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Advanced women’s claims to education, meaningful work and independence presented them with unique choices and decisions about personal behaviour. They questioned not simply how life might be lived but, more existentially, how they might be. Appearance, identity and relationships were disputed, along with the very boundaries of private and public experience. From the early 1890s the dilemmas raised by this re-creation of self, and of self in relation to society, were explored in a slew of articles and books written by women. On the Threshold (1895), a novel by the British socialist and feminist Isabella Ford, depicts a new woman heroine struggling with the claims of family, the decision of whether or not to marry, and her yearning for an active, independent life. The image of the ‘threshold’ is also there in a poem by another socialist and feminist, Dora Montefiore. She described the fin-de-siècle new woman in 1898 as ‘Pausing on the century’s threshold/With her face towards the dawn’.¹ The threshold not only marked the advent of a new era in terms of time; it symbolized inchoate aspirations and a powerful sense of unknown possibilities.

Being poised on the edge of the unimaginable encouraged a reliance on inner-directed defiance. The anarchist Lizzie Holmes declared in 1896: ‘No barrier, no code, no superstition should stand in the way of woman working for the best thought within her, with her best strength, according to the brightest light glowing within her breast.’² When Helena Born died in Boston in 1902, a friend from the Liberty anarchist circle, Emma Heller Schumm, described the journey from respectability Born and Miriam Daniell had made when they left the protection of convention:

Fabian Women’s pamphlet (Fabian Society)

They were serving their apprenticeship in the new life of their choice. There was much enthusiasm for ideas, much storm and stress, much material hardship; but it was all very beautiful. How I longed to shelter them from the world’s rough handling.³

Reflecting on Helena Born’s life, Schumm declared, ‘Hers was certainly the experimental life; there were no rut marks on her.’⁴

New selves, it seemed, could be made from old if only the will was sufficiently strong. This faith in human beings’ capacity to experiment in personal behaviour simply by asserting individual judgement against established moral codes and conventions, influenced not only anarchist adventurers, but feminist and socialist new women in the late nineteenth century. ‘What is thought proper now will very probably not be thought proper in the year 1919; therefore, let no mere conservative bias thwart our judgement,’ predicted Jane Hume Clapperton in 1885.⁵ She would be proved right. The resolve to follow inner conviction in sweeping aside the outdated clutter of conformity was reasserted from differing perspectives by rebel women on the left, in the feminist movement and in the artistic avant-garde. ‘We are regimented by conventions, habits and customs and ideas persist amongst us and control us because we do not submit them to trial by our commonsense’, the socialist and feminist Teresa Billington-Greig told the youth group connected to the Clarion newspaper, the Clarion Scouts, in Glasgow in 1914.⁶

An immediate practical difficulty when women decided to behave differently was their inability to move about easily. Fashionable apparel was of little use if you wanted to work, to walk through city slums or take off into the countryside on your bicycle. One of the delights of social work, for Mary Simmons at the Bermondsey Settlement in South London, was that she could wander happily through the streets ‘with neither hat nor gloves, nor so much as even the hallmark of a sunshade’.⁷ Future suffragette Florence Exten-Hann came from a socialist working-class family in Southampton. In the 1890s she and her mother were members of the Clarion Cycling Club there: ‘Mother and I rode bicycles and wore bloomers, but had to carry a skirt to put on when riding in a town for fear of being mobbed.’⁸ A less inhibited young Crystal Eastman was to be found hurtling through the small New York town of Glenora, on the shore of Seneca Lake, ‘on a man’s saddle in fluttering vast brown bloomers’.⁹ Her parents, who were both Congregational ministers, believed in women’s rights. Nonetheless she startled her father by the open display of ‘bare brown legs’ when she wore her swimming costume: ‘he would not want to swim in a skirt and stockings. Why then should I?’¹⁰

Bloomers had a long history. Adopted initially by utopian socialists and advanced women in the mid-nineteenth century, this overtly emancipated clothing had attracted such obloquy and derision that the next wave of rational dressers took care to make their bloomers look exactly like skirts. The veteran American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton was intrigued by their ingenuity at a Glasgow suffrage meeting in 1882: ‘all the garments are bifurcated but so skilfully adjusted in generous plaits and folds, that the casual observer is ignorant of the innovation.’¹¹ The Rational Dress Society was formed in 1888 to encourage comfortable, healthy clothing based on reason, utility and simplification. It extended beyond women’s wear, intimating a new lifestyle. By 1889 babies had been brought into the Society’s remit: the advanced baby in ‘simpler’ dress should sport either white flannel attached with a safety-pin between the legs, or white flannel shirts wrapped in front and ‘little warm bootikins’.¹²

