Slumming
Page 21
Banks may have been the American Girl in London but for the next few years she reinvented herself as yet another sort of outsider with an insider’s eye for social details: she styled herself the All-British Woman or the English Woman in New York. Once again, she took on the task of explaining England and America to one another. While she served as a New York correspondent for several London papers, the bulk of her energies went into the pursuit of sensational copy as a “special rate” writer of commissioned pieces for New York’s leading yellow newspapers. To her delight, she reported that she often earned over $150 per week—putting her at the highest echelons of the profession. Banks catalogued her journalistic slumming in New York, much of which she published under the title “How I Live on Three Dollars a Day”: “I worked among the Polish and Russian Jews in the sweat shops, writing up the lives they led and the life I led among them. I picked over refuse with the ragpickers; made artificial flowers for the adornment of the hats of the working girls.”21 For the first time in her life as a journalist impersonating the poor, she appeared to stop posing and allowed herself to feel deep empathy with their struggles and vulnerability. But as always, she focused on the impact of her slumming on her own subjectivity.
FIGURE 3.2. This double portrait of Banks and her poodle, Judge, served as frontispiece to Banks’s The Autobiography of a “Newspaper Girl” (1902) and accurately reflected Judge’s prominence as the object of Banks’s deepest affections in her telling of her life story. Banks translated her “dog love” into public service during World War I when she wrote a series of well-publicized and immensely popular stories about heroic dogs. She donated the proceeds from the sale of these books to help war animals and babies. She also used the stories to encourage Americans to join the war effort in support of Britain.
As the days and the weeks went on I could even feel myself growing, growing in grace, growing in charity, putting aside such narrow creeds and prejudices as had been a part of my up-bringing…. Life! Life! Seething life was all about me. The life of a great city, its riches, its poverty, its sin, its virtue, its sorrows, its joyousness—there it was, and I was in it. This life was no longer like a panorama spread out for me to look at simply, to smile or weep over and then to turn away my eyes from beholding it. I entered it and, while I studied, became a part of it, learning how akin was all humanity, after all, and how large a place had environment and circumstance in the making of character and the molding of destiny.22
Apparently her newly discovered kinship with “all humanity” did not diminish her enthusiasm for passing harsh judgments. We get a sense of just how opinionated Banks was when she embarked on her first explicitly political work in New York in 1896. While debates about the silver standard, monetary policy, and their implications for the distribution of wealth in America captured the headlines in the 1896 presidential election, gender also played a role at the grassroots level and in the campaign rhetoric. If Republicans blasted populist women as unwomanly “harpies” in an unholy alliance with William Jennings Bryan’s pro-silver forces,23 Republican women also entered the political fray. Banks, an ardent supporter of McKinley’s economic policies, combined her reporting about the living conditions of New York’s vast population of aliens with her efforts to recruit votes among them for the Republican party. Her account of her work as an electioneering woman in New York opened with a harsh condemnation of suffragists: “In this paper I do not propose to treat of the Anglo-American female suffragist, who votes where she can, grumbles where she cannot, and, robed in garments as unique as they are ugly, proclaims, in strident attitude from a public platform, her desire, while she emphasises her unfitness to take part in national affairs. Of none of her I write.”
By contrast, Banks then sang of the Republican Girls whose ranks she joined. In a bit of shameless self-flattery, she described the Republican Girl as a “dainty specimen of femininity, who does not want to vote, and would not if she could” but who canvasses to get votes for the man she supports. Keenly aware of Anglo-American suffrage rhetoric claiming that women, given the vote, would domesticate and moralize politics, Banks countered by extolling the more “truly feminine and womanly” strategies deployed by the Republican Girls. They stormed the slum kitchens of immigrant women laden with armfuls of potatoes and apples, which they used as props to demonstrate to the alien women how much more food they could purchase for their money if McKinley rather than Bryan were elected. Banks and her fellow Republican girls would then accidentally leave the provisions behind to enhance the family diet and swell the electoral rolls of the Republican party.24 What Banks did not mention is that the Republican Girls’ strategy in their “missionary work on the East side” of New York closely resembled her own journalistic methods in London. As the New York Sun reported, the members of the Women’s Republican Association looked like “a lot of tramps” as they set out for the slum tenements, divested of their jewels, cash, and fine clothes. It is easy to understand not only why Banks felt so comfortable in their company, but why New York Democrats complained that the Republican Girls had feminized old-fashioned bribery rather than infusing public life with private morality.25
