip on and off without the trouble of lacing. • “If you love me, alter these corsets before I see you,” she urged

21. One of the many eras in American history when young women were at war with their bodies. • “We in America have got so far out of the way of womanhood that has any vigor of outline or opulence of physical proportion that, when we see a woman made as a woman ought to be, she strikes us as a monster.” • Girls starved themselves to win the ultimate compliment of “fairylike”

22. Under Willard, the WCTU became a vocal pressure group for the protection of women and improvement of society • Willard’s policy of “do everything” meant that all WCTU members did something • Members were encouraged to fight for a reform in whatever way struck them as best • Wearing her badge, a white ribbon to symbolize the purity of the home, the WCTU member might also work for one of the union’s many departments • Each was a propaganda arm for the cause, such as peace, labor reform, social purity, health, or city welfare work

23. The WCTU member might even be converted to woman suffrage, a ca use that Willard endorsed with fervor because she believed that the ballot was “the most potent means of social and moral reform.” • Women’s clubs similarly drew women into association, at first for cultural purposes, but later to support an agenda of civic reform • Like the WCTU women’s clubs educated their middle and upper class member while providing an avenue to public affairs • By the time the General Federation of Women’s Clubs was established in 1892, there were almost 500 affiliate clubs with over 100,000 members • By the end of the century, women’s clubs had over 160,000 members and by WWI over a million • The women’s club movement served a special purpose. It enable middle class women to enter public without abandoning domestic values and without adopting the aggressive stance

24. associated within either the temperance crusade or the politicized woman suffrage movement • But women’s clubs were a step toward politicization as well • The typical women’s club of the 1880s began by holding weekly meetings for lectures, discussions, and book reports • These literary and cultural overtones provides club women with a substitute for the higher education open to daughters • It is important to note that like college, the club was an exclusionary society, defined as much by who was admitted or left out as by the works of art discussed • Club women contemplated the social order on a local level in a non- controversial manner • Women’s clubs raised funds for planting trees, established libraries, and building hospitals and playgrounds

25. After clubs federated in 1892, delegates moved on to national issues – protective labor laws, child labor laws, pure food and drug legislation, and finally in 1914- women’s suffrage • Black women’s clubs were not welcomed in the GWFC as became clear in 1900, when Mary Church Terrell, representing the National Association of Colored Women, was denied seating at a GWFC convention • Black women’s clubs therefore occupied a truly separate sphere, rejected by white clubwomen but united by a sense of racial pride • While black women’s clubs filled much the same function as the GWFC they also voiced concerned about race-specific causes, such as railroad conditions and anti-lynching • Since the 1890s, pioneer clubwoman and suffragist Ida B. Wells-Barnett had run a one woman crusade against lynching

26. The groundwork of organization laid by the temperance movement and women’s clubs bore results in the progressive era. • The settlement house movement began in 1889 when two young college graduates Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, established Hull House in a poor neighborhood • Addams exemplified the crisis felt by many upper-middle class women who formed themselves with lots of education and little to do that felt “real” or significant • Chicago was full of two populations that helped define American society at the turn of the century – poor immigrants and well educated women who were looking for something to do • Addams genius was in bringing them together. The immigrants may have been drawn to her because she was not judgmental, and she was a good listener, interested in understanding how her neighbors viewed thing • Wealthy women saw Addams as one of their own and readily gave her their money.

27. The settlement house was a good symbol for the difference between the age of the New Woman and that of the Victorians. • Jane Addams was a natural descendant of Clara Barton, Dorthea Dix, and Catharine Beecher, whose rootless lives seemed to embody the principle that there would never be a place where such forceful women could permanently fit in • But Addams and her fellow settlement workers had a home. They achieved domesticity, not with a husband and children, but with other women • Some like Jane Addams found lifelong partners in other women who lived with them in the settlements • Addams and Starr established the first playground in Chicago, on a vacant lot near Hull House • They started a nursery school and organized women’s clubs, lecture series and art exhibits. • Within two years the settlement had more than fifty rooms and endless classes that occupied every corner of the house for the twelve hours a day it was open • The settlement house resembled not only an upper-class home – with its parlor, drawing rooms, library, and music room, its fireplaces and stuffed armchairs – but also the colleges from which residents had recently graduated • A thousand people came to their programs every week

28. Thanks to her example, the six settlement houses that existed in the United State in 1892 became nearly 100 by 1900 • Like so many great transitional figures in American history, she introduced the public to new ideas while assuring them they were not buying into anything dangerously radical. • She was on every list of the most admired people in America, and when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, many felt it was a long overdue honor for the work she did before WWII