The strict application of reason and utility were never entirely satisfactory, and Romanticism also served as a wellspring for several waves of alternative fashion. An early exponent was Mary Paley, one of the pioneering group of Cambridge graduates who became a lecturer in political economy, teaching first at the new University College in Bristol, then at Oxford and Cambridge. An admiring student compared her to Tennyson’s learned Princess Ida: ‘She wears a flowing dark green cloth robe with dark brown fur round the bottom (not on the very edge) – she has dark brown hair which goes back in a great wave and is very loosely pinned up behind . . .’¹³ The aesthetic Mary Paley married the economist Alfred Marshall in 1877 and faded over the years into the role of great man’s helpmate, earning the scorn of Beatrice Webb as an example of how definitely not to become.

If one impulse within Romanticism in style invoked a lost golden age, another emulated nature. Getting in touch with nature necessitated rethinking how to dress. After emigrating from Bristol to Boston in 1890, Helena Born explained in her lecture on ‘Whitman and Nature’:

Ordinary clothes are apt to be an impediment to the appreciation of nature. For women the disqualifications of dress have been very serious – happily becoming less so, not so much from a saner view of the dignity of the body as from the demands of locomotive improvement.¹⁴

By the turn of the century the arts and crafts movement was inspiring simplified forms of clothing suitable for locomotive, natural women. The Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, founded in 1901, propagated ‘health, comfort, activity’.¹⁵ One of its leading members, Janet Ashbee, had settled at Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds when her husband, the designer Charles Ashbee, brought the Guild and School of Handicrafts to the village. Their ‘arts and crafts’ community allowed scope for eccentric innovation. In the early 1900s Janet Ashbee was to be seen in a peasant smock, sun bonnet, fisherman’s jacket and sandals.¹⁶ Utopian communities fostered freer clothes along with new lifestyles, which influenced first the bohemian intelligentsia and eventually moved into the mainstream. Nellie Shaw went bare-legged and in sandals at the Cotswolds anarchist colony, Whiteway – though when her mother visited, she sat down on the road just outside Gloucester and donned ‘stockings and shoes to please her’.¹⁷

The Healthy and Artistic Dress Union was keen to establish a counter-cultural aesthetic of ‘graceful appearance’, and promoted flowing Grecian clothes for women seeking expressive freedom.¹⁸ The style proved popular with the American dancer Isadora Duncan and with the British pioneer of exercise and healthy food, Margaret Morris. The wealthy American lesbian émigrée in Paris, Natalie Barney, created a ‘Temple à l’Amitié’ in her overgrown Parisian garden in the early 1900s, where her women friends danced in scanty Grecian robes evocative of nymphs close to nature.¹⁹

Margaret Morris, 1921

But there was more to clothes than met the eye. ‘Cloth is a social tissue; a sort of social skin,’ wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her 1915 The Dress of Women, arguing that the distinct costumes of men and women were meant to ensure that ‘we should never forget sex’.²⁰ In the late nineteenth century the practical shirt-waister and tie subverted these indicators. By desexualizing clothing, women could enter male spaces – the workplace or the café at night – while signalling that they were not sexually available. The new women who went a step further, dressing as men and cropping their hair, found they could walk through cities unmolested. Masculine styles were consequently at once the badge of a geographical mobility and marked the social arrival of the new woman in men’s zones. Nevertheless, to revolt against the conventions of appearance and behaviour meant putting oneself into an unprotected space. Critics sneered at the plain shirtwaisters and ties worn by Russian-Jewish immigrant working-class new women who sat in cafés debating marriage, the family and working conditions. One hostile observer in the 1890s derided the ‘atmosphere of tea-steam and cigarette smoke’, denouncing the ‘pallid, tired, thin-lipped, flat-chested and angular’ women for whom ‘The time of night means nothing until way into the small hours.’²¹ To dress, act and think differently upset cultural assumptions about gender that were deeply embedded.

Relatively small deviations in conduct could place a woman outside the norms of socially acceptable behaviour and invoke rejection, not only from men, but from other women. Cosmo Gordon Lang (later to become Archbishop of Canterbury) recalled how Beatrice Webb, while researching her book on the co-operative movement, upset the co-operative women of Hebden Bridge in 1889 by asking if she could smoke, then by announcing that she would go for a walk with the men on Haworth Moor.

