Marm the Doctor, Mill Children, and the American Dream in “One Way to Get an Education”

A Recovered Short Story by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Roxanne Harde, University of Alberta, Augustana

DOI: 10.55520/JH2H5VJD | Scholarly Editing, Volume 40
Edition Contents

Although it appeared on the front page of The Youth’s Companion at the height of that periodical’s popularity, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s story “One Way to Get an Education” (1871) has been missed on all major bibliographies of her work, including the biographies by Lori Duin Kelly, Carol Farley Kessler, and Ronna Coffey Privett.1 The sheer number of Phelps’s short stories, over 150 published with about a third of them for children, suggests why this story has been overlooked. With more than sixty books, over one hundred essays and one hundred poems, plus miscellaneous prose pieces and plays to her credit, compiling a fully accurate list of Phelps’s publications is a daunting task for any researcher. These numbers, however, also serve to underscore Phelps’s importance as both a literary figure and a cultural critic for more than four decades after the Civil War. Through the course of her long and productive career, she commented on and envisioned reform of women’s and children’s positions in American society, just as she does in “One Way to Get an Education.” She worked and wrote for women’s rights to vote, to attain an education, and to select the career of their choice. Always suspicious of her culture’s treatment of the working and poor classes and their children, Phelps wrote fiction that critiques standard economic practices like child labor.2 She repeatedly suggests that every child has a right to the “American dream,” and Jake in “One Way to Get an Education” is only one of the intelligent and enterprising children she created for her adult and child readers.

Jake, however, is a fascinating study for a couple of reasons. First, Phelps constructs him as a figure of youthful manliness similar to a number of the male characters in her fiction for adults, including a novel published the same year as this story, The Silent Partner, in which Stephen Garrick is a young man who works his way up the industrial ranks from mill-hand to manager. The descriptions of the intelligence and extreme sensitivity of Jake’s eyes and mouth prefigure the way in which Phelps draws Emmanuel Bayard, the protagonist of A Singular Life (1895),3 the character she described in her memoirs as her favorite in her oeuvre. Jake’s determination to take the necessary medical treatment, an unanesthetized amputation, in a stoic manner and his rejection of the doctor’s pity—coupled with his sensitivity—combine to make him a figure of self-reliant but sentimentalized masculinity. He may faint and fall, but he will not cry. Phelps emphasizes Jake’s insistence on handling treatment in a manly fashion with three repetitions of “But Jake said nothing,” even as she describes his resolution to tell his truths to the doctor. To what end does Phelps make him so determined to be independent and yet so dependent on help from and the good opinion of the story’s narrator?

Second, Jake’s decision to make an extreme sacrifice for his own future poses interesting questions. Phelps wrote several other narratives about factories in the first decades of her career, beginning with Up Hill; or, Life in the Factory (1865),4 a proselytizing novel for children that pragmatically accepts the fact that some children must work in the mills. In her memoirs, Phelps writes that she was inspired by the 1860 Pemberton mill disaster5 and the 1861 publication of Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills to research the condition of mill workers. She published a fictionalized account of the Pemberton mill’s collapse and subsequent fire in “The Tenth of January” (1868)6 and followed it with The Silent Partner,7 a novel concerned as much with women’s rights as with labor laws. Unlike Up Hill, these narratives depict the grim reality of life as a mill worker, and both sympathize with the plight of the mill child. Phelps draws as an object of pity a little girl, comforted by the protagonist in “The Tenth of January” as they both die from smoke inhalation. Young people are also the center of the pathos in The Silent Partner: Bub, a self-directed working boy very like Bob in “One Way to Get an Education,” finds it “mighty hard on chaps as has to stay to work industrious” when his coworkers “get out” because of accidents. In the novel, while struggling for a plug of tobacco, Bub dies in the works when “life, like everything else, was quite too young for Bub. He has got so old, he has given it up.”8 While it seems clear that Phelps writes children into mill accidents in fiction for adults for the purposes of labor reform, to what end does she portray the deliberate loss of Jake’s finger in a story for children? While the parents of The Youth’s Companion’s young readers might understand Phelps’s story as part of an agenda to reform child labor laws, what would the young readers take away? Does the story of Jake’s finger, then, negotiate between a message about the value of education and one about the significance of children sacrificed for the economy? As Hugh Hindman notes, “children have always worked,” and child labor “has always been closely associated with poverty.”9 Phelps repeatedly constructs child laborers within her narratives and thus gives a face to an entire class of exploited Americans.

