Unseen Labor: Institution Builders

School to Recital: Women Teaching Music

November 24, 2019 by tiadams@davidson.edu

T. Adams, J. Griffin, S. Moskowitz, B. Riley, with I. Padalecki

The profession of teaching is often associated with women; in 2019, approximately eighty percent of elementary school teachers were women.¹ This feminization of teaching originated in the middle of the nineteenth century. During the Market Revolution, the American economy became more market-oriented, and households became less self-sufficient. This drove an increasing number of men off farms and toward jobs that paid wages or salaries. Literacy became a required skill and teaching boys to read a necessity. In addition to performing unpaid domestic labor and childcare, women, too, felt pressure to earn income to support their families, but their options were limited by notions of gender-appropriate behavior.²Out of these economic changes emerged the ideology of “separate spheres,” which presented women as inherently suited to maintaining households as a sanctuary from the public sphere. Women’s work generally was not considered skilled “work” to be compensated monetarily; this status was primarily reserved for work done by men (manufacturing, resource extraction, craft, and commerce).³

Feminized Morality

The Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revival in which many Americans developed a personal relationship with God through participation in evangelical Christianity, also shaped gender roles in the early nineteenth century. This caused an uptick in women’s participation in Protestant churches, including Presbyterianism, increasing the association of womanhood with purity and morality.⁴

This was also related to the concept of Republican Motherhood, which emphasized women’s role in educating children to be virtuous and literate citizens that could participate in civic life. For literate women, teaching their children to read became another facet of their domestic responsibilities. The important duty fell mainly on mothers, again emphasizing women’s critical role as educators of their children.⁵

These shifts, along with the notion of separate spheres, allowed women to access the profession of teaching as an “extension of mothering,” in which women were seen as uniquely equipped to instill moral values in and provide care to children in a setting that mirrored the domestic home.⁶ This newfound ability of women to access teaching as one of the few legitimate careers open to them was clearly shown in the story of Mrs. William A. Holt, who established the first secondary school for girls in Davidson in 1860.⁷

1959 Newspaper article about Mrs. Holt’s school.⁸

Music as Access to Academia

While white Southerners expected respectable women to confine their labor to their homes and families, musical performance played an important role in early Davidson as an entry point into the public sphere for women and a source of entertainment for the whole community. The male and female members of the church club made up the choir and also performed for the students in Chambers, the main academic building at Davidson College.⁹

In southern society, music also allowed nineteenth-century women to access income as teachers. Southern white women of the upper class traditionally had access to music instruction, a talent seen as desirable in a spouse. Middle-class families aspired for their daughters to have such skills, too. For this reason, women who worked as educators often taught music because doing so conformed to gender norms and did not challenge the widely held belief that women were incapable of teaching subjects that required reason and logic, like math or science. Mary Brown Hinely, a piano instructor and choral director in Georgia, argues that the progress of women’s opportunities within American music parallels that of women’s progress within American society.¹⁰

Eulalia V. Cornelius was a music teacher who taught piano and singing lessons in Davidson. Because music lessons were an extra expense in an economically volatile period, these women likely taught children of middle- and upper-class families.¹¹ In the 1900 census, Eulalia Cornelius’ profession is not listed; only her husband’s profession, cradle-making, appears. That a census-taker obscured her skill and profession is not surprising; excluding women’s paid work emphasized the “distinctive male claim to the role of the ‘breadwinner’” that characterized the period. ¹² Nonetheless, Cornelius’s recital pamphlet makes it clear that she had a profession and generated income.

1900 Census with the Cornelius family listed — U.S. 1900 Census.¹³ Eulalia and her family are located in the bottom rows.

