Dreamers of a New Day (42 page)

Yet it is also true that as the innovations came to be absorbed into the realm of ‘the obvious’, some of the radical social meanings invested in them fell away. How could all those new women self-consciously wearing advanced dress and riding their bicycles imagine that trousers would be donned and bicycles mounted without a thought? The simplifiers and nature enthusiasts of the 1880s and 1890s could not have conceived that their arts and crafts enthusiasms would produce the standardized bungalows of the twentieth century, or result in several generations of primary-school children doing raffia work. The allegorical dreamers could hardly have foreseen that their interest in fictional utopias would give such a boost to the advertising industry, nor could the enthusiastic inhabitants of garden cities have comprehended that their alternative businesses, catering for radical tastes, would pioneer niche markets. ‘Advanced living’ metamorphosed into a series of post-war ‘lifestyles’ with its detritus of formica-topped kitchens, hippy beads, legwarmers and torn jeans. The inventors of daily life in the twentieth century could not control outcomes.

Writing on the
Problems of Everyday Life
in 1924, Leon Trotsky had observed: ‘In order to change the conditions of life we must learn to see them through the eyes of women’. Trotsky’s insight into ‘masculine egotism in ordinary life’ would be eclipsed in the left-wing theorization of the everyday which followed.
¹³
Between the wars the Surrealists wanted to transfigure everyday existence by seeking the wondrous through the transgressive revelations of dreams and desires; they were less enthused by mundane propositions for change, or, indeed, for seeing through the eyes of women.
¹⁴
Because Marxists gave priority to the workplace, other aspects of daily living tended to be regarded as, at best, of secondary significance; at worst as the preserve of capitalist mass consumption. In post-war France, the Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre recognized that daily life was shaped by history, and stressed the significance of consumption. His
Everyday Life in the Modern World
(1968) notes in passing how women were ‘consigned’ to the everyday and mentions their ‘incessant protests’, but it presents them as targets of consumer capitalism, not as historical agents in a sustained struggle to alter the circumstances of social and sexual reproduction.
¹⁵
Women were inscribed, for Lefebvre, into the semiology of advertising.
¹⁶
It was as if the adventurous and inventive women dreamers had never been. All those battles around personal and social existence, all those passionate debates about daily life, seemed to have been deleted from the record.

But then, in the late 1960s, the women’s liberation movement surfaced and within a few years feminists in many countries were endeavouring once again to bridge the personal and the political, production and community, society and the state. The new movement contributed to a revived interest in the history of experiments in free love, same-sex relationships, communal living, community action and a wider scope for trade unions. Moreover the adventurers’ efforts to reconfigure social citizenship and social rights have been revisited by the wider women’s movements which developed alongside feminism. Globally, working-class women have agitated for equality in trade unions and taken action in communities in support of men on strike. Poor women have devised new forms of association to defend their livelihoods. They have also campaigned for access to resources, from water to housing, from sanitation to land, and have risen against the destruction of the environment by large corporations. Ideas of ethical consumption as a means of improving workers’ conditions are again on the agenda, along with those of a living wage and citizen’s income. The rebellions mounted in recent decades
by women worldwide for rights and entitlements have contributed to an assertion of the need to extend democracy into every aspect of everyday life. The boundaries between inner and outer change and differing ways of knowing are being reimagined and reinvented; clear-cut dichotomies are being resisted in favour of fluidity. This new ‘awakening’ of women throws the efforts of the dreamers and adventurers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into new relief.

In seeking to translate personal experiences and desires into the public sphere of politics, while attempting to balance autonomy with loving relationships, caring for others with self-realization, modern feminists have come up against many of the dilemmas which puzzled the adventurous dreamers of an earlier era. Moreover, in many parts of the world, women have wrestled with powerful economic and political interests in their efforts to claim resources from the state while retaining democratic control over how they are used. Radical and ingenious stratagems have been devised to enable women participating in community and local politics to affect the centres of power. Like the dreamers before them, women in contemporary movements over the last few decades have been forced to realize that the changes sought have to be regarded as a continuing quest. Indeed, each gain reveals unexpected problems which have to be tackled anew.
¹⁷
There is no automatic accretion of improvement. The initial imprint of action can be erased and lost to view, just like the visions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century dreamers.

Those women who invented so much have been partially forgotten because they were not at the centre of power, nor were they engaged in heroic acts or glitzed with glamour. But societies are recreated in more ways than meet the eye. The mundane, the intimate, the individual moment of anger, the sense of association: all contribute to the fabric of daily life. The rediscovery of their lost heritage is revelatory, and not only because these energetic innovators dreamed up so much that we take for granted in the world. They also staked out a remarkably rich terrain of debate around questions which are equally vital today. How to renew the body politic; how to take account of specificities while maintaining a wider cohesion; how to allow for individuality while finding connection through relationships and social movements; how to combine inner perceptions with outer change; how to respect the insights and experience of the subordinated and still move from what is to something better; all these are as germane as they ever were. Nor was
the awakening of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries simply a matter of the intellect; it involved the spirit too. The utopianism of our adventurous foremothers intimated new ways of being and relating: together they effected what Linda Gordon has called a ‘transformation of hopes’.
¹⁸
Perhaps this faith in possibility is their most precious legacy. Across the decades the voice of the redoubtable Lois Waisbrooker rings with the dreamers’ zeal and energy, rallying the faint-hearted among the new wave of ‘everyday makers’: ‘The first step . . . is to believe that it
can
be done; the next that it
will
be done, and lastly to determine to do it
ourselves
’.
¹⁹

Acknowledgements

The inspiration for
Dreamers of a New Day
was Dolores Hayden’s
The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities
(1981). Hayden’s fascinating account of women reshaping everyday life struck powerful chords with my own observations of women’s activism in trade unions and community politics, my work in the early 1980s at the Popular Planning Unit as part of the Greater London Council’s Industrial Strategy, and then for the United Nations University’s economics institute, WIDER, where I began to learn of the global networks being formed by poor women. My knowledge would be deepened by the commitment of women organizing around homework in Britain and internationally.

