REVIEW Author tackles hard reality in American women's history

The book examines ordinary women's lives through diaries and manuscripts.
By VALERIE FINHOLM
HARTFORD COURANT
"America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines," by Gail Collins (William Morrow, $27.95)
One of the most fascinating stories in Gail Collins' book, "America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines," depicts the Mayflower, anchored off Cape Cod in November 1620.
After a grueling 10-week voyage across the Atlantic, 102 passengers -- including 19 women and a handful of children -- looked out on the bleak wilderness of North America that would become their home.
Seasick, homesick, and in some cases sick of each other, the women remained aboard as the ship bobbed at sea and the men set off to explore. Almost immediately, pneumonia or typhus began a deadly sweep through the ship. One woman apparently decided she had had enough. Dorothy May, the 22-year-old wife of Pilgrim leader William Bradford, threw herself overboard to her death.
This is just one of the stories that Collins -- the first woman to be editorial page editor at The New York Times -- writes about in her unvarnished look at the history of American women. It is the history of ordinary women -- based on well-documented diaries, manuscripts or memories. And it is lively and compelling.
Realities of life
Collins does not pretty up the lives our ancestors lived -- or endured -- or leave to the imagination how they coped in those pre-Pampers/tampons/birth control/child-proofing days.
To wit: How did women handle the chore of cleaning diapers in a time when soap was hard to make and water had to be hauled in buckets? (Answer: They didn't wash them, but laid wet diapers by the fire to dry, then put the reeking cloths back on. Some mothers began to toilet train very early -- within a few weeks of birth -- by encouraging regular bowel movements by using the equivalent of a suppository, made of a quill covered with lubricated cloth.) And what about menstruation? (Answer: Accounts show they used rags, or even grass. Doctors at the time thought women were deprived of blood to the head during menstruation, thus leaving them "idiotic.")
Collins tells her stories chronologically. At 452 pages (before the extensive notes), the book looks daunting -- and perhaps she has taken on too much in telling the story of American women from the early settlers to the early 1970s. Yet it is a very accessible book, made more so by her attention to detail, and is sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes witty.
One thing the book is not is a study of the oppression of women, something Collins makes clear in her introduction:
"It's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed messages about women's roles that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders."
Shift in roles
In the early days, women worked side by side in the fields with men to carve homes out of the wilderness; but by the mid-1800s, after the Industrial Revolution, the "proper" woman was confined to her home to cook, clean and care for her many offspring. As Frances Trollope reported from Cincinnati, husbands in America even went to the market, and if it weren't for church services, "all the ladies would be in danger of becoming perfect recluses."
Even attendance at parades and Fourth of July celebrations was typically all male. "Staid in all day and saw the procession and all there was to be seen from my window," wrote a San Francisco housewife in the mid-1800s.
Collins points out that it was some women -- workaholics such as Sarah Josepha Hale, the powerful editor of "Godey's Lady's Book," and Catharine Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe -- who helped further the notion that women belonged in the home and not the outside world.
When Hale, a young widowed mother of five, began writing novels in 1827, she repeatedly assured her readers her financial endeavors were not for fame but support for "my little children." Collins wryly notes that Hale repeated that mantra long after her last child had left home, as she continued to preside over the influential magazine.
In 1841, Beecher became a best-selling author on the role of woman as goddess of the hearth, while also insisting that women's roles as mothers and keepers of the home should be given respect. Yet she never married (her fianc & eacute; drowned at sea) and never had a home of her own, depending instead on the good will of her large and famous family.
Collins does not overlook the very separate spheres of life for black women. One former slave in Nashville, Tenn., whose master hired her out to a working-class family, said she was required "to nurse, cook, chop in the fields, chop wood, bring water, wash, iron and in general just do everything." She was 6 years old.
Collins has written a book for even the most history-phobic -- and that includes teen-agers -- enlightening those who think of history only in terms of wars and other exploits of men.