Читать книгу Dreamers of a New Day - Sheila Rowbotham - Страница 8

What caused so many women from diverse vantage points to set about altering how daily life was lived? Part of the answer lies in force of circumstance. The lives of individual women were caught up in the large-scale economic changes which brought upheaval and suffering in their wake. Powerful vested interests were intruding into daily life, in the countryside as well as the towns and cities. The future American anarchist Kate Austin resisted when she, and the farmer she married, were evicted by the powerful River Company from the Des Moines River Basin. The federal government had granted the company land on the understanding that they would improve it. Instead, the company quickly sold it on to speculators.¹ Lizzie Holmes was uprooted from her Ohio home after a violent strike of railroad workers in 1877. In retrospect she reflected:

‘The working classes’ was a term that was just beginning to be heard and I longed to know more of the people set off as belonging to a caste . . . With my sister I went to work in a cloak factory and during the next two years passed through every phase of a struggling sewing woman’s existence . . . I know of all the struggles, the efforts of genteel poverty, the pitiful pride with which working girls hide their destitution and drudgery from the world.²

Arriving in Chicago, she managed to find a small group, the Working Women’s Union, who were struggling to persuade young women workers to organize. In 1881 the Working Women’s Union was recognized by the American trade union organization, the Knights of Labor. The Knights appealed to all the ‘productive’ classes and were nominally committed to equality – including that of women and blacks. On 2 May 1886 Lizzie Holmes, recently married to the anarchist William Holmes, proudly headed a women’s march through the garment district demanding the eight-hour day; the Chicago Tribune reported that despite their ‘worn faces and threadbare clothing’, they ‘shouted and sang and laughed in a whirlwind of exuberance.’³

The mood of carnival release was short-lived. On 3 May, during a rally in Haymarket Square, a bomb was thrown at the police, who opened fire; 200 people were injured and an unknown number killed. The police swooped at random on activists including Lizzie Holmes, though she was later freed. Among those who would later be executed was Albert Parsons, Holmes’s co-editor on a paper called the Alarm, which advocated taking direct action for the eight-hour working day. His wife Lucy Parsons, part African American, part Native American in descent, had also worked with Holmes in the Knights of Labor. Holmes’s bonds with the Parsons meant that the impact of Haymarket was personal as well as political. Impatient for change and dismayed by the lack of revolt, she wrote in the Alarm: ‘The spirit of justice and retribution dwells deep, if it lives at all, for it stirs no ruffles on society’s surface today.’⁴ Her response was to move towards anarchism, writing regularly in libertarian journals such as the Alarm,Lucifer,Labor Enquirer, Our New Humanity. Haymarket also had a profound impact on others who were not personally involved. Shaken by the news of the executions, an immigrant garment worker, Emma Goldman, who had just arrived from Russia, was also drawn towards anarchism. The Chicago Martyrs troubled the middle-class conscience too; the executions prompted the future Hull House settler and reformer Julia Lathrop to question the social order.⁵

British labour relations were less violent. Nonetheless, during the late 1880s and early 1890s, militant labour resistance radicalized both middle-and working-class women. ‘New unions’ extended beyond male craft workers, and sought to reach outwards to the unskilled and semi-skilled in the factories, sometimes even trying to organize scattered home-based workers. The social investigator Clementina Black, along with Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, supported the new unionists in London, and when women at the Barton Hill cotton works in Bristol went on strike in October 1889, two local ‘new women’, Helena Born and Miriam Daniell, helped them to set up strike committees. Aided by the London and Liverpool dockers, the strikers won, but it was hard for many women workers involved in new unions to sustain militancy and unionization.

Emma Goldman, 1885 (Emma Goldman Papers)

Factory worker Ada Nield Chew was propelled into the public eye when, in the summer of 1894, she protested against her working conditions in a series of articles in the Crewe Chronicle. She complained that women could not earn a living wage and described the frustration of women waiting for work all day in the slack times, then fighting to be taken on when there was work. She revealed how women workers in the factory were forced to fund their own materials and even to pay the manufacturers for hot water to make their tea. That August, Chew and Eleanor Marx Aveling addressed a meeting of one of the ‘new unions’ which accepted women as members and was campaigning for the eight-hour day, the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers.⁶ Chew later joined the Independent Labour Party and became a member of the Nantwich Board of Guardians, which administered poor relief; she supported the suffrage movement and the Freewoman.

