AMERICA 1900-1910 -- 'A MAN'S WORLD' (Part 1)

SEIFERT

Posted By: David (email)
Date: 3/7/2004 at 21:10:57

'AMERICA 1900-1910'

'A Man's World'

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THE MASTER SEX

The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

-- Grover Cleveland.

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In any confrontation between the sexes, it was a foregone conclusion that men would come out ahead. For one thing, according to the 1900 census, men outnumbered women by more than a million and a half. But masculine supremacy went far beyond mere numbers. Like ex-President Grover Cleveland, every red-blooded American male was convinced that the sex he belonged to was innately superior.

The entire country, in fact, from the logging camps of Oregon to the U.S. Senate -- with its convenient cuspidors - was seemingly arranged by men for their own satisfaction. Men ran the nation's business, cast its votes and produced most of its art and literature. They were, in theory at least, complete masters of their households, dispensing justice and wisdom to their families like Oriental potentates.

Along with their exalted status, men reserved special rights and privileges. Not only did they ban ladies from voting booths, they also kept them out of clubs, restaurants, saloons and tobacco shops. In some states an unescorted female might, by law, be refused a meal at a restaurant or a room at a hotel, and in l904 one particularly audacious young lady was arrested and put in jail in New York City for smoking a cigarette in public.

While men called the tune, they also worked hard to pay the piper. Most men labored at least 10 hours a day, six days a week. An office worker was usually at his stool by eight o'clock, a factory hand at his bench by seven. Both would remain there until five-thirty or six, when they would trudge home to pipe, slippers and the affectionate ministrations of wife and children. All for an average weekly pay of less than $12.

In the confident mood of the first decade, however, most men were robustly certain that the opportunity to strike it rich lay just around the corner. With hard work and a bit of luck they might, like the Horatio Alger heroes, rise from clerk to president of the company. As good men, in an age of male superiority, they deserved no less.

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MANLY RETREATS

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"There is something mentally enervating in feminie companionship," advised The Cosmopolitan in l905, and so "the genuine man feels that he must go off alone or with other men, out in the open air, as it were, roughing it among the rough, as a mental tonic." The spirit, if not the letter, of that statement was dogma at the time. Most men sought the society of other males in less rugged circumstances, in the comfortable, for-men only atmosphere of barbershops, clubs and saloons. A turn-of-the century barbershop was much more than a place to get a haircut. It was a retreat where, amid the reek of cigar fumes and bay rum, men would congregate to browse through the spicy pages of the Police Gazette, ogle the ladies who hurried past the door, and wait for a 15-cent shave.

Even more impregnable to women were the men's clubs. For the rich and wellborn, there were such exclusive establishments as New York City's august Union League Club, whose major asset, according to one member, was the fact that "no women, no dogs, no Democrats, no reporters" could be found there. But most clubs were a good deal more proletarian. The average man could join sporting societies, volunteer fire companies, municipal bands and marching societies, and gourmandizing fraternities with such fancy names as the Honorable John McSorley Pickle, Beefsteak, Baseball Nine and Chowder Club, which held raucous clambakes on an island in the East River in New York.

The most democratic gathering places of all were the saloons. There were at least 100,000 of these in the country, supplied by 3,000 breweries and distilleries. It is a fact of record that in Boston and Chicago, half the male population paid a daily visit to favored neighborhood bars. Part of the saloon's appeal was camaraderie, but the main attraction was the whiskey. So important was this commodity that on one occasion, when a supplier drew up to the door of a saloon with 20 large kegs of whiskey and a few small sacks of flour, one customer dryly commented, "Now what in hell does he think we're going to do with all that flour."

To Be Continued. . . The Immigrants' Ordeal.

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Copied by Nancee(McMurtrey)Seifert
February 25, 2004