Women's Elusive Stories -- Laura Barber
A woman with a washing machine like the one in this 1866 ad probably felt fortunate. She was expected to confine all her interests to her home and family.
Why don’t I write more stories about women ancestors? I know they led lives as full and interesting as men’s lives. The people I write about are people I can find information about - information beyond census records and (when available), birth, marriage and death records.
Even today, most of us, men and women, don’t make the news very often, if at all. But women in Victorian and Edwardian days were supposed to be “invisible,” to “disappear” behind a man. This was her proper role in the prevailing Cult of Domesticity and “Separate spheres” theory that people believed was handed down by God. A woman was supposed to stay home, to make no waves, to be retiring, passive, demure, totally devoted to home and family, with no outside interests, though promotion of Christianity was a given. Women were the guardians of morality, and it was their responsibility to (gently, sweetly) bring men to Christian devotion and to tame them of their temptations. Upon Mother rested the future of the nation, for it was her duty to raise devout Christian children.
Even joining a women’s club was too suspect, too dangerous, too outside her league to some. Former President Grover Cleveland warned against this in a May 1905 Ladies Home Journal article, “Women’s Mission and Women’s Clubs.”
He attacked women whose “restless desire” tempts her, “to be and do something not within the sphere of her appointed ministrations.” His goal was to reveal the “Dangers of the Club Habit,” he said. “...the innocent and the helpless are made to suffer …Children will be irredeemably deprived of the mysterious wholesomeness and delight of an atmosphere which can only be created by a mother’s loving presence and absorbing care,” he said. “…I believe that it should be boldly declared that the best and safest club for a woman to patronize is her home.”
Today it seems especially incomprehensible that anyone would oppose the work of the Women’s Club Movement, which began in 1868 and reached a peak at the turn of the century. Women's clubs worked for issues that seem entirely fitting within the separate spheres framework: donating copies of artwork into schools, starting or contributing to libraries for “wholesome uplift,” advocating for children’s issues such as the creation of playgrounds and kindergartens; free milk for impoverished mothers, better street lighting, city beautification and the preservation of “sacred” historical spots.
But women’s clubs also pressed for more controversial issues such as juvenile justice reform, higher education for women, temperance, suffrage, pure food and drugs – areas that increasingly stepped on men’s feet. Such work necessitated movement into the men’s sphere in advocating for funding, policy changes and societal change.
Clearly however, women ignored the former president’s advice. By 1910, membership in women’s clubs was estimated at 800,000, and would continue to rise until 1926. They also fought back against comments he made that club women were committing "race suicide" by being involved in clubs instead of having children. The General Federation of Club Women enlisted their 300,000 members to send statistics on how many children each woman had. They also said it was "unfair and unmanly for Grover Cleveland or any man to rush precipitously to the conclusion that a club woman does not make a good mother."
As far as I can tell, the women I directly descended from did not join any advocacy groups that attracted women - not the Women’s Christian Temperance League, not suffrage organizations, nor any local women's club. My third great-grandmother, Jane Suttenfield Barbour, contributed to the Ladies Aid Society at her Presbyterian Church in Fort Wayne, and probably belonged to its sewing circle. My great-great grandmother, Agnes Banta Barbour, helped organize a sabbath school in her Kansas farm neighborhood, and was elected assistant superintendent. A sister of my great-great-grandfather, Lida Barbour, attended temperance meetings with her father.
None of the female ancestors I directly descend from were transgressive women. They lived conventional lives, staying home, living the lives that were expected of them. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously wrote, "Well-behaved women seldom make history."
The ideals of the Cult of Domesticity and the separate sphere theory were most applicable to white middle- and upper-class women. The average white person certainly wasn’t concerned that a Black woman or Irish immigrant had to leave her children to the care of others to work for wages. But as historian Smith-Rosenburg said, “The desire to marry and the belief that a woman’s social status came not from the exercise of her own talents and efforts but from her ability to attract a competent male protector were as universal among lower class and farm women as among middle and upper class urban women.” My ancestors were lower to middling class, and farm women.
He added that women were “routinely socialized to fill a weak, dependent, and severely limited social role. They were sharply discouraged from expressing competition or mastery in such “masculine” areas as physical skill, strength and courage, or in academic or commercial pursuits, while at the same time they were encouraged to be coquettish, entertaining, non-threatening and nurturant. Overt anger and certainly violence were forbidden as unfeminine and vulgar. The effect of this socialization was to teach women to have a low evaluation of themselves, to significantly restrict their ego functions to low prestige areas, to depend on others and to altruistically wish not for their own material success, but for that of their male supporters.”
With all of this said, for most women born in the nineteenth century and before, they were defined by two questions: Who’s your daddy? And who’s your husband? Newspapers regularly said things like, “The bride is the daughter of______,” and included only her father’s name even though her mother was alive and lived with him.