The ladies were now all the more convinced that they must be at hand to protect their lords. We started, an odd-looking party. But the good women, in their long dresses and elastic-sided boots, wholly unaccustomed to walk further than the distance between their homes and shop or chapel, soon gave up. They intimated to the New Woman that they must return. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said she, with engaging frankness, ‘but I’m going on.’ Then one of the guardians of the proprieties turned to another and said grimly: ‘The impudent hussy.’²²

Some women preferred to disregard dress sooner than defy the codes overtly. Neither Sylvia Pankhurst nor Ada Nield Chew were particularly interested in fashion. However, ignoring what you looked like could also make you memorably bizarre. In the 1970s, after the passage of more than half a century, the former trade union leader Maurice Hann remembered Sylvia Pankhurst speaking at a meeting in a blouse that was inside out. ‘A proper scruff,’ he declared to me with the admonition not to quote him.²³ Doris Nield Chew recollected how her mother ‘was completely without personal vanity’. Indeed, her hairdresser recalled ruefully how Chew ‘crammed her hat on a head of beautifully waved hair’.²⁴

Ada Nield Chew might go ‘round the world on a sixpenny tin of Pond’s cold cream’, but plenty of middle-class feminists rebelled without loss of style.²⁵ Appropriating conventional forms of femininity offset unconventional political action and confused male opponents. Ironically this resulted in suffrage shoppers being courted by the new large department stores – despite the broken windows. The Women’s Social and Political Union militants, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, were studiously elegant and would have concurred with the Liberal father of the constitutional suffragist, Margery Corbett Ashby, who advised her: ‘if you want to reform anything else, do not reform your clothes’.²⁶

In contrast, for working-class women fashionable clothes could mark a break with deference. In early twentieth-century America the bright, modern young telephone operators who formed an elite among working women brought glamour to the picket line in defiance of scabs. They took a class pride in wearing clothes that signalled their access to the respect and power surrounding rich women. Similarly, when Milka Sablich, the American miner’s daughter who became active in the violent strikes of the Colorado mining industry in the late 1920s, was taunted for wearing a silk dress, red-haired ‘Flaming Milka’ flashed back: ‘Miners’ children like pretty things as well as anyone else!’²⁷ In Britain during World War One, young women in munitions factories earned high wages by working in conditions of considerable danger. They responded by seeking fun and spending their money on clothes, earning disapproving comments in the press. Such criticism provoked a defiant letter to the Daily Express in November 1917 from a ‘Munition Girl’:

Those who point the finger of scorn at me seem to me to be utterly without imagination. Let them put themselves in my place. Let them realise what it means, after a life of soul-suffocation, to find oneself suddenly able to breathe free air, to see the walls of one’s prison house gradually crumbling, to feel the shackles of tyranny loosening from one’s feet, to taste a tiny bit of ambition realised. Ambition is the same power in every walk of life, whether it aims at world domination or the possession of a small article of flesh-coloured crepe de Chine.²⁸

A. Philip Randolph and his Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an organization of black workers on the Pullman trains, encouraged African-American women to stand up for their rights and stay in fashion. The union journal, the Messenger, opined that ‘Bobbed hair is very often attractive and becoming. Bobbed brains however are a serious handicap to anyone.’²⁹ Randolph was encouraged by his wife, the socialist Lucille Randolph, who saw the ‘new negro woman’ as beautiful and brainy. She linked the Brotherhood’s ‘ladies’ auxiliary’, the Women’s Economic Council, to 1920s modernity by holding ‘bobbed hair’ contests.

The semiology of the ‘social tissue’ was various indeed. Well-dressed suffragettes could infiltrate a venue in ladylike mode, only to smash windows and hurl axes at politicians. Workers dressed up to assert class, race and gender pride, while ‘new women’ donned male clothing as a means of holding gender at bay. The shirt and tie were marks of the respect due to women at the cutting edge. When in 1920 members of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy Club made an album for the club’s founder, Marie Jenny Howe, several chose photographs of themselves in white shirts and ties – including Heterodoxy’s only black member, Grace Nail Johnson, who was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and married to the Harlem poet, James Weldon Johnson.

While male styles could denote a seriousness of purpose above feminine frivolity, by the 1920s they had transmuted into high fashion. Women added small signs of femininity to distinguish modishness from cross-dressing. The lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall, for example, posed in male evening dress, Spanish hat, pearl earrings and a kiss-curl in 1926. The Radclyffe Hall ‘look’ did not indicate sexual orientation. Instead it was part of the image of belonging to a fashionable avant-garde. When Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was first published in 1928, a reviewer in the Newcastle Daily Journal remarked on her ‘aura’ of ‘highbrow modernism’.³⁰ However, the novel was quickly to be redefined as obscene and its author’s dress recoded as the mark of a lesbian subculture. By 1929 the boyish styles were no longer modish, and short hair, monocles and tailored clothing came to assume a chosen lesbian identity.