In one of Banks’s first essays written in London but for an American readership, she avowed that she had “always fondly imagined that I belonged to that class of women known as the ‘emancipated.’”26 How can we reconcile this claim with her barbed description of Anglo-American suffragists? We need to keep in mind that as late as the 1890s, support for female emancipation did not always mean advocating woman suffrage.27 In Britain, some of the most prominent champions of women’s higher education and participation in local government and social reform, such as the intrepid ethnographer and explorer Mary Kingsley and the famed novelist Mary Ward, were outspoken opponents of suffrage; they feared that women would lose their ability to bring their distinctly female moral authority to the public if they were implicated in the self-serving and bellicose policies of the imperial Parliament in Westminster. All suffragists were by definition emancipated women. Not all emancipated women were suffragists, though the gap between the two narrowed considerably in the next fifteen years as the campaign for the vote became the paramount social and political issue among women. In her articles about conditions inside London’s laundries, Banks went out of her way to lash out against the New Woman, for whom smoking cigarettes, riding bicycles, and adopting rational dress were emblems of freedom.28 “Despite the fact that I live in the days of the ‘new womanhood,’ which demands stiff shirts, high collars, neckties, and waistcoats as proofs of complete ‘emancipation,’” Banks explained, “I still hold to the belief that boiled shirts are, or should be, a man’s exclusive property, and I can readily understand his objection to the ‘new woman’ who, in her fierce clamour for what she calls her ‘rights,’ will not stop to consider the wrongs she is inflicting on the opposite sex, and, not content with having, in some professions, deprived man of his means of livelihood, would now take away from him his very clothes.”29
Banks’s need to caricature New Women and suffragists and her determination to enter into politics in a way that she deemed “feminine” and “womanly” recall the central question to which she returned time and again in her writings during the 1890s: Was the profession of journalism compatible with her own vision of femininity? To answer this question, we need to put aside Banks’s personal history for the moment and consider the emergence of journalism as a profession for women and the relationship between gender and journalism in the 1880s and ’90s.
GENDER AND JOURNALISM
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, only a handful of women earned their livings as journalists in the United States and Britain, and few magazines and journals targetted women as readers. Most of those that did address women were part of the vast print apparatus of didactic evangelical uplift.30 At mid-century Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Smith Bodichon launched first the English Woman’s Journal (1858–1864), and later the Englishwoman’s Review,
as a mouthpiece for their radical views. But their wealth and unconventional lives—Smith Bodichon was the illegitimate daughter of an MP (Member of Parliament) and conducted an affair with the editor of the Westminster Review—disqualified them as models for future women journalists in Britain.31 The journalistic enterprises of Samuel and Isabella Beeton in the 1850s and ’60s provided a much more popular and commercially oriented alternative to the English Woman’s Journal and marked a significant expansion of female readers beyond committed sex-radicals and Evangelicals. The Beetons’ Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine enjoined its middle-class female readers to see themselves as “active hands” that stitched and sewed; as “loving hearts” that tended family and cared for the poor; and as “erotic surfaces” which wore (or hoped to wear) the latest fashions to capture the attention of men.32 The magazine encouraged women to create and preserve the private inner sanctum of the home, uncorrupted by the crass materialism of the age. At the same time, it was their task to fill their homes with commodities that would reflect their taste and social status.
While the Beetons’ magazines and newspapers employed women in a variety of positions, it was only in the 1870s in America and the 1880s in Britain that the female journalist began to emerge as a significant member of the press. A variety of factors, some internal to the history of the press and others more broadly linked to changing roles for educated women, galvanized this expansion in the ranks of women journalists. The single most important stimulus was the explosion in the number and variety of magazines and newspapers targeting women.33 By the 1890s, virtually all newspapers intended for general readers included sections and regular columns written by and for women.34 Contemporaries also believed that the growing prominence of the interview as a technique for gathering news, while first popularized by men in the 1880s,35 favored women who “naturally” possessed an abundance of precisely those traits so essential to the successful interviewer: a gift for provoking conversation larded with salient gossip, tact, charm, an eye for the details of dress and speech, and personal diplomacy.36 British women journalists’ determination to make newsrooms more open to members of their sex led by the mid-1890s to their admission to heretofore all male professional societies as well as the creation of exclusively female organizations designed to advance their professional aspirations.37 Newly founded single-sex clubs, such as the Writers Club and the Pioneer and Women’s clubs, provided institutional settings where women could earnestly debate pressing social and political issues among themselves while providing informal networks of mutual aid, advice, and introductions to young women seeking work in journalism.38
Aspiring female journalists at the end of the century also benefited from the general broadening of women’s opportunities to engage in paid work of all sorts, ranging from medicine and nursing to social work, education, and typewriting.39 As an anonymous reviewer of Lady Jeune’s Ladies at Work (1893) commented in the Spectator, “the number of societies, leagues and bands of workers, started and managed by women shows that a great wave of energy is sweeping over the feminine world; and it is another sign of the times that women are boldly adopting professions or trades who, a generation ago, would have sat meekly at home, fading away to a colourless old age among poverty-stricken surroundings because it was thought impossible for a so-called ‘lady’ to soil her fingers by earning money.”40
