Ida Tarbell- "Bachelor Soul," Transitional Woman, or Both?
Ida Tarbell
Library of Congress
by Kathy Warnes
“A sound working imagination inspires a healthy contempt for copy-book lives. If we only had as young girls as much interest and good sense about life as about looks we would save ourselves many a mistake..”
Ida M. Tarbell
Many Twenty First Century women would consider Ida Minerva Tarbell’s views about women and their place in society quite old fashioned, yet her intellect ranged far ahead of her time. She saw potential and possibilities in her own life and acted upon them, but expanding her vision to the lives of other women seemed to be more difficult in practice for her than in theory. In fact, like most human beings, Ida Tarbell could be a bundle of intellectual and emotional contradictions at times.
Ida Tarbell, the “Bachelor” Soul” in a Female Body
Ida Minerva Tarbell once called herself “a bachelor soul” and in many ways her soul along with her intellect and career followed the masculine instead of the feminine expectations of late Nineteenth, early Twentieth century society. She said more than once that she preferred men to women and that women were too emotional to vote or function in the masculine world. Another remark that she made about women seems to express her contempt toward them. She said that the only reason she was glad that she was a woman was because “she wouldn’t have to marry one.”
Although Ida Tarbell’s “bachelor soul” helped her achieve much in the man’s world of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, she believed in the Cult of Domesticity tenets that said men and women had separate spheres and a woman’s place remained firmly in the home. A woman’s purpose was to make a home that served as a refugee for her bread winning husband, and a nursery and nurturer for her children. Ida Tarbell never married. Instead, against her societal norms, she became one of the foremost journalists and writers of her time.
Perhaps Ida Tarbell felt ambivalent in her attitude towards a woman’s place – home or workplace – because her grandmother believed woman should stay in the home and her mother was a suffragist. Tarbell had a foot in both worlds, although at times her steps didn’t appear to rest firmly in either world.
Possibly with just a little tongue in cheek, Ida speculated about the direction of her mother’s life in different circumstances. “Had she never married, I feel sure she would have sought to ‘vindicate her sex’ by seeking a higher education, possibly a profession.” The woman’s suffrage fight “would have delighted her.”
In a March 30, 1913, New York Times interview, Ida Tarbell recalled crusaders for women’s rights being welcomed at her home. “I remember best Mary Livermore and Frances Willard – not that either touched me, saw me; of this neglect I was acutely conscious…Men were nicer than women to me, I mentally noted.”
Unlike her mother, Ida Tarbell did not believe women should vote, although she disagreed with the anti-suffragists about three major points: economic independence, individual freedom for women, and the right of a woman to remain single and orchestrate her own life. Ida sought to maintain a balanced view about the balance of power between men and women. Addressing the claims of the woman’s movement, she believed that women were not the only gender in subjugation. As far as Ida was concerned, there were not only “down trodden women, but also henpecked men.” She believed that the major unfair treatment of women was that women who had to do the spending must ask for money or depend on charging. She thought that the two rights worth going after were the right to an education and the right to earn a living.
Ida Tarbell, Transitional Women
Her society and her environment also shaped Ida Tarbell’s views. She was born in a log farmhouse in Hatch Hollow, four miles south of Wattsburg in the rolling green hills of Erie County, Pennsylvania, on November 5, 1857. Her parents Franklin Sumner Tarbell and Esther Ann McCullough Tarbell had English and Scottish roots. Franklin was a teacher/carpenter with the proverbial pioneer itchy feet and Esther Ann Tarbell McCullough had taught school before she married.
The Tarbells had four children, and when Ida, the oldest was still a baby the family changed their plans to move to a farm in Iowa and moved instead to Rouseville, Pennsylvania. Erie and Crawford County Pennsylvania buzzed with oil strike excitement in towns like Pit Hole and Titusville and Franklin Tarbell started a business making wooden oil tanks. In 1870, he moved his family to Titusville and he and Esther converted from Presbyterianism to ardent Methodism.