Printed original copy of music program with names of performers and pieces — Eulalia Cornelius’ recital program.¹⁴

Though music classes were not incorporated into North Carolinian school curriculums until the latter part of the 1800s,¹⁵ women who were music teachers earned income before this period, some of which could support their families. In an 1869 letter, Davidson resident Ann Mills wrote to her niece Ella about her professional prospects. She explained that several parents asked her to teach their children and included the wages they offered her. Mills explained: “I will teach and be glad of the chance, for I can help my family more by teaching than any other way.”¹⁶ The inclusion of the rates offered for her teaching capabilities suggests that neighbors compensated and acknowledged women’s labor–even when officials and census-takers did not. This is a cautionary reminder that singular historical narratives told by government documents, like the census, underestimate the importance of southern women’s paid, and unpaid, labor in the nineteenth century.

1869 handwritten letter from Ann Mills to Ella — Ann Mills’ Letter to Ella.¹⁷

In late-nineteenth-century Davidson white, middle-class women expanded the domestic, maternal sphere to include certain paid jobs. Teaching music became an accessible way to participate in public life while also fulfilling the idealized feminine role of educating and raising moral children.18 Therefore, through teaching music, white women in Davidson were able to leverage the expectations of domesticity and motherhood. While excluded from the faculty of the college because of their gender, records in the Davidson College Archive provide evidence that female educators were nonetheless part of the intellectual community here. As teachers and performers, female musicians nurtured young minds and the emerging arts scene on campus.

The Helper Hotel: Women’s Labor in Early Davidson

November 22, 2019 by cemiller@davidson.edu

C. Miller and F. Resweber, with I. Padalecki

Until the development of the field of women’s history in the 1960s, historians often limited their analysis of nineteenth-century women’s roles to that of wives and daughters. Listed beneath male heads-of-households on the census and ignored in many common primary sources, women were considered secondary contributors to their families and communities — if historians considered them at all. Over the last fifty years, historians have proven that women and girls were key participants in the workforce and economy, including in the town of Davidson.

Historians have described the lives of nineteenth-century women and men as characterized by an idealized separation of gendered spheres. Known for her innovative research about the economic value created through domestic labor, historian Jeanne Boydston explained that the ideology of separate spheres normalized a system in which men worked for wages in the public sphere and women cared for children and ran households in a private one. Men’s work was valued as skilled labor and given monetary compensation, whereas women’s labor cleaning, caring for children, and preparing food in their homes was uncompensated.¹ Despite the ideology of separate spheres, working-class white women and women of color regularly labored in the market economy. They often did so in other women’s homes or turned their homes into income-generating workplaces by taking in laundry or borders, referred to as the accommodations business.² ³

The accommodations business was particularly important in nineteenth-century Davidson because town families provided housing and meals to students and faculty. Because men usually owned these houses and businesses, women’s labor in them was often obscured in primary sources. For example, take the Helper family business, founded in 1848.⁴ Hanson P. Helper was a prominent businessman who converted his general merchandise store across from Davidson College into a thirteen-room hotel while simultaneously opening a new store and post office on the property. The people of Davidson respected Helper, referring to him as “one of the most highly thought of citizens of Mecklenburg County.⁵ The Helper businesses were family operations, however, to which his wives (he was widowed and later remarried) and children contributed. By understanding nineteenth-century gender roles and divisions of labor, we can read primary sources about Hanson to learn about Sallie, Martha, the ten surviving children he had with the two women, and the enslaved women who also lived in the household.

" " — The 1977 certificate declaring the Helper Hotel a historic site, as declared by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Properties Commission.⁶

Female Labor in the Helper Household

Historical records show multiple female laborers in this household over time, and the evolution of this family’s composition hints at common demographic trends in the mid-nineteenth century South. In addition to Hanson, the 1860 census lists one adult woman, Sallie, as well as two children and an unrelated male laborer.⁷ Hanson also leased three enslaved people, including a twenty-five-year-old woman and a twelve-year-old girl, evidenced in the 1860 slave schedule. ⁸This leasing arrangement may have accommodated the seasonal nature of the family’s hospitality business. Slave schedules do not include the name of the enslaved people, a reality that frustrates historians and makes research challenging. Additionally, by separating enslaved and free women onto two documents, the documentary record makes invisible the collaboration required between enslaved and free white women to complete essential domestic labor.

