Dreamers of a New Day (9 page)

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.