The fluidity of style evident during the 1920s was personified in the insouciant flapper dancers. Yet while they appeared as the essence of ultra-modern immediacy and flux, they were shadowed by a motley crew of image-breakers who had defied the conventions before World War One. Masculine styles had been the badge of serious new women seeking sexual autonomy, but they also invoked Victorian and Edwardian erotica in which cross-dressing had been a motif. A model on a sexy postcard, dressed as Napoleon with enhanced crotch, titillated gender taboos. When, in 1910, the French writer Colette posed in men’s clothes with a daring cigarette, she symbolically crashed through into the cultural space reserved for pornography and prostitution. As a ‘vagabond’ woman without roots, Colette pirouetted gleefully into forbidden fantasies by adopting their trappings – diaphanous nymphs, Grecian nudity, ‘Oriental’ slave girls, the dominatrix – and sending them up. The borderlines of feminine identity were being breached. Elsie Clews Parsons, influenced by the contemporary European thinking of Gabriel de Tarde, Ernst Mach and Henri Bergson, theorized this vagabonding before the War. In 1914 she wrote in her Journal of a Feminist:

The day will come when the individual . . . [will not] have to pretend to be possessed of a given quota of femaleness and maleness. This morning perhaps I feel like a male; let me act like one. This afternoon I may feel like a female; let me act like one. At midday or at midnight I may feel sexless; let me therefore act sexlessly. . . . It is such a confounded bore to have to act one part endlessly.³¹

Instead of willing a new self through reason or seeking to uncover an innate natural self, the bohemian avant-garde had begun to play with being different selves. Women as well as men, it seemed, could be and do as the mood might take them. Crystal Eastman’s brother, the writer Max Eastman, poked fun at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s ‘perpetual war on habit’ in his 1927 novel, Venture. The fictional character he based on her, Mary Kittredge, ‘was always just entering upon some new spiritual experiment that involved a complete break with everything that had gone before’. This restless quest made it impossible for her to settle, to be constant or still:

Either she was getting married, or she was getting divorced, or she was testing out unmarried love . . . or snake-dancing, or Hindu philosophy, or Hindu turbans, or female farming, or opium-eating, or flute-playing. There was nothing in the world that Mary could not want to do, and there was very little that she could not, in a surprisingly short space of time, do.³²

Mabel Dodge Luhan’s mercurial crazes signified a wider restlessness. The modern woman did not want to be pinned down. Elsie Clews Parsons contended in 1916 that the key objective of feminism was not political or even social rights, but the declassification of women. ‘The new woman means the woman not yet classified, perhaps not classifiable.’³³

In the 1920s the taboos breached by advanced thinkers and vagabond bohemians were being flouted openly by modern women who articulated a new common sense. In the symposium edited by feminist Freda Kirchwey, Our Changing Morality (1924), Isobel Leavenworth, an academic at Barnard, asserted women’s right to experience, including sexual experience:

Because she must first of all conform to an unpolluted archetype, and because society must be secure in the knowledge that she is indeed so conforming, she has never been able to meet life freely, to make what experience she could out of circumstances, to poke about here and there in the nooks and crannies of her surroundings [the] better to understand the world in which she lives.³⁴

Though 1920s American culture fostered this kind of faith in infinitely expanding opportunities, the possibilities of opting for a plurality of identities were never equally stacked. In the Harlem Renaissance, African-American women writers briefly reached out towards dynamic self-definition, yet despite belonging to Du Bois’s elite, they were constrained within a racist culture. The freedoms of the 1920s contained a catch; the radical enthusiasm for nature initiated by the Romanticism of Greenwich Village and the fashionable discovery of outsider cultures endowed black women with a spontaneous animality. This rebranding of racial difference meant that black women were being given an ascribed identity in the very era in which white women were attempting to declassify themselves. In response, some rejected sensuality outright; others grabbed the ‘primitive’ tag and ran with it. ‘People have done me the honor of believing I’m an animal,’ announced the 1920s comedian and dancer Josephine Baker. ‘I love the animals, they are the sincerest of creatures.’³⁵ She kept dogs, cats, monkeys, rabbits, a pig, a goat and a leopard as pets.

