men – Empowering women through fiction and history.

The Marriage Age in the 19th Century

In the 19th, and even the early 20th centuries, age was an important factor for both men and women when it came to marriage. This is especially true of women. Pretty much any woman who didn’t get married early was sneered at behind closed doors as being well on her way to spinsterhood (which, today, isn’t stigmatized like it was then).

In the 21st century, many choose to marry at a later age. I can see several reasons for this. Both women and men are generally established in their careers later in life, so they choose to marry and have a family once they feel they’ve “gotten it together”. Many women prefer to start their careers before they take on marriage and motherhood. There is also a level of emotional maturity and intelligence that comes with age that (we hope) makes relationships and child-rearing more fulfilling. And there is no denying the pandemic and economic downturn in the last three years has something to do with people waiting a little longer to get married.

marriage, 19th century, gilded age, Waxwood Series, women, men

Young married couples in the 19^th century knew marriage wasn’t all hearts and flowers. They were practical as well. I’m guessing this is probably an advertisement for Domestic sewing machines.

Photo Credit: Bride & Groom: Karen Arnold/PublicDomainPictures/CC0 1.0

This is in stark contrast to the marriage age in the 19^th century. The average age for women to marry was, roughly, 20, while for men, it was 26. Why were women marrying at such a young age? We want to remember women were not as autonomous as they are today. Due to the separate spheres, many women were dependent on others for their livelihood, and marriage was the primary way they could survive when they came of age. There was also the “cult of True Womanhood” mentality where women’s destinies were to be wives and mothers, so marriage was seen as their goal in life. This is even true in the early 20th century when the New Woman. Keep in mind that, as independent and career-oriented as the New Woman was, she was still positioned as offering no threat to the “cult of True Womanhood” in her ultimate purpose in life (marriage and children).

Surprisingly, upper class women took the marriage age more seriously than middle and lower class women. You would think women with social and economic privileges would be more independent than their less privileged sisters, but, in reality, family and social expectations lay heavily upon them (a theme that comes back again and again in my Waxwood Series). Women who expected to marry into high society and/or maintain their position among the blue bloods had to marry young. In her book What Would Mrs. Astor Do? author Cecelia Tichi describes actress and model Evelyn Nesbitt, whose decision to marry the rich but abusive Harry Kendall Thaw came largely from the fact that she was “now over twenty years old, a perilous age for a Gilded Age starlet harboring hopes of matrimony” (location 3210). How much over twenty years? According to Tichi’s book, when Nesbit married Thaw, she was 21 years old.

In Pathfinding Women, the social standing of both Vivian and her mother Larissa hinges on Vivian marrying again. Vivian and her mother and, in fact, the Washington Street blue bloods that make up their social set are hyper-aware of this fact:

Vivian thought with irony of the past few days. “Yes, it would certainly be peaceful for us both if I were to become Mrs. Monte Leblanc.”
“And just what you need at this particular time in your life.”
A pain shot through Vivian. “What do you mean, Mother?”
“You always accuse me of ignoring the truth,” said Larissa. “But you don’t like it when someone else shows you the truth you’ve been ignoring.”
Vivian turned up the gas lamp on the night table and observed her mother’s face illuminated by a yellow halo. “You’ve always been shrewd, haven’t you, Mother?”
“I’m trying to make you see!”
“See what? That I’m not getting any younger?” Vivian’s eyebrows arched. “That’s what you meant, isn’t it? You think I ought to grab the first man that asks me like Cousin Emma did.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as that.” Her mother’s voice was reasonable. “But twenty-six is an age where a woman can begin to expect little out of life if she’s not married.”
You make twenty-six sound like ninety-six,” said Vivian, realizing she was starting to sulk.

Vivian is considered, by the standards of the 19th century, to be well above the marriage age, though she is still young, and this puts her in an awkward position matrimonially, and one that her love interest, Monte, who is considerably older than she is, doesn’t fail to grasp and use to his advantage.

