Free Thinker Page 5
Alice’s lodging situation also improved in Sandusky, where she rented a room at Catherine Melville’s house.3 In 1861, Mrs. Melville’s husband, a railroad executive and business leader, died suddenly at the age of forty-one, leaving her to support eight children, the youngest just two weeks old. The Widow Melville began taking in boarders. Of “quiet and domestic tastes,” Mrs. Melville was an ideal “Christian mother whose faith was as strong as her purpose.”4 Her stately home, located at 319 Lawrence Street, just a few blocks from the high school and from Lake Erie, housed many prominent visitors over the years and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Alice boarded at the Melville home along with the newlyweds John and Alice Mack, the brother and sister-in-law of Isaac Mack, editor of the Sandusky Daily Register. Just a few years older than Alice, the Macks had met as students at Oberlin College, the first college to enroll both white women and African Americans. John helped his brother Isaac run the newspaper, and the two Alices became good friends. As a boarder, Alice would have eaten her breakfast and dinner with the Melville family and the Macks, sharing news of the day and plans for the future. The trade-off for such sociability, as Alice would soon learn, was lack of privacy.
DURING HER FIRST YEAR in the classroom, Alice distinguished herself among her peers. On May 9, 1874, her students passed Superintendent Ulysses T. Curran’s phonics quiz at the fortnightly teachers meeting and excelled in division. The Sandusky Daily Register raved about “Miss C’s” classroom presence, noting that she “possesses the happy, and may we add essential, faculty of presenting the lesson, and by a natural ingeniousness, procures the attention of her scholars, which she retains throughout the entire lesson.”5 The next month, Miss Chenoweth’s students were singled out as having the finest penmanship in the district.6
After her standout performance at the end-of-year events, Superintendent Curran selected Alice, just twenty-one, to be the principal of Sandusky’s brand new teacher training school. From her office in the new school, Alice supervised the training of five novice teachers, each posted at a different primary school. Administrators and education experts agreed that the Sandusky teacher training school provided a “very excellent arrangement.”7 By the school’s second year, Alice had sixteen aspiring teachers in her class.8 For the rest of her life, she took great pride in having been the youngest school principal in Ohio history, prominently including this achievement in all her profiles.
Parents and school visitors could have been forgiven for mistaking this young principal for a student herself. In addition to her youth, Alice stood just over 5 feet tall and weighed 90 pounds. Even as an old woman, new acquaintances regularly assumed that she was twenty or more years younger. Her dark, inquisitive eyes enhanced her aura of youthfulness and charmed students and peers alike.
Alice’s high-profile post as principal also elevated her status in the Sandusky community. With her annual salary of $800, she could afford to buy tickets to the town’s weekly lectures and concerts.9 She also befriended the leading citizens of Sandusky. Mrs. Melville’s husband and in-laws had helped run the Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad, the first chartered railroad west of the Allegheny Mountains. And as newspaper publishers, her fellow boarders, the Macks, knew everyone in town.
After spending eight years in a small farm town, Alice eagerly engaged in the social and intellectual life of Sandusky. She had grown up hearing about Virginia society but had not previously had the opportunity to participate in “society” events. As with school teaching, Alice was a natural. On New Year’s Day 1875, she helped host a party at the four-story mansion owned by the Folletts, who were railroad investors, philanthropists, and civic leaders.10 And she always remembered the life-changing revelation she experienced when she invited herself—the youngest person and only woman allowed—into a prominent judge’s home for a heated discussion of a controversial article entitled “The Relations of Women to Crime,” recently published in Popular Science Monthly. The author, Ely Van de Warker, shocked readers by arguing that woman “must be regarded as one in whom the passions burn with as intense heat as in the other sex.”11 Now that was an argument Alice had surely not encountered at the Cincinnati Normal School, in her brother Bernard’s books, or at her father’s revivals, and it was a truth that Sandusky leaders most certainly were not ready to contend with among their own teachers.
