Charity and Sylvia by Rachel Hope Cleves

Author:Rachel Hope Cleves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

Miss Bryant Was the Man

1820

IN AUGUST 1820, census takers fanned out across the state of Vermont to execute the decennial record of the nation’s population. An appointed recorder visited roughly 130 households in Weybridge, noting the race, sex, age, and occupation of the inhabitants within each. The only names he took were the heads of household. A great many Benjamins, Samuels, and Williams filled his rolls. About halfway through his record, after knocking at the doors of Asaph Hayward and Benjamin Hagar, the visitor inscribed the first woman’s name into the record. Occupying a small house near the Hagar farm, he found two women, in the age group 26–44 years, who operated a commercial business. In careful penmanship, he recorded the proper spelling of the head of the household: “Charity Bryant.”1

The census taker ten years later had fine handwriting, but poor spelling. Between the Hayward and Hagar farms, he enumerated a household headed by “Carity Briand,” including two women, one aged 40–50 and the other 20–30.2 Sylvia was actually thirty-five at the time, but compared to most Weybridge women her age, who bore the physical strain of multiple pregnancies, Sylvia likely appeared quite young. In 1840, the census taker got both Charity’s name and Sylvia’s age right. He also recorded a third woman aged 30–40 living in the household, one of the couple’s sewing assistants.3 The 1840 census included many more women as heads of household than had been the case twenty years before, but Sylvia remained unnamed within the federal population count until 1850, the year that dependents’ names finally entered the rolls. In that Seventh Census of the United States, Sylvia Drake appeared for the first time in the official records of the American population. She was sixty-six years old.4

By 1850, the legal doctrine of “coverture” that had long subsumed married women’s civic identities under the identities of their husbands was beginning to weaken. The passage of married women’s property acts in many states entitled wives to own property separately from their husbands; an emergent women’s rights movement called for women’s prerogative to make their own decisions about childbearing; and wives and other dependent members of households finally had their names entered into the census. But the dismantling of coverture was a slow-moving process. Wives living with their husbands did not become coequal heads of household in 1850; they retained their subordinate position beneath their husbands. Accordingly, when Sylvia Drake was counted in the seventh decennial U.S. census, her name fell below Charity Bryant’s.5

From the July day in 1807 that Sylvia came to live with Charity until the October day in 1851 that death divided them, Charity headed the women’s household in their own eyes, as well as in the eyes of their family, their friends, and their community. William Cullen Bryant likened Charity to a “husband,” and Sylvia to her “fond wife.”6 Charity used the term “my help-meet” to describe Sylvia, adopting a common synonym for wife, given to Eve in the book of Genesis. By extension, Charity figured herself as the Adam-like patriarch within the household.

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