" " — The 1860 census showing Hanson Helper as a druggist with the value of his personal estate listed as $13,000. His wife and two children are listed, as well as their live-in laborer.⁹

A section of the 1860 slave schedule, in which Mr. Helper is listed as leasing three enslaved people from local slave-owners: a 12-year-old girl, a 25-year-old woman, and an 18-year-old man.

By 1870, Hanson had remarried to Mattie (presumably after the death of Sallie), and they were parenting five children between the ages of twelve and one years old.¹⁰ The family continued to grow by the 1880 census as son John had moved out of the household while Mattie and Lillie, Hanson’s eldest daughter by Sallie, continued to care for the remaining children. Another young man also worked and boarded with the family.¹¹ Though we cannot know for sure why John left while the Helper’s female children stayed, we can infer that the demand for their domestic labor to keep the Helper business running did not lessen simply because these children became adults. Ultimately, that these women were still listed under Mr. Helper’s household in the 1880 census demonstrates remarkable stability, even through Sallie’s probable death, in a familial structure in which the Helper’s home and business both relied on the daily, domestic labor of women.

Though the Helper business is recorded and therefore remembered as the property of Hanson Helper, women’s labor was essential to the creation and running of this business.This is because coverture, the dominant gendered legal system during the period in which the Helper’s ran their business, allowed a husband total control over his wife’s body, wages, and any property she inherited..¹² Because of this, anything Sallie or Mattie Helper produced would have been listed in Hanson Helper’s name. This is why many women, with few exceptions of “keeping house,” are listed as lacking occupations in the 1860, 1870, and 1880 census. Census takers likely focused on obtaining an accurate count of women’s children—emphasizing their reproductive worth. Much of the labor these women and their daughters performed in the family store is effectively missing from the record.

Because it is almost impossible to track the trajectory of each Helper woman, we investigate the collective roles the women played in the household, store, home, and community. We do not know who performed which tasks, but enslaved women usually performed the heaviest labor in Southern households. In a typical week, these women and girls were responsible for a variety of tasks in the home.¹³Sallie and later Mattie, their daughters, and enslaved women and girls prepared and preserved food, likely purchasing raw goods from nearby farmers to do so while selling some in the family store.¹⁴ Enslaved women likely did the hard, manual labor of chopping wood, building fires, and pumping water for each meal. The endless work needed to feed family members, employees, and hotel guests is often overlooked in the historical record.

Women were also responsible for laundry, sewing, and ironing. The Helper women likely made some of their clothes, as their store sold fabrics and sewing materials.¹⁵ Clearly, the work of “running the household” required a wide variety of skills and talents, despite that it was undervalued as an unskilled, inherent component of womanhood that did not merit monetary compensation.

The Helper Businesses

The Helper Hotel existed at the intersection of women’s domestic labor and the male-dominated market economy. Hotels were commonly owned by men, but the upkeep was largely considered women’s work.¹⁶ Although not documented, most of the domestic labor in the hotel was performed by Helper’s wife, older daughters, enslaved women before emancipation, and potentially hired servants after the war: they washed, cleaned, and cooked. Helper’s literate daughters potentially worked in the store and could have assisted in record keeping, as women in mercantile families commonly did.¹⁷

"A yellowed invoice page with cursive writing. Shows a long list of items purchased, with amounts and prices." — Invoice from Helper store showing items purchased, such as alcohol, sugar, spices, tea, and indigo.¹⁸

Though the Helpers employed a live-in male clerk via the 1870 census, the store’s success in town suggests that Mattie and the older daughters likely worked the counter of the store alongside hired employees.¹⁹ The Helper women facilitated purchasing, wrapped packages, and used the store as an outlet to connect with community members. It is not known exactly how much this labor was worth, but a nineteenth-century woman working as a clerk in the Midwest made about thirty dollars a month—demonstrating that the work of the Helper women was of high economic value, even if they were never paid.²⁰

