A woman's rightful place

By Mary Leonard, 10/19/2003

America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

By Gail Collins

Morrow, 556 pp., $27.95

Among the many delicious morsels Gail Collins dishes out in ''America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines," is that Lillian Russell, the voluptuous showgirl, quadruple divorcee, Chicago newspaper columnist, and arm candy of Diamond Jim Brady, made feminist history in the 1890s when she pedaled her gold-plated bicycle through Central Park without a corset.

Russell's real name was Helen Leonard, and according to an adequately researched and certainly earnest family genealogy, Russell and I are related. To think I might have a piece of DNA from a liberated dame who made weight gain a womanly virtue, placed the first-ever long-distance phone call (singing to President Harding), and defied a male editor who insisted on more stories about acne and fewer about the lovely spirit of women -- well, it's just one of the benefits of reading Collins's enormously entertaining and illuminating social history.

Pioneers like Lillian Russell spice page after page of Collins's lively survey that spans four centuries of American womanhood, from Eleanor Dare, who bore the continent's first white baby (1587), to Betty Friedan, a New York housewife who in 1963 told women they didn't have to stay home with babies.

In between, there are heroines like Margaret Brent, the nation's first female lawyer who brokered the end of a rebellion in Colonial Maryland in 1645, and Hannah Dustan, a Massachusetts settler who took scalps and stole a canoe in 1697 to escape Indian captors. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of ''Godey's Lady's Book," was a 19th-century Martha Stewart who made a career outside the home by instructing women how to keep house. The indefatigable Grimke sisters of South Carolina were such principled abolitionists that they boycotted all slave-labor products and stuck to a diet of rice and molasses.

Annie Oakley, the 19th-century sharpshooter who could hit a target standing on her head but only rode sidesaddle and never wore trousers, epitomizes the tension at the heart of Collins's story: The slow, uneven march to women's liberation in the United States has been less about the oppression by men (however considerable) than about women's persistent ambivalence over their own role -- the exalted lady of the house or the gutsy gal who escapes it.

''Southern matriarchs aspired to be the image of the helpless female, then ran the plantations while their husbands went to Congress -- or luxuriated at a spa. Pioneer women rode sidesaddle and wore gloves to protect their soft hands, then crawled up the side of mountains with a newborn baby in one arm. Everyone believed that married women were obliged to stay home with their children, while everyone bought factory goods produced by poor working mothers, made from cotton picked by female slaves," Collins writes.

The gender rule that a woman's place was in the home -- where, for at least three centuries, the drudgery of back-breaking housework challenged the label of ''weaker sex" -- repeatedly got suspended in emergencies, according to Collins. Pioneer women fought Indians. They dumped tea during the Revolutionary War, spied in the Civil War, and ran boardinghouses for California gold-diggers. When the textile mills required small hands or the telephone company needed patient operators, they turned to women. Women drove ambulances during World War I, and tested aircraft and towed targets for live artillery practice during World War II.

Collins, a veteran journalist I once worked with who became the first female editorial-page editor of The New York Times in 2001, writes in a wry and witty voice and with an unflagging, feminist point of view. As in ''Scorpion Tongues" (1998), her entertaining history of political gossip, Collins proves to be an informed storyteller. One shortcoming in this book, she admits, results from having too little original material to properly tell the stories of black and Native American women. There is also too much ground to cover to devote more than a few pages to important figures like Dorothea Dix, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Rosa Parks.

Using the threads of fashion, sex, health, and housework, Collins weaves a historical pattern of wage-and-employment discrimination, political disenfranchisement, and medical malpractice aimed at anyone who menstruated. The pursuit of equal rights was at best uneven, she observes, as the pendulum swung from women as business partners to brainless homebodies, from hatchet-wielding reformers to fashion-and-diet-crazed flappers, from Rosie the Riveter during World War II to submissive suburbanites, stereotyped in '50s sitcoms.

The 20th century brought women many tools for domestic emancipation: the vote, Kotex, the typewriter, the dishwasher, and the Pill, plus divorces and college degrees for more than a select few. Yet, Collins notes, the federal Equal Rights Amendment, which would have reversed almost 400 years of propaganda about a woman's proper place in society, failed in the 1970s because many women saw it as a repudiation of everything they were about.

''It was easy for the amendment's backers to forget that for most American women throughout history, the goal had been getting into the house, not out of it," Collins writes. ''The vast majority never got a chance to reject the limitations of a career as a full-time housewife. Trapped in a world of endless work on the farm or in the factory, they yearned for a chance to exercise more control and creativity as wives and mothers.

''Susan B. Anthony had said that married women were only allowed to be dolls or drudges, but stay-at-home wives saw themselves as something else entirely -- as domestic entrepreneurs whose accomplishments entitled them to some respect. When that status was threatened, both the women who had it and the ones who hoped some day to get it reacted with dismay."

Here in the 21st century, professional opportunities for women appear boundless, yet the challenges in balancing work, home, and family seem as great as ever.

Mary Leonard is a member of the Globe staff.