It has been my good fortune to write in a period when a historical culture informed by feminism has not only ‘brought women in’, but questioned who and what can be seen.
Dreamers of a New Day
rests on the extraordinary growth of interest in women’s and gender history which has occurred since the emergence of the women’s movement in the late 1960s. To assert the inventiveness of women is not to deny men’s role as historical agents; instead, women’s history as I see it seeks to rebalance the frame of reference. Rather than creating a new separate sphere, the aim is to alter the bias in perspectives in which women have been either absent or added as appendages.

My mother used to joke that my father had big ears because he was a farmer’s boy, used to listening to the earth. In looking back at the ‘everyday makers’, I have drawn on the historical equivalent of putting your ear to the ground – an approach I learned from Richard Cobb and E. P. and Dorothy Thompson. Ideas most certainly come from those who write books, articles, pamphlets, reports, but they are also generated
through action and lived experience, recorded in passing and snatched up by many people about whom little is known. I have consequently sought out obscure ‘dreamers’ who questioned prevailing assumptions, along with the figures who left more extensive traces. It is an orientation which is appropriate not simply for women but for all those who are excluded from dominant versions of what has been.

I owe a profound debt to Rosalyn Baxandall, who suggested books and articles and read early drafts of the manuscript, making detailed comments and criticisms; and to my agent, Faith Evans, whose editing skills, insights and knowledge of the period were invaluable in helping me to rewrite chapters. The enthusiasm and expertise of my publishers at Verso have been crucial in enabling me to complete a project which has been long in the making. Tom Penn’s meticulous editorial suggestions and criticisms helped me to express concepts with greater clarity, and his empathetic interest inspired me. Lorna Scott Fox’s copy-editing not only spotted errors but cleverly improved my phrasing. Big thanks are due to Sonia Lane and Anne Morrow, my RSI rescuers, who typed the manuscript and gave greatly appreciated support. I am also grateful to Logie Barrow, Susan Porter Benson, Lucy Bland, Myrna Breitbart, Stella Capes, Lee Diggings, Carina Galustian, Linda Gordon, Temma Kaplan, Ruth Milkman, Alison Ravetz, Linda Walker, Colin Ward, Harriet Ward, and Barbara Winslow who provided help with written and visual sources. Particular thanks are due to Candace Falk, Barry Pateman and Jessica Moran at the Emma Goldman Papers Project at the University of California at Berkeley, who not only guided me to references but dug up material even after I had returned to Britain. Thank you as well for the encouragement of Stephanie Barrientos, Huw Beynon, Diane Elson, Swasti Mitter, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright who saw the relevance of this history to contemporary movements and policies relating to gender, class and race.

For permission to quote I am grateful to the following: Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York (Helena Born Papers); Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. (Ellen Gates Starr Papers); Sheffield Archives (Carpenter Collection). For permission to reproduce images and help in finding pictures I am grateful to all the institutions credited and to the members of staff who dealt with my requests. Special thanks to Derek Clarke for his patience and forbearance in helping me make contact online.

Notes

Introduction

1
  Winifred Harper Cooley, ‘A Dream of the Twenty-First Century’, in ed. Carol Farley Kessler,
Daring to Dream: Utopian Stories by United States Women
1836–1919, Pandora Press, Boston and London, 1984, p. 207. See also Winifred Harper Cooley in
Woman’s Who’s Who of America
1914–15, p. 203. See also cutting in Women’s Rights Papers Biographies; Box 3 Series 2, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith’s College Northampton, Mass.

2
  Ada Nield Chew, ‘Mother-Interest and Child-Training’, in ed. Doris Nield Chew,
Ada Nield Chew: The Life and Writings of a Working Woman
, Virago, London, 1982, p. 249.

3
  Clementina Black,
Woman’s Signal
, 29 August 1895, quoted in David Rubinstein,
Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the
1890
s
, The Harvester Press, Brighton, Sussex, 1985, p. 217.

4
  
Punch
, 26 May 1894, quoted in Rubinstein,
Before the Suffragettes
, p. 17; Christine Stansell,
American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century
, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Co., New York, 2000, pp. 26–34.

5
  Mary Ritter Beard, ‘Mothercraft’, in ed. Ann J. Lane,
Mary Ritter Beard: A Sourcebook
, Schocken Books, New York, 1977, p. 79.

6
  On the social and economic background, see Neville Kirk,
Labour and Society in Britain and the USA
, Vol. 2, Scolar Press, Aldershot, Hants, 1994; Joshua Freeman et al.,
Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture and Society
, Pantheon Books, New York, 1992; John Whiteclay Chambers II,
The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era,
1890–1920, Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2001.

7
  Eds Peter Gordon and David Doughan,
Dictionary of Women’s Organisations,
1825–1960, Woburn Press, London, 2001, pp. 174–5. See also Patricia Hollis,
Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government,
1865–1914, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987, pp. 27, 307–36, 358–9.

8
  Pamela M. Graves,
Labour Women: Women in British Working-Class Politics,
1918–1939, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, p. 175.