Dreamers of a New Day (5 page)

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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.’
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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’.
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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”.’
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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?’
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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So too were the American Transcendentalists and Whitman.