Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  The Boston convention opened in Barnard Hall on Monday 12 June and lasted till the following Saturday, by which time Miles had been elected national secretary of the NWTUL. After a few days’ break it was on to New York for more league meetings.7

  New York was not a new city to her. Her first visit had been in the summer of 1908, when she resided with Jessie Childs and visited Mary Dreier in Connecticut. ‘New York is a wonderful city,’ Miles wrote on a postcard to Grandma Lampe, dated 26 June 1911, and on another, of Trinity Church, to Aunt Lena the next day, she noted that the church drew ‘part of its revenue from brothel rentals’.8

  Miles left New York on 28 June 1911. She travelled north by train to Montreal, where she met Editha. Then she and Editha continued together to Quebec, arriving on 30 June to catch the Empress of Ireland later that day. They disembarked at Liverpool nine days later, having passed through ice floes in the Atlantic, and by the shores of ‘poor old Ireland’ and the beautiful but bleak coast of Scotland, glimpsing also the Isle of Man (where, as Miles Franklin had noted in Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, women had had the vote since 1881) as they came in from what was an uneventful trip.9

  Miles was delighted by the trip south to London via Stratford-on-Avon, where she saw Shakespeare’s house and sent a postcard to Susannah Franklin. Like so many New World visitors steeped in the old culture, Miles’s response was heartfelt: ‘England is beautiful beyond words.’ Then it was on to Oxford and London, arriving at Miss Brennan’s boarding house at 22 Upper Woburn Place on 10 July.10

  What a contrast with the previous year’s break at Harbor Springs. Here at the heart of the British Empire, Miles, who, like all Australians until 1949, was a British subject, felt quite at home. Even the food agreed with her. She saw all the sights, starting with the National Portrait Gallery, and was kept busy visiting friends and associates. Almost first thing, she went to a Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) meeting and heard the Pankhursts speak (having first heard Emmeline Pankhurst in Chicago eighteen months earlier); later, with Editha, at the home of Raymond Robins’ sister, the suffrage actress and writer Elizabeth Robins, in Henfield, Sussex, she met Christabel Pankhurst socially, finding it an enjoyable experience. Vida Goldstein was in London too, and had already made quite an impact; so were young Molly David and Agnes Murphy, formerly social editor of Melbourne Punch and now biographer of Melba. As secretary of the National Women’s Trade Union League of America, Miles also made contact with prominent British labour women Mrs Philip Snowden, Mary Macarthur and Margaret Bondfield, and with Miss Moore of the People’s Suffrage Federation.11

  This was Miles Franklin’s first encounter with the liberal intelligentsia of London. Among the interesting people she met in 1911 was Florence Dryhurst, translator of the Russian anarchist Kropotkin and a friend of Editha, who in turn introduced her to the well-known radical journalist Henry Woodd Nevinson. She also met the McMillan sisters, Margaret and Rachel, already famed for their child welfare work, and the redoubtable Charlotte Despard, leader of the Women’s Freedom League (WFL), a breakaway group from the Pankhursts’ authoritarian WSPU. Radical, reputable and progressivist, the largely middle-class WFL was a natural affiliation for Miles and she joined the organisation in 1913.12

  In early August Editha and Miles took a trip to Paris, travelling via Dieppe and Rouen. Miles’s diary indicates that she saw the main sights, but she didn’t enjoy herself greatly. There is a vignette of her and Editha sitting in a typical street café (which Editha liked to do), being pestered by Afghan carpet-sellers. Helen Marot, a league colleague from New York who was also in Paris at the time, later commented that it was a pity Miles had not stayed long enough to appreciate all the city’s charms — to which Miles replied that her French was not good enough and the food had upset her finicky stomach, so she hied herself back ‘to the heart of my British Empire’.13

  Back in London, she agreed to an interview for the WFL weekly, the Vote, which appeared in the September 1911 issue. There had already been a hint in postcards home that the poverty of London was hard to take. The day she returned from Paris, Miles noted a great dockers’ strike and later she went down to a strike of women factory workers at Bermondsey. In the Vote interview she made so bold as to say that she was glad that the workers of England still had enough stuffing in them to strike. It was in fact the summer of the Triple Alliance, when the coincidence of syndicalist industrial action, suffragette militancy, and the Ulster rebellion against Home Rule for Ireland heightened fears of revolution.14

