The positive value given to paid work ran parallel to the labor movement’s first serious efforts to organize women in the needle trades. These were years when women poured into the labor force, both in traditional manufacturing jobs and the burgeoning sector of low-level white-collar jobs. Although married women were present in compounding numbers, the prototypical female industrial worker was still young and single—which is to say, ripe for political activity. Middle-class feminists saw workingwomen as sturdy sympathizers, with aspirations for economic independence similar to their own—no longer forlorn and timid, the quintessential victims that Victorian feminists thought them to be. In 1903, the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) formed, with branches in New York, Boston, and Chicago, dedicated to promoting contacts between middle-class “allies” and female industrial workers. The idea was that allies would support union organizing with social connections, writing skills, and legal aid. In the great garment workers’ strike of 1909–10, the legendary “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand” carried on through a bitter New York winter, allies’ help—which included walking the picket lines—was crucial. The “working women and the leisure women mix, on the whole, rather naturally,” an American suffragist happily allowed to a British colleague.4
Workingwomen understood that the vote could put in office mayors, governors, and legislators sympathetic to the eight-hour day, health and safety measures in workplaces, and strike arbitration. In turn, the prospect of workingwomen’s votes eased union antagonism. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) made formal gestures of support to suffrage in the early century. The Socialist Party, too, relented; although it did not endorse NAWSA, the party allowed members to create their own suffrage groups.5
Wage-earning women were often leery of suffragists, who were not immune to patronizing “girls” they considered simple and timid. “I feel as if I butted in wher[e] I was not wanted,” complained Margaret Hinchey, a union representative, about a convention she attended. But there were productive ties, too. The New York feminists, in particular, incorporated working-class leaders such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Dorothy Day. And overall the political convergence pushed suffrage into dialogue with new allies.6
Feminism was an approach to sexual equality that was at once political and psychological. Féminisme was a French coinage from the 1890s that described a version of women’s rights that was avowedly feminine and thus different from the stodgy ideas (as the French saw the matter) of the clunky, mannish British movement. By 1910, “feminism” had taken on subversive connotations and migrated to Britain and the United States as a term analogous to other radicalisms of the day: anarchism, socialism, Zionism.7
Feminism was a metropolitan approach: It belonged to young women in London and New York (Paris invented it, then expelled it). The British and Americans competed to be the “storm center” of the movement, one group vying to outdo the other in militance. The British saw themselves as the avant-garde of the most civilized nation of the world, standing at the head of the empire as leaders of world democracy who exemplified the most advanced women’s gains. For their part, Americans fancied themselves freed from Old World custom, empowered by their country’s youth and revolutionary spirit.8
On both sides of the Atlantic, the outward trappings were similar: fashions that scorned Victorian fussiness (no gloves, corsets, or long skirts) and embraced smoking cigarettes, open love affairs before marriage, a college education and/or serious vocation as an artist or professional. Feminism lent a romantic, ingenuous cast to these self-styled daughters steeped in lyrical beliefs about the imminence of a thoroughgoing social revolution led by a vanguard “half-way through the door into tomorrow.” The favored image was “a band of capable females, knowing what they want and taking it, asking no leave from anybody, doing things and enjoying life,” as Floyd Dell, a bohemian admirer, described a New York City group in 1913.9 The prized attitude was insouciance toward the world’s limitations and rules, a willingness to experiment with what women could and could not do. It was an eloquent politics that could only have been embraced by those who styled themselves daughters, predicated as it was on freewheeling exemption from women’s typical family obligations.
Feminism overlapped with suffrage, but it was not coterminous. Feminists assumed that suffrage was necessary, but votes did not really interest them as much as did subjective change. Psychological introspection and self-expression would clear the way for real equality. “We intend simply to be ourselves,” avowed Marie Jenney Howe, a New Yorker who organized Heterodoxy, a club for feminists. “Not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves.” Feminists encouraged each other to throw off the constraints of mind and heart—what we would now call sex role socialization. Escaping femininity’s decorum and limits of imagination, women would become their big human selves. Largeness was the operative trope, as if standard womanhood was impossibly small: “big spirited, intellectually alert, devoid of the old ‘femininity,’ ” cheered Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World.10
Feminism developed from the conviction that a life lived on equal terms with men was within reach. It was not so much a theory of male power as it was of the accidents of male power, and in its benign view of patriarchy, it departed from darker nineteenth-century views of male dominion. The assumption was that men’s power over women was atavistic and would dissolve soon enough, given the right circumstances. Feminism would open the way to the reign of the “human sex,” only incidentally divided into male and female. Feminists intended to live in a world where the sexes mingled (no more domestic sphere), consorting with male friends, lovers, and husbands as fellows in a world-building enterprise.11
The brothers would welcome them and do what they could to help emancipation along. It was a way to make a place beside men who were already established as artists, political leaders, writers, and cultural spokesmen.
