What’s a woman to do? Few women ventured into the male work world a century ago

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Maine Women in History Rediscovering Their Lives and Legacies

Miss Clara Stimson was called the Lumber Queen of Maine a century ago. She owned sawmills in Smyrna Mills, New Limerick and Ashland. She managed timberlands. Her success enabled her to build one of the finest houses in Houlton.

“Miss Stimson is one of the ablest and most enterprising business women of New England, and has for many years successfully conducted a large timber and lumber manufacturing business in the face of keen competition,” said the Bangor Daily News on Dec. 5, 1907. “She has had many interesting encounters with leading lumber barons of Aroostook, but so comprehensive is her knowledge of Maine’s lumber resource and so accurate is her estimate of men that she has seldom come off second best in her deals.”

Clara Stimson was an unusual phenomenon. About a fifth of the work force in Maine were women a century ago, according to the U.S. Census. Nationally, about one in five women worked compared to nine in 10 men. Most working women were young and unmarried, their jobs considered only temporary. Career-oriented women like Miss Stimson were exceptional.

In an era when women couldn’t vote and were constrained by social and moral strictures as rigid as a bone corset, few crossed the line, as did Clara Stimson, into the vocational domain occupied by males. As oddities, their stories occasionally were told in the newspapers. Almost invariably, it was revealed they owed at least part of their success to a male relative. The idea of a member of the “gentler sex” making it big on her own in a man’s world was quite foreign to the times.

“I was obliged to go into the lumber business first because of the death of my father, who was extensively interested in sawmills and timberlands,” Miss Stimson told a reporter. “I soon became interested in it for its own sake and have accomplished all I could.”

Did she act like a man? Did she hold her own against shrewd operators and worse? The reader would want to know the answers to such questions. Apparently the answer was yes. “I have never been used discourteously in any of my business dealings, but I have never been given any advantage and have had to look out for myself,” Miss Stimson responded politely to the reporter’s questions.

Another female battering on the door of the male work world was Miss Grace Thayer of South Paris, the only woman undertaker in Maine. “When my father died, I carried on the business and have never regretted the course I took,” she was quoted as saying in the Bangor Daily News on March 6, 1907. “I had been with him a number of times as assistant and had always liked the work.” After her father’s death, she had sought schooling in her occupation in Boston and New York.

Another woman who had crossed the line was Capt. Jennie A. Crocker, the only woman to hold an unlimited master’s license for sail and steam in the United States. Capt. Crocker was expected to dock at High Head in Bangor harbor in command of the four-masted schooner Ruth Martin with a load of soft coal from Norfolk destined for the Orono Pulp and Paper Co., said the BDN on Oct. 28, 1924.

The Machiasport native had sailed for years as “cook and hand” under her husband, Capt. Nelson Crocker, “when Bangor was a real lumber port.” Over 20 years, they had carried millions of feet of lumber from Sterns Lumber Co. in Hampden to New York. They had sailed between New York and West Africa.

On this day, her husband was sailing as her first mate. After discharging in Bangor, they expected to take 1 million feet of lumber at Cape Jellison from the Van Buren Lumber Co. to New York.

None of these women is well-known today. None achieved fame outside her own times, if then. But they were in positions enabling them to make more money and have more freedom than the average woman worker a century ago.

The top 10 paid occupations for women nationally in order of numbers, according to a report issued by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1907, were servants, farm laborers, dressmakers, laundresses, teachers, farmers, textile mill workers, housekeepers, saleswomen and seamstresses. With the exception of farm laborers, which were mostly African-American women working in the South, these same categories probably applied to Maine, a state which had about the same percentage of working women as the nation.

While most of these occupations, including teaching, required little training and offered little pay or prestige, there were chances to excel. Sales clerks could become managers and buyers. Many school administrators were women including Bangor’s own Mary Snow, reputedly Maine’s first female school superintendent.

Many Bangor women operated their own small businesses as dressmakers, milliners, knitters, music teachers and musicians, boardinghouse operators, clairvoyants and so on as reflected in the Bangor City Directory in 1907 and in a report of the Maine Bureau of Industrial and Labor Statistics in 1910. For example, Bangor listed at least 30 self-employed female dressmakers in 1910 including Miss Hortense Gibson who had four employees. Miss M.A. Clark, one of several self-employed female milliners, engaged seven female workers.