  In the interview Miles expressed her commitment to the ‘splendid work’ in Chicago, and explained that although the vote was her passion, in America it made more sense to address the industrial question first. Never one to miss a trick, however, she referred obliquely to Some Everyday Folk and Dawn to underline her suffrage credentials: ‘You will judge how I have been “on the active list” if you will do me the honour of reading my book on a political campaign in Australia.’ At that moment, as one of the world’s few enfranchised women, and as a significant figure in the rising women’s trade union movement in America, she occupied the high ground. She was abreast of the most advanced feminist thought too. Editha encouraged her to read Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour, the bible of Edwardian feminism, and for Miles as powerful in its impact as The Story of an African Farm. The new work, she opined, was ‘as relieving as rain on the dust after drought’. From London, she sent her mother a copy, along with another book important to her, Women and Economics by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, with instructions to read the latter carefully if she had not already done so, and Aunt Lena too.15

  Then, on 29 August, Miles and Editha left London for Liverpool, where they set sail on the Empress of Britain for America. They were both seasick most of the way. From Quebec they caught through trains to Chicago, arriving on 7 September 1911.

  Secretary Franklin went straight to the office. It was good to catch up with friends but within days she noted ‘no rest or peace’. There was much to be done; and until the end of September she was again camped in the ‘beastly flat’ at Hull House. But she felt much stronger for her summer break and was enjoying Chicago’s culture with Editha, including its political culture. Perhaps it was at a single-tax conference she attended with Editha and Alice Henry later in the year that Miles Franklin first encountered the architect-planner Walter Burley Griffin and his brilliant wife, Marion Mahony Griffin, who were to win the international competition to design a new Federal capital of Australia on the Yass-Canberra Plains in 1912.16

  On 29 September 1911 Miles moved into a new residential hotel north of the Loop at 200 East Superior Street, a main east–west thoroughfare running between Lake Shore Drive and North Michigan Avenue, within easy walking distance of the office on Dearborn Street. ‘I pay three dollars a week . . . for a big back room [on the fourth floor]’, she wrote of it in 1915. ‘It is in a house among working people . . . a very humble place, but I can squark on my piano without getting on anyone’s nerves.’ Since her salary, paid by the league from 1910, was and remained $25 per week, $3 a week for accommodation suggests exceptional frugality. However, she had then to pay for meals, cheap as they seem to have been, and outlays for full board of $7 a week in 1911 make it appear more realistic. Piano hire and a post-office box seem to be the extent of personal indulgence.17

  Money was never far from her mind; and it is obvious from even a cursory glance at early records that although she never had much, she paid careful attention to it, and that she was a good saver from the moment it was possible. The entries in her Illinois Trust and Savings Bank passbook, which begin in March 1911 at $100, by January 1915 had reached $661.26, and when she left for London later in the year she still had $500 in the account. She also did what migrant workers often do: she sent money home. According to the notebook, between June 1912 and March 1915 she sent her mother £190.

  In October 1911 Miles took two train trips with Mrs Robins on league business: an overnight trip to Springfield (17
–18 October), to promote a state legislative committee, as determined at the convention; and to attend a conference in the industrial city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (24–27 October), where the league sought to assist striking mine workers and their families. Her report to the national executive on conditions among the mine workers and their families around Pittsburgh is one of the most effective pieces of writing about her league work extant: on the first day of her visit she met with miners in their homes and saw ‘the terrible living conditions, the utter lack of sanitation as represented by choked drains, and the general desolation of the mining camps’.18

  From diary entries it seems Miles did most of the dogsbody work on Life and Labor, preparing dummy issues and endlessly negotiating with Saul Brothers, the printers, several blocks away on ‘Printers’ Row’ in Federal Street. Bringing out a journal was very different from what it is today, involving much physical running around, with Miles more than ever on the streets of Chicago. At first, very little of her own signed work appeared in the magazine, but a vivid piece of reportage, ‘More About Pearl Buttons’, appeared in December 1911. The button workers of Muscatine, a small factory town on the Mississippi, had originally been locked out, and after the employer failed to honour an agreement, went on strike over union rights and unfair working conditions. At the time of Miles’s writing, morale was high, and the article begins with a handsome girl striker from Iowa dancing at the Union Halloween Ball in Chicago in November; however, the dispute dragged on to a stalemate in 1912.19