“One Way to Get an Education” as a whole is interesting alongside Phelps’s vision of women’s place in American society. “Marm the doctor,” the story’s narrator, adumbrates Phelps’s discussion of female physicians in her germinal essay “The True Woman,”10 published in the Independent in October 1871, some five months after “One Way to Get an Education.” The narrator-doctor looks to the day “when there is a woman physician in every town”; in the essay Phelps looks to the time “when 2/3rds of the practicing physicians in the world are women.” The narrator of the story initially resents being called “marm the doctor” rather than “the doctor,” but in depicting Jake’s evocative experience, she reconsiders: “now I think of it, I do not know but the little fellow intended rather an unusual exhibition of confidence in my professional capacity, than a masculine and satiric fling at my sex.” Bob’s confidence in her is also shared by Jake, who needs the physician and not the marm. At the same time, the narrative suggests that Jake could tell his tale only to an educated woman who would understand his desires and ambitions. Perhaps this woman also needed to be brave for Jake to confide in her. At the story’s climactic scene, the doctor is on her way to visit her diphtheria patients. Though generally thought of as a childhood disease, diphtheria infected adults as well, and was infamous for its success in killing doctors.11 This doctor’s bravery—in pursuing such a career in the first place and putting herself in danger in fulfilling its obligations in the second—might be seen as inspiring Jake.12

While Phelps continued to discuss the need for female physicians in her work, her most extended writing on the topic occurs in Doctor Zay (1882),13 a novel portraying a radical female homeopathic practitioner who cures a male neurasthenic. In a study of Phelps’s essays exhorting women to enter the medical profession, publications that culminated in the novel, Frederick Wegener observes that it “was not altogether outlandish for Phelps to promote medicine as a field for women,” given that Elizabeth Blackwell had received her medical diploma in 1849 and was followed by many others.14 Phelps’s Dr. Zay is a fictional counterpart to the hundreds of women in practice who also founded hospitals for women and children, including the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Analyzing the role of antebellum female doctors in Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, Xine Yao emphasizes Phelps’s commitment to both this cause and suffrage in comparison to other publications by women doctors, including Mary Putnam Jacobi.15 The narrator-doctor in “One Way to Get an Education” is, like Doctor Zay and Phelps’s personal physicians, a homeopath, although Phelps renders that aspect of the account fairly tacitly. If she was less than explicit about homeopathy in this story, she was overt about it in Doctor Zay and in her correspondence with eminent neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, who, as Kristine Swenson notes, Phelps challenged by promoting women physicians and homeopathic treatments for neurological illnesses. She offers subtle clues to enable readers to characterize the narrator’s medical practice when the doctor describes herself as “preparing attenuations of aconite in the little back office.”16 Aconite, from the Ranunculaceae, or buttercup family, also known as monkshood or wolfsbane, is a homeopathic remedy commonly used to cure sore throats and fevers through the nineteenth century and today. Attending to her attenuations, this doctor suggests she may need the aconite for more illnesses than sore throats. Notably, Dr. R. Ludlam describes aconite in 1863 as a valuable homeopathic treatment for diphtheria because of its ability to relieve sore throat and reduce fever.17 As she pauses over her aconite, Phelps’s narrator-physician thus subtly connects homeopathy to her confidence in treating her diphtheria patients. Moreover, she highlights her narrator’s courage and commitment; in the late 1800s, diphtheria patients were eight times more likely to die from the “heroic” measures standard to American Medical Association physicians than they were from homeopathy, as Kenneth Kiple argues in his introduction to The Cambridge World History of Human Disease.18 Kiple quotes one Dr. Hering, who with his colleagues successfully treated several hundred cases in the winter of 1860: “these were genuine cases of fully developed diphtheria, treated by us, and does not include the multitude of sore throats which we treated.”19 Phelps’s narrator reflects confidence in her ability to cure her patients, even the diphtheria cases in “the new parish,” a designation that suggests this epidemic is running through an underprivileged neighborhood. In Doctor Zay, Phelps thus emphasizes the need for and efficacy of women physicians and challenges current discourses about poverty and child labor.