Chew’s protest highlighted the problem of women’s low pay in labour-intensive trades which came to be known as ‘sweated’ work. ‘Sweating’ characterized factories and home-work alike, and in both Britain and America women reformers resolutely tramped up and down tenement stairs and braved dark alleys to document its extent. In Chicago, Florence Kelley led a campaign for intervention against sweating, and during the 1900s Clementina Black and Gertrude Tuckwell were able to form a broad alliance in London through the Anti-Sweating League. Along with reformers and trade unionists, the League included liberal employers distressed at the proliferation of labour-intensive work, which they saw as an archaic form of production damaging to the competitive efficiency of the economy.

If anger and guilt led women towards public action, a sense of religious and moral mission also exercised considerable sway, drawing them into movements which tried to foster sexual purity and combat prostitution. In Britain they marched in the Salvation Army and supported the National Vigilance Association, which was formed in 1886 to watch over public morals. Warning of the dangers of pornography and prostitution, women moral reformers urged working girls to join Snowdrop Bands to ‘discourage all wrong conversation, light and immodest conduct and the reading of foolish and bad books’.⁷ America was particularly prone to militant evangelical crusades to reclaim sinners; women played an energetic part in these, for the call to redeem overrode gender proprieties. Rescue and redemption also suffused organizations such as the women’s club movement and the powerful Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which underscored the links between drink, violence and poverty.

Moral zeal could, in some instances, merge with social and political engagement. Frances Willard steered the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union towards support for suffrage, social welfare and labour organizing, declaring in 1891 that when women and workers acted in combination, ‘the war-dragon shall be slain, the poverty-viper shall be exterminated, the gold-bug transfixed by a silver pin, the saloon drowned out, and the last white slave liberated from the woods of Wisconsin and the bagnios of Chicago and Washington.’⁸ American women reformers such as Willard not only put women at the forefront of redemption, but envisaged women bringing purer domestic values into culture, work and government. This version of women’s special moral mission exerted a powerful and continuing influence upon both white and black American charitable women and social reformers. By pushing female domestic responsibilities out into the public arena and extending the scope of charitable work, they sought to appropriate motherliness and housekeeping as a source of power.

Black American reformers were inclined, however, to associate the domestic redeemer also with ‘uplifting’ the race. The National Association of Colored Women, formed in 1896 and led by Mary Church Terrell, integrated the concept of a special role for women with racial uplift. At the National Woman Suffrage Association conference of 1898, Terrell articulated this in a moral language both her black and white audience would understand: ‘And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.’⁹ She equated personal fulfilment with a conscious relationship with other African Americans. Her words were, moreover, rooted in the actual practice of black women reformers. Largely excluded from white charitable projects, Southern black Americans demonstrated considerable ingenuity in devising their own alternatives for survival. A black social settlement, the Locust Street Social Settlement, was founded in 1890 in Hampton, Virginia by Janie Porter Barrett. Like many African-American social welfare projects, it connected self-help with mutual aid. Providing services for everyday needs could be linked to campaigning for change. In 1908 Atlanta’s Neighborhood Union, formed by Lugenia Burns Hope, incorporated educational and health services with investigation and lobbying for better schools and sanitation.¹⁰

A broad ethical consciousness could inspire social action among women and men alike, regardless of gender. However, some areas could be more easily justified as ‘womanly’. In Britain, upper-class women’s intervention as Poor Law Guardians in the care of children, the training of girls and the ‘rescue’ of unmarried mothers, as well as the care for the elderly and ‘feeble-minded’, could be presented as an extension of acceptable philanthropy. The pioneering British Poor Law reformer, Louisa Twining, argued in 1886 that since women had ‘come forward to fill these posts of usefulness . . . we can truly say they have made their mark and done good service to the cause of the poor and helpless of whom women and children form so large a proportion’.¹¹

A religious sense of duty and service could also be translated into socialism. Kate Richards O’Hare, who had started as an evangelical Christian in the Florence Crittenton Mission and Home in Kansas City rescuing prostitutes, became an activist in the American Socialist Party. Not only did O’Hare retain the mindset of salvation through service, she gave it a motherly twist. Facing imprisonment in 1919 under the Espionage Act for accusing militarists of reducing women to breeding for the war machine, O’Hare made an impassioned farewell speech:

I gave to the service of the working class all that I had and all that I was, and no one can do more. I gave my girlhood, my young womanhood, my wifehood and my motherhood. I have taken babies unborn into the thick of the class war; I have served in the trenches with a nursing baby at my breast.¹²

The impetus to serve came also from a personal unease about class division. The Boston reformer Vida Scudder, who worked at the settlement Denison House among the immigrant poor, yearned to overcome the distance between classes through ‘sincere and serious intercourse’.¹³ The socialist and feminist Isabella Ford came from a progressive Quaker family in Leeds with a strong sense of moral obligation. Her sister Emily believed that a formative influence on Isabella’s future socialism was a class the sisters had run for young women factory workers: ‘This constant intimacy with girls of our own age, but brought up in different circumstances . . . was among the beginnings of her understanding what it was that was wrong with life and . . . a desire to help them to better conditions of life’.¹⁴ Personal contact not only assuaged the separation between classes, it was seen as experientially educative.

