18: Mary. Wife. Self.
Supplement to Endnotes
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Endnote 2) Mary, in her own irreducible way, was one of countless quiet congregants in what Elizabeth Cady Stanton called the “gospel of fewer children.” Over the duration of the 1800s, the average birth rate for white, native-born married women was nearly halved. Couples like the Coles, from northern commercial and urban areas, led the way. It is not altogether clear how this silent revolution (or at least one with fewer crying children) took place; but most of it did between 1840 to 1880 when the marketplace began teeming with products, advertisements and literature for people seeking contraceptive methods (Like the advertisement ran with George’s name.) Many women read and approved of the more open contraceptive advice but were less willing to express approval in public or in front of other men. See: Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-century America, pp. 2-4, 134-35, 150-151.
Endnotes 4 & 5) For more on the control that parents, and especially mothers, came to believe they had over the formation of children, the pressures of childrearing and falling birth rate, see 18.4&5, here.
Endnote 6) Given George’s medical training, the advertisements for his stores, and the Coles’ sympathies with reforms, it would be surprising if Mary did not use some form of contraception.
With the flood of advice and the number of touted advances, though, came deep confusion. Access to contraceptives did not promise success in avoiding pregnancy. By the 1870s, perhaps hundreds of different vaginal syringes were available in the marketplace. But they were not regulated for safety or effectiveness. If Mary had experimented with contraceptives, she would have had to navigate a sea of conflicting advice. Champions of the rhythm method -- or the “agenetic period”-- gave contradictory or even wrongheaded instructions; many counseled women who feared pregnancy to engage in intercourse starting roughly a dozen days after their menses (ironically, their most fertile period). Freethinkers, medical practitioners, and peddlers debated the efficacy of douching, extended breastfeeding, compressing testicles, cinching the penis shaft with a string, withdrawal (partial and full), spermicides, “preventive powders,” vaginal suppositories, and the question of whether or not a woman had to reach climax to conceive. Even the most thoroughly researched advice literature was tinctured with misguided folk wisdom. And even when the advice was sound, much could go wrong. Douching had to be done thoroughly and with careful timing. The withdrawal method demanded control that too many lovers lacked in the peak of passion. See: Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in the Nineteenth-Century America, pp. 57-86.
Endnote 12) Image of ad coming soon [here]
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Endnote 13) In response to the alarm concerning abortion, medical associations sought to take abortions out of the custody of pregnant women (who determined the quickening herself and often sought help from female networks) and place it under the control of professionally trained male doctors. Mohr, Abortion in America, pp. 3-19; Reagan, When Abortion was a Crime, pp. 11-14.
Endnote 14) A report in the Syracuse Journal, April 27, 1868, and other testimonies make it sound like the Cole’s moved into the Jervis House in 1867. Yet, another record of the trial states that they moved into the Jervis House in the middle of the war. Mary, who engaged in a flurry or real estate transactions before and during the war, may have moved there first during the war and later returned. See testimony of Elizabeth Wyman, Remarkable Trials, p. 253.
Also, either Luther Hiscock or his brother Frank at one time during the 1860s owned half interest in Syracuse’s family hotel, called Hotel Candee. For more on this and familiy hotels, see: Dwight H. Bruce, Memorial History of Syracuse, N.Y: from Its Settlement to the Present Time (Syracuse: H.P. Smith & Co., 1891), pp. 681-82; Franklin Henry Chase, Syracuse and Its Environs: A History (Syracuse: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1924), pp. 318-319; Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), pp. 135-151; Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), pp.69-77.
Endnote 15) At first, it was only the wealthy who took to living permanently in hotels, mostly in major cities like Boston and New York. Then, in pace with the expanding markets, clusters of family hotels sprung up along the canals and railroads that passed through burgeoning cities like Syracuse. Family hotels began multiplying by mid-century after growing populations and speculation drove real estate prices out of the range for many city dwellers. Many families found less desired dwellings in poorer sections, or moved into the first rings of American suburbs. Still others began living in what had once been spacious single-family homes broken up into multiple dwellings.
In 1862, before moving into the Jervis House, Mary moved her family to Mrs. Matthews’s place, something like a boarding house. Americans, in general, seemed unlikely candidates for hotel living as they had long preferred the English domestic tradition of freestanding structures; and if they had to share walls they hoped to do so in their own single-family row house. Separate homes dovetailed nicely with the nineteenth-century ideology of American domesticity where pure-hearted mothers supposedly gathered their children and together hunkered around the mantle, cordoned off from the vice and madness of the world.
The family hotel, however, gave women a way to connect with a larger and more sophisticated society. It permitted mothers to escape much of the drudgery of keeping a house. It allowed many middle-class families to stay in the heart of cities.
For more on the ways in which hotels played a vital role in expanding markets, see: Andrew K. Sandoval- Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
Endnote 17) Blurred lines: Advertisements in city newspapers regularly listed merchants’ and professionals’ hotel residences where they could be reached outside of their offices. Their private rooms served as continuations of their offices and shops. The public halls and dining areas scrambled domestic and city elements. Hotel visitors and residents ran ads for lost-and-found intimate possessions, like gold lockets and chains, cartes de visites of family, and opal shirt studs. Those who placed the ads were often unsure if these belongings had been lost (or stolen), or if they came from hotel residents or strangers from the streets who filtered in and out of the hotel’s halls and salons. Similar ads can be found throughout the papers. See, for example: “Lost” in Syracuse Daily Standard, May 16, 1860; “Lost” in Syracuse Daily Standard, February 24, 1864; “Lost” in Syracuse Courier & Union, November 9, 1863; Syracuse Daily Journal, December 13, 1858.
Endnote 18) In 1862, while George was laying waste to villages in North Carolina and “ushering” slaves to freedom, young ladies at the Jervis House performed a tableau inspired by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The scene was the death of Eva, the angelic white child whose death shattered Uncle Tom and others. A Syracuse newspaper proudly reported that the tableau featured a “genuine” Uncle Tom, though a white girl “extemporized” her part as the young slave girl, Topsy. See: Syracuse Journal, March 17, 1862 (clipping in OHA “Hotels & Inns” folder). Syracuse Journal, April 23, 1858 (Clipping in OHA folder, “Syracuse Block 113”)
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