Perfect Recluses, Great Workers, and Black Beasts: Frances Trollope’s Cincinnati Women in Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1828–1830

On June 29, 1818, forty-five women from the Dorcas Society in Cincinnati, Ohio, gathered at the First Presbyterian Church.¹ The Reverend Joshua L. Wilson, an “Old School Calvinist” who had shepherded the congregation for the previous ten of its twenty-eight years, left his ivory-handled cane resting beside his pew and stepped forward to speak: “He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord; and that which he hath given will he pay him again.”² Looking out, the minister squinted his eyes, bringing into focus the approving faces of the women whose mission it was to improve Cincinnati morally and physically and care for the city’s indigent.³ Mrs. Kinney followed Reverend Wilson and presented the proceedings of the last six months, which included a unanimous decision to open all meetings with prayer, the collection and apportionment of garments for the poor, and regular visitations to the inmates of the nearby prison to attend to both their “temporal and spiritual wants.”⁴ Bonded in solidarity and equipped to do their part to better Cincinnati, the women agreed that the next session would be held on July 14 at Mrs. Howell’s residence. The assemblage adjourned with closing words from Pastor Barnes.⁵

Frances Trollope, an Englishwoman who sojourned in America in the late 1820s and published a book of her observations in 1832, presented “public worship, and private tea-drinkings,” of which the Dorcas Society was a part, as one of the few ways in which “all the ladies in Cincinnati” could avoid “becoming perfect recluses.”⁶ And Trollope’s comments on the Dorcas Society—the only female benevolent society in Cincinnati that the author mentions by name—provide but a handful of her numerous comments on women in the United States.⁷ Although much research has been done on Trollope’s travel narrative Domestic Manners of the Americans, specifically lacking in the secondary literature is a thorough discussion of the Englishwoman’s observations of American women—a subject to which she devotes much ink.⁸ In her caustic criticisms of the United States, Trollope highlights many salient characteristics of early nineteenth-century women, and a full discussion of her remarks is warranted.

But an analysis of Trollope’s every comment on American women is not the subject here. In addition to the gap in scholarship on Domestic Manners (dm), there yawns an equally apparent aperture on women in Cincinnati. When at the World’s Fair of 1893 the youthful Frederick Jackson Turner introduced his “frontier thesis,” it was little thought that his essay would change American historiography.⁹ But Turner’s argument popularized “the American West” and macadamized new avenues for historical scholarship.¹⁰ Still lacking, however, is a thorough discussion of women in Cincinnati, the “Athens of the West,” the “Queen City” of antebellum America.¹¹ Significantly, Trollope’s two-year residence in Cincinnati, which lasted from February 1828 to March 1830 and comprises over one-third of dm, generated numerous observations of a diverse sampling of women forming one of the most extensive single primary documents on women in the Queen City during the antebellum period.¹²

But every source has its limits, and Trollope is no exception. For one thing, Trollope abhorred Cincinnati, with its lack of entertainments and incredible number of pigs, and remarked upon leaving that her “only regret was, that we had ever entered it.”¹³ Her comments on Cincinnati women, which are almost always critical and shrouded in sarcasm, are thus likely tainted by her unfavorable opinion of the city as a whole. Even Mother Nature, the first Cincinnati woman to receive comment from Trollope, did not please the opinionated English visitor. The Queen City’s tree-covered hills were “sufficiently steep and rugged to prevent their being built upon, or easily cultivated, but not sufficiently high to command from their summits a view of any considerable extent,” Trollope lamented.¹⁴ And

the forest trees [were] neither large nor well grown, and so close as to be nearly...