Alice Chenoweth as a teacher, soon to become the youngest school principal in Ohio and a fixture in the state’s newspapers.
BY THE SPRING OF 1876, after nearly three years in the city, Alice had fallen out of favor with Sandusky leaders. On April 28, Isaac Mack, brother of Alice’s housemate and the editor of the local paper, published an editorial demanding an end to taxpayer funding of Alice’s $800 salary.12 Mack charged that Alice had “coaxed the [school] board into the scheme” of funding the teacher training school and then “induced” them to hire her an assistant. An assistant was then “imported from Cincinnati” at the rate of $600 per year. Mack approached a member of the school board and demanded to know just what Miss Chenoweth did to justify her $800 salary ($17,000 today). “Nothing,” responded the board member. “And now we ask in behalf of the burdened tax payer,” Mack pressed, “how much longer $1,400 of public money is to be squandered to keep two young women busy doing nothing.” Later that evening, Alice Chenoweth tendered her resignation on account of ill health.13
But it was not Alice’s $800 salary that piqued Mack and the school board (her salary was well within the normal range). That was a dissimulation. What Alice had done was violate the public’s trust. Her noteworthy appointment as the state’s youngest principal, together with her feminine good looks, had brought her to the attention of Charles Selden Smart, the Ohio commissioner of common schools and a married father of two.
Born in Virginia, Charles Smart grew up in Ohio and attended Ohio University. Upon graduating in 1859, he became a teacher and soon announced plans to open his own school. The former president of Cincinnati’s Wesleyan Female College endorsed Smart as “a young man of excellent abilities, and of superior scholarship, and of good moral character.”14 In 1861, Smart married Lovenia “Love” Cating, but the Civil War derailed their plans to start a school (the hall they hoped to use was requisitioned as a hospital).15
By 1867, Charles and “Love” Smart operated a classical and English school in Jackson, Ohio. Charles taught mathematics and languages, while Love instructed the younger students.16 Smart served as superintendent of Union schools in Jackson before accepting the post of superintendent in Circleville, Ohio, 50 miles away. In 1872, Smart came just a few votes shy of securing the Democratic nomination for Ohio commissioner of schools.17 During the next election cycle, Smart’s friends recognized him as “every way fitted for a more enlarged sphere of duty” and unanimously nominated him for state school commissioner once again. This time the handsome and outgoing Smart secured the nomination on the first ballot and was elected to the post in October 1874.18
As commissioner of common schools, Smart traveled around Ohio meeting with teachers, principals, and school board members and in general ensuring that the public schools were performing well. He also attended teacher conferences, observed teachers in the classroom, and gave talks advancing his views on pedagogy. Newspapers covered his occasional visits home to see his wife and their two daughters, Cora and Iva, but Smart spent most of his time on the road.
Commissioner Smart’s travels increasingly brought him to Sandusky, which raised eyebrows because Sandusky did not rank among Ohio’s biggest or most important cities. Alice’s friends and neighbors grew concerned that Smart had been visiting Sandusky altogether too frequently and for inappropriate reasons. For months, rumors circulated that the commissioner had been coming to Sandusky not to survey the schools but to see the young school principal.
Locals reported that “his visits to us were manifestly not in the line of his duty as a public officer.” For example, he often arrived on Friday even
ings and left on Monday mornings—a period of time when no schools were in session. Furthermore, during these weekends, Smart made no visits to the superintendent or the Board of Education. Instead, he called on the young teacher who boarded at the Widow Melville’s. When “accused of improper intimacy with this innocent young lady teacher,” Smart told people in Sandusky that he and his wife had agreed to separate two years before and that he intended to divorce her so that he could marry the teacher.