Feminism thus eschewed the quiet realpolitik of the older women’s movement, the Victorian assumption that a gulf divided most men from most women, that in education, work, interests, temperament, experience, and sexual desire, the sexes had little in common. The view was sanguine, not to mention wildly naïve, oblivious to the hard realities of motherhood, marriage, and male power. The twentieth century was expected to bring, if not utopia, then still something grand and shining between men and women. No dreary message about immovable laws and customs; here was a feminism that promised to propel women into a dazzling future with enthusiastic men at their side.
Crystal Eastman, a lawyer and something of a celebrity in bohemian New York, summed up the ethos. The modern woman “wants money of her own. She wants work of her own.” But not just any work: fulfilling work. “Some means of self-expression, perhaps. Some way of satisfying her personal ambitions.” Her aspirations did not stop there, though. She wanted a husband, home, and children, too. “How to reconcile those two desires in real life, that is the question.” Feminism offered a double hope: meaningful work in the world and a rich intimacy with men. It was the marriage plot with a modern twist: Women’s destiny was to live happily ever after, but in an equal partnership with a man. Eastman’s question—“how to reconcile those two desires”—was intensely individualistic and self-referential and at the same time keenly aware of the needs of all women. Could freedom, full political and civil rights, the vote, education—all these goals of the nineteenth century—really lead to the realization of the two goals, and not one or the other? “How to reconcile those two desires in real life”?
The question, first broached in the 1910s, would be fundamental to twentieth-century feminism. It proved to be not quite answerable.12
The fascination with psychological development brings to mind Margaret Fuller’s Romantic celebration of a transformed subjectivity and concord with men. Yet the historical antecedents were forgotten. The women knew about suffrage, but no feminist in 1912 would likely have known that others before her had connected democracy, socialism, t
he enlarged soul, and emancipation. Absent a history of women, these modernists could only believe that they worked with a clean slate.
Any twentieth-century political movement was liable to amnesia—modernity by definition instructs its protagonists that the past has little to offer—but feminists have been peculiarly liable to seeing their own generation’s ventures as unique. The result is that thoughts and proposals have to be generated anew, mistakes are repeated, and few arguments are resolved. Although there is a complex, instructive feminist past, it has seldom been available to guide the present. This was going to be the case, too, with the valiant efforts of the 1910s to remake the human sex: soon abandoned, soon forgotten.
The feminist esprit worked its way into the suffrage movement. With the Southern strategy faltering in NAWSA and the old guard dying off, a space opened and women from progressive reform and the political left moved in. Young workers did an end run around the genteel tactics of the parlor to introduce a boisterous politics of the streets and flashy techniques of showmanship. The love of breaking rules, of making a spectacle of oneself, produced a repertoire of ways to stage feminism to the public.
Suffragists had always conducted their affairs inside, except for the New Departure challenges in 1872; the censure of the so-called public woman who exposed herself to strangers put street demonstrations and public gatherings off-limits. Now, for the first time, suffragists moved outside to express their views. Today, when women in many parts of the world march and take to the streets, it’s difficult to grasp how daring was the act. When Harriot Stanton Blatch organized the first American suffrage parade in New York in 1910, her critics claimed it would set the cause back fifty years.13
In England, the WSPU pushed the entire question of suffragist propriety some degrees to the left. Thus the NUWSS could exploit its moderate reputation to hold an unprecedented march in London in 1907, although, as the suffragist Ray Strachey observed, “the vast majority of women still felt that there was something very dreadful in walking in procession through the streets” and believed they were risking public shame. But if they were exposing themselves, at least they weren’t screaming at MPs as the Pankhursts were, and the march of some three thousand women set a precedent. In New York, Harriot Stanton Blatch orchestrated the 1912 parade as a pageant. Twenty thousand women marched before the eyes of an estimated half million watchers. Dressed in white and walking in step, they held their heads high, a tableau of noble mothers and valiant wage earners, spiced with a dash of stylishness and a strong dose of youthful good looks.14
Even so, marchers endured taunts from onlookers given to casual hatred of the kind a poison-pen writer expressed in a letter to Blatch’s New York headquarters: “I don’t wish you any bad luck, but I hope the sidewalk falls through and you all go to Hell.” On the respectable end, contempt came from the likes of a prominent New York anti who judged the marchers morally bankrupt: “Your methods are utterly abhorrent to me at all times, but now, after the superb unselfishness and heroism of the men of the Titanic, your march is untimely and pathetically unwise.” This was Annie Nathan Meyer, who was also the moving force behind the founding of Barnard College. Meyer believed in women’s progress but thought that seeking the vote amounted to unseemly resentment of men. What the sinking of the Titanic had to do with voting rights, or why the men on the boat were more courageous than the women, did not need to be specified. Well-behaved women should always take the backseat.15
