by Jill Roe
Both writings are signed ‘Miles Franklin, Shawondasee’, a placename in Connecticut. As evidenced by postcards home, in the summer of 1908 Miles went east from Chicago for the first time. She stayed with the writer and suffragist Jessie Childs and her husband on Riverside Drive, ‘the most fashionable part of New York’, and took a trip to Stonington, Connecticut, with Margaret Robins’ younger sister, Mary E. Dreier, president of the New York WTUL. There had been an earlier break too, in the Illinois lake country. Summer breaks would become a regular feature of Miles’s life in America.26
On 1 January 1909 Miles Franklin made the first of the brief daily entries in her pocket diaries that run in a virtually unbroken series to 1 January 1954. Early entries confirm that in her own time she continued to write, though she told no one. They show too that she was often unwell, from the cold and possibly from nervous exhaustion, perhaps partly as a result of being alone and far from home. In consequence some weeks she seems to have spent almost half her time in her room at the Harvard Hotel on Washington Street, West Side.27
By 1909 Miles was de facto secretary of the league. Despite bleak moments, which reliance on daily diary entries may easily overemphasise, Miles was forever gregarious. Some weeks she was out most nights. For example, in January 1909 she was singing in the league chorus, attending a ‘reading class’, and going to a stenographers’ dinner on a weekly basis.28
A highlight was the Chicago league’s Anniversary Ball on 22 February 1909. Miles and three of her colleagues — Agnes Nestor of the glove workers’ union, fellow office worker and member of the stenographers’ union Olive Sullivan, and Mary McEnerney, founder of the bindery women’s union — were among those chosen to sing that night. Dressed in Norwegian peasant costumes, the ensemble sang the ‘Spinning Chorus’ from The Flying Dutchman: ‘a great success’, she recorded. Another notable outing was a league delegation to the state capital, Springfield, in late April, led by Mrs Robins, to further the league’s legislative program. Agnes Nestor and Elizabeth Maloney of the Chicago waitresses’ union addressed the Illinois Senate on working conditions, to great effect; and Miles, who helped with lobbying at Springfield, went to see Abraham Lincoln’s house. She also had a taste of industrial action closer to home when, a month earlier, led by temporary union president Magdalen Dalloz, stenographers at various union offices in Chicago walked out after their demand for a half holiday was rejected by their bosses (though it is unlikely she was personally affected, as she was privately employed by Mrs Robins, who took charge of the protest).29
In mid-1909, from June to September, Miles took a lengthy and beneficial break in adjacent Wisconsin, during which time she attended a summer school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. When she returned to work in September, Mrs Robins noted: ‘All the lieutenants are returning from their vacations and Stella Franklin has brought back red cheeks.’30
Mrs Robins became her ‘good fairy’. In late 1909 Miles wrote:
In a country where brilliant women abound at every turn, Mrs Robins is easily one of the ablest and most remarkable of living Americans. The prominence which is her due is forced upon her daily in increasing degree . . . In the prime of the early thirties, she has beauty, birth, wealth, superb physical strength, a brilliant intellect, a vivid and delightful personality, and a few years since formed a romantic and ideal marriage with Raymond Robins, who brought his Brooklyn heiress to live the life of the people in a fourth-floor tenement flat in the most congested of Chicago’s broad acres of slums. With the executive ability of a Prime Minister, intensely practical, and at the same time imbued with lofty ideals and infectious enthusiasm, anything she undertakes is sure of success.31
That justifiable assessment was written on the occasion of the second biennial convention of the NWTUL, held in Chicago from 27 September to 1 October 1909, when Miles, who was listed as office secretary and representative of the stenographers and typists’ union, served as convention secretary. The convention was Miles’s first, and marked the onset of increasingly arduous duties. With the first great uprising of clothing workers in New York in late 1909, followed by a strike that lasted from 22 November 1909 to 15 February 1910, the league won its industrial spurs by supporting the strikers in various essential ways, and its role became increasingly clear. Although Miles was not directly involved — her time would come the following year — the combination of the convention and the New York strike made for more clerical work in Chicago, and year’s end found her very tired.