As questions about the absolute truth of the Christian gospels mounted, partly as a result of Darwin’s findings on evolution, men and women alike translated their besieged religious faith into secular contexts by establishing social settlements in the slums. For women, this social altruism was often combined with a pressing personal need to find more meaningful work. Before starting Hull House in Chicago’s slums, Jane Addams and her companion Ellen Gates Starr had been uncertain what to do with their lives. Starr told her sister that Addams regarded settlement work as ‘more for the benefit of the people who do it’ than for the working class, and Addams was convinced that personal discontent with the narrow destinies available to educated middle-class women brought many of the later recruits to the settlement.¹⁵ Social settlements provided half-way houses where women could live outside convention while remaining respectable; Hull House enabled Addams to live with her lover Starr, and offered a refuge for Florence Kelley who was fleeing an unhappy marriage to a Russian revolutionary. Similarly, Denison House in Boston allowed Vida Scudder to penetrate the city’s deprived South End, putting her privileged Beacon Hill background behind her. Social settlers literally mapped the surrounding slum streets when they did their surveys, but they were metaphorical map-makers too, tracing new outlines for their working lives and their personal relationships.

Jane Addams (Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College)

The ethic of service not only derived from Christianity; it was also a central tenet of the Russian revolutionary tradition which emphasized the sacrifice of individual lives for the ‘Cause’. Emma Goldman struggled with this self-denying creed as a young woman, and in her own life sought to find a balance between personal fulfilment and political commitment. Her dilemma troubled many other women adventurers. Revolutionaries, reformers, feminists and African-American women activists experienced conflict between autonomous needs and the pull of duty towards collective solidarities. This tension helped to shape women’s challenge to everyday life and customs. It was one of the many discrepancies which provoked unease and encouraged questioning.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the campaigns of an earlier generation were bearing fruit in the expansion of women’s higher education. This was particularly marked in the United States, but in Britain too, late nineteenth-century women were prising open the bastions of male privilege at Oxford and Cambridge, attending University Extension lectures and entering provincial universities. As students they experienced evident absurdities: at Owens College, Manchester, in the 1880s and 1890s they were barred from the library and had to send their maids to collect books.¹⁶ Once they graduated, some joined the ranks of teachers, clerks, ‘typewriters’, translators, journalists and social investigators in an effort to earn their own living, but many of the better-paid male professions remained closed to them. The incongruities in women’s moves towards autonomy stimulated further revolt, as growing numbers of middle-class women found themselves with one foot in the conventional world and another in the unexplored territory of ‘new womanhood’. The arrival of these ‘odd women’, hovering between the established parameters of class and gender, unsettled the status quo: they did not fit within the established structures of society, and their singularity inclined them to dissent.

In 1889, stirred by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s call for individual revolt, Eleanor Marx Aveling, the novelist Olive Schreiner and Edith Ellis, who would become a new woman writer herself, gathered outside the Novelty Theatre in London after the British premiere of A Doll’s House. Ellis records how she and her friends were ‘breathless with excitement’ about Nora’s defiance of domesticity. ‘We were restive and impetuous and almost savage in our arguments. This was either the end of the world or the beginning of a new world for women’.¹⁷ In 1896 the American anarchist Lizzie Holmes appealed to women to brave calumny as defiant individuals: ‘there is a need of women who are past all fear of being called “unwomanly” when a truth presents itself to be told.’¹⁸

On the other hand, unconventional behaviour put women in a precarious position: the consequences of deviation were much more severe than for men. Edith Lupton gravitated, via feminism and local municipal politics, to William Morris’s revolutionary Socialist League in which the anarchists were gaining influence by 1890. That August, Lupton was shouted down by her colleagues for expressing a belief in ‘leadership’ – albeit of a spontaneous sort. In September, perhaps keen to prove her mettle as an open-air speaker on women’s position in the battle for free speech, she was arrested on a charge of being drunk and disorderly. When she denied this in court, the policeman opined that if she had not been drunk she must be ‘mad’.¹⁹ Absolute defiance consequently appealed only to a minority; others resolved to cut their own pathways more strategically. Inspired by the housing reformer Octavia Hill and the social settlers at Toynbee Hall, the future Fabian socialist, Beatrice Webb, negotiated her autonomy adroitly. In 1885 she described the life she envisaged tactfully to her father: ‘An interesting hard-working life with just a touch of adventure is so delightful, so long as one does not get stamped with that most damaging stamp, “Eccentricity”.’²⁰