While Jake insists that he “won’t be a poor little fellow all my life!,” “marm the doctor” demonstrates a similar conviction; her personal choices may also work for the greater good. Readers might understand the ambitions of this doctor and Jake as being brought to their full potential in Doctor Zay and The Silent Partner. In the former, the titular doctor successfully practices homeopathic medicine, and in the latter Garrick, who worked in the mills as a child, scraped together enough schooling to manage a mill owned by the novel’s titular character, a young woman determined to be more than a silent partner in the mill she inherited. Like these women and doctors, being brought Stephen Garrick and Jake, Phelps is willing to undertake challenge and sacrifice in order to challenge, and perhaps change, the status quo.

§Notes

§Footnotes

  1. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “One Way to Get an Education,” The Youth’s Companion, 11 May 1871 (44.10):1; Lori Duin Kelly, The Life and Works of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Victorian Feminist Writer (Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing Company, 1983); Carol Farley Kessler, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982); Ronna Coffey Privett, A Comprehensive Study of American Writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 1844–1911: Art for Truth’s Sake (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). The sheer bulk of Phelps’s catalogue might also be why she is credited with being the author of “Tenty Scran,” which was published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1860. In Chapters from a Life (Boston: Houghton, 1896), Phelps notes that she first published short fiction for adults in 1864; in 1860, she was only publishing short fiction for children in Sunday school magazines. The style and themes of “Tenty Scran” suggest that its author is Harriet Beecher Stowe. ↩

  2. See also Roxanne Harde, “‘Nobody Stops to Speak to Beggars in Boston’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Politics of Child Poverty,” in To See the Wizard: Politics and the Literature of Childhood, ed. Laurie Ousley (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), 273–96; Roxanne Harde, “‘One Way to Get an Education’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Borders between Working and Other Children in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature,” in The Sands of Time: Children’s Literature, Culture, Politics, and Identity, ed. Jenny Plastow and Margot Hillel (Hatfield, UK: University of Herefordshire Press, 2010), 11–24. ↩

  3. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, A Singular Life (Boston: Houghton, 1894). ↩

  4. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Up Hill; or, Life in the Factory (Boston: Henry Hoyt, 1865). ↩

  5. See “The Mill Children—A Documentary by Noah Riffe,” 2014, YouTube video, https://youtu.be/3U5OFvFP1Os. ↩

  6. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “The Tenth of January,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1868, 345–61. ↩

  7. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Silent Partner (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871), 215–16. ↩

  8. Phelps, The Silent Partner, 215–16. ↩

  9. Hugh D. Hindman, Child Labor: An American History (New York: Routledge, 2015), 17. ↩

  10. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “The True Woman,” The Independent 12 October 1871, 1. ↩

  11. Kenneth F. Kiple, ed., The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). ↩

  12. Phelps’s ongoing promotion of women in medicine was a direct challenge to a medical establishment that was working to keep women out. In her fine history of women physicians in American medicine, Regina Morantz-Sanchez details the many difficulties women faced, noting that “medical schools remained frustratingly slow to admit women” until the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 65. ↩

  13. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Doctor Zay (Boston: Houghton, 1882). ↩

  14. Frederick Wegener, “‘Few Things More Womanly or More Noble’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Advent of the Woman Doctor in America,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 22, no. 1 (2005): 1. ↩

  15. Xine Yao, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). ↩

  16. Kristine Swenson, “Doctor Zay and Dr. Mitchell: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Feminist Response to Mainstream Neurology,” in Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920, ed. Anne Stiles (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 97–115. ↩

  17. R[euben] Ludlam, A Course of Clinical Lectures on Diptheria (Chicago: C. S. Halsey, 1863), 98. ↩

  18. Kiple, The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, 3. ↩

  19. Kiple, The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, 4. ↩