A TERMAGANT DOVE?
In post of the 26th of May, I commented, among other things, on Stephanie Coontz’s recent article on the shifting memes surrounding wifedom and motherhood. In this she appeared to suggest that American women had taken a fall in both status and grace since a supposed golden age in the 1840s.
While I am not qualified to assess the quality of her feminist rhetoric, I am bothered by her grasp of history and place.
In support of her early Victorian Garden of Even, Stephanie quotes Sophia Hawthorne, the wife of novelist Nathaniel, who apparently told her mother that she did not share her concerns about improving the rights of women, because wives already exerted “a power which no king or conqueror can cope with.”
I put forward the challenge that this statement was never meant to apply to American women in general and that Sophia’s comment owes much to her experience in North West England.
Sophia (born Sophia Amelia Peabody born Massachusetts, 1809) was the sickly child of a dentist, who toyed with hypochondria in later life. Mostly bedridden, before she met her beau, her headaches fortunately abated rather than increased after her marriage to Nathaniel. They seem to have been a devoted couple. Naturally somewhat shy, they both appreciated each others’ quiet ways.
Nathaniel wrote of his Dove: ‘she is, in the strictest sense, my sole companion; and I need no other—there is no vacancy in my mind, any more than in my heart... Thank God that I suffice for her boundless heart!"
She was equally gushing: "I am always so dazzled and bewildered with the richness, the depth, the ... jewels of beauty in his productions that I am always looking forward to a second reading where I can ponder and muse and fully take in the miraculous wealth of thoughts".
So the devoted Dove seems an unlikely surrogate king or conqueror of males.
At least until she went to live in Liverpool, Lancashire – which she did in 1853, when Nathaniel was appointed US Consul.
BELLIGERENT PROPENSITIES
The Hawthornes rented an elegant red sandstone villa (26 Rock Park) at Rock Ferry in Cheshire that overlooked the Mersey Estuary. Every morning Nathaniel would take the ferry to work in the Washington Building of the Goree Piazza, Strand, Liverpool.
For recreation, the family explored Chester, dining (like Jonathan Swift) at the Yacht Inn in Watergate Street, and North Wales where Nathaniel was particularly taken with Conway Castle.
[Incidentally, both 25 Rock Park and the Yacht Inn have been demolished to make way for road projects – while Conway Castle now has a motorway beneath it].
But Nathaniel also liked the odd walk on the wild side, observing English life. And what he observed about the Lancashire Lasses of the lower orders in the back streets is interesting;
‘The women and children greatly preponderate in such places; the men probably wandering abroad in quest of that daily miracle, a dinner and a drink, or perhaps slumbering in the daylight that they may the better follow out their cat-like rambles through the dark.
‘Here are women with young figures, but old, wrinkled, yellow faces, fanned and blear-eyed with the smoke which they cannot spare from their scanty fires,--it being too precious for its warmth to be swallowed by the chimney.
'Some of them sit on the doorsteps, nursing their unwashed babies at bosoms which we will glance aside from, for the sake of our mothers and all womanhood, because the fairest spectacle is here the foulest.
‘I am persuaded, however, that there were laws of intercourse which they never violated,--a code of the cellar, the garret, the common staircase, the doorstep, and the pavement, which perhaps had as deep a foundation in natural fitness as the code of the drawing-room.
‘Yet again I doubt whether I may not have been uttering folly in the last two sentences, when I reflect how rude and rough these specimens of feminine character generally were. They had a readiness with their hands that reminded me of Molly Seagrim and other heroines in Fielding's novels.
‘For example, I have seen a woman meet a man in the street, and, for no reason perceptible to me, suddenly clutch him by the hair and cuff his ears,--an infliction which he bore with exemplary patience, only snatching the very earliest opportunity to take to his heels.
‘Where a sharp tongue will not serve the purpose, they trust to the sharpness of their finger-nails, or incarnate a whole vocabulary of vituperative words in a resounding slap, or the downright blow of a doubled fist.
‘All English people, I imagine, are influenced in a far greater degree than ourselves by this simple and honest tendency, in cases of disagreement, to batter one another's persons; and whoever has seen a crowd of English ladies (for instance, at the door of the Sistine Chapel, in Holy Week) will be satisfied that their belligerent propensities are kept in abeyance only by a merciless rigor on the part of society.
‘It requires a vast deal of refinement to spiritualize their large physical endowments’.
So we come back to women that would have excited the imagination of Stephanie Coontz – but they are not in Salem or Boston – they are in Toxteth and Bootle.
And, among the homely red sandstone facades of Rock Ferry, something obviously turned in the delicate young lady from New England, as she fought the belligerent propensities of her Old English female cousins. Sophia the Dove became No Nonsense Sofie.
I am not in the least surprised – as I have discussed on other occasions, the women of the North West of England are a formidable lot.
After they had returned to the States, Nathaniel swapped coffee for tea, buckled and wisely admitted:
"She is the most sensible woman I ever knew in my life, much superior to me in general talent, and of fine cultivation."
Two years later Nathaniel who had been preternaturally active, took sick and died and, after she had tidied up her affairs, Sophia moved back to England with her three children.
For more on Cartimandua, the lusty, devious and tyrannical Queen of the Brigantes under the Romans - the epitome of powerful womanhood in North Western England - see my post of Saturday, June 5, 2010 'Sally Darlington & the Kinseys of Burwardsley, Cheshire'
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