Anxiety about reputation was not confined to the upper-middle class. In differing ways, working-class and black women knew the harsh consequences of flouting conventional gendered behaviour. Nevertheless, a desire for self-expression propelled some less privileged women to take remarkable risks. The working-class American immigrant Anzia Yezierska, who longed to become a writer, had to break with her background in a quest for self-realization which would eventually take her to Hollywood. She asked bitterly, ‘Ain’t thoughts useful? . . . Does America only want the work from my body?’²¹ The African-American writer and campaigner Anna Julia Cooper, whose mother had been a slave, graphically described her yearning for a broader intellectual sphere: ‘I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without’.²²

Such feelings led some adventurous women to try and create the conditions for ‘a beckoning from without’, not only through formal educational institutions, but through social action. Jane Edna Hunter formed the Working Girls’ Home Association in Cleveland in 1911 on the basis of small subscriptions from a voluntary association of women. Her parents had been servants, and she became a nurse before gravitating towards law in 1925. Describing her commitment to serve African-American women, she stated:

There was something . . . [that] kept urging and making me less content with what I was doing and calling me into a broader service . . . Then the thought came to me that there were other girls who came to Cleveland, perhaps under similar circumstances as myself and were strangers and alone and were meeting with the same difficulties and hardships in trying to establish themselves in a large city.²³

Though this sense of personal reciprocity was particularly characteristic of black women social reformers, it also touched some of the more radical middle-class white women. Florence Kelley, who translated Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Classes in England before working at Hull House, remarked in a letter to him in 1887 that her friend Helen Campbell’s understanding of poverty was typically American, coming from ‘personal contact’ rather than from theory.²⁴ In fact such an approach was not restricted to American reformers. Engels’s own contacts in Manchester had after all been personal ones, while in 1883 the young Beatrice Webb observed somewhat stiffly in her diary, ‘it is distinctly advantageous to us to go amongst the poor’.²⁵ Margaret Llewelyn Davies, the daughter of a Christian Socialist clergyman, who from the late 1880s devoted her life to the predominantly working-class Women’s Co-operative Guild, was convinced of the value of personal interaction. She saw co-operation as a means of combining individual self-development with new relationships of mutuality. When she handed her friend Virginia Woolf a faded bundle of letters by Guild members, she remarked nervously that she hoped that through these accounts of hardship and aspiration, ‘the women would cease to be symbols and become individuals’.²⁶ The co-operative women’s moving life stories were eventually published by the Hogarth Press in 1930, with the title Life as We Have Known It.

Behind many women adventurers’ impulse for a broader service and their efforts to assert their personal autonomy in a wide range of movements, lurked shadowy dreams of a new day. Some of these dreams reached back into the much older heritages of individualist radicalism and co-operative association. The American anarchist Kate Austin was brought up in a family that respected the eighteenth-century radical Tom Paine. Another anarchist and Painite, Voltairine de Cleyre, was literally a child of the Enlightenment – her father had named her after Voltaire. Margaret Sanger, the campaigner for birth control, was the daughter of a stone-cutter of Irish descent whose hero was the American free thinker Robert Ingersoll. In the mid-1880s, the British ‘advanced’ woman Jane Hume Clapperton demonstrated a familiarity with the work of the early nineteenth-century co-operative pioneer Robert Owen, though she believed that his mistake was to try and ‘make people live together before they were fit to simply live in harmony,’ arguing that change had first to come in relationships within the home.²⁷ At the 1898 conference of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Mary Church Terrell was carefully diplomatic in claiming both a shared and a distinct heritage, mentioning the Owenite and women’s rights campaigner Ernestine Rose, along with white anti-slavery and women’s rights stalwarts Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony, as well as the black eighteenth-century poet, Phillis Wheatley.²⁸

Mary Church Terrell (Library of Congress)

The utopian communitarianism of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier was preserved in American schemes for co-operative housekeeping as well as in the British Women’s Co-operative Guild. In 1893, Catherine Webb called on co-operative women ‘to be heralds of the dawn, rousing the world to take notice of the “good time coming”.’ Webb’s cooperative future closely echoed that of the Irish radical William Thompson, who as early as 1825 had made an eloquent plea for women’s social and political rights. Like Thompson, Webb believed that ‘the day of “association and mutual helpfulness” in all stages and phases of life is slowly but surely dawning upon the world, to drive out the black night of individualism’.²⁹

