Old and New New Englanders: Immigration and Regional Identity in the Gilded Age

Three. New England Delicacy: Immigration and the Regional Body

79 three New England Delicacy Immigration and the Regional Body If asked to name the one word that best described New England women, a Gilded Age commentator might well choose delicate. A profoundly ambiguous term that spoke on multiple registers, it evoked a long history of debates about the health, beauty, morality, and reproductive practices of New England women. The oldest of those debates centered on the issue of climate. For centuries authorities on both sides of the Atlantic had clashed over the effects of the New World climate on Europeans, and New England had always loomed large in that debate. Opponents of colonization routinely pointed to the alleged physical and mental decay of the New Englanders as proof that Europeans degenerated in the New World. From the Great Migration of the 1630s to the Revolution, New Englanders countered that the robust health of their people proved the salubriousness of their climate . By the early nineteenth century, a few Yankee holdouts continued to resist the degeneration thesis, but most admitted that their region’s climate was a health risk—especially for women. It was the emergence of the cult of True Womanhood in the 1820s that convinced them to reconsider that view. The champions of True Womanhood argued that the Yankee female’s delicacy should be taken as a sign not of physical degeneration but of moral refinement. Many New England writers responded by celebrating the Yankee lady’s delicacy over against the coarse strength of her foreign-born Others , Irishwomen in particular. After the Civil War, the willowy body ideal promoted by the cult of True Womanhood came increasingly under attack by a group of conservative physicians whom Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles E. Rosenberg have dubbed medical moralists.1 In New England the medical moralists contended that Yankee females undermined their own 80 • old and new new englanders health and fertility when they rejected domestic pursuits for the enticements of education and fashion. The conservative physicians invidiously compared the Yankee daughters of fashion and education with their immigrant rivals, insisting that it with the latter, not the Puritan descendants, who best carried on the New England tradition of large families and robust health. Yet, in the century’s last decades, the medical moralists were themselves challenged by New England’s feminists, who contended that the educational opportunities of Yankee females were actually making them healthier than their counterparts in other regions. Many feminists also rejected the medical moralists’ portrayal of female immigrants as models of good health. They cited reports by medical experts who claimed that female immigrants were in fact quite sickly as a result of their struggles to acclimate to American conditions. A number of those experts identified the second-generation Irish American female as the chief sufferer. As the century ended, they suggested it was she, rather than the Yankee female, who deserved the dubious title of New England’s most delicate woman. Parsing the changing meanings of female delicacy in New England across the decades is made more challenging by the fact that, as new theories about it emerged, the old ones did not simply disappear. Instead, the emergent and residual theories jostled for supremacy in the minds—and writings—of commentators. This accounts for the internal inconsistencies and contradictions that characterize much of the discourse on the subject. Some writers were capable of veering from one theory to another in the span of a few pages or even sentences. In the most extreme cases, the reader is left wondering whether a given writer sees female delicacy as something to be embraced as a point of New England pride or condemned as a betrayal of regional tradition. The ambiguity of female delicacy in New England was further compounded by the sheer variety of debates in which it was implicated. Whether the issue was climate or abortion or domestic labor, people across the political spectrum believed they could read the future of New England on the delicate bodies of its women. “It Is a Wretched Climate”: New England Delicacy as Degeneration By the early nineteenth century, the question of how New England’s climate affected the health of its inhabitants had been bandied about for almost two hundred years—generally as part of a larger debate about the feasibil- New England Delicacy • 81 ity of transplanting the Anglo-Saxon race to the New World. The stakes of that debate were already becoming clear...