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“One Can't Live on Air”: Sarah McComb and the Problem of Old-Age Income for Single Women Teachers, 1870s–1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Linda Van Ingen
Linda Van Ingen*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska-Kearney; e-mail: vanin-genL1@unk.edu
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Alone in her last phase of life, Sarah McComb copied a poem onto the back of a postcard that read, “And now… what wait I for? No home, no welcome, nobody who needs me; no love, to which in my loneliness I can turn. And now… what wait I for?” She died in January 1937, not long after she “fell and broke her thigh” the previous December. She was ninety-one years old. Her hospital bills and funeral invoice, like most of her expenses, were sent to her brother's daughter. Her old-age dependency on extended kin, however, was not inevitable. As a single, childless, white middle-class woman, Sarah had supported her independence through itinerant teaching, traveling the American west including Alaska, with additional adventures to Guatemala and Cuba. As she approached her sixties, she pursued alternative strategies for income, intensifying her efforts to earn a profit through business ventures while continuing to teach for as long as she could. Despite her determination, Sarah faced old age without savings of her own; she would not be able to finance her independence once she stopped teaching. When that time finally came, she was seventy-six years old and had to turn to her brother for help. Securing his support, however, was a proposition fraught with familial tension and personal anxiety. Although women like Sarah valued their independence, they struggled to carry this independence into old age.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 172 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 History of Education Society 

References

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25 Sarah noted in her diary on board the Granada that Jack “gave me a copy of ‘Burn's poems” and that she had spent “most of the time” with him while at sea. Many poems and letters from Jack also attest to an egalitarian spirit of endearment and passion typical of a companionate union. Sarah McComb, Diary, 18 April 1880, in author's possession; McComb, Jack to Sarah Voorheis, 18 August 1880, file 35, carton 1; Jack McComb to Sarah Voorheis McComb, 7 January 1883, carton 1; Marriage license, 30 January 1882, Alameda county, California, file 96, carton 2, Keyes Papers. See also Davis, Rebecca L., “‘No Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry': The Companionate Marriage Controversy,” Journal of American History 94, no. 4 (March 2008): 1137–63.Google Scholar

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