Ida attended high school in Titusville and developed an ardent interest in science. Microscopes fascinated her and initially she thought that she might attempt to solve life’s dilemmas using biology, until she discovered that science careers were not open to women in the 1870s. Like many girls of her generation, Ida’s youthful efforts to reconcile inherited religion with scientific revelation stripped her faith of dogma, clouded her ethical horizons, and expanded her life possibilities beyond the confining walls of home.
In 1876, Ida Tarbell entered Allegheny College, a Methodist college in Meadville. College intensified her desire for a career, but she found few career opportunities for independent women. When she graduated in 1880, she accepted a position as a principal at a seminary in Poland, Mahoning County, Ohio.
Exploring the country around Poland, Ida glimpsed the destruction of industry replacing farm country. She wrote about the destruction of beauty, the destruction of behavioral standards, social problems, increasing love of money above everything else, and instability of work. She later realized how much these factors shaped her future interests and thinking.
During her two years in Poland, Ohio, Ida experienced another revelation that profoundly influenced her intellectual career and her ideas about women and their place in society. In her book, All in A Day’s Work, she said that during a drive into the country around Poland she first saw what she believed to be proof that women are not inherently peaceful. As Ida put it, “I learned the meaning of Maenads, Furies, as we came upon a maddened, threatening crowd rushing towards the offices of the mills which had been shut down without warning. It was led by big robust shrieking women, their hair flying, their clothes disheveled. It was a look into a world of which I knew nothing.”
Discovering that her teaching duties stifled her spirit, Ida left after two years in Poland, Ohio, and returned to Meadville. In Meadville, she found work as a writer-editor on the Chautauquan, a monthly magazine expressing the Chautauqua idea of self culture and self improvement. After eight years of social reform and self improvement, Ida collected her savings and left for Paris in 1891.
Ida Tarbell, Muckraking Journalist and Biographer
In Paris Ida lived with friends in the Latin Quarter and attended lectures at the Sorbonne. She researched the role of women in the French Revolution at the Bibliotheque Nationale and wrote articles for several American Midwestern newspapers. In 1892, Samuel.S. McClure, usually called S.S., a magazine editor, found Ida in Paris and convinced her to write some articles for him. Just a year later he published her article about Louis Pasteur, connecting her with McClure’s magazine for the next twelve years.
When she returned to America in 1894, McClure commissioned Ida Tarbell to write a serial biography of Napoleon Bonaparte which McClure’s Magazine’s readers eagerly read. Next, she wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln, whom she revered and continuously wrote about over the next forty years.
By 1901, Ida Tarbell had proven her journalistic skill and become an important staff member on the staff of McClure’s Magazine. At this point, S.S. McClure decided to devote his magazine to exposing the problems in American society and the group of journalists who wrote about these abuses came to be called Muckrakers.
In 1901, S.S. McClure gave Ida Tarbell her most important assignment to date, an expose of the oil interests of John D. Rockefeller. She had a unique perspective in writing her history and exposing Rockefeller’s campaign against the interests of oilmen like her father and brother. Her assignment began as a series of articles carefully exposing the oil trust and ended as a study of corporate arrogance, dishonesty, and greed. Her assignment lasted five years and came to encompass nineteenth articles in McClure’s Magazine. In1904, it was published as the two volume The History of the Standard Oil Company.
The History of the Standard Oil Company gained Ida Tarbell national recognition. In 1905, she traveled to Kansas and Oklahoma to report the controversies that oil strikes created, and she soon became a reluctant champion of antimonopoly. In All in the Day’s Work she described herself as “fifty, fagged, wanting to go home while I collected trustworthy information for my articles.”