Strong currents within both anarchism and socialism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century shared Catherine Webb’s conviction that individuals must act, while assuming, at the same time, that a utopian future was inevitably unravelling. Charlotte Wilson, who formed an anarchist faction in the Fabian Society, was profoundly influenced by the anarchist-communist Prince Peter Kropotkin, who had spent many years in prison for his beliefs. In 1886 she argued the aim should be ‘by direct personal action to bring about a revolution in every department of human existence, social, political and economic’.³⁰ In a less extreme manner, some socialists were also arguing that individuals should choose alternative ways of living in the here and now. Isabella Ford in Leeds, writers Olive Schreiner and Edith Ellis as well as the Bristol socialists who organized the women cotton workers, Helena Born and Miriam Daniell, were all influenced by the ideas of the ‘new life’ put forward by the British socialist Edward Carpenter. In the 1880s, troubled by social inequality and the parasitical dependence of his own class on working people, Carpenter decided to cut down on his needs and live close to nature. He, in turn, was influenced by the American writers Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, stressing self-realization and harmony with one’s own ‘nature’ as well as with the external world. Like the libertarian socialist William Morris, Carpenter, who wrote on homosexuality and women’s freedom, was an important inspiration for women struggling to balance personal liberation and public commitment.³¹ So too were the American Transcendentalists and Whitman.

In 1890 Helena Born and Miriam Daniell left Bristol for America. After Daniell’s early death in 1894, Born settled in Boston where she moved in anarchist circles and was a member of the Walt Whitman Society. While making an unsuccessful attempt to live off the land, she told her lover, anarchist William Bailie, ‘I have Morris’ portrait on the wall and Emerson’s and Whitman’s also conspicuous’.³² Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s connection to the Transcendentalists was a personal one: she was friendly with William Ellery Channing’s granddaughter Grace in the 1880s. In 1896, when she visited Britain, she was extremely proud of the sandals Carpenter made for her and was an enthusiastic reader of Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age (1896).³³ The British socialist and feminist Mary Gawthorpe remembered how both Carpenter and Whitman were still revered by Leeds working-class socialists in the early twentieth century.³⁴

If Ibsen, Carpenter, Whitman and the Transcendentalists were inspirational sources for individual action and personal inner transformation, some adventurers also drew on John Ruskin’s organic vision of society as an interconnected household. Ignoring Ruskin’s patriarchal views on the role of women, they interpreted his ideas in diverse ways. The British housing reformer Octavia Hill, who believed in the endeavours of individuals rather than state intervention, applied Ruskin in her plans for housing provision and appropriated him for the Charity Organisation Society. On the other hand Ruskin’s critique of laissez-faire and competitive social relations endeared him to the Independent Labour Party member Margaret McMillan, a campaigner for school medical inspections and nurseries, and to Selina Cooper, a socialist working-class activist in Nelson, Lancashire. In 1897 when Selina Cooper named her new baby ‘John’, it was partly after Ruskin. In the US, the anti-poverty campaigner and domestic innovator Helen Campbell was deeply influenced by Ruskin. In 1894 Campbell worked closely with Charlotte Perkins Gilman on a journal called Impress, in which she wrote a column on ‘Household Economics’. Later more imaginatively entitled ‘The Art of Living’, the column was introduced by a quotation from Ruskin and heralded many of the themes Gilman would subsequently develop.³⁵

In the late 1890s the Boston settlement worker Vida Scudder argued that Ruskin’s dismissal of that ‘unreal and unpleasant figment the so-called “economic man”’, in favour of ‘a man complete in all his faculties and desires, including his moral instincts’, accounted for the popularity of his works in reform circles.³⁶ Ruskin promised the reintegration of aspects of life which had fragmented, and his aesthetic critique of capitalist production travelled into the arts and crafts movement via the socialism of William Morris. For many arts and crafts enthusiasts like the Bostonian ‘new woman’, Mary Ware Dennett, art was inseparable from new ways of ethical living.³⁷

Regardless of their strong emphasis on the moral agency of individuals, women adventurers also assimilated more deterministic social theories. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Helen Campbell both admired one of the founders of American sociology, Lester F. Ward. His interpretation of social evolution provided an organic metaphor of the body politic which postulated that change in one part of society necessarily affected others. This integrated perspective was attractive to Gilman because it offered a framework for connecting reform in one area of the social fabric to another. Ward’s view that women were more important to evolutionary survival than men, who were merely the enablers of procreation, also appealed to Gilman and to other feminists.³⁸ Versions of Ward’s concepts of biological necessity lingered on into the early twentieth century because they added weight to arguments that mothers required improved conditions of employment or social welfare provision.