In late 1909 the personal column of the Sydney Morning Herald, which carried gossipy items contributed by readers, noted that she was thinking seriously about returning to Australia. ‘I am now well enough to be growing outrageously homesick, so intend to work very hard so I can make tracks for the Great South within a year or so,’ she wrote from the summer school in Madison on 21 August. ‘I have just finished correcting the proofs of a yarn that is to appear in book form in the near future, and mean to take up my rusty pen again.’32
Buoyed by the imminent publication of Some Everyday Folk and Dawn by Blackwood, and by references to it in the press at home (supplied by whom is unclear), and by the publication of a short story, ‘Jilted’, in the Australasian of 14 August 1909, Miles was now admitting to renewed literary aspirations, but she made no mention of new work, of which it turns out there was a good deal. Not all the output that survives in manuscript in the Franklin Papers is dated, but it seems clear that when she told the Sydney Morning Herald in August 1909 that she was considering returning to the literary life in Australia, she had already that year written three short stories (possibly more) and another novel (‘When Cupid Tarried’, later turned into a play). The irony for her would be that the Australian reception of Some Everyday Folk and Dawn was lukewarm, and worse in England, as noted by the Book Lover, which loyally rose to her defence; and the short story ‘Jilted’ dated back to 1900.33
The Australasian said the story was interesting. What seems significant now is her resuscitation of the tale at this time. Possibly it has a bearing on the silence that descended on her relationship with Edwin Bridle back in 1907. On 27 May 1908, at Waverley, Sydney, Edwin Bridle married Australia Wentworth Lea Little, known as ‘Trallie’. Miles apparently made no comment on this or later events in his life, such as the five children borne by Trallie or the family’s move to Queensland in 1928. Yet it is likely she knew of the marriage, and she was aware of Edwin’s death in 1953. Moreover, she developed a distinctive angle on jilting in her second Chicago novel, On Dearborn Street, begun in 1913 and published posthumously (1981). Here a woman, Sybyl, is the jilted one, as she defiantly says to her would-be suitor:
One man nearly as good as you was once engaged to me, yet I’m free! Thank God! They say any fool can get married but it takes a devilish clever woman to remain an old maid, so that is the distinction I covet. When a man becomes too vigorously engaged to me, I change my geographical location and then he jilts me. I just love to be jilted.
Sybyl then produces a wedding ring: ‘He had the ring all ready and then I moved, so he jilted me. He was so sorry for me that he sent me the ring as a souvenir.’34
If this vignette has any basis in Miles Franklin’s experience — and according to her early biographer Marjorie Barnard, she was wearing a wedding ring when she returned to Australia in late 1932, though no one knew why — it suggests that with Edwin Bridle her bluff had been called.
On 14 October 1909 Stella Miles Franklin turned thirty. There is no mention of her birthday in her diary (nor would she ever mention her birthday, at least not until very late in life, and then only because her Aunt Lena insisted on marking it).
