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all-male schools admitting women, while the majority of the education-minded daughters attended the teaching academies known as “normal schools.”
    No matter how unusual and enlightened her upbringing, no adolescent girl started out in life aspiring to a state of single blessedness. She entered boarding school understanding what any average woman knew: Marriage served as a woman’s only practical life solution. Moreover, it served as her moral and spiritual duty. If any aspect of this observation had been left unclear, every political, religious, educational, and literary force in the culture, every leader, of anything, wrote out or recited for girls the female life agenda: to make and maintain the family home, populating it with no fewer than five children (allowing for inevitable miscarriages), andto create within it a calm, well-decorated realm for her hardworking, exhausted husband.
    Author Catherine M. Sedgwick, writing circa 1835, summarized the primitive female media blitz in this way: “By all the talk that we hear from old and young, married and single…marriage is not only the felicity of woman, but [the source of ] her dignity, her attractiveness, her usefulness…her very life depends on it!”
    By the second or third year of school, the more intuitive, rebellious girl had come to grasp the underpinnings of the institution. Perhaps she’d learned that nuptial came from nupta, the Latin word for veil, or covering. In French the word was couverte, which gave rise to the full-surrender marital state known as couverture. As adapted in the United States from British common law, married women had no legal rights and were in essence the property of men, who owned and got to keep it all, including any children, in the case of divorce. As that translated on a day-to-day basis: He ventured forth into the world; she stayed inside. As it was said of these appointed spheres: “He for the world and commerce; she for the domestic, the nursery.” Or, as Milton had earlier expressed it: “He for God only; she for God in him.”
    By graduation, such a girl would have understood the mechanics of Victorian marriage, and what historian Barbara Welter dubbed “the Cult of True Womanhood.” True womanhood was the brainchild of the “domestic feminists” (oxymoron notwithstanding), a group of reform-minded women who sought a conservative way to mediate their problem. Their problem, roughly summarized: What exactly should intelligent married women do, given that they didn’t belong in the world but had opinions and ideas too big for the house?
    The best-known domestic feminist was Catherine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe (she watched the kids while Harriet wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and Henry Ward Beecher, the preacher now best remembered for his role in a sex scandal. As she and others viewed it, the Wife, exercising subtle manipulations—an exquisitely hypnotic feminine style—might exert some quiet influence over her husband, encouraging him to take certain desired actions out there in the world. At the same time, she’dproject a radiant moral force over her children. Think of her as a human aerosol can, her sweet lingering residue infusing the house with calm, a sense of order for her brood, and, when needed, an undetectable means for mesmerizing her husband to get her way.
    Not all marriages followed the stage directions—one partner set to play the whispering, encouraging angel and one to play the boss. But there was an inherent deceit in many male-female transactions. Consider that most men and women, husbands and wives, did not always know each other at the start of marriage. They knew only what to expect. No matter how pleasant on the surface, marriage could be what one young college girl called “a trial of inequality.” And not always in the ways expected. Activist Mary Dodge, who preferred instead of “singly blessed” the term “nobly discontent,” had put it this way: “True, he may be as