Holding apparently contradictory strands of thought simultaneously was not peculiar to the women adventurers. A deterministic Social Darwinism exercised considerable influence within the emergent social sciences, but was frequently combined with the conviction that enlightened social scientists could sort out the problems of society. From the 1880s, Herbert Spencer’s individualistic ideas of social evolution were being contested by reformers calling for more state regulation, in an effort to curb the worst effects of capitalist greed. The idea that society was evolving towards collectivism was influencing liberals and socialists alike. In differing ways they saw their role as speeding up the process.

The tension between a teleological unfolding of history and human agency was present in Marx’s writings as well, though there was a tendency in the late nineteenth century to focus on the former rather than the latter. While Marx, Engels and the German socialist August Bebel all supported the emancipation of women, only Bebel stressed the importance of women’s conscious agency. In Marxist groupings, primacy was always given to the proletariat as the catalytic anti-capitalist force – a view which contrasted sharply with the emphasis on women’s significance in American reform circles. Personal engagement was also a sticking point. Jane Addams, for instance, was familiar with Marx’s works, but her sensitivity to subjective factors in the relationships between people of differing classes and races was alien to Marx and Engels’s theorizing. It proved difficult for British Marxist women such as Eleanor Marx Aveling, Annie Besant and Dora Montefiore to express discontent about male–female encounters. These remained outside ‘politics’, as did the personal experience of motherhood and child-rearing.³⁹

In dreaming of a new day, women adventurers looked back to a heritage of radical thinking and selected concepts from their male contemporaries, but they also learned from one another. Jane Addams was reading Beatrice Webb’s The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain soon after it was published in 1891, and Webb’s work later influenced the Chicago women social theorists.⁴⁰ Arts and crafts enthusiast Mary Ware Dennett was a reader of the avant-garde British journal the Freewoman.⁴¹ Labour women too were aware of books and ideas from other countries. In 1911 American labour women in the Women’s Card and Label Union, which boycotted non–trade union goods in Seattle, were reading the South African socialist and ‘new woman’ Olive Schreiner.⁴²

Women adventurers’ networks extended over a range of issues and could converge in surprising ways. They also crossed boundaries as individuals took debates across the Atlantic. When Ida Wells-Barnett, the African-American suffragist and anti-lynching campaigner from Mississippi, visited Britain for a lecture tour in 1893, she was hosted by radicals, socialists and feminists. One of her lectures was delivered at the invitation of Annie Besant to the women-only Pioneer Club in London. Wells-Barnett, who was in conflict with Frances Willard because of the latter’s concern to placate white Southern suffrage supporters, found allies in a club which debated feminism, anti-vivisection, anti-vaccination and temperance, and took its name from Whitman’s ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers’. Its members, who included Eleanor Marx Aveling, Dora Montefiore, Olive Schreiner and the ‘new woman’ writer Mona Caird, as well as Besant, assembled in an elegant Mayfair establishment which had formerly been a home of Lord Byron.⁴³

The free thinkers and anarchists were resolutely internationalist. Lillian Harman, the daughter of the editor of Lucifer, came to Britain in 1898. Harman addressed a group which supported free love, the Legitimation League, who regarded her as a heroine because she had been imprisoned for living in a free-love union. Emma Goldman visited Britain several times, while Voltairine de Cleyre went to London to meet the French anarchist Louise Michel in 1897. Rose Witcop, a Jewish East End anarchist, wrote articles for Margaret Sanger’s Woman Rebel and in 1920 spoke with Sanger on birth control in London.⁴⁴

Personal connections were vital in communicating ideas. Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of the famous American radical feminist Elizabeth Stanton, lived in Britain during the late nineteenth century and was associated with the Fabians. When she returned to the US in 1902 she kept up her personal links with British social movements. Mary Beard, later a municipal reformer and historian in the US, also encountered the British women’s suffrage movement while living in Oxford where, in 1899, her husband Charles founded the trade union college Ruskin Hall. Sisterhood was practical when it came to travel. Alice Hamilton, a resident at Hull House who investigated lead poisoning in industry, visited Britain in 1919 and was looked after by Margaret Ashton, a local feminist active in the Women’s Local Government Society. Though feminist international networking was aided by formal organizations, such as the International Alliance of Women and the International League for Peace and Freedom which opposed World War One, these links between individuals were vitally important in disseminating ideas and policies.⁴⁵

Sexual radicals also networked internationally, informally as well as formally. Stella Browne, a birth control advocate in Britain, met Margaret Sanger after she fled the United States, indicted for giving out information about contraception. After they parted the two women corresponded with one another; in 1916 Browne wrote to the American writer on sex and birth control, Elsie Clews Parsons, urging her to support Sanger.⁴⁶ Letters complemented direct personal encounters; they were as important as published material in spreading ideas.