Others tried to ‘be’ on their own terms. Among the American escapees to the Parisian left bank was the black novelist Jessie Fauset, who stated in 1925: ‘It is simplest of all to say that I like to live among people and surroundings where I am not always conscious of “thou shalt not”. I am colored and wish to be known as colored, but sometimes I have felt that my growth as a writer has been hampered in my own country.’³⁶ For African-American women of all classes there were manifold difficulties in being purely an individual. In Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand (1928), the heroine Helga Crane, who is of mixed race, recoils from the conformity of racial uplift but finds her European relatives regard her as an exotic symbol of primitive sensuality. Physically attracted to a black preacher from the South, she becomes his wife. But her resolve to improve the lives of the local women is thwarted when her own health and spirit are broken by repeated pregnancies. Hazel Carby reflects:

As readers, we are left meditating on the problematic nature of alternative possibilities of a social self. Consider the metaphor of quicksand; it is a condition where individual struggle and isolated effort are doomed to failure. Helga’s search led to the burial, not the discovery, of the self. The only way out of quicksand is with external help; isolated individual struggle ensured only that she would sink deeper into the quagmire.³⁷

Whether the quest for an autonomous self was consciously willed, seen as a hidden true nature to be released or as a quicksilver of shifting selves, the yearning for a separate, distinct individuality constituted a passionate and powerful motive force in leading women to break with conformity. But there was, as Carby indicates, something more – the social self. New women not only required new ways of being individuals; they needed differing kinds of relationships with others. Charlotte Perkins Gilman recognized that self-expression required sociability, that ‘our specialized knowledge, power, and skill are developed through the organic relationships of the social group’.³⁸

Nella Larsen (Beinecke Rare Book Collection, Yale University)

Organic social relating proved problematic for many fierce rebels who had been compelled to hone their new selves against the opinion of the world. And, of course, they discovered that in practice radical countercultures could evince competition, malice and prejudice just like the bad old world of conformity and reaction. Nonetheless their experiences of interconnection opened precious spaces for imagining, quarries for mining visionary possibilities from the known and moments when the future seemed immanent within the present. Once glimpsed these glimmered like lodestars through their lives. Mabel Dodge Luhan recalled her Greenwich Village days in terms of a fluid communalism: ‘barriers went down and people reached each other who had never been in touch before; there were all sorts of new ways to communicate, as well as new communications. The new spirit was abroad and swept us all together.’³⁹

Movements involved an interior culture of personal relationships which affected individuals profoundly. Women who participated in the suffrage movement found a transformative affinity with other women which could result in passionate love affairs, lifelong friendships and an overwhelming sense of empowerment. Looking back on the suffrage campaign, the British constitutional suffragist Margery Corbett Ashby recalled how it transformed perceptions. Instead of the assumption that women were necessarily ‘catty and jealous’, seeing ‘other women as poachers on the same ground’, she recalled how ‘we suddenly found we were intensely loyal to other women’. The movement ‘turned all the can’ts into can’, affecting feminists personally and creating a new sense of collective identity.⁴⁰

Anarchist and socialist movements, too, offered women a greater degree of equality and a broader scope for personal relationships than conventional society. Isabella Ford was drawn to the Yorkshire Independent Labour Party in the early 1890s because the woman question was linked to working-class politics; she was impressed by a visit to a Labour Club in the Colne Valley, where the men had given a tea party for the women, pouring out the tea, cutting the bread and butter, and washing everything up ‘without any feminine help and without any accidents!’⁴¹ In 1899 the new ‘Clarion woman’ was being hailed proudly by the Clarion newspaper as being able to ‘look on a man’s face without simpering or blushing’.⁴² Hitches did occur between promise and actuality. Only a week later the columnist Julia Dawson was berating the ‘miserable misoginists [sic]’ who were trying ‘to oust women from the Manchester Clarion cycling club’.⁴³ As Ada Nield Chew observed dryly in 1912, ‘The task of taking women into account is to some reformers so appallingly difficult that they are inclined to shelve this aspect of the question and to postpone its settlement.’⁴⁴

Nonetheless women experienced fellowship and comradeship in movements which placed a strong emphasis on creating new values, developing consciousness and making cultural institutions which reached into every aspect of life. A network of mini-utopias in the shape of cafés, clubs, choirs, theatre groups and holiday homes sustained hopes of a new day coming. Even courtships could be conducted within this alternative terrain. In 1896 Ada Nield Chew accompanied her husband-to-be George on a socialist Clarion Van propaganda tour. The van was Julia Dawson’s idea and was kitted out with bunks and cupboards. George slept in a tent and was responsible for the horse who pulled them along.⁴⁵ In both Britain and the US, anarchists and socialists put great stress on education for young and old. When Annie Davison was growing up in a Glaswegian working-class socialist family before World War One, anarchist, Marxist and socialist Sunday Schools abounded in the city. At her socialist Sunday School she learned to love learning, respect her teachers as well as her parents, and remember ‘that all the good things of the earth are produced by labour’. She was taught the ‘three great principles . . . Love, justice and truth’, along with a ‘history, not of kings and queens, but common people’.⁴⁶