Davidson College and the store maintained good relations—students recalled fondly Mr. Helper’s kindness and intelligence.²¹ Davidson College also accepted a loan from Mr. Helper as they rebuilt after the Civil War.²² Further, while the college launched lawsuits against local businesses for selling alcohol to students, there is no record of such a lawsuit against the Helper business, despite that store ledgers indicate the sale of alcohol in the Helper store in 1873. The Helper store and the women who worked there provided important services, products, and community to Davidson College students.²³

"Type-written page showing the history of the Helper family, as written by Lillie Helper." — A family history written by Helper’s daughter, Lillie, in honor of the hotel becoming a historic landmark.²⁴

Although the domestic labor of the Helper women was unpaid and left unrecognized in that only their Hanson’s name was legally attached to the business, it was not unimportant. Rather, the lack of pay and historical recognition attributed to the Helper women reflects a broader devaluation of the work associated with womanhood. In recognizing their work, agency, and skill, we can trouble the historical master narrative that seeks to make their contributions to the Davidson community invisible.

Enslaved Women in Antebellum Davidson

November 22, 2019 by eomills@davidson.edu

E. Mills, M. McClelland, and E. Hudson, with I. Padalecki

Archives are not neutral spaces. They reflect the beliefs of those who established the institutions and created records they deemed worthy to save. Documents from the Antebellum era favor those who owned land and enslaved people. Enslaved women, in particular, make comparatively few appearances by name in most records from this period. This includes those kept by Davidson College, specifically its faculty and trustees. While this makes researching and writing about enslaved women challenging, learning about their experiences and their impact on the college is possible. The irony is that the references we do have tell us that enslaved women’s presence was ubiquitous and their labor essential. Using innovative methods and informed by Black feminist theory, we can gan insight into the lives of enslaved women from plantations around the college and households within town and understand how enslaved women in both of these settings interacted with the school.

Plantation, College, and Archival Silences

Records kept by the college document by name the sons of planters that enrolled and provide some insight into routine interaction between the college and neighboring plantations. Still, we know less about the region surrounding Davidson than we do about other regions of the South. In his article about slavery in the North Carolina Piedmont, historian John David Smith writes in reference to this documentary gap, “part of the explanation for the lack of knowledge about the Piedmont and slavery results from the relative paucity of information pertaining to it in secondary accounts.”¹ For this reason, historians of slavery rely heavily on a wide range of primary sources and secondary sources to make comparisons to areas more thoroughly studied. Trustee minutes, for example, reveal that slave owning trustees were compensated by the college for labor enslaved people performed on campus. They do not document the names of the enslaved people as they do the names of those educated here whose families owned other human beings, nor do they tell us in detail what kind of labor enslaved people performed. The more thorough documentary records at other Southern colleges and universities suggest that enslaved people performed routine domestic labor, including cleaning and heating buildings, and grounds maintenance around the campus, but they also performed specialized labor involved with construction and the actual physical growth of the campus.² In July 2018, when a descendent of Betty Davidson Tate, a woman enslaved on a nearby plantation, contacted the college because their family had kept a story about her role “helping to build the college,” an archivist confirmed that the college had purchased bricks handmade at a nearby plantation for construction of early buildings.³ The college still has a record of that payment although no list of who did the work; now, however, because of that phone call, we now know the name of Betty Davidson Tate.

Although no one document held in the Davidson College Archives tells about the lives of enslaved women in detail, we can learn about general patterns by considering primary sources together. For example, take the map of the plantations around Davidson compiled by historian and archivist Chalmers Davidson. At first glance, we find no mention of the enslaved people who lived and worked at this site. If we cross-reference this map with the slave schedules, or censuses, created by the US government in 1850 and 1860, we can learn how many enslaved people lived at each plantation and some basic demographic information about them: their gender, their age, and their ancestry– Black or mulatto, meaning mixed. Tellingly, these records also do not identify enslaved people by their names. For example, nineteen of the thirty three people enslaved by William Lee Davidson, Jr, one of the founders of Davidson College, were female. They ranged in age from sixty-five to one year old. The majority are identified as Black, but the color of two women, a twenty-two-year old and a twenty-four-year old, is coded as mulatto.⁴