Being relatively geographically mobile, middle-class women were able to establish strong direct links, but these personal bonds could also extend to working-class women in socialist and anarchist circles. The ‘Crewe Factory Girl’, Ada Nield Chew, admired the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which were popular in labour and co-operative circles.⁴⁷ Labour women also exchanged concepts about organizing with one another. The American trade unionist, Fannia Cohn, told the British Labour Party leader Marion Phillips in 1927:

I am extremely interested that wives of trade unionists should have an organization through which they can function just as well as middle-class women, business and professional women function through their organizations. Women of the middle class have excellent organizations in the United States and they are such a power in our social life that no political party or leader can afford to ignore them.⁴⁸

The adventurers’ inventiveness was sustained by the dynamic networks through which they organized. Ideas passed back and forth between clusters of women, interweaving, conflicting and constantly moving. Not only were they thinking in action amidst flux, but affiliations to radical and reforming organizations or networks could be extremely fluid. Individuals often straddled several causes at once, and women shifted their points of view over a lifetime. Initially anti-suffrage, Beatrice Webb changed her mind in the 1900s. The British anarchist Charlotte Wilson’s trajectory is an extreme example of theoretical and organizational catholicism. In the mid-1880s she took part in the self-consciously ‘advanced’ discussions of the London-based Men and Women’s Club about sex and society, and was a member of a group around the Russian revolutionary émigré Stepniak, the Society of the Friends of Russian Freedom. She quickly gravitated to the Marxist Social Democratic Federation and then to the Fabian Society, where she proceeded to organize her anarchist faction. In 1885 she helped to start the first British anarchist paper, the Anarchist, which was associated with the American Benjamin Tucker’s Boston-based individualist anarchist paper Liberty. The following year she was editing the anarchist-communist journal Freedom with Kropotkin. Withdrawing from politics in the 1890s, Wilson popped up again with a new political persona during the 1900s, joining the Women’s Local Government Society along with a suffrage organization called the Women’s Freedom League, as well as the research group, the Women’s Industrial Council. She was back with the Fabians in 1908 helping to found the Fabian Women’s Group.⁴⁹

Charlotte Wilson was unusual, but not unique. Other adventurers moved between movements, assimilated apparently contrary influences and shifted their views. Annie Besant was radicalized by free thought, later working with both the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Fabians. In 1893 she converted to the spiritual philosophy of Theosophy, spending many years in India where she supported the Nationalist movement. Another ‘SDFer’ and feminist, Dora Montefiore, was at the same time a Theosophist and a member of the Pioneer Club, the Women’s Local Government Society and the suffrage movement.⁵⁰

Differing generations of women adventurers were affected by the prevailing preoccupations of their era. In the early 1900s the fascination with surveying and mapping which had emerged in reform circles in the late nineteenth century persisted, but it was accompanied by an intense preoccupation with scrutinizing oneself. Elsie Clews Parsons, who had worked with the settlement leader Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, was also influenced by the anthropologist Franz Boas’s emphasis on ethnography. Observing others with a camera-eye was not such a big step from treating oneself as a document, and this is exactly what Parsons did in a series of intimate journals in which she examined her personal relationships.⁵¹ She was indicative of a new impatient mood. In the early twentieth century an advance guard of ‘modern’ women were prepared to defy the sexual taboos which the older generation had, on the whole, negotiated warily.

In 1914 the creator of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy Club, Marie Jenny Howe, writing in the avant-garde journal New Review, sought to accommodate the inner and outer dimensions of women’s experience by linking political, economic, cultural and psychological transformations:

Feminism is woman’s struggle for freedom. Its political phase is women’s wish to vote. Its economic phase is woman’s revaluation of outgrown customs and standards . . . Feminism means more than a changed world. It means a changed psychology, the creation of a new consciousness.⁵²