Regardless of the hostility, the parades were a hit. In New York, the resemblance of the marches to Broadway musicals brought to mind pretty chorus girls more than Amazonian viragoes. “A year ago 3,000 marchers and perhaps 70,000 onlookers. This year 20,000 marchers and 500,000 watching,” reported a New York newspaper with something close to admiration. Marching in the company of thousands was a way to make a statement, not only about one’s politics but one’s stake in a different way of being female. It used to be the case, explained Gertude Foster Brown, middle-aged but nonetheless a woman of the Newest sort, that daughters learned “that self-distrust and shrinking from publicity were the most admirable of womanly qualities—‘womanly modesty’ was the phrase that covered it all, and this was thought to be the supremely desirable feminine characteristic.” But that was over now; her generation was bringing about “a startling change.”16
Between 1910 and 1915, suffrage spectacles swept the country, entertaining and enchanting. Suffragists organized automobile, trolley, and train “suffrage specials,” put on street dances and outdoor concerts, launched hot-air balloons, staged shows in vaudeville theaters, stated their case on billboards, electric signs, and in store windows, and produced suffrage comedies and plays. The commercial media gave back in kind: Newspapers put up their doings in banner headlines, magazines gave them illustrated features, and the theater and silent film industry turned them into comic material. Top-billed actresses signed on to the cause: divas who were the equivalents of today’s Hollywood stars, including the “divine” Sarah Bernhardt. In the cities, troupers climbed up on soapboxes—that platform for coarse politicians and dangerous radicals—to declaim to crowds. All were welcome, and it was a remarkably multigenerational moment, but youth, élan, and good looks were at a premium.17
On the West Coast, the innovative tactics contributed to the first big breaks. In Washington state in 1910, California in 1911, and Oregon in 1912, suffrage coalitions broke through the female apathy and opposition that had thwarted the issue for decades. The California campaign was the turning point. An assortment of clubwomen, former Populists, Socialist Party workers, and trade union women won the vote in the fastest-growing state in the nation, putting half a million women’s votes into play and doubling the number of female voters nationwide. Suffrage expanded its class base. In Los Angeles, self-professed “women of leisure” gave tea parties for the “crème de la crème” of society. Simultaneously, working-class women, schooled in organizing tactics from union drives, held festive open-air meetings in parks, leading crowds in belting out suffrage songs. In San Francisco, Irish Catholics, Eastern European Jews, and the waitresses’ union pitched in. Black women organized a suffrage league in the Bay Area. Socialists joined in Los Angeles. Californians utilized news-grabbing events, kicky stunts, and razzle-dazzle; they passed out doughnuts tagged with Votes for Women slips. There were parades and pageants on the English model, thick with drapery, costumes, banners, and speechifying. Workers traveled the state in automobiles to barnstorm for the referendum, a sensation when cars were rare and women driving them rarer still.18
Victories fanned out in the West: Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon in 1912; Alaska Territory in 1913; Montana and Nevada in 1914. Cross-class coalition politics made the difference. Where old-line suffragists castigated the horse-trading of elections and promised to purify the atmosphere at the polls, new suffragists saw power to be captured; where conservatives sniffed at the vulgar, ignorant male masses, suffragists saw allies; where the old guard drew back from divisive issues that might pull women from the high ground, these New Women spotted opportunities to attract followers of other causes. Harriot Stanton Blatch encapsulated the change: “The old order of suffragist had kept youngsters ‘in their place,’ had left working women alone, had not ‘bothered’ with men bent on politics.”19 The new order was different. Those who forced the change were not always young in years (Blatch was forty-six when she returned to the United States and jumped into New York suffrage). But in their political psychology they occupied the position of the daughters.
American militance became a gesture of rebellion, not martyrdom as it had been with the Pankhursts. It was a demonstration of modern woman’s determination to hold her ground in a man’s world. A rash of silent films made comedy out of the presumption that such brazen women might as well be men. Charlie Chaplin turned his genius to playing a brawny suffragist in A Busy Day (1914); he brawled with police and walloped a pretty feminine rival who caught the eye of the suffragist’s henpecked male companion. B
ut to be the butt of a joke in a Chaplin film was far preferable to being invisible. Suffragists dipped into a popular culture brimming with visual media—silent films, newsreels, magazine and newspaper illustrations, and photographs—and turned spectacular behavior into a prerequisite for modern womanhood.20
It was as if they all had decided at once to disobey their mothers’ steely injunction, “Don’t make a spectacle of yourself.” You could defy the rules of ladyhood all by yourself—Elsie Clews Parsons, future anthropologist, made a point of undressing in front of a window—or you could march in a suffrage parade. Or you could stage a spectacle by doing something in front of a crowd that would surely appall your mother. At San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Hazel Hunkins, a recent Vassar graduate, nervously clambered into an airplane to take a ride and shower the crowd with suffrage flyers—this at a time when few people had seen an airplane, let alone flown in one.
Such adventures in motion generated the publicity that came from risk and self-exposure. A cross-country automobile trip for suffrage that three women took from the San Francisco exposition to Washington, D.C., broke the rule against unchaperoned travel. The grueling journey along a chain of barely marked wagon roads was the high point of a practice that sent young women bombing around the countryside in automobiles to distribute flyers and make speeches. (In Britain, where distances were smaller and cars fewer, women were known to pedal around the countryside in cycling clubs to deliver the message and to travel in gypsy caravans for trips to out-of-the-way villages.)21
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