Pathfinding Women, the third book of the Waxwood Series, is at a very special price right now. Find out about the book here. And don’t forget that Book 1, The Specter, is free here

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, you’ll enjoy my novella The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to my newsletter subscribers and you can get it here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

Works Cited:

Tichi, Cecelia. What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age. Washington Mews Books, New York University Press, 2018. Kindle digital file.

Marriage Advice From the Turn of the Century

Photo Credit: Portrait of a man and woman, possibly wedding photo of husband and wife, probably from around the 1890s, photographer unknown, Wakefield 1 High Street, Ealing: whatsthatpicture/Flickr/Public Domain Mark 1.0

If you’re a fan of my work, you know I’m not a romance writer, per se. I have nothing against historical romance, and I love classic romances like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Austin’s novels, but I’m just not in that vein.

However, my upcoming book, Pathfinding Women, does have a romantic subplot. And for this, I went searching for information on marriage and love in the Gilded Age. A very interesting article on the Click Americana website cropped up in my research titled “Tips for a happy marriage: Advice for newlyweds, from the 1900s“. It’s actually a series of articles published in the early 20^th century by the San Francisco Examiner, so the advice given is actual “real time” suggestions for newlyweds.

Needless to say, the marriage advice is about what I expected. Although the first few decades of the 20^th century were somewhat more progressive than the prior century, there was still a lot of Victorian baggage left from the separate spheres when it came to relationships. The passage that interested me (there are a few included in the article) was written in 1901, just at the beginning of the new century. The advice begins with the obvious: “‘First select a MAN’” (Wheeler Wilcox, par 2). At first glance, this might seem like a “well, DUH” kind of thing. But I think it’s interesting to note Wheeler Wilcox uses the word “select”. Sadly, many women in the 19^th century didn’t really chose a marriage partner — their circumstances often made marriage imperative, and they sometimes had to go with whatever was available. But the Gilded Age was the era of the New Woman, so women had choices, even in marriage partners.

Also interestingly, Wheeler Wilcox was no fool when it came to the personality of the Gilded Age man. She warns women, “[o]f course, he will be more or less selfish. That is the way parents rear their sons to be” (par 3). Her solution to this problem is for the wife to show patience and tolerance, and teach him to be a considerate, kind human being by modeling that behavior.

Some of the advice is actually quite sound, though. For example, Wheeler Wilcox suggests that, when a husband chides a wife about one of her faults, she ought to remind him he has faults as well and enter into an agreement with him so that they can both work on themselves (“‘Let us enter into a Mutual Improvement Society. I want to be everything you admire — you want to be everything I admire. I will try and do my part and you must do yours’” (Wheeler Wilcox, par 6)). There is the assumption here that men and women are equal partners in a marriage and therefore, must compromise and work together to make the marriage a happy one. This wasn’t exactly the attitude the Victorians had toward marriage (as you’ll see later).

Unfortunately, Wheeler Wilcox’s advice sort of goes downhill from there. Wives are told to be prepared to make sacrifices, stroke the husband’s ego, and please him as much as she can. She should create a happy, harmonious home, always having the house clean and looking her best. Wheeler Wilcox even suggests bad behavior (including alcoholism and adultery) should be accepted as a given for some men:

“Of course, we must make allowances for the occasional lawless and drunken mariner who sends his ship on the rocks and the worthless husband who does not appreciate life’s best gifts. There are men whom no woman on God’s earth could keep loyal or honest; but they are exceptions” (par 15)

Nevertheless, the attitude toward marriage and especially a woman’s role in it has clearly shifted from the Victorian period. Although the woman is still expected to play her role as the angel in the house, she is also advised to voice her displeasures in the marriage and expect more of her husband in terms of love, affection, and respect. Such, sadly, was less the case a century before. In another article by Click Americana, we get a taste of pre-Civil War marriage advice. There is no assumption that the woman is equal to the man in marriage. She is the subservient and should always remain so, abiding by her husband’s law in the home, never contradicting him (heaven forbid!), and centering her world around him.