If various factors spurred women to seek jobs as journalists, the workplace culture of the metropolitan press, as well as its formal and informal institutional structure, continued to constrain them. In the 1860s and ’70s, many male journalists in London moved in a bohemian demimonde on the fringes of polite society into which no upstanding woman would willingly enter. Leading editors and journalists like G. A. Sala, Douglas Jerrold, G. R. Sims, Edmund Yates, and James Greenwood saw themselves as members of a penurious but rakish brotherhood. While they mocked the stiff formality and stifling conventionality of London’s all-male clubland—those inner sanctums of prestige, power, and wealth in Victorian Britain—they deliberately cultivated eccentric masculine personae and eventually established their own private clubs, such as the Savage, the Eccentric, and the Press Club. Theirs was an intensely and intentionally homosocial world in which independent, educated women had no role.41
Following the passage of the Forster Education Act mandating universal education (1870) and the Third Reform Bill enfranchising substantial numbers of laboring men (1884), the press wielded ever more political power in the 1880s and ’90s by providing news to an increasingly democratized and literate electorate. Press lords regularly recruited talent from the best and brightest young male college graduates to serve as editors, reporters, and special correspondents. The consolidation of the economic and political power of the press may have been accompanied by the increasing respectability of many of its practitioners, but editorial offices more often than not remained bastions of an aggressive, roughand-tumble masculinity. William Beveridge’s path from all-male Balliol College Oxford, to the leading all-male settlement house in the slums of London, Toynbee Hall, to his position as a leader writer for the Morning Post was a logical progression for an ambitious young man on the make. Beveridge secured his positions through the dense network of institutional and personal affiliations linking together elite men—and the professions of journalism, law, medicine, the church, the universities, the civil service, and Parliament—in late-Victorian London.42 He used his career in journalism to enhance his credentials as an academic social scientist and as a leading social welfare bureaucrat. Women in Britain were at best relegated to the fringes of these interlocking worlds. The structure and hierarchy of newsrooms further disadvantaged women. The lowest positions—jobs such as messengers—offered points of entry into the profession for those lacking influence and personal connections but were monopolized entirely by boys and young men.43
The backlash against women’s growing prominence in the press was swift. The female journalist was just one of many figures in the fin-de-siècle landscape around whom a host of anxieties about gender, sexuality, degeneration, social disorder, and national identity clustered.44 In Britain, the evangelical writer G. Holden Pike believed that journalism compelled women to “assume a bold mien” and to lose their “feminine graces” by encroaching on the province of men.45 XYZ, an anonymous and apparently male writer for Author, argued that the practice of journalism unsexed a woman by compelling her to form “promiscuous acquaintances” with strange men and placing “her natural impulses of reserve and unaggressiveness in the background.” The cumulative impact of female journalists was as far-reaching as it was disturbing: their influence explained the “hysterical and emasculate attitude taken up in some quarters on certain social and other questions.”46 The “unsexed” woman journalist was the janus-face of the effeminate male contributor to journals such as the Chameleon, the Yellow Book and the Savoy, which self-consciously experimented with representing new ideas about masculinity.47
Women journalists’ responses to these attacks revealed their ambivalence about the gender disorder of their age and their part in its promotion. They actively defended their honor and denied that journalism was incompatible with true femininity and the cultivation of domestic graces.48 When English women journalists wrote about the female colleagues they admired, they invariably domesticated them by describing their “womanly” appearance, manners, or taste. So in one article, “Leading Lady Journalists,” we learn that the editress of the Sunday Times, Mrs. Frederick Beer, has “beautiful drawing rooms” and that Mrs. Humphrey, the first woman’s columnist in England, is the “sweetest voiced and most graciously mannered of Irish women.”49
The transformation of the “social” with its myriad incidents of daily life into “news” created employment opportunities and endless subjects for women journalists. By the 1890s, many persons believed that women’s journalistic domain rightly consisted of the “chronicling of fashions; the recording of social functions in which celebrities and pretty dress have the
ir part, at weddings and bazaars; the discussion of philanthropic subjects; the special interests of the factory, labouring, and toiling classes of the sex; and such topics as the education of the young, cookery, furniture, and nursing.”50 The range of women’s subjects, from the frivolity of a society wedding to the hardships of laboring women’s lives reflected the elasticity of Victorian separate-spheres ideology.51 Philanthropy stood side by side with dress and cookery as arenas of feminine duty and accomplishment and as fit subjects for women journalists. All were part of the realm of the “social” to which women were expected to contribute their peculiar gifts.52 Throughout her journalistic career, Banks proved herself the consummate chronicler of the social. In the articles she wrote as London correspondent for the Chicago Evening Post, she blithely moved from utterly trivial banter about the pink frock she wore to theatre to serious discussion of the public-health threat posed by tainted meat.53