Because they were considered the property of their owners, enslaved women could not refuse to have sex with planters, their sons, or white men who oversaw their labor. The widespread experience of sexual abuse in slavery was well-documented at the time by abolitionists and critics of the institution and remains a painful theme in the oral histories and family stories of many Black Americans. Considered together — this map, the slave schedule, and our general understanding of women’s experiences of enslavement — we can make logical conclusions about what enslaved women in and around Davidson would have experienced. That included sexual violence.⁵

Map depicting 28 locations relevant to plantation life around Davidson in the Antebellum period

Southern plantations were sites of racialized and gendered violence, and while historical scholarship has thoroughly documented the normalized brutality enacted by slave-owning men, more recent scholarship by historians of women has demonstrated how white women participated in the system of enslavement as well. While some historical narratives attempt to depict white women and enslaved women as equals in experiencing gendered oppression, this was not the case. White women often were responsible for physical violence perpetrated against enslaved women because of proximity to them and responsibility for household labor. According to historian Thavolia Glymph, “White women…owned slaves and managed households in which they held the power of…life and death…”⁶ Southern white women on plantations were responsible for their separate sphere of domesticity, the “women’s work” in the household that was seen as distinct from men’s work in the public sphere.⁷ Likewise, white women did not perform much of the hard labor required to keep a household running. Enslaved women did this work and faced severe, violent punishment if their white mistresses were not satisfied. The idealized, pious, and pure domestic sphere did not extend to enslaved women, who performed the same hard labor as enslaved men as well as the emotional, domestic labor often attributed to white mothers. Understanding gendered and racialized norms of behavior within antebellum slavery, we can work toward a more nuanced understanding of plantation life around Davidson.

Black Women’s Emotional Labor in the Domestic Sphere

One document held by the Davidson College Archives does speak to the humanity of a local enslaved woman. The emotional labor associated with caregiving performed by enslaved women in Davidson is especially evident in the story of a woman named Cynthia. The family of Franklin Brevard McDowell (class of 1869) claimed ownership of Cynthia, who lived on the Brevard Plantation, which was located near Davidson College. As an adult, McDowell wrote about Cynthia, who he describes as his ‘nurse’. According to historians Emily West and R.J. Knight, the term ‘nurse’ was often used to describe both enslaved wet nurses, women who breastfed the children of white slave-owners, and general caretakers of young children.⁸ Cynthia could have been either or both. West and Knight describe the expectation of enslaved women to act as wet-nurses as “a system of dual exploitation of enslaved women’s bodies as both reproducers and as workers.⁹ Therefore, it is possible that the McDowells exploited Cynthia for both her reproductive and physical labor. White slave-owning parents forced enslaved women to feed owners’ babies instead of their own, a violent theft of bodily autonomy normalized by white supremacy.¹⁰

The first part of the letter Franklin Brevard McDowell wrote describing Cynthia as his nurse.

The second part of the letter Franklin Brevard McDowell wrote describing Cynthia as his nurse. — Letter from James Brevard McDowell about Cynthia

At the same time, McDowell’s reminiscences reveal a girl or woman who had loved ones of her own. We know her father’s name was Nero. She also had a sense of humor and teased the young boy about his being a foundling she saved from a hawk — a joke that inverted the power dynamics between her and the boy’s parents. If Cynthia found the boy, she was his, not the other way around. McDowell’s memories also hint at Cynthia’s agency is finding respite from the plantation and physical distance from its hardships by taking her young charge into the woods. In her study of enslaved women, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, historian Stephanie Camp emphasized that the forests surrounding plantations often were safe spaces for enslaved women. They would sometimes run away into the woods to rob their owners of their labor. ¹¹ Camp argues that the economic impact of these minor acts of truancy was cumulative, and through them enslaved people reclaimed time, labor, and bodily autonomy. Seemingly unaware of the irony in his recollections, McDowell gives us a glimpse of how Cynthia carved out space to briefly feel freedom from bondage.