Without diaries, memoirs and saved letters, all that’s left to trace their lives is when and where they were born; parents’ names, marriage date and husband’s name; the names of children who lived long enough to be named; where they lived on census and other records; and their death date. That doesn’t make for much of a story. In rare instances I can find a name on a list of students at a female academy, or a mention of some participation in the Ladies Aid Society or Sabbath School. I can fill in a little by tracing the career and activities of their husbands and fathers.
Below is a typical example I picked randomly. She is the sister of my third great-grandfather, Myron Fitch Barbour, my “anchor” in navigating relationships in this family tree. Her name is Laura Barber. Here’s all I can put together about her:
Laura Barber. She was the firstborn child of Roswell and Elizabeth “Betsey” Barber, born in 1794 in her parents’ hometown, Simsbury, Connecticut. Generations of Barbers lived in Simsbury in the years since an indentured carpenter named Thomas Barber immigrated from England to help build homes for wealthy Puritans. Now Roswell and Betsey’s generation was the first to spread their wings. First there were years in Loudon, Massachusetts, then back in Connecticut, and finally, trying life where there was cheap, abundant land out west. Western New York! Laura was 16, leaving civilization for the wilds of Genesee County, where her father was one of the first to purchase land in Sheldon, New York.
This was log cabin living, the struggle days of clearing land to plant corn. There was the constant labor helping her mother to get meals prepared, make candles and soap, tend to livestock and garden, to spin and sew and mend. There were little siblings to help with, fires to keep burning, a thousand things to do to keep a household going.
At age 17, she married Maxon Godfrey, 19. Maxon was the great-grandson of Colonel Godfrey Malbone of Virginia and Connecticut, once one of the richest men in the country.
The colonel made his fortune in the triangle slave trade - sugar, rum, slaves - and privateering. He was a childhood friend of George Washington’s, and hosted him at his castle-like country home, Malbone Hall, in Newport, Rhode Island. It was considered one of the finest houses in all the colonies. The Colonel’s fortunes turned after a fire burned Malbone Hall to the ground in the 1766, and he died two years later.
The fortunes of his descendants in Maxon’s line were quite changed from the grandeur of the past. Now here Maxon was, a young pioneer, a farmer, in a raw, remote little outpost. Laura’s father Roswell must have given them help in getting their household set up. In his will he left “in addition to what she has already received,” fifty dollars “of the money secured of John Barber’s mortgage” and $100, half in stock and half in cash, “when the last payment becomes due on Anson Drigg’s mortgage.” John Barber could be referring to his brother-in-law; Anson Driggs was his son-in-law.
Maxon and Laura had their first of eight children a year later, in 1812. In 1813 Maxon joined Parmenio Adam’s unit of New York volunteers in the War of 1812. Adams was a Simsbury native who also pioneered in Genesee County, and would serve as its sheriff after the war. Maybe Laura moved in with her parents for the time that Maxon was gone.
Laura’s mother died in 1817 and her father rapidly remarried. She and Maxon moved first to Buffalo, then Portland, New York, then to Girard, Pennsylvania. Her sister Sylvia and brother-in-law Anson Driggs made the same moves, only they settled in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Each place was directly or indirectly part of the important Erie Canal transportation system. The Erie Extension Canal was completed in Pennsylvania and near Girard in the 1840s - which is when they moved there. Girard was also known for being winter quarters of Dan Rice’s circus from 1852 to 1875. Rice was known as “the most famous clown in America” and one of the most highly paid performers of the day, pulling in about $1,000 a week in the 1850s. Each October the circus would return to Girard via canal boats, and parade down the main street with the elephants and other exotic animals. Then they would put on a special show for town residents before going into winter’s break. It must have been wonderful for Laura’s grandchildren!
Laura helped raise some of those grandchildren, due to the losses few avoided in that era. She buried her son Oscar in 1846 (and his wife in 1841) and her daughter Laura Lucina in 1848. On the 1850 census she and Maxon were raising two of the grandchildren – Martin Taylor, Laura Lucina’s son, and Oscar Myron Godfrey, Oscar’s son, who went by Myron.
Maxon died in 1870. He had already retired from farming and they were living with their grandson Myron and his young family. After Maxon’s death, Laura went to live with her daughter Sophronia. She died in 1883.
Note: Laura was 16 when her baby brother, my third great-grandfather, Myron Fitch Barbour, was born.
Sources:
"Godfrey Malbone Oath (RLC.Ms.552)," Redwood Library and Atheneum, Rhode Island Archival and Manuscripts Collection Online, https://www.riamco.org/render?eadid=US-RNR-ms552&view=biography
Rawley, James and Stephen D. Behrendt. The Transatlantic Slave Trade, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Sherry, Jeff. “Dan Rice and Dan Rice Days in Girard, Pa.,” Hagen History Center Blog, 6 Aug 2021, https://www.eriehistory.org/blog/dan-rice-and-dan-rice-days-in-girard-pa
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