Girls could aspire to occupations unheard of by their mothers. One of these high-tech positions was that of “typewriter” – a stenographer who typed up her notes on the relatively new invention. Women had a definite edge as telephone operators, another growing occupation, because they were believed to have better skills than young men at handling rude male phone users.

Another occupation growing in popularity was nursing. Formal education was available, and particularly ambitious girls with an interest in business could even aspire to own their own hospitals. One such woman was Ellen Paine, a former administrator at Eastern Maine General Hospital who founded in 1907 what one day would become St. Joseph Hospital in Bangor.

Nurses also could aspire to be doctors. There were nine female physicians in Portland in 1907, and at least one in Bangor. Dr. Mary Burnham of Ellsworth made headlines in the fall of 1904 when she returned home from China where she was head of the Women’s Hospital, founded by Presbyterians.

Stellar examples of success in the arts were readily available for young women with the ambition and, in most cases, the money and social background to pursue such careers. For example, there were at least nine female artists advertising their work in the Bangor City Directory in 1907, including Anna E. Hardy, a member of the famous family that produced her father, Jeremiah Pearson Hardy, the artist, and her cousin Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, the author. These artists were undoubtedly familiar with the work of Mary Cassatt, the impressionist painter whose wealthy brother Alexander had a summer home at Bar Harbor.

There were only a handful of female journalists at this time (eight reportedly in Portland). Few, if any, are remembered today. Yet there were exceptional examples of female journalists nationally who achieved fame and a measure of fortune.

One of them was Margherita Arlina Hamm (Mrs. John McMahon), who lived for part of her childhood in Bangor. College-educated, she traveled the world sending dispatches to major New York newspapers and gathering material for books, some of which are in Maine libraries today. She was a correspondent in the Sino-Japanese War. In the Spanish-American War, she was the only female correspondent at the front, according to the Bangor Daily Commercial on Dec. 18, 1907, reporting her death at age 40. Her parents, two sisters and a brother still lived in Bangor.

Great actresses such as Fay Davis of Houlton and Maxine Elliot of Rockland raised the aspirations of susceptible Maine girls with theatrical flair. Whether Elliot financed her theater on Broadway herself or with the help of her close friend J.P. Morgan is still debated by biographers.

World-famous opera singers such as Lillian Norton of Farmington and Emma Eames of Bath also stimulated aspirations. Neither forgot her roots, returning to sing in the Pine Tree State many times including at the famous Maine Music Festivals in Bangor and Portland during this period. Such women were exceptions to the rule and they were well rewarded for their accomplishments and respected for remaining in the female sphere even if their private lives didn’t always conform to the rigid moral standards of the day.

But the real heroes of this saga to equal employment were those unsung females who crossed the gender barrier without hope of fame or huge wealth – women such as Miss Clara Stimson and the others mentioned at the beginning of this story.

They included Aunt Beccy Robinson of Long Island, who worked as a fisherman, usually a man’s job because of its arduous nature. “She is a small woman, 55 years old, with a brow furrowed by years of toil, but active and full of ambition,” according to B.W. Stevens in a letter published in the Commercial on Nov. 20, 1907.

Aunt Beccy, as everyone called her, caught fish because she enjoyed it and for the money. “‘They don’t want me to go,” she said, “but I am bound to.”

Bait being scarce in the harbor she walked a mile and a half to the eastern beach to collect mussels. Then she shucked them and tramped back carrying them in a pail. A young man used to accompany her to row, but later she rowed herself, “and her days catch with a handline frequently amounted to several dollars. … During the past season she has earned upwards of $50. Truly a good record.” She undoubtedly smoked a corncob pipe as well, although it would not have been polite for the writer to have mentioned this in a letter to the newspaper.

From this brief account we learn that Aunt Beccy was a grandmother with a granddaughter and possibly a grandson, and we can imagine that she was the sole breadwinner for the remnants of a family much weathered by the hardships of life on a remote island. She had little hope of fame or fortune, and her competition in a man’s world may have had more to do with desperation than ambition. This was the lot of most female wage earners a century ago.

wreilly@bangordailynews.net