by Kate Corbett Pollack
For the past year, I
have been transcribing and writing about the letters in our archives written by
the Spaulding family of Buckland, Massachusetts. The APHGA also has in its
archives a letters collection written by members of the Pomeroy family of
Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Dottie H., an APHGA member, and descendant of Hart
and Lester Pomeroy graciously lent us the collection which we scanned and
photographed and returned to her.
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| Portrait of Lemuel Pomeroy. |
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| Portrait of Hart Lester Pomeroy. |
With Pleasure my dear Harty I received your
letter…it is very nice, I am very glad to find you are at Plainfield under the
tuition of A gentleman whose abilities I think capable of rendering you great
advantage, I hope you will pay strict attention my dear girl & not think
more of the tutor than you do of your studies, I only give you A little warning
Harty as I hear he is A fine young Man, I think he has A fine chance to fix his
choice among so many fine girls unless his heart is steel’d, but enough of him…
At first I thought that
Hart was being privately tutored by a professor or teacher in the Plainfield
area, because women did not usually attend this type of school in the late
1700s. Academies were for men. However, the History
of Windham County, Connecticut: Vol. 1-2 in its chapter on Plainfield Academy
reports that “the school was organized for both sexes”, and mentions Hart
Lester directly:
“It
may not be irrelevant to notice among the young ladies, Miss Catherine Putnam,
granddaughter of General Putnam of the Revolution, who married Francis Brinely,
Esq. of Boston; the Misses Lester of Preston - one of whom married Hon. Lemuel
Pomeroy of Pittsfield, Mass.; …with many others who have adorned society by
their example and their influence.[i]”
Plainfield Academy
was founded in 1770. It endured through the Revolutionary War, and gained
prominence as a superior academic institution, attracting students from all
over the region and abroad. Plainfield through the late 1700s became a lively
place full of bright young people from families respectable enough to send
their children to the prestigious academy, which charged tuition. There young
men were prepared for college, specifically Yale, or business. Young women
received enough education, separate from the male population, to be considered
eligible marriage material. From History
of Windham County:
“Society
in Plainfield was quickened and elevated by Academic influence. The brilliant
young graduates who served as teachers found in this rural town a select circle
of accomplished and attractive young women and usually carried away a wife, or
left their hearts behind them.”
Teachers in this era
of New England history were young, unmarried men (as I wrote about in last
month’s blog post). Hart could not expect to have her own career, and her
education served only to make her into a respectable lady who could marry well.
The “advantage” Hart’s aunt was speaking of in the above letter was the
opportunity for a prestigious marriage, which she did achieve with her
betrothal to Lemuel Pomeroy in 1800, only two years after the letter was
written. Hart was 19 at the time of her marriage. By 1801, she had given birth
to the first of her eleven surviving children. Hart was either pregnant or
nursing for the next twenty years of her life. Despite Hart’s wealth, education
and social class, her role was ultimately to bear children, as many as
possible. Hart’s Congregationalist background taught that this was women’s life
purpose. Plainfield Academy was also a Congregationalist (Puritan-Calvinist)
school, founded by members of the church. At that time, it was the only
religion in the area. There were no other churches, and religion was not kept
separate from education, nor was it separate from the state and town
governments at this time.[ii]
Most areas of Hart’s life would have been affected by her religion, although
the letters in the Lester-Pomeroy collection do not mention religion as much as
the Spaulding sisters’ do. It is possible that this family did not have the
need to cling to it quite as much due to their wealth providing a less grim
life for them.
Wealth and status
aside, the lines between the Spaulding sisters and the Lesters start to blur in
other areas. The Lester-Pomeroy women may have been wealthy, well-educated
socialites who did not worry about having enough to eat or toiling over a
burning hearth all day, as the Spaulding women did, but the hardships of
childrearing and their limited ability to participate in the public sphere of
life isolated them in much the same ways. The reality of childrearing is key to
understanding the experience of women from this or any era. Dr. Judith Walzer
Leavitt’s essay “Under the Shadow of Maternity”, mentions Mary Vial Holyoke:
“Take,
for example, the life of Mary Vial Holyoke, who married into a prominent New
England family in 1759. In 1760, after ten months of marriage, she gave birth
to her first baby. Two years later, her second was born. In 1765 she was again
“brought to bed” of a child. Pregnant immediately again, she bore another child
in 1766… during the next twelve years she bore five more children. The first
twenty-three years of Mary Vial Holyoke’s married life, the years of her youth
and vigor, were spent pregnant or recovering from childbirth. Because only
three of her twelve children lived to adulthood, she withstood, also, frequent
tragedies… Mary Holyoke had little choice in her frequent pregnancies: her life
reveals how the biological capacity of women to bear children historically has
translated into life’s destiny for individual women.[iii]”
Mary Holyoke and
Hart Lester both belonged to upper class New England families. In my
genealogical research of New England, what first struck me was the enormous
size of families common in the 1600s through the early 1800s. Family sizes were
sometimes upwards of twelve children. A second wife in some circumstances would
be brought in shortly after the death of the first and continue the pattern of
constant childrearing, picking up where the first wife left off. This created
gaps in sibling ages of up to thirty years. By the early 1800s, average family
size was about seven surviving children.[iv]
Throughout the 1600s this was also the average:
“In
the early-17th century, women usually married between ages 20 and 23. (The aged
[sic] dropped somewhat in succeeding generations and was younger in some
locales than others.) They probably spent up to 20 years bearing children and
most of their adult life raising them. There were some large families of 10 to
15 children, but the average family had six or seven. Many children died from
disease in infancy or early childhood (only about half of Colonial infants
reached adulthood). Most couples lost one or more children.[v]”
The above
information does not factor in the instance of the second wife, however. It is
referring to the childrearing of individual women. The addition of a second
wife would also mean that she would be responsible for the deceased first
wife’s children, of which the average was seven, as well as her own. It is also
possible that a second wife would be bringing children from a previous marriage
to the new family, and statistics don’t always factor this in. A genealogist
will notice these patterns. Family size dropped as developments in women’s
equality, public health and access to family planning, among other factors,
progressed into the twentieth century. As we have seen in last month’s blog
post on Mary Howes, the opportunity for college and career offered some women
the choice of a different life, one where they had more control over their own
destinies. Hart Lester attended a prestigious secondary school academy, but
that was the end of her educational options. The expectation was that it would make
her more eligible for marriage to a socially and financially prominent man, and
as soon as she graduated, marriage and childrearing commenced. Her role as a
woman of wife and bearer of children was not very different from the role of
the women of the Spaulding family.
