Civil War Quilts: Petticoat Press# 6: Old Maid's Ramble For Kate Field

Petticoat Press# 6: Old Maid's Ramble For Kate Field by

Jeanne Arnieri

"Old Maid" was an insult when single women were considered a threat to domestic order.

Women of marriageable age were urged to "settle" rather than face spinsterhood.

Mary Katherine Keemle Field (1838 – 1896)

She never married.

Old Maid's Ramble by Becky Brown

Kate Field was born in St. Louis to a pair of actors. In her mid-teens they sent her to live with her mother's sister Cordelia Riddle Sanford who'd married wealthy Boston textile manufacturer Milton H. Sanford. After boarding school the Sanfords took her to Europe. Precocious Kate in her teens began writing columns about her travel for the influential Springfield Republican under the penname Straws, Jr., after a pseudonym her father had used with his published poetry.

Old Maid's Ramble by Elsie Ridgley

As the Civil War approached Kate and her Uncle Milton differed in opinion on many topics from John Brown's terrorism to whether girls like Kate should be writing for the public. He threatened to cease supporting her unless she promised to cease writing. She did not acquiesce. Her 1861 memoir of a European friend poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was published in the Atlantic Monthly.

When the Civil War began Uncle Milton increased his fortune by manufacturing blankets for the Union Army, money he invested in horse racing. Kate earned her own living writing about topics such as the 1864 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair in New York to raise funds for Union soldiers' aid.

"General Fremont and Mrs. Fremont were there, he looking very intensely out of that eagle eye, and she the embodiment of a strong, brilliant, impulsive woman. General McClellan also was there, creating a little curiosity and indeed a vastly interesting study to the impartial critic. It were not possible for such a head and face to save a country."

The Metropolitan Fair

Old Maid's Ramble by Denniele Bohannon

For five years in the first half of the 1890s, Kate published Kate Field's Washington.

Kate, like many political commenters, was not always on the side of the angels. She was caught up in anti-immigrant hysteria in the years when your great-grandparents and mine were escaping wars and famine.

My European grandparents from Ukraine and Belarus

who came here about 1890.

Nazis killed their parents in the 1940s.

"I said I failed to see the virtue of opening our arms to the scum of Europe and of closing them to the Chinese, who never get drunk, who do their work and don't vote, and ask nothing in return except to live." A speech at the 1893 World's Fair.

She took some rather eccentric positions such as opposing the Statue of Liberty. After trying the stage for a short career she spent time in Utah studying Mormonism to write about her opposition to polygamy.

Old Maid's Ramble by Denniele Bohannon

At the end of the century she traveled to Hawaii, advocating U.S. acquisition of the Sandwich Islands, and perhaps hoping to find relief from an unspecified health problem. She died there of pneumonia in 1896 at 57 to national shock.