Beatrice Ironside's Budget

As I delve deeper into the lives and personalities of the two women who will be at the center of my next novel, I’m struck by how different they are from the two Hannahs of A More Obedient Wife. Although only a few years younger than Hannah Wilson (Eliza was born in 1780, Betsy in 1785), the women I’m now researching were far better educated and significantly more worldly. Whereas the two Hannahs were, in different ways, women who felt they had a duty to follow their husbands down paths neither would have chosen herself, Betsy and Eliza took charge of their own lives–or tried to–with fierce determination. And each of them, in different ways, consciously struggled against the role society had assigned them because they were women.

Writing about the Hannahs, I had to constantly remind myself not to impose my own 21^st-century judgments on their choices. Hannah Iredell not only meekly accepted criticism from her husband, she did her best to change herself to suit his wishes. She tried to make herself into a "fashionable woman"–the kind who mingled smoothly in society and thus played the only sort of political role open to women at the time–when all she wanted was to stay quietly at home with her children. And Hannah Wilson loyally stayed by her husband’s side while he drove the family into poverty and disgrace, giving up on trying to discuss his financial situation with him because "it is a subject that he never wishes to hear mentioned." Why didn’t Hannah Iredell tell her husband to stop criticizing her? Why didn’t she want to participate in the larger world, rather than sticking to a traditional domestic role? And why didn’t Hannah Wilson insist that her husband either listen to reason or lose her companionship and support? These were the questions I tried not to ask, taking these women on their own terms and in their own context.

With Betsy and Eliza, things are different. Sometimes their audacity, in the context of their times, simply takes my breath away. They were intellectuals and aesthetes, friends who were united by their disdain for what they saw as the philistine narrow-mindedness of the wealthy merchant class in their hometown of Baltimore.

Betsy decided early on that living in Baltimore was a fate almost worse than death and did her best to acquire what for her was the ultimate prize, a European title. She came tantalizingly close, by marrying Napoleon’s brother, Jerome–but after Jerome abandoned her at Napoleon’s insistence, she refused to go down without a fight. Ridiculed by many for her pretensions and (at least in her youth) her provocative style of dress, she ridiculed her detractors right back. And she besieged the French ambassador with demands for a pension and a title, only to be told that the French government never gave titles to unmarried women. (Of course, the only reason she was "unmarried" was that Napoleon had refused to accept the validity of a marriage performed by the Archbishop of Maryland, referring to him in a letter to Pope Pius VII as a "Spanish priest" who "so far forgot his duties as to pronounce the benediction.")

Eventually Betsy fled Baltimore for Europe, partly to escape from the domestic duties her father expected her to perform at home after the deaths of her mother and sister. "What will the world think," her father wrote to her indignantly, "of a woman who had recently followed her mother and her last sister to the grave, had quit her father’s house, where duty and necessity called for her attentions as the only female of the family left, and thought proper to abandon all to seek for admiration in foreign countries; surely the most charitable construction that can be given to such conduct is to suppose that it must proceed in some degree from a state of insanity..." Betsy, for her part, disputed the idea that her departure left her father’s house bereft of females; she claimed he kept a succession of mistresses, starting even before her mother’s death.

Betsy’s determination and resilience is impressive, but I still have to work to put myself in her shoes; it’s hard for me to imagine caring about acquiring a title as much as she did. If I identify with either of these women, it’s Eliza. For one thing, she was a writer. In 1807, when she was a 27-year-old single mother, she appointed herself editor of a magazine in Baltimore, The Observer, after apparently rounding up some 500 subscribers. While she didn’t hide the fact that she was a woman, she adopted the common practice of the day and wrote under a pseudonym, Beatrice Ironside. As she declared in an early editorial, referring to herself in the third person, "She happens to have been luckily so constructed, that she can turn an iron-side to the `proud man’s contumely,’ (or women’s either) ... Insolence and neglect she knows how to endure with the happiest indifference ... not being very anxious about popularity."

But her "side" turned out to be a bit softer than iron. As she railed against the plebeian tastes and satirized the crude behavior of her neighbors, some of them apparently began to take offense. She answered them with spirit, but her dismay at their lack of appreciation is evident: "In a community like this," she wrote in April 1807, "where the nobler sex are almost entirely engrossed by parchments, pulses, or price currents, the attempt of a female to promote the cause of taste, literature, and morals, by undertaking the arduous employment of editor of a weekly paper, would, it should seem, have been cherished with respect... Such were the expectations of Beatrice, such the flattering prospect with which she entered on her new avocation... But alas! luckless dame, not long were the illusions of thy fancy to deceive thee..."

In July, she railed against an unnamed editor of a rival publication who she claimed was trying to "annihilate" The Observer. This editor had already criticized other respected publications, she wrote: "It may be judged then, if The Observer can possibly escape his indignation, when this paper has the misfortune of being edited by a WOMAN, and by a woman so impious as not to recognise his literary supremacy..." By the end of the year, due to a lack of subscribers, The Observer had closed its doors.

While it lasted, The Observer was an extremely personal publication. It printed articles by a number of contributors on a variety of subjects (including Eliza’s father, a respected doctor who wrote a seemingly endless series entitled "Remarks on Quarantines"), but its heart was Eliza herself and her column, "Beatrice Ironside’s Budget." This was a miscellany, the product of whatever happened to come into her head, written in her own distinctive style. In a way, it’s similar to what I’m doing right here, and what thousands of others are doing these days with their blogs. We just sit down and write, directly addressing our readers–we don’t have to plead with any editors or publishers to disseminate our words. There are two differences, though, that spring to mind. It cost money to publish The Observer, and Eliza had to round up subscribers–and eventually go out of business when those subscribers disappeared. The other difference also has to do with those subscribers: they were vocal, and Eliza maintained a spirited, if not always pleasant, dialogue with them. I, on the other hand, hardly ever hear from anyone who has read this blog–alas, I don’t have an easy mechanism for readers to send in comments, as many bloggers do. In fact, I really have no idea if anyone reads this blog! In a way, this is liberating. But–aware though I am, and as Eliza certainly was, that not all reader feedback is positive–I would sincerely like to hear people’s reactions to what I write. So if anyone does feel inclined to comment, please write to me at natalie@nataliewexler.com. And I’ll try to have a more iron-like side than Eliza did!