Josie and Myrtle
Josephine "Josie" Patchett (1872-1956)
The sweet, grandmotherly face of my grandma’s Aunt Josie, with her bobbed and marcelled hair, looks out from the black and white photo with a slight smile. Josie was the oldest girl in a family of ten. Two siblings died as infants. She was 14 when her mother, Avarilla Stephens Patchett, died. The youngest child in the family, Bertha, was only ten months old. Josie became a mother substitute to her siblings.
The photo was probably taken in the late 1920s, when the youngest of her own ten children was in high school. We look at photos of grandparents and great-aunts and uncles from long ago, and don’t imagine them as young, running around, and getting into trouble. Josie did get in trouble - trouble of the worst kind for a young woman in 1892. She had a baby, Myrtle Althea Patchett, out of wedlock.
The general thinking in the late nineteenth century in this situation was that girls had been seduced by men promising marriage, and then were betrayed. She was also considered to be “ruined,” and shame fell over the entire family. The loss of respectability meant the loss of a girl's marriageability. As a historian said, this threatened to make her financially dependent on her family for an extended period. The “ruined” young woman passed on her loss of respectability to her child.
The best solution was regarded as forcing the man to marry the young woman. Threatening him with a charge of rape and a prison sentence versus marriage sometimes persuaded him. This, or pursuing a bastardy charge against him to force child support payments, were options, but they further exposed the girl to public humiliation as her case went to court and received inevitable newspaper coverage. Some few went to new institutions like the Home for Friendless Women in Leavenworth, where the baby could be adopted or boarded at the home as the young mother worked.
But none of the above happened to Josie. She stayed at home and had the baby. While she was surely the subject of gossip and disapproval, she also comported herself in such a way that she was regarded positively in her Fawn Creek community. When she married, an item in the “country correspondent” column said, “Miss Josie Patchett is reported to have joined heart, hand and future fortunes with whom the writer knoweth not, but hope he is worthy of the prize he has won.” The country correspondent columnist may not have known her new husband, Charles Bond, because he lived in Parker Township.
Josie married just short of Myrtle’s fifth birthday, and she didn’t bring her little girl with her when she “went to housekeeping.” She and Charles moved to the Creek Nation in Indian Territory, where Charles’ parents had also moved. Myrtle was raised in her grandfather Enos Patchett’s home, and as he aged, and at times of difficulty in young adulthood, she lived with Josie’s siblings Reuben and Bertha.
Myrtle visited with her mother regularly, and her nine half-siblings always recognized her as their sister. Their children knew her as an aunt. I suspect, though, that a shadow of shame lingered over Myrtle. One of Josie’s grandchildren told me she was “never really wanted in the Enos Patchett home.” He was quick to tell me that his mother always treated this older sister kindly.
Myrtle married twice, the first time at age 18 to Charles Chezem. The marriage didn't last and Myrtle enrolled at Coffeyville Business College and moved in with Aunt Bertha and her family. Sometimes before 1940 Myrtle remarried to Ernest Jones.
Her nephew told me her second husband treated her so badly. It may be unfair to play “armchair psychologist,” but maybe Myrtle didn’t believe she deserved better.
Josie did a good job with her children from her marriage. They all did well, and several graduated from college at a time when that was still unusual.
Sources:
Erby, Kelly, “The Hull Baby Case and Women in 1870s Kansas,” Kansas History, Autumn, 2017, https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2017autumn_erby.pdf
Stevenson, Robert. “Making Right a Girl’s Ruin: Working-Class Legal Culture and Forced Marriages In New York City 1890-1950,” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Aug. 2002), pp.199-230.
“Around East Brown,” The Coffeyville Weekly Journal,” 2 April 1897, p. 1.
Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023
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