In Pathfinding Women, Vivian is in a thankfully more progressive state of mind than that. Though she’s not quite a New Woman, she has her own ideas about what she wants in marriage, some of which she expresses in a scene with Monte Leblanc, the love interest in the book, and in the company of a Miss Sowberry, who is quite young but has been taught all the virtues of Victorian womanhood by a rather domineering mother:

“There are times when women are a burden to men.” Vivian cast her eyes across a table with the silver-gilled carp. “Just as sometimes men are a burden to women.”
“You have modern opinions about marriage, then?” [Mr. Leblanc] asked.
“Some,” Vivian admitted. “I believe, like Mrs. [Lucy] Stone, that women should keep their maiden names after marriage, if they wish. That’s one reason why I went back to being Miss Alderdice when my husband died.”

“A girl ought to make a home for her husband, wherever it is,” said Miss Sowberry but she sounded as if her opinion were being dictated by someone else.

To read more about Pathfinding Women, which will be out on September 13, check out this webpage. And to learn more about the series, you can go here.

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Works Cited:

Wheeler Wilcox, Ella. “Love, sense, & patience: The 3 most important things for a happy marriage (1901).” From “Tips for a happy marriage: Advice for newlyweds, from the 1900s.” Click Americana. Synchronista, LLC, 2011-2020. Web. 29 July 2020.

The Order of Actaeon

Photo Credit: Marble bust of Actaeon with animal skin on his head, Hadrianic Period (AD 117-138), Museo delle Navi, Nemi: Following Hadrian/Flickr/CC BY SA 2.0

As many of you know, if you’ve read my blog post about the title evolution of False Fathers, the idea of Actaeon, the hunter who earned the goddess Diana’s displeasure and paid the consequences, plays a role as a metaphor for Gilded Age masculinity in the book.

One of the ways that Actaeon (whose story you can find here) figures into False Fathers is in a male fraternity called The Order of Actaeon (or, as they refer to themselves, the “Actaeons”). I talked about the importance of male secret societies and fraternities in the 19^th century here. Many men belonged to such societies in the Gilded Age, because it was a way for them to cement their identity as men in the chaotic twists and turns of the last decades of the 19^th century, when the definition of masculinity was changing just like the definition of femininity. Women had the suffragists and the New Woman to help them cope with these changes, and men had their societies and fraternities.

The Order of Actaeon (which, by the way, is entirely fictional) operates on the principle that there is, in the Gilded Age, a “disturbing inclination of modern young men toward falling into the twin traps of profit-seeking and vicious competition characteristic of civilized life and thus losing their manly strength and virtue.” It began, in fact, so that older men (known as “Patriarchs”) could guide younger men (known as “Youths”) and help them live a purer, more decent life with beliefs and virtues that were honorable and admirable. Each Youth enters the order on the recommendation of a Patriarch who then becomes his mentor throughout his life (or the duration of his involvement with the Order).

The Order’s activities evolve mainly around masculine pursuits, such as carpentry, fishing, and hunting. In fact, the hunt is an important metaphor for the Actaeons and the reason why they named their fraternity after the Greek mortal. The Order believes that hunting develops skills of “strength, aggression, instincts, pride, and self-control.” To this end, the Order organizes weekend hunts, where each youth is expected to participate and submit to guidance by his Patriarch.

Another important aspect of the order is secrecy. They don’t even allow men to know one another’s real names. Each member that enters the order choses a name for himself by which he is known in the order (Jake chooses the name “Carlton,” his beloved grandmother’s maiden name). Neither are the men allowed to know about one another’s life outside of the order. This secrecy is so important that, as one of the men explains to Jake, one of their founding members was asked to leave after he revealed some of their activities to his wife.