Socialist Sunday School membership card (Working Class Movement Library)

Women gave the values of mutuality a special twist. The American co-operative women in Seattle believed that in ‘co-operation lies our hope for the future, true co-operation that includes not merely the matters of dollars and cents but extends to the social and home life as well.’⁴⁷ The utopian faith in the possibility of prefiguring future social relations in the here and now was extended in perceptive and creative ways. Seattle co-operative women of the 1920s imagined a world without wallflowers when they decided to form a social club to enable single girls to go out properly chaperoned. ‘Especially do we desire to reach the lonely ones who dislike to go to the public dance halls and other public places of amusement, and as a result are deprived of the social life which they so much desire.’⁴⁸

African-American women also recognized that mutuality could have specific benefits for women and extend into the family. Mutual aid and benevolent associations were particularly strong in the Southern states. Along with black churches they combined practical benefits with a culture of co-operation which included informal neighbourhood networks and formal institutions. In the early 1900s in Richmond, Virginia, inventive African-American women formed a chain of mutual aid groups, which included the Children’s Rosebud Fountains, established by the Grand Fountain United Order of True Reformers to teach the children to ‘bear each other’s burdens . . . to so bind and tie their love and affections together that one’s sorrow may be the other’s sorrow, one’s distress be the other’s distress, one’s penny the other’s penny.’⁴⁹ Survival and solidarity were irretrievably linked; moreover they intimated a better future.

Glimpses of alternative relations not only nurtured the quest for other kinds of being; they strengthened resistance. The American Women’s Trade Union League member Pauline Newman who, along with many other women from immigrant backgrounds, worked from the age of twelve at the New York Triangle Shirtwaist factory, learned through the friendships she formed at work that ‘you are no longer a stranger and alone’.⁵⁰ Mary Heaton Vorse was a bohemian radical when in 1912 she went to report on the textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where workers from many different ethnic backgrounds united to confront not only their employers, but police and company guards. The assignment changed the course of her life. Vorse recalled:

Before Lawrence, I had known a good deal about labor, but I had not felt about it. I had not got angry. In Lawrence I got angry . . . Some curious synthesis had taken place between my life and that of the workers, some peculiar change that would never again permit me to look with indifference on the fact that riches for the few were made by the misery of the many.⁵¹

Amidst the hurly-burly of strikes, pickets, committees and meetings, radical and reforming movements brought women into new social relationships; they learned through doing of what might be. In turn-of-the-century Tampa, Florida, Italian and Cuban cigar workers who were influenced by anarcho-syndicalism sought to bring together male and female workers of all nationalities and colours in ‘complete moral and material solidarity’.⁵² Momentarily they were touched by that elusive utopian hope of making the whole world anew, and experienced the joy of boundaries dissolving.

The anarchist Emma Goldman believed autonomy and mutuality were integrally connected. The key problem for women was ‘how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities.’⁵³ She gave equal weight to women’s personal quest for liberation and their relational needs, in social movements as well as in friendship and love. Living the connections was harder than theorizing, as Goldman herself knew all too well. If the pull between a fragile sense of autonomy and wider solidarities caused recurring tension, sexual relationships with men were apt to blow the carefully assembled independence apart. Charlotte Perkins Gilman had hesitated when Walter Stetson proposed in 1882. ‘I like to go about alone independently.’⁵⁴ Two years later she did marry him, but being a wife and mother provoked a mental breakdown and physical crisis which she documented in The Yellow Wallpaper (1890), a stark, innovative short story chronicling her claustrophobic desperation. In the year that it was published, she wrote to a friend, ‘I haven’t any heart but a scar. . . . Now I guess I will shut the door of my heart again; and hang on it “Positively no Admittance except on Business!”’⁵⁵

Apart from a small minority of rebels, late nineteenth-century women adventurers tended to navigate carefully around the shoals of love and desire. Many were absorbed like Mary Paley, many more remained celibate and some, like Jane Addams, lived discreetly with other women. Some found a modus vivendi, at a cost. The young Beatrice Webb was shaken by her desire for the sexually attractive and dominating Joseph Chamberlain, opting instead for Sidney Webb. She told her sister Kate Courtney that her marriage would be subordinate to her work. When her sister remonstrated, ‘That is rather a question for your husband,’ Beatrice replied, ‘No: it is the question of the choice of my husband.’⁵⁶ She wrote in her diary in May 1890:

How absolutely alone and independent my life has become: not lonely, for I have many friends and fellow-workers and do not feel the need for more sympathy than I get; quite the contrary, in most of the relationships I willingly give more than I receive. But that terrible time of agonizing suffering seems to have turned my whole nature into steel – not the steel that kills, but the surgeon’s instrument that would save.⁵⁷

