In the North the effects of the war were of course less severely felt; but still there were effects detrimental to the interests of society as generally understood. Many a home had lost its chief worker and felt the sting of poverty as a consequence. The war had cost the North great treasure of money as well as blood, and the cost, while never thought of with a pang of regret, was often present to the consciousness of the people who bore its results. There was less impulse of gaiety among all classes; there was a graver trend of thought than ever before, and there was the recognition of past peril and present loss. These changes affected the women more than the men. The latter indeed felt but little of the detrimental consequences of the war, for the most part taking up their lives where they had temporarily put them aside to spend themselves in the service of their country. The women, however, where they felt the stress at all, felt it severely. Aside from their stricken hearts, there were problems of everyday life presented to them which clamored for solution, if that life were not to be made worse than a burden. In far better case than their sisters of the South, they yet had sufficient cause for gravity of thought and call of courage. Many were the fortunes that had been made during the war by Northern men who battened upon the needs of their country; but the more diffused loss of sustenance more than overbalanced even these fortunes and swayed the scale to the side of loss instead of gain in the totality of result.
Before considering the results which accrued from these conditions, North and South, it may be interesting to turn aside for a moment to make record of one of the most picturesque figures among American womanhood of that day, even though her fame was but local. About 1815 there was born in the city of Baltimore, of Irish parentage, an infant who was named Margaret Gaffney. She married young, and in 1836 went with her husband, whose name was Haughery, to New Orleans. Left a penniless widow in less than a year, she entered into the service of the city orphan asylum as a domestic, and when the second building was erected the Sisters, finding her faithful and intelligent, placed her in charge of the large dairy which was a part of the establishment. Soon she became associated with all the labors of the Sisters and by her efforts materially contributed to free the establishment from debt. When this had been done she opened a dairy on her own account, and in 1866 added a bakery to her business. She made money with a rapidity which was accountable only by the wide celebrity which she had gained by her labors in the cause of the orphans, for she was known far and wide as "Margaret, the Orphans' Friend." She retained the simplicity of her thought and life throughout, herself driving the cart by means of which her bread and milk were distributed, and all the money that she made was contributed to the cause of the forsaken children whom she loved. She died in 1882, and to her was erected the first monument to a woman ever reared in the United States. As the first woman to be thus honored she deserves to be remembered by more than local affection; and it speaks well for our country that the pioneer shaft raised to a woman did not commemorate the triumphs of intellect or even militant bravery, but the labors and unselfishness of one who could not so much as write her name, signing with a cross the will by which she made her last gift to the orphans--Protestant as well as Catholic, for her large soul knew of them nothing but that they were in need of care--of the city of New Orleans. Even yet, in these days of rush and bustle, New Orleans has not forgotten the woman whom it knew by the simple name of "Margaret," neglecting further identification of title; for to New Orleans there was but one Margaret, and the name carried unique meaning, even as would that of a reigning queen.
To return from this substitution of the individual for the general: Reconstruction, in a political sense, was happily of brief life in the South; but Feminine Reconstruction, which had its birth in the same time as the political, was destined to prove lasting in its work and effects. There was need of complete reconstruction, of thought as well as society, if woman were not to be a clog rather than an aid to the efforts of man; for the conditions which had enabled the latter, at least in the South, to look upon woman as the companion only for his leisure had disappeared, while in both sections there were left destitute thousands of women, with mouths which must be fed, both of themselves and of little ones. Moreover, in both sections the home was no longer the inevitable and perfect refuge which it had been. Either the father, the breadwinner, had been swept away by the destroying tide of war, together with the brothers upon whom the home might still have leaned, or he was so disabled in body or purse that he could not care for those who by nature were dependent upon him. These conditions did not press so heavily upon the Northern homes, since in that section there was plenty of work for willing hands and the men had little difficulty in obtaining a sufficient living for their households; but in the South those conditions were widespread. They were imperative in their instant demands; they must be satisfied; but how?
Only one answer met the necessities of the case; the women must work. For themselves, and often for their households, they must win support; the young girls, just verging upon womanhood, must go out from the homes where they had been so carefully and tenderly nurtured and face the battle for independence. It is difficult for us in these days of broader thought to understand the horror with which the women of the South contemplated this necessity. For a woman of the "upper classes"--and it must be remembered that, in the South, there was practically no middle class at that period--to labor for money was, in the eyes of the Southern lady, reared in all the prejudices and traditions of affluence, a real degradation. For herself she might have borne it uncomplainingly, as she had borne so many other hardships; but for her daughters it was terrible in her thought. To guard them from the rough touch of the world had been one of her first duties; now she must learn to fit them, if possible, for that contact, she must send them out to fight for their hands in the strife of existence. Elder as well as younger women were thus forced to fight; but it was for the latter, not for themselves, that the elders felt the stress. They had learned in hard schools to endure; but their daughters had been shielded as well as might be even in the nearest coming of hardship and peril, and they could not bear the thought of removing from those daughters their watchful and tender care.
The younger women themselves faced the situation with more courage; but that they were daunted by the prospect cannot be denied. They were eager to contribute to the support of those who had thus far cherished them; they grudged no pain of labor to effect this end; but they recoiled from the actual going out into the world, alone and unaided, to meet its coarseness and lack of sympathy. Yet, the need once acknowledged and proved, they met it firmly. They still retained some prejudices as to the limits within which it was possible for a lady to labor and retain her claim to the title she valued; they had not at a bound attained to the independence of thought and action which is a mark of womanhood in the days in which we of the present live; but they were ready to do all that within those limits fell to their hands, if so they might relieve their parents of part of the burden which weighed so heavily upon them.
