Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[T]he future looked bleak for Mary Catherine Severance. Growing up on a less-than-prosperous Vermont farm during the early 1800s, she saw that little awaited her but unrelenting labor.
“Everyone in my father’s family was early taught to work,” she wrote in an unpublished autobiography that she penned in her 80s at the request of her son. Severance, as she was known, was no exception from the family tradition.
As a young girl, her chores included fetching her family’s drinking, washing and cooking water from a stream near the home. She would carry the water back in a pair of buckets attached to a yoke that rested across her shoulders. When she returned to the house, she would heat the water over a fire she had made.
Then the real drudgery began. She would set to washing the family’s laundry, working with her hands and arms in the hot water and scrub until her skin would blister and peel.
The story of Severance’s travails is detailed in an article by the late Deborah Clifford for Vermont History, the journal of the Vermont Historical Society. A leading historian of Vermont women, Clifford moved to the state when her husband, Nicholas, became a professor at Middlebury College in the 1960s. Clifford earned a master’s degree in history at the University of Vermont while at the same time raising four daughters. She no doubt could identify to some extent with the challenges experienced by women like Severance.
It is perhaps not surprising that the point of Clifford’s article is not so much the grinding toil that Severance faced, but how she managed to obtain an education that helped her escape it.
Severance’s early education was scant, and typical of the age. Born in 1821 in Middlebury, Severance attended the local district school occasionally during the summer term, which ran from May to September. This was the busiest time of year on the farm and parents were often happy to have little ones out from under foot. As she grew older, and more helpful around the house, Severance spent less time at school. When Severance was 12, her mother gave birth to her seventh child and for a time, the bulk of the housework fell to Severance.
But she maintained her strong drive to learn. Clifford points out that Severance was lucky to be raised in a college town, where an interest in education suffused the air. In 1814, Emma Willard, a pioneer in women’s education, launched the Middlebury Female Seminary. Willard was gone by the time Severance enrolled there, but the school maintained a fine reputation. Though Severance writes that her parents were supportive of her getting an education, her grandfather was perplexed that she would study such subjects as Latin, Greek and advanced mathematics. “What good will they do you?” he asked. “My girls never studied these things and they got along all right.”
In her autobiography, Severance tells her life story as if each step was leading in a logical direction. Clifford, however, notes that the direction of Severance’s life might not have seemed so clear as she was living it.
To cover the cost of his daughter’s education, Severance’s father arranged for her to live with the family of a friend, Zachaus Bass, a prominent doctor in town. On the surface, the arrangement seemed ideal; in reality, it was anything but. Severance had to clean the house and wash the laundry for a family of nine, and hang the laundry out to dry before she left for school each day. The demands of Bass’ wife, Susan, resumed the moment Severance returned from class. The situation left Severance exhausted with no time to study.
The next summer, Severance, then 16, took a job teaching at the district school in Ripton. But she worked so hard that she soon ran herself ragged and developed what she termed a “nervous disease.” In all likelihood, Clifford suggests, Severance was suffering from what would have classified as hysteria, a complaint commonly diagnosed among women in the 19th century. Clifford quotes a scholar who described hysteria as the outward display of the conflict between women’s “desire for autonomy and independence and the reality of their subordinate roles.”
Severance explained her symptoms: “(a)nything coming suddenly would set me all in a tremble. A heavy thunderstorm accompanied by vivid lightning would so affect me that sometimes it would take two to keep me in my chair.”
The diagnosis had the effect of freeing Severance from her work at the Ripton school or at the family home, which at the time was the town poor farm, her father having become overseer of the town’s poor.
Instead, she spent a year recuperating at her grandparents’ home, before returning for another term at the women’s seminary in Middlebury. Severance and two other young women set up house in the village during the term, renting rooms together. Suddenly Severance had a degree of autonomy, and freedom from labor, that she had never before experienced. Instead of nearly constant labor, she could focus on her study of astronomy, history and geometry.
But after finishing the term, instead of continuing at the seminary, she returned to her local district school, which had hired a new teacher, David Bushnell, a Castleton Seminary student who planned to attend Middlebury College. With him, Severance studied chemistry, geometry and algebra. She wrote that in geometry and algebra, she was the only student, meaning she “could go so far and so fast as I pleased.”
Bushnell told Severance that she should continue her math studies at Castleton. She took the advice and enrolled at the coed institution. But Severance found the school restrictive. Castleton’s principal talked her out of taking math. Instead, her course load included French, which cost her extra.
She complained about her fellow female students, who seemed happy to use Castleton merely as a finishing school. The most important thing she gained at Castleton was the acquaintance of Warren Winchester, a senior, who she would meet again when he began attending Middlebury.
Returning home after the term at Castleton, Severance took a job teaching the summer term at a district school. Winchester appeared at her home one day, asking whether she might recommend him as a teacher for the winter term. She agreed and Winchester got the job. He was a natural teacher, Severance wrote. She was so eager to attend class with him that she returned to the district school. Rising before dawn each winter day and, working by candlelight, she did her family’s laundry and made breakfast. Then she walked the three miles to school.
It must have been a heady time for Severance. In Winchester, she had found a man who valued her intellect. He taught her Latin and Greek and the works of Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Wordsworth.
The two married a year after Winchester graduated from Middlebury. They had a traditional 19th century division of labor, Clifford notes: He became a Congregational minister, while she cared for the house and homeschooled their children. But when time allowed, Severance taught Sunday school, ran prayer meetings and joined the Women’s Temperance Union, and occasionally wrote sermons for her husband to deliver.
Through her own education, Clifford wrote, Mary Catherine Severance Winchester had “escaped a potential life of rural drudgery for a more refined and socially useful existence as a minister’s wife.”