By the time the United States government brought an antitrust suit against Standard Oil in 1907, Ida no longer cared about Standard Oil and monopolies. In 1906, Samuel McClure’s managing style and personal behavior caused his staff at McClure’s Magazine to disintegrate and Ida Tarbell, John S. Phillips, Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens resigned from his staff. Later, they and Finley Peter Dunne and William Allen White acquired control of the American Magazine. By the end of 1906, Ida had written another major series, this time against high tariffs, but she didn’t expanded her interest in tariffs to accept a place on Woodrow Wilson’s newly created federal Tariff Commission in 1916.
Ida Tarbell, Activist and Capitalist
Even though women won the right to vote and voted in their first national election in 1920, Ida Tarbell still did not agree with women’s rights. She felt that suffragists, urban bosses and trade union leaders mistakenly relied on force to achieve their goals and advance human progress. She felt more sympathy for the settlement house work and peace activities of Jane Addams and the movement, but she personally didn’t join such humanitarian endeavors as the Ford Peace Ship.
Henry Ford did help convert Ida to a fresh dream – welfare capitalism, or what she termed “The Golden Rule of Industry.” She traveled widely from 1912 to 1915, examining factory conditions and Henry Ford’s methods of mass production, wage policies, and his “sociological” treatment of his work force intrigued her. She also felt that Frederick W. Taylor’s ideas about scientific management and efficiency management were cures for strikes and unionization. Some of her muckraker friends thought that her new belief in corporate fairness was naive and shortsighted.
In 1915, comfortably settled in in Connecticut farmhouse, Ida Tarbell resigned from the American Magazine, but for the next twenty years she continued to be a prolific freelance writer and lecturer. She participated in government conferences about industrial problems and in 1919, went to France to report the effects of the war on that country and Europe in general. In 1926, she went to Italy to investigate Mussolini and his Fascist government.
Next, Ida wrote a biography of steel baron Elbert H. Gary. She turned to writing biography because the post World War I atmosphere at home and abroad depressed her and in 1925, she wrote a biography of steel baron Elbert H. Gary, praising what she believed to be his “ethical capitalism.” Her 1932 study of the career of American industrialist and found of RCA, lawyer, and diplomat Owen D. Young also stressed the positive works and contributions of capitalists. She praised Owen Young and Mussolini for their efforts at national industrial planning.
In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election revived Ida Tarbell’s hopes for the revival of the politics of democracy. She enthusiastically supported most of his New Deal Programs, although she had reservations about the New Deal administrators’ tendencies toward improvisation.
Tall, grave, and alert, Ida Tarbell retained her brisk, alert, and active mind into old age. On January 6, 1944, she died of pneumonia in Bridgeport, Connecticut, at age 87. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
References
Brady, Kathleen. Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.
Camhi, Jane Jerome. Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism. Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1994.
Weinberg, Steve. Taking on the Trust: How Ida Tarbell Brought Down John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.
Ida Tarbell Online Books
A Few of the Books that Ida Tarbell Wrote
Madame Roland. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895.
The History of the Standard Oil Company. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan Co. 1904
He Knew Lincoln. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. 1909.
The Tariff in Our Times. New York: macmillan Co., 1911.
The Business of Being A Woman. New York: Macmillan Co., 1914.
Peacemakers-Blessed and Otherwise. New York: Macmillan Co., 1919.
The Rising of the Tide. New York: Macmillan Co., 1914.
In the Footsteps of the Lincolns. New York: Macmillan Co. 1924.
The Life of Elbert H. Gary. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1925.
Owen D. Young: A new Type of Industrial Leader. New York: Macmillan Co., 1932.
The Nationalizing of Business, 1878-1989. New York: Macmillan Co., 1936.
All in the Day’s Work. New York: Macmillan Co., 1939.
Madam Roland-1896
Napoleon with a Sketch of Josephine- 1895
Life of Abraham Lincoln -1897
The History of the Standard Oil Company – 1903
Ida Tarbell Papers
Pelletier Library, Allegheny College, Meadville, PA.