  Miles began — in Life and Labor — an irregular book review page, ‘When We Have Time to Read’, which first appeared in June 1911 with a gentle reminder of league policy that working women would not be able to keep up with modern thought without an eight-hour day and the living wage.20

  Alongside her first column, Alice Henry, as editor, extolled Chapter 14 of Lester Ward’s Pure Sociology, a book that would have a significant impact on Miles. She ranked it ‘among the very few works which have revolutionised thought and helped humanity along a fresh line of progress’. All but forgotten today, except in the history of American sociology, where his creative environmentalism has been seen as foreshadowing the criteria of evolutionary biology, Lester Frank Ward was to become Life and Labor’s favourite thinker: his ‘gynaecentric’ theory made the female sex primary and the male secondary in the organic scheme, and the age-long masculine supremacy but a passing phase. The times, Alice Henry wrote, gave every hope of a restoration of ‘a better balanced world’: ‘The present tremendous uprising among women, so long kept down, and the parallel uprising among the working folks also so long kept down and suppressed, are linked together and seen to be both different expressions of a sound and normal impulse under which the world promises to progress as never before.’21

  Cover of the September 1911 issue of the NWTUL journal Life and Labor, with the league’s logo and photo of a street march (the first banner reads ‘We have an eight hour day’). (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Miles Franklin Printed Books Collection, No. 155)

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman was another profound influence on Miles. Gilman had been famous as an author since The Yellow Wallpaper, the classic portrayal of a woman’s nervous collapse caused by a repressive marriage, which appeared in 1892. She also wrote Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, first published in 1898, which made her name as a theorist by identifying the sex relationship as an economic relationship as well. Interestingly, she did not call herself a feminist, rejecting gender definitions of the world as too narrow for the liberal evolutionary processes she believed were, or could be, under way, preferring the term ‘humanist’.22

  According to Miles, who heard her speak several times in Chicago in 1912, Mrs Gilman was ‘incomparably the greatest American woman alive . . . a vivific force who promulgates new thought’. In October 1912, the ‘great one’ autographed the first of two bound volumes of the Forerunner, Gilman’s monthly magazine which Miles had earlier purchased; later Miles dined with her and souvenired a wash rag from Mrs Gilman’s bathroom to send home to Rose Scott, who had first introduced her to Gilman’s writings. ‘I told her . . . you were the first to put In This Our World into my hands when my young heart was breaking with the immorality of a man-worshipping society,’ Miles wrote to Rose.23

  In her book, The Man-Made World: Or Our Androcentric Culture, Gilman elaborated on an ‘over-masculine’ influence on literature, seen in the dominant modes of story-as-adventure and the love story (dismissed as little more than tales of premarital struggle). ‘Today,’ she wrote, ‘the art of fiction is being re-born. Life is discovered to be longer, wider, deeper, richer, than these monotonous players of one tune would have us believe.’

  Fresh fields for fiction were identified by Gilman. One is the young woman who is obliged to give up her ‘career’ — meaning her humanness, says Gilman — for marriage, and who objects. Another is the middle-aged woman who finds her discontent is due to ‘social starvation’, that it is not love but more business in life that she needs. There is a marked congruence between Miles Franklin’s writings over the coming decade and the content of New Woman fiction as sketched by Gilman.24

  There were five ‘Chicago novels’, only two of which, The Net of Circumstance and On Dearborn Street, ever achieved publication. Her unpublished output included novels, stories and plays. These writings are almost all set in a city, either Chicago or London; they mostly revolve around ‘the full grown woman’; and they variously address the question of ‘what do you [women] want?’25