The quotes I use above are from a document that appears in False Fathers, where the Order of Actaeon principles and philosophies are outlined in writing. Harland Stevens, the main father figure in Jake’s life, is the one who creates it, brought into the order as a Youth by the man who was asked to leave it and, now, one of the leading Patriarchs. Stevens’ vision of the orders’ philosophies are very clear and precise:

That emotional attachments may drain a man of his intelligence and virility, and he is to maintain some distance between himself and his loved ones beyond keeping the secrecy of the Order.
That modern man is forced to separate his pure life from his civilized life to cultivate his development and well-being.
That each man shall agree to the virtues of hunting not only as a means of athletic skill and success, but also as a way of developing his strength, aggression, cunning, and wile. He shall seek to make himself a skilled hunter and help others do the same.

The order and especially its vow of secrecy plays a major role in Jake’s journey at the end of the novel.

If you’d like to read an excerpt from False Fathers involving the Actaeons, you can do so by joining my readers group. For more about the book, go here. And don’t forget to check out the series page to find out more about the entire Waxwood series.

Release Day Blitz for False Fathers (Waxwood Series: Book 2)!

False Fathers Front Cover Photo Credit: Photo Credit: Portrait of a Young Man, Ferdinand von Wright, 1860s, portrait, oil on canvas, Finnish National Gallery: BotMultichill/Wikimedia Commons/PD old 100 expired

Title: False Fathers

Series: Waxwood Series, Book 2

Author: Tam May

Genre: Historical Fiction/Coming of Age

Release Date: December 28, 2019

Sometimes no father is better than a false father.

At nineteen, Jake Alderdice is shy, contemplative, and passionate about art. With the death of his grandfather, shipping magistrate Malcolm Alderdice, he becomes the new family patriarch and heir to Alderdice Shipping and Alderdice Luxury Liner. After two years of mourning, he is ready to add to the family honor just as all the Alderdice men have, but as an artist, not a shipping magistrate. His plans are delayed with his mother announces the family will be retreating to Waxwood, now a fashionable resort town favored by the San Francisco elite, for the summer, fulfilling her father’s dying wish to “go back”.

On the train, he meets Harland Stevens, an enigmatic but charming older man, who has come to Waxwood as chaperone and guide to his college-aged cousin Roger and Roger’s friends. Mr. Stevens, or, as he tells Jake, “just Stevens”, takes an interest in the young man’s ambitions, and introduces him to the town’s most prominent gallery owner. But when Jake takes his paintings for appraisal, the man delivers a fatal blow — Jake’s mythology-inspired paintings are too original for the market of realistic landscape paintings favored by Gilded Age patrons.

Stevens seizes the devastated and wandering Jake and counsels him toward a more aggressive but moralistic path to manhood inspired by Teddy Roosevelt and Thoreau. Jake proves himself to be more studious and serious than Roger and his friends. Impressed with the young man’s determination to take over his grandfather’s business, Stevens introduces him to The Order of Actaeon, a secret society built upon those ideals favored by his idols.

But the path to emotional maturity and masculine identity is, Jake learns, a complex thing in the Gilded Age. Will his journey free him from the Alderdice family illusions, half-truths, and lies that have kept him a child, just as it did his sister Vivian’s six years before? Or will it lead him into the world of Actaeon, where the hunter becomes the hunted?

You can pick up your copy of the book at a special promotional price at the following online retailers:

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Excerpt

The afternoon sun had arrived with its vengeance of rising heat. Jake took out his handkerchief and wiped at his forehead. At the same time, he felt something inside him shiver. He couldn’t help but think of what Vivian would have said, if she had heard the tale. He knew she would have found it one more reason to avoid Stevens, as the story would have struck her as another way in which Roger had been right about the way in which Stevens and his father engineered their will against the will of others.

“I suppose your father understood you.” He put the handkerchief away and made a shot through the hoop in front of him.

As Stevens set down his mallet down, Jake felt the weight of his expectant eyes. “I thought you would change your mind.”

“Change my mind?”

“About needing guidance,” said the redhead. “You needn’t be abashed. Other young men such as yourself have come to me when they needed a father too.”

“I didn’t say I needed a father.” Jake looked at the tussled grass at his feet. “I only meant I would be grateful for any ideas you have for me about my new undertakings.”