Drake Well Museum, Titusville, PA
The Sophia Smith Library, Smith College, Northampton, MA
“A sound working imagination inspires a healthy contempt for copy-book lives. If we only had as young girls as much interest and good sense about life as about looks we would save ourselves many a mistake..”
Ida M. Tarbell
Many Twenty First Century women would consider Ida Minerva Tarbell’s views about women and their place in society quite old fashioned, yet her intellect ranged far ahead of her time. She saw potential and possibilities in her own life and acted upon them, but expanding her vision to the lives of other women seemed to be more difficult in practice for her than in theory. In fact, like most human beings, Ida Tarbell could be a bundle of intellectual and emotional contradictions at times.
Ida Tarbell, the “Bachelor” Soul” in a Female Body
Ida Minerva Tarbell once called herself “a bachelor soul” and in many ways her soul along with her intellect and career followed the masculine instead of the feminine expectations of late Nineteenth, early Twentieth century society. She said more than once that she preferred men to women and that women were too emotional to vote or function in the masculine world. Another remark that she made about women seems to express her contempt toward them. She said that the only reason she was glad that she was a woman was because “she wouldn’t have to marry one.”
Although Ida Tarbell’s “bachelor soul” helped her achieve much in the man’s world of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, she believed in the Cult of Domesticity tenets that said men and women had separate spheres and a woman’s place remained firmly in the home. A woman’s purpose was to make a home that served as a refugee for her bread winning husband, and a nursery and nurturer for her children. Ida Tarbell never married. Instead, against her societal norms, she became one of the foremost journalists and writers of her time.
Perhaps Ida Tarbell felt ambivalent in her attitude towards a woman’s place – home or workplace – because her grandmother believed woman should stay in the home and her mother was a suffragist. Tarbell had a foot in both worlds, although at times her steps didn’t appear to rest firmly in either world.
Possibly with just a little tongue in cheek, Ida speculated about the direction of her mother’s life in different circumstances. “Had she never married, I feel sure she would have sought to ‘vindicate her sex’ by seeking a higher education, possibly a profession.” The woman’s suffrage fight “would have delighted her.”
In a March 30, 1913, New York Times interview, Ida Tarbell recalled crusaders for women’s rights being welcomed at her home. “I remember best Mary Livermore and Frances Willard – not that either touched me, saw me; of this neglect I was acutely conscious…Men were nicer than women to me, I mentally noted.”
Unlike her mother, Ida Tarbell did not believe women should vote, although she disagreed with the anti-suffragists about three major points: economic independence, individual freedom for women, and the right of a woman to remain single and orchestrate her own life. Ida sought to maintain a balanced view about the balance of power between men and women. Addressing the claims of the woman’s movement, she believed that women were not the only gender in subjugation. As far as Ida was concerned, there were not only “down trodden women, but also henpecked men.” She believed that the major unfair treatment of women was that women who had to do the spending must ask for money or depend on charging. She thought that the two rights worth going after were the right to an education and the right to earn a living.
Ida Tarbell, Transitional Women
Her society and her environment also shaped Ida Tarbell’s views. She was born in a log farmhouse in Hatch Hollow, four miles south of Wattsburg in the rolling green hills of Erie County, Pennsylvania, on November 5, 1857. Her parents Franklin Sumner Tarbell and Esther Ann McCullough Tarbell had English and Scottish roots. Franklin was a teacher/carpenter with the proverbial pioneer itchy feet and Esther Ann Tarbell McCullough had taught school before she married.
The Tarbells had four children, and when Ida, the oldest was still a baby the family changed their plans to move to a farm in Iowa and moved instead to Rouseville, Pennsylvania. Erie and Crawford County Pennsylvania buzzed with oil strike excitement in towns like Pit Hole and Titusville and Franklin Tarbell started a business making wooden oil tanks. In 1870, he moved his family to Titusville and he and Esther converted from Presbyterianism to ardent Methodism.