The “young lady’s friends” found this excuse “very thin.” When he broke the story in the Sandusky Daily Register, Isaac Mack reported: “We do not believe Smart ever intended to procure a divorce from his wife and we have the best information that his wife knows nothing of his conduct, much less of his professed intention to get rid of her. . . . We do know, however, that his conduct in this city has been a disgrace to him and to his office, and to the lady with whom he has been so intimate.” Smart’s conduct had “destroyed the reputation of an estimable young lady.”19 Mack did not identify who constituted “we” nor who comprised the young lady’s “friends,” but no doubt he procured his insider information from his brother and sister-in-law, Alice’s housemates.
Rumors about the affair likely accounted for Alice’s hasty resignation in April 1876, but the affair was not made public until that summer. On July 17, 1876, Mack printed a blunt but vague condemnation of Commissioner Smart in the Daily Register: “If half the stories told of State School Commissioner Smart are true, he is a disgrace to the State and to his office.”20 At first, Mack did not elaborate. Just what were these “stories,” the Springfield Republic demanded? Mack replied in an extended editorial on July 21: “One of these stories is easily told. Commissioner Smart is a married man.”21
Something must have transpired between April and July to compel Mack to write about an affair that had already resulted in Alice’s resignation. Mack’s initial accusations ran in the paper just a few days after Smart returned from representing Ohio at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the first world’s fair to be held in the United States.22 In a very high-profile assignment, Smart had been selected to lead Ohio’s Educational Centennial Committee and develop the state’s display.23
Because of the timing of Mack’s first editorial, the probable scenario is that Alice accompanied Smart—on the state of Ohio’s dime—to Philadelphia. Alice never wrote directly about having attended the World’s Fair, but her first published essay includes an anecdote about a young woman who attended the centennial celebration and saw many things “new and beautiful.”24 She may have even encountered Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who set up elaborate protests to demonstrate “that the women of 1876 know and feel their political degradation no less than did the men of 1776” and to advocate for the Sixteenth Amendment.25 If word had spread around Sandusky that Alice and Smart traveled together to Philadelphia, in a flagrant violation of both sacred vows and public trust, that would explain the timing of Mack’s editorial.
ALICE NEVER acknowledged her affair with Charles Smart, but it fundamentally altered her life and put her on a path to radicalism and reform. There are many clues in her later writings, especially in her fiction, which she confided to friends was often autobiographical, about the allure of the charismatic, 6-foot-2 school commissioner and the seismic shift that the affair triggered in her life.26 Unmoored by the Civil War, several moves, and the deaths of so many of her close family members, Alice was attracted to the tall, college-educated, thirty-seven-year-old Smart (the same age that her brother Bernard would have been) as a source of stability. Even more appealing, Smart was a rising star in the Democratic Party.
Alice also seemed drawn to Smart in the intense way so characteristic of first love, which may have been why, decades later, she still remembered the heated discussion about the Popular Science Monthly article that naturalized female desire.27 Throughout her life, she alluded to their strong attraction to one another, an attraction that had few—if any—acceptable outlets for a young woman in Victorian America. Masturbation was considered a mortal sin for men and especially for women. And a new disease had recently been designated to pathologize women who suffered from persistent sexual urges: nymphomania.28 While women who openly sought sexual release were diagnosed with nymphomania, women whose arousal found no outlet were diagnosed with hysteria, a disease that reached epidemic proportions in late nineteenth-century America.29
To the extent that Alice had read or heard about female sexual desire, it would have been in derogatory, pathological, or criminal terms. There was very little room in public or medical discourse for a woman in the 1870s to be understood as having healthy sexual urges, though of course many women experienced them in private. As the historian Linda Gordon asserted in her study of birth control, in the nineteenth century “normal” sex meant “a form of intercourse dictated primarily by male desires and typified by the mutually dependent institutions of marriage and prostitution.”30 Marriage was for procreative sex; prostitution for pleasurable sex, at least for the customers, leaving aside altogether female pleasure. Once considered essential for fertilization, by the nineteenth century the female orgasm (and even the clitoris itself) had dropped out of medical and anatomical guides entirely.31 While Alice may have intuitively understood what she felt for the strapping and charming Smart, she would have found no reference to her sensations in books or women’s magazines.