“As you wish,” said Stevens, though his eyes sparkled in the sun.

About the Author

Tam May grew up in the United States and earned her B.A. and M.A in English. She worked as an English college instructor and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher before she became a full-time writer. She started writing when she was 14, and writing became her voice. She writes fiction about characters who find their future by exploring their personal past influenced by the time in which they live.

Her first book, a collection of contemporary short stories titled Gnarled Bones And Other Stories, was nominated for a 2017 Summer Indie Book Award. She is currently working on a Gilded Age family saga. The first book, The Specter, is now available, and the second book, False Fathers, will be out in December, 2019. She is also working on a historical mystery series featuring a turn-of-the-century New Woman sleuth. Both series take place in Northern California.

She lives in Texas but calls San Francisco and the Bay Area “home”. When she’s not writing, she’s reading classic literature and historical fiction, watching classic films, or cooking up awesome vegetarian dishes.

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The Odd Duck: The Character of Jake Alderdice

[Jake Teaser]

Photo Credit: Father and son (Thomas Hopewell and his son Timothy), Frank Buchser, 1861, oil on canvas, Galerie Koller: Botaurus/Wikimedia Commons/PD art (PD old 100)

In an earlier version of False Fathers, my second book in the Waxwood Series, Jake Alderdice tells his mother how people have always thought of him as an “odd duck.” To me, this summarized Jake’s character not only in the story but in the canon of my own writing.

I won’t lie. Writing about Jake was a struggle for me for many reasons. On the one hand, since the Waxwood Series is about the deterioration (physically, mentally, and emotionally) of the Alderdice family, Jake’s story had to be told since he’s Vivian Alderdice’s younger brother. But I was nervous about writing the story of a male main character, even though Jake’s psychological reality was familiar to me.

The story I conceived of Jake in the original 3-part novel about the Alderdice family (which I talk about here) included Jake’s story. In fact, his story is the only one that remains more or less true to my original conception of it from that novel, in the sense that Jake comes of age amidst psychological circumtances many young men usually don’t have to deal with. But I realized when I started rewriting the story that I didn’t really know Jake at all. My own uneasiness about writing male characters (especially central ones) kept me from really digging deep into his character. I knew some things about him — that he was an artist, taught by his grandmother, that his mother had a particular loathing for him she didn’t have for his sister, and that his identity as a man (and the only surviving male of the family) was instrumental to his evolution. I liked him, but he felt remote to me, much more so than his sister Vivian or Gena Payne, the main character in Book 3 of the series.

What gave shape to the character of Jake was the historical time frame. When I wrote the book as contemporary fiction, Jake didn’t seem all that much different from other young men. He didn’t go for “sowing his wild oats,” but so do a lot of young men these days. He was an artist, but so are many others. His mother treated him as if he were a mistake, but so do a lot of other mothers (unfortunately).

So why did the historical context change this? Simply, I started to see Jake’s character against the backdrop of the Gilded Age. The psychology of gender has always interested me, not only regarding women but men as well. When I started researching masculinity in the Gilded Age (some of which I talk about here and here), I realized how complex the idea of what it meant to be a man back then was, almost more complex than what it was to be a woman (since women had some support with the suffragist movement and the New Woman ideal). As I wrote the drafts for this book, I got to know Jake better and understood his struggle to figure out who he was, not only in the shadow of the family half-truths, lies, and myths, but with his own personality and quirks that did not suit the growing ideals of masculinity at the end of the 19^th century.

So he became a character I appreciated and thought I could make readers appreciate as someone looking for what he wanted to be in a chaotic world with contradicting messages and conventions (not unlike young people in our world today). I could see not only his struggles, but also what he learns about his family, those around him who profess to help him, and, most importantly, himself.

To learn more about Jake, you can check out the series page here. To order your copy of False Fathers, which is now at a special preorder price, go here. Plus, you can read a bonus excerpt from the book if you join my readers group here.