Her primary concern remained her writing. In 1910 she joined the British Society of Authors, and it was in early 1910 that Blackwood withdrew My Brilliant Career from sale, in accordance with her instructions. There had been six editions since 1901, and there were 168 copies in stock in December 1909. But it was still selling, with £16 12s in royalties paid to Miles
in March 1910. Although Miles’s letter of instruction does not survive, it seems clear she wanted to move on. She needed to distance herself from My Brilliant Career, particularly in the British market, where Some Everyday Folk and Dawn’s suffrage theme was topical, and if the book sold, she would do well out of British royalties as compared with the lower rate she would receive back in Australia. However, she was willing for remaining copies of My Brilliant Career to be sold back in Australia, provided no more were printed.35
The NWTUL had developed in a somewhat haphazard way, it was now recognised that its affairs should be put on a sound business basis, rather than relying on the philanthropic impulse. Thus it was decided at an executive meeting in St Louis in May 1910 that Stella Franklin would be employed as league secretary fulltime and paid $25 weekly from the league’s treasury rather than Mrs Robins’ private purse, more than twice what she had been receiving.36
Miles was just back from a summer holiday in Harbor Springs, with barely time to send ‘When Cupid Tarried’ off to Blackwood when, on 22 September, a small group of girls working for the clothing manufacturer Hart, Schaffner and Marx struck against a wage cut, followed by another group on 29 September. So began the Chicago garment workers’ strike of 1910–11.37
Within three weeks of the first small strikes, over 40,000 garment workers were out, directly affecting some 100,000 families in Chicago, and by late November, the entire city. The workers’ grievances were many, from wage cuts to heavy fines for damaged work. There was no minimum wage as in England and Australia, or, at the outset, any recognition of collective bargaining rights.38
Even before the national council of the United Garment Workers of America called a general strike, some women workers had asked the Chicago WTUL for help; and it was not long afterwards that the union accepted a formal offer of assistance from the national league. The league itself formed a strike committee at a meeting at Hull House at the end of October, with Mrs Robins chairman-treasurer and subcommittees set up on picketing, grievances, organisation, publicity and so on. Miles Franklin became chair of the publicity committee.
She had plenty to work with. The grievances committee immediately collected strikers’ stories, and the citizens’ committee produced its own report, based on worker testimony from the worst of the sweatshops. Miles joined picket lines where she saw police brutality at first-hand, attended rallies and, on 14 November, ‘went out investigating conditions on the N. W. side’. Her diary for the crowded days of November records the early preparation of a statement from the league for general distribution, and the establishment of effective contacts with churchmen. She also attended court as a witness for picketing workers over several days (but was not called). All in all, her efforts were rewarded in that by the end of the month the public had been aroused, calls for arbitration were heard, and, though this was not her responsibility, considerable sums were being raised by the league to support the strikers, who were by then, with winter setting in, in great need but standing firm.39
The league was especially important in sustaining their resolution. On Friday 11 November Miles’s diary records, ‘Terrible jam of people at 275 La Salle [headquarters of the CFL — Chicago Federation of Labor] coming for money.’ Most of them were unorganised workers without strike funds, and the local council of the United Garment Workers was already in the red. There was nothing in the kitty for the 10,000-odd workers who waited patiently through the day. In consequence, CFL leader John Fitzpatrick organised commissary stores to dispense strike benefits in kind, obtained at cost from wholesalers and paid for by the national garment workers’ union, and run by league workers for up to 50,000 claimants daily when the strike was at its peak. What a task it was to obtain the food and meet other urgent needs, such as for rent assistance and coal, and deal with the voucher system established by the experienced Fitzpatrick; but evidently it worked, as there was virtually no violence at CFL headquarters (or in any other aspect of the strike). However, since the strikers at first shrank from what seemed like charity, it was necessary to prepare a bulletin explaining the situation. No doubt that too was the responsibility of ‘S. M. Franklin’, as she usually signed herself in America. Later she and Alice Henry would claim of the scheme adopted for the provision of groceries on a fixed rations scale at commissary stations: ‘As far as we know such a plan has never before been adapted to the needs of women nor carried out by organized labor for the benefit of a large unorganized group.’ The contribution of the ‘allies’ (that is, wealthy friends of the union) was also significant. In March 1911, after what Mrs Robins defiantly called ‘the hunger bargain’ was struck by early February, it was estimated that the league had raised about two-thirds of the strike funds, some $40,000 of the nearly $65,000 raised by the league and the CFL combined.40
By December 1910, it had seemed that the strike might succeed. Reconciliation between the largest of the employers, Hart, Schaffner and Marx, and its work force had begun, and would soon be successful. Although the more obdurate employer associations remained opposed to any recognition of workers’ rights, the strikers were not about to capitulate, as demonstrated by a great parade through the streets of Chicago by some 30,000 strikers to cheer a phalanx of speakers in West Side Ballpark. As recounted by Miles and Alice Henry, they ‘evinced their faith in the common brotherhood of labor’.41
Another initiative was the establishment of Life and Labor, a monthly publication of thirty-two pages geared to the needs of working women.42
Alice Henry and Stella Miles Franklin were appointed editor-in-chief and assistant editor respectively. For all her cautiously revived hopes for her singing voice and her numerous literary endeavours since leaving Australia in 1906, a career in journalism had long been more likely; and now, in addition to her other responsibilities, it would come close to reality. Amazing to relate, news of her new role appeared in the Nepean Times, Penrith, on 18 February 1911, where it was noted that the first issue of Life and Labor contained a condensed history of the garment workers’ strike as it stood at the time of going to press.