Just after Alice left Dardenne for Cincinnati, reformers concerned about extramarital sex scored a signature victory: the passage of the Comstock Laws, named after anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock. Passed along with 117 other bills in a hurried session on the eve of the second inauguration of President Ulysses S. Grant, in 1873, the Comstock Laws banned the publishing, selling, distributing, giving away, exhibiting, or just plain possessing of “any obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing or other representation, figure . . . on or of paper or other material.” The text of the law was so wide-ranging that it defined as “obscene” nearly everything related to sex—from outright pornography to educational descriptions of anatomy.32 One practical effect, then, was to bar women from accessing information about their reproductive health, including contraception and sexually transmitted disease.
Nineteenth-century periodicals often contained advertisements for quack medicines promising to cure all sorts of female ailments, including blocked menstrual flow, but safe, effective contraceptives were largely out of reach for middle- and lower-class women, especially after the passage of the Comstock Laws. Wealthy women living in urban centers could obtain barrier methods such as pessaries (early diaphragms) or perhaps even condoms, though getting a man to wear one would have been another struggle altogether because “unnatural devices” were closely associated with prostitutes. Most women, even women’s rights activists, remained opposed to birth control because they feared that accessible contraceptives would further encourage husbands to pay for sex outside of marriage.33
To avoid pregnancy, Alice and Smart likely practiced the birth control methods deemed “natural” and at least somewhat acceptable: the rhythm method or coitus interruptus.34 Smart’s later medical history suggests that the pair may have suffered from infertility, a blessing and a curse given their illicit affair, possibly related to syphilis or gonorrhea, which were among the most prevalent infectious diseases of the nineteenth century.
Beyond a dearth of knowledge about sex, Alice also lacked people in whom she could confide such things. During the heated first months of her affair and then, soon after, when it became public knowledge, to whom and where could Alice have turned for advice and solace? Surely not the Sandusky socialites like Mrs. Follett, whose 1875 New Year’s Day tea she had helped host, or the Widow Melville, the ideal Christian mother in whose home she boarded. Alice’s teacher friends also made for unlikely confidants. School teachers, by definition, were supposed to be passionless. Part of Catharine Beecher’s mission in making teachin
g an acceptable profession for young single women was to create the institution in such a way as to obviate the possibility that these young single women, nestled into schools far from home, would sleep with the married men of the community. Through her affair, then, Alice not only lost her livelihood and good reputation, but also upset the tacit compromise that allowed single women to work as teachers in the first place.
This lack of female confidantes further tethered Alice to Smart and their shared secret, long after it ceased to be a secret in Ohio. Throughout the summer and fall of 1876, Smart traveled regularly, including frequent visits home to his wife and children, and thus could not have squeezed in many visits to Alice. If he wrote her any letters, they have not survived.
WHETHER OR NOT he wrote to Alice, Smart penned several public letters to defend himself. From his hotel room in Columbus, he denounced the Sandusky Daily Register’s charges as “utterly false.” Smart’s former hometown paper, the Jackson Standard, urged a full investigation in court. Smart had lived among the people of the county as their school superintendent and been their friend. The editors criticized Smart’s associates in the Democratic Party who, as soon as the allegations surfaced, declared they knew he was guilty and that they “never had any confidence in him and always knew him to be a d___ed fool.”35
Smart told another reporter that the false rumors stemmed from his opposition to a nefarious “school-book ring.”36 Isaac Mack denied this, noting that he had no knowledge of such a ring and that the existence of a book ring could not possibly explain the persistent “street gossip” in Sandusky. Mack proposed that Smart, as an act of repentance, come forward to expose the ring: “He may be forgiven his love making to interesting young school teachers, if he can expose a ring.”37