In the 1880s the members of the London Men and Women’s Club had struggled over how to speak about sexuality.⁵³ While their early twentieth-century counterparts were likely to be more psychologically aware, they too grappled with how to devise a language for women’s sexual desires in all their variability.⁵⁴ This endeavour was made even harder because many of them also wanted to combine self-exploration and self-expression with external change in society as feminists, socialists or reformers. Even for the most privileged, reconciliation was not always possible. Mabel Dodge Luhan turned her back on her Greenwich Village salon brimming with spiritual gurus, sexual experimenters and revolutionary syndicalists, to head to the Taos desert in New Mexico in 1917, declaring, ‘My life broke in two’.⁵⁵ Elsie Clews Parsons also began to look to other cultures as sources of wholeness. By 1915 she was applying her interest in ethnography to the new cultural anthropology which was contesting the racial hierarchies embedded within the evolutionary tradition. Parsons argued that cultural anthropology could help an ‘unconventional society’ to develop by questioning accepted systems of classification.⁵⁶ A new crop of women cultural anthropologists would explore culture in this light during the 1920s. Among them was Zora Neale Hurston, who chronicled the beliefs and customs of black Southerners, and Margaret Mead, whose interest in sexual freedom led her to enthuse about sexual attitudes and practices in Samoa.

In both countries many of the older adventurers were deeply puzzled by the new circumstances of the 1920s. In a sense they were surrounded by their successes. More young women were going into higher education, becoming the first generation among the middle class to assume they would combine work and motherhood. Mobile, short-haired and short-skirted, the new generation were casually open about ideas and behaviour which had required martyrs in the 1880s and 1890s. Sex and birth control were not only discussed, but demanded as rights. A distinct lesbian identity was emerging in defiance of prejudice. The unabashed assertion of sexual experience and the questioning of monogamy – which before the war had marked out a minority of wild bohemians – began to modify the sexual mores of the mainstream. In Britain, labour women could look out at council houses and municipal swimming pools, and occasionally even Turkish baths. In the US, too, ideas of social citizenship were alive and well at a local level, where some of the progressive advocates of city housekeeping had gained municipal influence. But while such changes in everyday social existence were imperceptibly being taken for granted, they did not correspond to the earlier grand dreams of new dawns and new days.

In the immediate post-war era, circumstances and assumptions had shifted fundamentally. Feminism had lost cohesion as a movement, and divisions which had been passed over in the struggle for the vote were beginning to emerge. Attempts were made by the American socialist feminist Crystal Eastman, among others, to draw up a broader feminist programme which could span legal reforms, equal pay, an independent income for mothers from the state, nurseries and birth control. She was trying to give weight to the specific needs of women alongside the claim for equal citizenship, and she still wanted to change personal life.⁵⁷ However, the efforts of women like Eastman who sought to unite the subjective and the social faced overwhelming political and economic obstacles.

The rifts were not only there among feminists; the women adventurers were at variance more generally. One wing had endorsed efficiency, social regulation, progress through technology; another had adopted Romanticism’s elevation of the natural, the spontaneous and the simple life. Contrary impulses which before the war could ride in tandem were taking separate paths in the 1920s. For some Americans, Henry Ford promised a high-wage economy and the democratization of consumption, while others recoiled from boom-time materialism and headed for rural communes, craft workshops or Paris’s Left Bank. The vibrant market economy absorbed aspects of the adventurers’ faith in self-realization, which, when grafted onto the enterprise culture, stimulated private consumption rather than social transformation. Arts and crafts became a matter of form; neutralized as taste, contributing to 1920s ‘modern’ living in which simplification and lack of clutter were a means of streamlining existence. Similarly, enthusiasm for the ‘natural’ was detaching itself from any social utopia to focus on the bronzed athletic body, revolutionizing fashion and ideals of beauty. Daily life had changed, but not on the terms the innovators had imagined.

The same trends affected British society, but were constrained by long-term economic decline and by a different political context. The existence of the Labour Party, backed by the trade unions and labour women’s organizations as well as Liberals sympathetic to reform, constituted a much stronger lobby for state intervention locally and nationally than in the US. Though suspicion of the state persisted among both Liberals and strands of the libertarian left that had been opposed to the war, the need for state resources seemed self-evident to large swathes of male as well as female reformers. But in the 1920s, a series of bitter industrial disputes and mounting unemployment meant that the earlier glimpses of a new dawn would be tempered by severe hardship. They emerged muffled and modified by party resolutions and local government committees. Amidst the long struggle for small gains against the economic grain, hopes of democratizing relationships at work, in communities and between individuals could seem like idealistic luxuries from an unrealistic past.

Nevertheless hope died hard. In 1927 the British socialist and feminist Dora Russell envisioned a future in which human beings could feel ‘at home in the world, not fearing change but perpetually developing in suppleness and wisdom, perpetually devising new forms and new sources of delight’.⁵⁸ The dreams of a new day morphed; nonetheless they survived.