What is also similar
in the letters of the Lester and Spaulding women is their bond. Like Mary
Spaulding’s sister-in-law Deborah Pomeroy Trowbridge, Hart’s sister-in-law
Damaris Lord Lester fills the role of an actual blood sister, and there is no
differentiation in how she is addressed, or what her role is: she is a sister
to Hart, called one, and treated as one. Deborah Pomeroy Trowbridge was not
only a sister to Mary Spaulding Pomeroy; she was considered part of the family
by Nancy, Lydia and Deborah Spaulding, as well. What struck me during the
course of transcribing the 144 letters of the Spaulding family was this
incredible closeness and bond between the women (written about in my December
14th, 2011 post The Spaulding
Sisters). No important anniversary was left unremembered by the women, and
they wrote to each other through the hardest of times, speaking candidly of
death and offering mutual support. Damaris and Hart’s relationship was similar.
From a September 21, 1800 letter from Damaris Lord Lester to Hart Lester
Pomeroy referencing the death of a friend:
“I received yours [letter] My Dear Sister by
Mr. Belcher for which I return you many hearty thanks… I hope you will ever
feel inclined to pour balm in the bosom of the afflicted the wisest of all the
sons of Adam said it is better to go to the house of Mourning than to the house
of feasting, and I think I can truly say for one when I have attended those
trying scenes have felt and inward satisfaction very different from the
sensations of Mirth & jollity lest us, My Dear Sister bear a part in the
joys and sorrows of all our friends…”
Damaris was telling
Hart about her personal experience with the mourning process in this letter.
Another aspect of the Spaulding and Lester-Pomeroy letters is the scarce
mention of the men in their lives. The APHGA has many more letters written by
the Spauldings, and it is in their letters where I have noticed this more,
mostly because of the sheer amount of material. Evidently, it was not unusual
for the time period, as written about by Dr. Carol Smith-Rosenberg in her
seminal work “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century
America”:
“Several
factors in American society between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth
centuries may well have permitted women to form a variety of close emotional
relationships with other women. American society was characterized in large
part by rigid gender-role differentiation within the family and within society
as a whole, leading to the emotional segregation of women and men. The roles of
daughter and mother shaded imperceptibly and ineluctably into each other, while
the biological realities of frequent pregnancies, childbirth, nursing, and
menopause bound women together in physical and emotional intimacy.[vi]”
We are
very fortunate to have letters written by these families in our archives at the
APHGA, and their examination can contribute exponentially to the study of
American History; specifically providing insight into the private world of
America’s women in the 18th and 19th centuries. We cannot
look up Hart Lester or Mary Spaulding in a history book; we cannot learn about
their lives in the same way we can learn about their husbands’. The experience
of genders, however, is critical in aiding our understanding of America’s past.
[i] Larned,
Ellen D. History of Windham County, Connecticut. Vol. 1-2. Worcester, MA:
Author, 1874. Excerpt from Ancestry.com http://tinyurl.com/bj9dqq5
[ii] "Town
History."Plainfield History.Plainfield Historical Society, 2011.Web. 16
Nov. 2012. .
[iii] Leavitt,
Judith Walzer, and Jane SherronDeHart. "Under the Shadow of Maternity:
American Women's Responses to Death and Debility Fears in Nineteenth Century
Childbirth." Feminist Studies 12
(1986): 129-54. Rpt. in Women's America:
Refocusing the Past. By Linda K. Kerber. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 184-91.
Print. 185.
[iv] "Achievements
in Public Health, 1900-1999: Family Planning." Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2 Dec. 1999. Web.
16 Nov. 2012. .
[v] Gormley,
Myra Vanderpool, CG. "Colonial Love and Marriage."Colonial Love and Marriage.Genealogymagazine.com,
2004.Web. 16 Nov. 2012. .
[vi] Smith-Rosenberg,
Carol. "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in
Nineteenth-Century America." Signs
1.1 (1975): 1-29. JSTOR.Web. 16 Nov. 2012. 9