Ida attended high school in Titusville and developed an ardent interest in science. Microscopes fascinated her and initially she thought that she might attempt to solve life’s dilemmas using biology, until she discovered that science careers were not open to women in the 1870s. Like many girls of her generation, Ida’s youthful efforts to reconcile inherited religion with scientific revelation stripped her faith of dogma, clouded her ethical horizons, and expanded her life possibilities beyond the confining walls of home.
In 1876, Ida Tarbell entered Allegheny College, a Methodist college in Meadville. College intensified her desire for a career, but she found few career opportunities for independent women. When she graduated in 1880, she accepted a position as a principal at a seminary in Poland, Mahoning County, Ohio.
Exploring the country around Poland, Ida glimpsed the destruction of industry replacing farm country. She wrote about the destruction of beauty, the destruction of behavioral standards, social problems, increasing love of money above everything else, and instability of work. She later realized how much these factors shaped her future interests and thinking.
During her two years in Poland, Ohio, Ida experienced another revelation that profoundly influenced her intellectual career and her ideas about women and their place in society. In her book, All in A Day’s Work, she said that during a drive into the country around Poland she first saw what she believed to be proof that women are not inherently peaceful. As Ida put it, “I learned the meaning of Maenads, Furies, as we came upon a maddened, threatening crowd rushing towards the offices of the mills which had been shut down without warning. It was led by big robust shrieking women, their hair flying, their clothes disheveled. It was a look into a world of which I knew nothing.”
Discovering that her teaching duties stifled her spirit, Ida left after two years in Poland, Ohio, and returned to Meadville. In Meadville, she found work as a writer-editor on the Chautauquan, a monthly magazine expressing the Chautauqua idea of self culture and self improvement. After eight years of social reform and self improvement, Ida collected her savings and left for Paris in 1891.
Ida Tarbell, Muckraking Journalist and Biographer
In Paris Ida lived with friends in the Latin Quarter and attended lectures at the Sorbonne. She researched the role of women in the French Revolution at the Bibliotheque Nationale and wrote articles for several American Midwestern newspapers. In 1892, Samuel.S. McClure, usually called S.S., a magazine editor, found Ida in Paris and convinced her to write some articles for him. Just a year later he published her article about Louis Pasteur, connecting her with McClure’s magazine for the next twelve years.
When she returned to America in 1894, McClure commissioned Ida Tarbell to write a serial biography of Napoleon Bonaparte which McClure’s Magazine’s readers eagerly read. Next, she wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln, whom she revered and continuously wrote about over the next forty years.
By 1901, Ida Tarbell had proven her journalistic skill and become an important staff member on the staff of McClure’s Magazine. At this point, S.S. McClure decided to devote his magazine to exposing the problems in American society and the group of journalists who wrote about these abuses came to be called Muckrakers.
In 1901, S.S. McClure gave Ida Tarbell her most important assignment to date, an expose of the oil interests of John D. Rockefeller. She had a unique perspective in writing her history and exposing Rockefeller’s campaign against the interests of oilmen like her father and brother. Her assignment began as a series of articles carefully exposing the oil trust and ended as a study of corporate arrogance, dishonesty, and greed. Her assignment lasted five years and came to encompass nineteenth articles in McClure’s Magazine. In1904, it was published as the two volume The History of the Standard Oil Company.
The History of the Standard Oil Company gained Ida Tarbell national recognition. In 1905, she traveled to Kansas and Oklahoma to report the controversies that oil strikes created, and she soon became a reluctant champion of antimonopoly. In All in the Day’s Work she described herself as “fifty, fagged, wanting to go home while I collected trustworthy information for my articles.”
