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the prose equivalent of a hand-carved miniature or cameo. Scholar Carroll Smith-Rosenberg writes that Goethe published the love letters sent between his fiancée, Bettina, and a countess she was deeply attached to; Margaret Fuller, respected New England intellectual, found a U.S. publisher for the volume. To underscore how important these bonds were in the young (and older) female life, consider the life span of one early study on the subject, The Friendships of Women, by William R. Alger. It was published in Boston in 1869 and by 1890 had reached its twelfth printing.
    It was obvious still that to marry was to win at the era’s female lottery—if not necessarily hit the jackpot—but the point is that a few women actively, and without trace of pathos, had begun to question the contest. In articles entitled “A Loyal Woman’s No,” and “The Difficulties That Accrue to Our Sex from the Marriage Bond,” they argued for allowing some female lives to evolve on their own terms, possibly with their own chosen friends or family. As one midcentury woman, a self-styled biological researcher, wrote to her “dearest dear”: “I cannot wait these days to turn 30! Then I may put away all pretense of being marriageable and concentrate on my interests.”
    SEND ME NO FLOWERS
    Starting in the 1870s, the marriage rate among educated women plummeted to 60 percent, compared with 90 percent of all women in the general population, and the figure would remain low until 1913 or ’14. Remember that these women lived in an era that celebrated feats of daring and genius in the visual and dramatic arts, social and physical sciences, transportation, politics, and archeology. Explorers, doctors, even realist novelists were heroes, secular gods lauded for their intellectual gifts and their bravery. A talented woman would have been acutely aware of her potential.
    And she also would have been acutely aware that marriage carried with it specific dangers. One in every thirty women died in childbirth. And there was plenty of opportunity to witness a live unanesthetized birth before marriage, an experience that Susan B. Anthony herself called “a very nasty business.” (The entire nature of the business would become far nastier in 1880, when the U.S. government declared abortion and the few extant forms of contraception illegal—a ban on all abortions that would remain in place until the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.)
    Then one had to contemplate husbands.
    Even the loyal and genuinely loving ones couldn’t help but domineer, and many of them, even the very best, were likely to drink. In fact, it was widely accepted that all men drank, just as all men used spittoons and knew their way around a rifle. (Some even claimed drinking was healthy. Midcentury it was often argued that whiskey was cleaner and safer to drink than New York City public water.) Earlier in the nineteenth century the little-known but remarkable Women’s Moral Reform Society had railed against alcohol as the primary cause of spousal battering, rape, and the use of prostitutes. There were always pious groups who specialized in social cleanup, “municiple housekeeping,” as it was called. But none had made the explicit link between male drinking and male abuse of women. In its women-run newspaper, The Advocate, Moral Reform editors listed the names of men seen leaving brothels. As they saw it, this was “The Everyman” and they also called him “The Destroyer.” One Advocate writer stated, “I’d as soon bed down with a nice clean dog as with a man…holding a bottle.”
    That’s not to say that the singly blessed used terms such as “The Destroyer” or that they refused to hear marriage proposals. Many young women had simply learned to reject them—no matter how often they were repeated.
    In one famed case, a Boston woman refused the same man sixteen times; another allegedly turned down twenty-six different men. Poet Lucy Larcom, who worked for years as a mill girl in