Most Women Married But....

Shop keepers

Drawings here by George Cruikshank, views

of England of thirty or more years before 

his illustrations of the 1830s & '40s

"The vast majority of adult women married," is the conventional wisdom about 19th-century women's life.

And this is indeed true. In the 1830s only 7.3% of Americans were never married.

Women's job was to marry. Therefore, women's occupations have been viewed through that of their husbands. But the fallacy in the logic is that once married, women remained married. True, divorce was hard to get but....

Possibly Cruikshank's satrical self-portrait

But being married did not mean women were supported by the men they married. Many husbands could not support their families.

Selling Clothes for Money

And many men used their income for their own interests and vices.

Many husbands were incompetent, housed in asylums or regularly absent

Others were imprisoned.

Some were too aggressive to live with.

And many abandoned their families, never to be heard of again.

Many, many died leaving many, many widows with

children to raise and their own mouths to feed.

Quilt in the Markey family, https://eyeonelegance.dar.org/collection of the 

Plains Indian & Pioneer Museum

I've been reading about a family in Frederick, Maryland in the 18th and 19th centuries in connection with a group of quilts attributed to Anna Catherine Hummel Markey Garnhart. Anna Catherine, her mother Christina Hummel Fiega and her daughter-in-law Elizabeth Dill Markey Thomas each spent most of her adult life unmarried. 

Each married twice and each was widowed twice. Each was left with young children to support. The eldest Christina Catharina Gründler Hummel Fiega (1747-1849) lived to be 101 years old, supported by her two husbands for only 29 years of her eight decades of adulthood.

Crib quilt from the Garnhart group of quilts

Christina's daughter Anna Catherine Hummel Markey Garnhart (1773-1860) lived to be 87 years old and like her mother, was a wife during 29 years of her adult life. For most of her last 8-year marriage she and her husband lived in different states.

Catherine's son Frederick Markey married Elizabeth Dill Markey Thomas (1800-1866) and died at 30 after 7 years of marriage. Five years later Eliza remarried a husband who lived ten years. Eliza spent 17 years of her 46 years of adult life as a wife. Quilts descended through her three children.

I'd guess the Hummel/Dill/Markey women were not unusual in their long lives as women alone (not really alone, since I'd also guess they lived together and with other adult family members).

The Garnhart quilt photos are from the DAR Museum' site.

https://eyeonelegance.dar.org/

The question is: How did they support themselves? At first I wondered if this amazing group of skillfully done quilts somehow contributed to the household economy. But there is no evidence of any commercial needlework in that family.

It's more likely that Anna Catherine and her mother had a hand in the family mill businesses. Several of those successive husbands were listed as mill owners and one family member remembered the mills as Anna Catherine's family business. It seems the family lumber mills supported at least three generations of women with or without husbands to run them. But there is little evidence.

Taking the Census

It wasn't until 1840 that the U.S. census included information about individuals' occupations and not until 1860 that women's occupations were indicated, although cross checking these records against data from city directories, etc. shows us the data collecting was rather slipshod.

It is surprising to see from the data how many widows did not remarry.

If one could afford to live in single blessedness, one might be inclined to do so.

The 1860 census of the District of Columbia counted 63,309 females, according to the 1870 article above.

21,689 married females
41,620 widows and single females
63,309

Percentages here: Nearly 66% of the women were not married.

The paragraph under the table of married/single, widowed Washingtonians says: "This information above has never been required in a national census." City censuses sometimes collected the statistics. In their book Ladies, Women, and Wenches: Choice and Constraint in Antebellum Charleston and Boston Jane and William Pease cite a similar figure:

"In the 1845 Boston census 70% of the women over 60 years old were not married. Most were living without husbands because they were widows but one third of those women had never married."

Further reading about women's economic and marital history.

Ladies, Women, and Wenches: Choice and Constraint in Antebellum Charleston and Boston by Jane Pease & William Pease, 1990.

Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in the Urban South, 1800-1865, Christine Jacobson Carter