Thus, in the pangs of bitter necessity, was born among women the era of the worker. It was an era which was to last to the present and to reach into the future as far as the eye of prophecy can penetrate; but, like all infants, it was feeble at birth and even its first steps were tottering and uncertain. The beginnings of the true Feminine Reconstruction were made under stress of circumstance and not of choice; but they were none the less admirable in result, though slower in attaining thereto. This was the fruit of the Civil War, its great gift to the womanhood of our land. That fruit first blossomed in the South, since here there was the greater need; and her daughters went out from their homes into the crowded marts of business and claimed a share in the work of men. Not at first; indeed, the more radical impulse in this wise came from the North, where also conditions had changed since the first half of the century. The Southern girl saw but little proper direction for her efforts beyond the profession of education; she went out as teacher or governess, and considered that thus she had reached the uttermost bourne of possibility in this wise. But the educational circle became so thronged that on its margin, vainly endeavoring to enter, stood a countless throng of girls and women who must work or be a burden upon those they loved, if even this shameful refuge was open to them. So perforce they turned away, battling with their prejudices, to seek other employment; and when they had found it they discovered to their relief and delight that they had gained rather than lost caste in the eyes of the world, even of their own circles.
Under varying conditions but to similar purpose, there was an equal movement among Northern womanhood. Timidly at first, for they too had their prejudices to conquer, the women of the North sought to enter into the great competition for the means of existence; and, having once tasted independence, they found it sweet. There was almost the same hesitancy and the same circumscription of womanly calling in the North as in the South; but the Northern woman, with her stronger sense of independence in right-doing, sooner shook herself free from the shackles of tradition. Had there been equal need in both sections, the North would doubtless have taken and maintained the lead in the emancipation of women from the servitude of the obligations of caste as in those days held; but because of the greater incentive among the women of the South these were in the van in the new movement until that movement became so general that there was no longer front or rear thereto. That time was not long in coming; revolutionary as were its theories, the country had long unconsciously been prepared for them, and when they were set up they were almost universally acknowledged as the proper standard. There still remained some whose prejudices in this respect were irrefragable, but they gradually found themselves in a constantly weakening minority. The worker in the hive of humanity found herself not only tolerated, as she had hoped as the best possible, but honored, even more than the queen bees; she found herself, though originally forced there by circumstances, in an environment which was in all ways congenial to the best of her nature. Not a little of this result, it must be proudly admitted, was owing to the chivalry of the American man. With all respect, as all courtesy, he welcomed to participation in his pursuits the woman whom he had looked upon as by training and even nature cut off from such participation, and he gladly embraced the opportunity to prove to the women of the land that his deference for their sex was not limited to the bounds of the drawing room, but was a thing which was unlimited in application. With their contact with the world of affairs thus made easy for them by those upon whose hitherto exclusive territory they were intruding, the women of America found their new life not only tolerable but pleasant.
That "the ages call and heroes come" has risen to the dignity of an apothegm; but if "inventions" were substituted for "heroes" in the saying it would be at least as true and perhaps of more practical value and meaning. It does not appear that the typewriter has ever been mentioned as one of the determining factors of our present feminine status, but that it deserves such credit does not admit of a doubt. That invention, whose use is now so nearly universal that it is difficult to remember that it has been with us but a scant twenty years, came at the psychological moment in the history of American womanhood. It opened, as nothing else, an avenue for the direction of feminine effort in the struggle for existence; and it displayed its possibilities just at the period when the supply of women workers began far to exceed the demand. There were still recognized limitations to female effort, far straiter than those now laid down, if indeed any limitations, other than those drawn by physical conditions can be said now to exist. As formerly in educational circles, so now in those of affairs there was overcrowding among the women who sought work; and just in time to relieve the stress there was opened a new field of labor, peculiarly adapted to the feminine nature and need, in the manipulation of the novel instrument of record. Quickly was the field seized and cultivated by the eager women; and it not only was itself rich in harvest, but it led into new and hitherto uncultivated fields of effort, and from the time of the acceptance of the typewriter as a necessity of business, the position of women in the world of affairs was assured and established.
Before the nineteenth century had passed the eighth mile-stone of its existence the foundation of Feminine Reconstruction had been laid in enduring material, and each succeeding lustrum saw the edifice arise in fairer and more definite proportions. So accustomed to the new status of women did we soon become that we failed to recognize how radical was the change which had taken place in the general conception of the sphere of womanhood. The very fact that there was no definite and determined movement looking to the desired end made for success. The woman worker did not come with demand for equality of recognition, with parades and conventions and speeches; she simply entered upon the field which she desired to possess, and made it her own by right. Therefore that right was instantaneously recognized, and there was tacit acceptance, which is the most significant and enduring of all.
Meanwhile, the "reformers" among women had not been idle. In many respects true reformation had taken place: legislation had from time to time assured women of equal rights in property--in some respects had even recoiled to the opposite extreme and had given to the married woman, whose property was once entirely under the control of her husband, immunity from just responsibilities and made her lot in this respect far more enviable and secure than that of the man whose rights she shared.