Action in the external world seemed to require a cauterization of wandering emotions and sexual passion. Later generations were more up-front and combative. ‘Let us turn away from the antiquated advocacy of work in lieu of love, as an alternative to love, and let us look to work for the sake of love, as a means of salvation for love,’ declared an optimistic Elsie Clews Parsons in 1913.⁵⁸

In 1924 the American Jungian psychologist Beatrice M. Hinkle noted how modern women were not satisfied with rhetorical abstractions about freedom. Instead, they were ‘demanding a reality in their relations with men that heretofore has been lacking’.⁵⁹ She celebrated the way in which women rather than men were becoming the active agents in altering sexual relationships.

Signs of this new assertive mood had already been evident in the pre-war years, when women had started documenting their responses to sexual partners in terms which would have been inconceivable to the earlier generation. In 1911 Elsie Clews Parsons gave a fictionalized account of her estrangement from Herbert Parsons in The Imaginary Mistress, exploring shifting subterranean emotions:

The old sense of oneness with him which I had ridiculed as a conjugal tradition but which had been a profound and joyful reality for me had disappeared. He became alien and at moments I had the pain of feeling that our physical intimacy might become not merely indifferent but repugnant. This change in me did not affect the surface of our life at all – at least in his eyes. He did not notice. He was quite content.⁶⁰

In the New Age in 1912 the defiant and beautiful ‘Beatrice Hastings’ described how contempt for a man had destroyed a sexual relationship. ‘He becomes my spaniel.’⁶¹ She was soon to be the Parisian correspondent for the New Age, smoking hashish and haunting cafés such as the Dôme and the Rotonde with her lover, the artist Amadeo Modigliani. This time she had not found a spaniel; they fought one another passionately and noisily in the cafés and streets of Montmartre.

Early twentieth-century feminists explored the ambivalence of women’s wants. Two Greenwich Village writers, Susan Glaspell and Neith Boyce, married to men who supported feminist emancipation, examined the gaps between women’s desires to change their lives – including sexual relations – and the contrary feelings such longings engendered.⁶² Their work was part of a wider questioning about whether psychological shifts in sexual and gender relations could ever be controlled or predicted. In 1913 Elsie Clews Parsons concluded in her Journal of a Feminist that ‘the problem of sex feminists have not faced is primarily a psychological problem’. She had decided that woman’s ‘impulse to subjection . . . self-surrender is one of the dominant characters of her passion’.⁶³

The resolve to reveal what had been concealed by exposing the messy actuality of sexual relationships combined with a new psychological awareness to bring out problems earlier generations could not have envisaged. Confusion erupted over what exactly women wanted in their sexual relationships with men. Early twentieth-century women rebels were beset by a contradictory inheritance. They were at once daughters of reason and daughters of nature, as attached to the primitive as they were to being modern. They wished to use their intellects and to remain open to all those heady romantic feelings of infinite energy and elemental receptivity. They felt a need for the intimacy, mutuality, warmth and sensuousness which seemed to have been excluded in the drive for self-possession. More and more women found themselves living out the incongruities which were arising from the changing relations between the sexes. By the 1920s the subjective voice had hit the mainstream. In 1927 the British journalist Leonora Eyles confessed in Good Housekeeping how becoming a divorcee had led her to question deeply-held assumptions about independence, adding, ‘It is necessary to strike the personal note.’ She told readers she had married ‘a man who was not a very strong character’, and managed everything by doing ‘without him’. But this had left him feeling that he was not needed.⁶⁴

Problems were evident in the labour movement too. Eyles noted in the left-wing Lansbury’s Labour Weekly how ‘the new woman, the comrade woman’ was ‘tending to admire the weaker, gentler, less active type of man’. They in turn were fastening ‘on to the aggressive woman’. Unforeseen snags were appearing from efforts to reverse gender roles, and Eyles observed the new relations bringing hostility. Men were sore because women seemed to be encroaching on the places they held sacred. Eyles urged women not to inflame sex antagonism by ‘putting on airs of superiority about our earnings and our abilities’.⁶⁵

In 1925 the African-American social investigator and journalist Elise Johnson McDougald, writing in a special issue of Survey Graphic dedicated to black intellectuals, was also inclined to hold out an olive branch. She noted some conflicts in relationships between ‘the masses of Negro men . . . engaged in menial occupations’, and ‘Negro working women’ who were tasting ‘economic independence’ and rebelling against ‘the domineering family attitude of the cruder working-class Negro man’. But she contrasted these to ‘the wholesome attitude of fellowship and freedom’ evinced by younger, educated ‘Negro men’, advising women to ‘grasp the proffered comradeship with sincerity’.⁶⁶

The possibilities of new personal relationships interacted with external circumstances. McDougald was writing in a period when hopes of changing race relations were not stirring only among members of the young black intelligentsia like herself in the North. Black and white Southern American women were beginning at last to organize together, and black women were laying out their terms. They were agitating for nurseries, playgrounds and recreation centres along with better education for black children. They also challenged segregated accommodation on public transport and lynchings.

