Reviewed: Women, Work, and Worship in Lincoln’s Country: The Dumville Family Letters, Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz, eds.  University of Illinois Press, 2016

 

I had more to say than I had space to say it when I submitted this piece. I added some further observation on the Dumvilles in the blog that I hosted on the Illinois Times website in a post titled “Women’s Place” that appeared in IT on November 3, 2016. Those observations appear below at the end of the original essay.

 

Hepzibah was a young woman of a sort we’ve all known—smart, full of gumption and eager for a little bit more from life than life was prepared to give her. “It does seem to me that any one who thinks me either pritty or remarkably inteligent must err greatly. I often complain of my ignorance and want of atainment feeling that between what I know and what I desire to know there is no comparison.”

Hepzibah Dumville is only one of the arresting characters found in Women, Work, and Worship in Lincoln’s Country: The Dumville Family Letters, which the University of Illinois Press gave us earlier this year. The letters—107 in all, of which one hundred appear here—were found among the treasures in the state’s historical library in Springfield by their eventual editors, Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz.

The Dumvilles came from England, arriving near Jacksonville in 1840 or so. The family consisted of father and wife and three daughters who bought land as part of a cooperative society of the sort then springing up all over mid-Illinois. Then, calamity—the co-op failed, father died, they lost the land. Mother went work in Jacksonville as a domestic. The oldest, aged eighteen, wed a local farmer. Her sisters had to live with a farm family near Carlinville, where the older of the two taught school and the youngest was for all intents in indentured servitude as a governess, housemaid, and seamstress.

The Dumvilles remind us that there is no group of people less likely to be alike than members of the same family. Mother Ann was a fierce Methodist, devoted to church; illiterate Elizabeth labored almost invisibly on her husband’s farm; Jemima, a prayerful and dutiful schoolteacher; and Hepzibah, the “very bad but would like to be good” sister, as she once put it. They feuded and fussed but remained close. The fifty miles between the two towns might have been five hundred, considering how bad the roads were; the editors note that letters helped hold the far-flung family together in spite of prolonged absences, important because women had to look so often to each other for emotional and financial support.

Life for women was not as hard as it had been a generation earlier, but it was still hard in ways we are not used to. Death was omnipresent. Of the ninety-four letters written by the Dumvilles, forty percent refer to death. (There was a cholera outbreak in mid-Illinois in the 1850s.) One can’t grasp the importance of religion on the frontier unless one understands its role in helping people accept death. The Dumvilles held to what they called “old-fashioned” religion, meaning charismatic Christianity, and much attention is paid to revivals and conversions and lapses and the oratorical skills of preachers.

However, in ways that might surprise some readers, their times in many ways differed hardly at all from ours. Race was on everyone’s agenda, if not always on their tongues, and immigrants (Germans and Irish) were raising frights among the ignorant. Then there were the rascally politicians. Hepzibah’s advice to her sister about the presidential race roiling the nation in 1856 remains sound. “It seems Mima that with all your Quaker like sobriety of appearance, you have had to dip into the political whirlpool . . . I presume by this time you have a very poor opinion of Mankind in general and of F[illmore] and B[uchanan] in perticular. Well they are rather uncertain animals I believe, but as we have to stay in the world with them we must get along with our disaggreeable situation as well as we can.”

I will not be the only reader to be captivated by young Hepzibah. (To her sister: “Mima I am surprised at our lack of ready wit in conversation. I think our wit might be compared as a certain writer likens the wit of the Germans, to an “old rusty gun that never goes off till after the game is gone.”) In spirit if not in learning, she reminded me of another woman on the frontier, Ethel Waxham, whose letters on her life in the Wyoming of the turn of the 20th century are a delight. (Lady’s Choice: Ethel Waxham’s Journals and Letters, 1905–1910, University of New Mexico Press, 1996.)

Happiness, alas, needed a man. Hepzibah was born to become a teacher, or minister’s wife and thus adorn the middle class, yet the opportunities did not come her way, or perhaps (in the latter case) she spurned them when they did. (Any suitor had his work cut out for him.) A parade of churchly men passed by her, yet she ended up marrying (late) a German craftsman and they worked her sister’s land in Iowa until she died in 1869, only thirty-five years old. It is a sad coda to a very interesting book. ●

 

The book’s editors, Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz, offer the letters as lessons in American social, political, and cultural history, as “essays on the comfort provided by religion during personal loss and national conflict, as a comment on the roles of women, as a picture of the antebellum Midwest, or as all of those things.” This they are, certainly, but it is the dilemmas faced by women of the era that most impressed me.

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The Dumville girls grew up as mid-Illinois was being transformed by the telegraph and railroad and newspapers. Suddenly their Morgan and Macoupin counties were part of a wider world, and they (well, mainly Hepzibah, the youngest) were fascinated by the agitations over slavery, the rise of the Republican Party and the Civil War.

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The effects of this transformation were not, however, entirely happy. Hepzibah in particular matured on the cusp of a new age, and she never quite made up her mind about her proper place in this brave new world. The Heinzes explain one reason why. 

 

In early frontier economies, the principal economic unit was the family, but as industrialization and urbanization proceeded and the market economy developed, work formerly performed within the home increasingly moved into the public sphere. When it did, the roles of men and women became more distinct both in their work and within their families. Home remedies for illness were replaced by doctors and hospitals, and reading at the kitchen table was replaced by teachers and schools. When these services moved outside the home and were "professionalized," the professionals were usually men. This was less true of teachers and dressmakers than it was of doctors, cabinetmakers, and tailors, but the work that was left within the home, the woman's domain, became less honored and was perceived as less consequential. For the most part, it consisted of cooking, cleaning, and childcare, and these tasks were then defined as "women's work," not a prestigious category.

 

Progress for women, in short, was in some ways anything but.

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In the end Hepzibah became one of the uncounted millions whose energy and intelligence and virtue were wasted because of her sex. The current Presidential campaign reminds us that the place of women in this society remains unsettled. I wonder what Hepzibah might have made of the likely election of a female as President of the United States. ●