  This body of work constitutes Miles Franklin’s middle period, and provides a glimpse of its vitality. The writings show not just that Miles’s creative drive did not dry up away from Australia, but that in America she sought to enter new terrain as a writer. Whereas it may seem the Chicago novels all start from much the same place as My Brilliant Career, this is not quite right. Modern research on the previously overlooked New Woman fiction phase in English literature, which lasted from 1880 to 1914, has unearthed a number of early-twentieth-century feminist writers who were bringing new psychological, though not necessarily progressive, insights to bear on the paradoxes of ‘love and freedom’ (Olive Schreiner’s formulation). For example, Miles was scathing about the fevered sexual experiments of bohemian associates in Chicago, whose blandishments she firmly resisted; indeed, as a social purity feminist of the dominant turn-of-the-century school, she found their proposals revolting. But in seeking to reinvent herself, her problem was to find a way between the sexual preoccupations in the writings of her contemporaries and her own fastidiousness as an older-style feminist.26

  During 1912 Miles seems to have found a new patron at Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, probably Florence Baverstock, once a Bulletin columnist, and editor of the Telegraph’s ‘Woman’s Page’, from 1907 to 1914. The ‘Tele’ published three features by Miles in 1912. Baverstock then moved to the Sydney Morning Herald’s women’s section, which, and it hardly seems coincidental, resumed publication of Franklin features in 1916.27

  On New Year’s Eve 1911, which she spent with fellow expatriates the Newshams, Miles felt ‘cold in the joints’. It turned out that she had measles, not a simple thing in adults, and was out of action for over a month, the latter part of which she spent at Resthaven Sanitarium some 60 miles up country at Elgin, Illinois; she returned to Chicago by train on 4 February. A costly sojourn at $15 per week. On the other hand, as she later told New York league worker Leonora O’Reilly, ‘you get a lovely rest and everyone sympathizes’.28

  Leonora O’Reilly was one of the most impressive figures in the early years of the American women’s labour movement. Originally a garment worker, later a domestic science instructor and always an ardent socialist, she was a source of inspiration and a tower of strength to all who knew her, especially, it seems, the allies. In 1911, it had been hoped she would become the league’s first paid organiser; and it was to her that
Mrs Robins turned when, due to her illness, Miles was unable to go to Kansas City and Pittsburgh in January. Miles and Leonora grew closer as time went by.29

  In February 1912, the main concerns of the league were that typically American hazard, judicial setbacks, and a strike of textile workers faced with wage cuts at Lawrence, Massachusetts. In mid-February, Secretary Franklin and President Robins again took the train to Springfield to defend the ten-hour law of 1911. Two months later, on 15 April, the day of the sinking of the Titanic, they were off again, to a special executive board meeting in New York to address problems arising from Boston league’s participation in the Lawrence strike, which had been led by an organiser of the militant Industrial Workers of the World and not authorised by the American Federation of Labor. The main outcome of the two-day meeting was a successful request for funding by the men’s unions to employ a fulltime organiser, on the grounds that ‘the organization of the unskilled is imperative and [its cost] must in part be borne by the organizations of the skilled’. The league then appointed the secretary-treasurer of the glove workers’ union, Agnes Nestor, as national organiser. Nestor was a winning figure who rose to national prominence after World War I and whom Miles was proud to call a friend.30

  The list of lifelong friendships Miles cemented during these prewar years is a long one. Mostly they were with league associates, though a few were with allies, some, but not many, of whom were grande dames and, being very rich, were regarded by Miles with a mixture of awe and hostility. Her close friends Arnold and Louise Dresden, and Margery Currey Dell, a Vassar girl, she informed Rose Scott, were more plainly middle-class allies, while the Lloyds of Winnetka belonged in a class of their own. Of the league’s leadership, first in Miles’s estimation came Margaret Dreier Robins, her mainstay, and her sister Mary Dreier. Of fellow league workers, Alice Henry, her mentor and educator in journalism, later sometimes addressed as ‘Pa’, remained pre-eminent. Of members, mostly working women, in addition to ‘my beloved Editha [Phelps]’, Miles’s close friends included Emma Pischel, Agnes Nestor, Leonora Pease, Mary Anderson and Elisabeth Christman, all of whom she saw on a more or less daily basis. Her friendship with Emma Pischel dated back to 1907 when Emma was a clerk at City Hall. Leonora O’Reilly died in 1927, too soon to be counted as a truly long-term friend, and was in any case a New Yorker, as was the diminutive Jewish clothing worker Rose Schneiderman, the New York league’s fulltime organiser from 1910, when Miles seems first to have encountered her.31