In contrast, among the white metropolitan intelligentsia in the United States, the pull to public engagement was slackening. The suffrage had been won, but World War One had divided radicals; there was a red scare after the Bolshevik revolution, isolating those who joined the Communist Party and making it harder for independent leftists to form coalitions. Radical 1920s women were edgy and undermined; a feeling of exhaustion is evident in the autobiographical essays written by radicals and reformers for the Nation which Freda Kirchwey gathered together in 1926–27. Surrounded by a buoyant consumer culture, several women expressed their longing for a more hedonistic self. Garland Smith, in rebellion against her Southern Presbyterian background, described a love of dancing, early intimations of sexuality, her interest in Freud and Ellis. ‘I am at least free now from the old distortions and repressions.’⁶⁷ They were beginning to feel that they could no longer find self-realization simply through taking part in movements for external change. Ruth Pickering, a journalist who had been a member of the Heterodoxy Club in Greenwich Village, said she had ‘traded . . . exhilarating defiance . . . for an assurance of free and unimpeded self-expression’.⁶⁸ The preoccupation with the personal impinged on how feminism was conceptualized. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, writing in Harper’s in 1927, decreed that the ‘Feminist – New Style’ who was ‘truly modern’ no longer felt the need to renounce marriage and children for a career; a ‘full life’ required combining work with emotional and domestic fulfilment.⁶⁹ Beatrice M. Hinkle internalized the feminist quest for freedom. Women’s struggle against convention was, she wrote, essentially ‘the psychological development of themselves as individuals’.⁷⁰ Adventuring was being recast as a purely inward affair.

In response, a determined radical minority mounted an effort to reconnect how to ‘be’, personally, with the transformation of society. The faith in self-realization inspired by the American educational philosopher John Dewey persisted into the 1920s, travelling in tandem with a new psychological awareness. In Britain, 1920s feminists such as Dora Russell and Stella Browne, active in campaigning for birth control in the labour movement, explicitly combined economic and social demands with an interest in culture and psychology. In the United States, Crystal Eastman resolutely continued to write about both the inner and outer forms of subordination. In 1920 Eastman defined the ‘problem of women’s freedom’ as being ‘how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways’. This was not ‘the whole of feminism’, she conceded, but ‘enough to begin with’. When some of her friends protested, ‘Oh don’t begin with economics! Woman does not live by bread alone. What she needs first is a free soul,’ Eastman carefully asserted a balance. She agreed it was true:

Women will never be great until they achieve a certain emotional freedom, a strong healthy egotism, and some un-personal sources of joy – that in this inner sense we cannot make woman free by changing her economic status. What we can do, however, is to create conditions of outward freedom in which a free woman’s soul can be born and grow.⁷¹

In 1926, in Concerning Women, another radical modern woman, Suzanne La Follette, similarly argued the need to challenge both the economic and psychological aspects of women’s ‘subjection’.⁷² Emma Goldman too was not prepared to abandon the link between the outer society and her personal experience. When in 1927, aged fifty-eight, she was planning her memoirs, she told the bohemian Hutchins Hapgood: ‘I want the events of my life to stand out in bold relief from the social background in America and the various events that helped to make me what I am: a sort of conjunction between my own inner struggle and the social struggles outside.’⁷³ Yet in using her own life as a document Emma Goldman was aware of how she would be judged. Though she left a trail for posterity through letters documenting her passionate and painful love affair with the hobo philanderer Ben Reitman, Goldman knew that the exposure of her personal vulnerability and her sexuality would not be understood in the America of the late 1920s. Both her politics and her gender laid her open to derision. The woman who had defied so many boundaries was forced to concede that there were some she had to negotiate. Goldman confided to her former lover and companion, the anarchist-communist Alexander Berkman: ‘We all have something to hide. Nor is it cowardice which makes us shrink from turning ourselves inside out. It is more the dread that people do not understand, that what may mean something very vital to you, to them is a thing to be spat upon.’⁷⁴

The translation of personal intimacy and sexual desire into the public realm of the social and political proved to be one of the most difficult aspects of women’s freedom.