6
THE NET OF CIRCUMSTANCE: 1911–1915
I love my work very much.1
The Chicago garment workers’ strike was brought to an abrupt halt on 3 February 1911 by the leader of the national garment workers’ union, Thomas Rickert, an old-style craft unionist more concerned about securing agreements with employers than the problems of unskilled workers, who in consequence gained little from their heroic struggle. The sudden ending of the strike left many loose ends to be tied up by the strike committees, and it was not until March that the WTUL and its officers could feel their duties done.2
These later American years were perhaps the most astonishing of Miles Franklin’s life. She held down a demanding job in one of the most bustling cities in the world while in her own time writing compulsively, producing some three novels and at least two plays over the next four years. And although there was no phrase for it then, her biological clock was relentlessly ticking. Now into her thirties, and in her prime, it was time to take romance seriously. At the same time the social politics of which the WTUL was part took an exciting new turn with the foundation of the Progressive Party in Chicago in 1912, and first-wave feminism faced new issues.
In 1911 she began a new novel, The Net of Circumstance, which was published in London in 1915 under the extraordinary pseudonym ‘Mr & Mrs Ogniblat L’Artsau’ (a play on ‘Austral Talbingo’), a work that remained virtually unknown until the 1980s, mainly because Miles never divulged her authorship. In those years in Chicago before the Great War, Miles Franklin sought to reinvent herself as a modern writer, and so great was the stimulus of time and place, she very nearly succeeded.3
Although she was again feeling the pressure of work — as well as suffering from a number of maladies — Miles still had the energy to attend to her own writing. On 15 April 1911 she sent three short stories off to a literary agent in New York, and copies to another in London. The three stories were
‘Mrs Mulvaney’s Moccasins’, ‘Not All a Coward’, and ‘The Mystery of Her Parentage’, the only new one being ‘Mrs Mulvaney’s Moccasins’, which does not survive in its original American form. It was to be hoped, she wrote to the New York agent Mr D. Murphy, that he would have better luck with these than with her stuff to date (the word ‘stuff’ replacing ‘yarn’ in her vocabulary in the United States).4
Since the stories were quite slight, more like sketches, their lack of success now seems unsurprising. Yet all three stories concern women perplexed by modern life, and it seems somehow significant that after a long day typing them up at the office one Saturday, Miles wrote in her diary ‘tired but content’. The day after she sent them off, a Sunday, she resumed work on ‘The End of My Career’.5
Working in the office on the weekend was not unusual for Miles. Long and irregular hours were the norm in partly philanthropic, partly reformist work. By the end of April Miles was feeling ‘pretty ill’, and her eyes became so troublesome she had to try the ‘damned glasses’ (a rare instance of swearing). Now she seemed set to become not only patron saint of the snub-nosed but, as used to be feared before the coming of plastic frames in the 1950s, of the socially handicapped. The first photographs of Miles Franklin in glasses date from much later in life, when she was back in Australia, so perhaps the despised glasses were primarily reading glasses.
Miles’s uncertain health worried her friends. In the summer approaching, her now close friend the librarian and league ally Editha Phelps invited Miles to go with her on her customary summer vacation to England; and when approached, Mrs Robins, back from Florida, responded generously to the proposal. It was, she wrote to Miles on 17 May, ‘a great and beautiful opportunity’, and two months’ leave was granted, one paid, the second unpaid, as apparently proposed by Editha. Once the Boston convention was over in June, they would be on their way.6