By the time the United States government brought an antitrust suit against Standard Oil in 1907, Ida no longer cared about Standard Oil and monopolies. In 1906, Samuel McClure’s managing style and personal behavior caused his staff at McClure’s Magazine to disintegrate and Ida Tarbell, John S. Phillips, Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens resigned from his staff. Later, they and Finley Peter Dunne and William Allen White acquired control of the American Magazine. By the end of 1906, Ida had written another major series, this time against high tariffs, but she didn’t expanded her interest in tariffs to accept a place on Woodrow Wilson’s newly created federal Tariff Commission in 1916.
Ida Tarbell, Activist and Capitalist
Even though women won the right to vote and voted in their first national election in 1920, Ida Tarbell still did not agree with women’s rights. She felt that suffragists, urban bosses and trade union leaders mistakenly relied on force to achieve their goals and advance human progress. She felt more sympathy for the settlement house work and peace activities of Jane Addams and the movement, but she personally didn’t join such humanitarian endeavors as the Ford Peace Ship.
Henry Ford did help convert Ida to a fresh dream – welfare capitalism, or what she termed “The Golden Rule of Industry.” She traveled widely from 1912 to 1915, examining factory conditions and Henry Ford’s methods of mass production, wage policies, and his “sociological” treatment of his work force intrigued her. She also felt that Frederick W. Taylor’s ideas about scientific management and efficiency management were cures for strikes and unionization. Some of her muckraker friends thought that her new belief in corporate fairness was naive and shortsighted.
In 1915, comfortably settled in in Connecticut farmhouse, Ida Tarbell resigned from the American Magazine, but for the next twenty years she continued to be a prolific freelance writer and lecturer. She participated in government conferences about industrial problems and in 1919, went to France to report the effects of the war on that country and Europe in general. In 1926, she went to Italy to investigate Mussolini and his Fascist government.
Next, Ida wrote a biography of steel baron Elbert H. Gary. She turned to writing biography because the post World War I atmosphere at home and abroad depressed her and in 1925, she wrote a biography of steel baron Elbert H. Gary, praising what she believed to be his “ethical capitalism.” Her 1932 study of the career of American industrialist and found of RCA, lawyer, and diplomat Owen D. Young also stressed the positive works and contributions of capitalists. She praised Owen Young and Mussolini for their efforts at national industrial planning.
In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election revived Ida Tarbell’s hopes for the revival of the politics of democracy. She enthusiastically supported most of his New Deal Programs, although she had reservations about the New Deal administrators’ tendencies toward improvisation.
Tall, grave, and alert, Ida Tarbell retained her brisk, alert, and active mind into old age. On January 6, 1944, she died of pneumonia in Bridgeport, Connecticut, at age 87. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
References
Brady, Kathleen. Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.
Camhi, Jane Jerome. Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism. Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1994.
Weinberg, Steve. Taking on the Trust: How Ida Tarbell Brought Down John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.
Ida Tarbell Online Books
A Few of the Books that Ida Tarbell Wrote
Madame Roland. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895.
The History of the Standard Oil Company. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan Co. 1904
He Knew Lincoln. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. 1909.
The Tariff in Our Times. New York: macmillan Co., 1911.
The Business of Being A Woman. New York: Macmillan Co., 1914.
Peacemakers-Blessed and Otherwise. New York: Macmillan Co., 1919.
The Rising of the Tide. New York: Macmillan Co., 1914.
In the Footsteps of the Lincolns. New York: Macmillan Co. 1924.
The Life of Elbert H. Gary. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1925.
Owen D. Young: A new Type of Industrial Leader. New York: Macmillan Co., 1932.
The Nationalizing of Business, 1878-1989. New York: Macmillan Co., 1936.
All in the Day’s Work. New York: Macmillan Co., 1939.
Madam Roland-1896
Napoleon with a Sketch of Josephine- 1895
Life of Abraham Lincoln -1897
The History of the Standard Oil Company – 1903
Ida Tarbell Papers
Pelletier Library, Allegheny College, Meadville, PA.
Drake Well Museum, Titusville, PA
The Sophia Smith Library, Smith College, Northampton, MA
