Dreamers of a New Day (24 page)

Hannah Mitchell (Tameside Local Studies and Archives Centre)

Ambivalence towards the home was expressed by women in the American radical movement as well. Late nineteenth-century Populist women could idealize the life of the rural home as a ‘sacred refuge’.
However, Populist women could also be activists in movements like temperance reform, and could express criticism of the assumption that women were naturally suited to housework: ‘Some people find it is acutely funny if a woman anywhere is not devotedly attached to making biscuits and darning socks. And yet men have been known who preferred other occupations to ploughing and cleaning sewers, and no one seemed to think they were monstrosities.’
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Not all working-class women saw themselves as cut out to be housewives. Mary Archibald, the ‘square peg in a round hole’ from the Seattle Women’s Card and Label League, stated in 1918: ‘I loved my home, but I hated the everlasting monotony of putting the sugar-bowl on the table and taking it off again three times a day; of wanting something of beauty as well as utility in my surroundings, and never being able to afford it.’
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A particularly intense rebellion against the domestic ideal erupted among some American women in free thought circles during the 1890s. In 1893 Lillie D. White challenged the cult of ‘Housekeeping’ in a series of articles in
Lucifer
, declaring that ‘For one thing in my life I am truly grateful. I have never been guilty of being a good housekeeper.’
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She was scathing about the pressure on women to be homemakers:

Woman has always been taught that her highest happiness lies in a correct step to the music of pots and kettles, a mastery over the ingredients and process of making palatable bread, butter, pies and pickles, and a general devotion to the loves and duties of home; and my protest is that she has learned the lesson so well.
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White maintained that it should not be assumed that women were uniquely suited to washing dishes, scrubbing floors or making beds. She maintained that ‘woman’s work, her place and sphere so entirely separated from man’s special field of action, is a mumbo jumbo that has been revered too long and must be dethroned’.
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Lillie White’s articles caused quite a furore among the anarchist readers of
Lucifer
. Her sister, Lizzie Holmes, returned to the fray three years later in an article on ‘The Unwomanly Woman’ in
Our New Humanity
. It was wrong, Holmes asserted, to imagine that every woman should become a housewife, whether in isolated homes or in co-operative communities. Giving a gendered twist to the individualist anarchist emphasis on self-determination as the key to human fulfilment, Holmes declared, ‘If . . . she tries to conform to an idea not her own, she will not be free and she
will not be a success.’
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The anarchist Kate Austin, who knew the arduous nature of housework in rural America, ridiculed the masculine ideal of the angel at the hearth: ‘I’ve always noticed that the men who talk that way never feel hurt when the angel chops the wood, milks the cow, and builds the fire on a cold morning. He is not afraid of that sort of independence, but only of the kind that might question his authority.’
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By the 1900s, while some strands in the socialist movement maintained that capitalism was destroying the home and that socialism would restore it, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ideas about transforming home life were gaining adherents in both America and Britain. Gilman not only theorized; she proposed imaginative alternatives. ‘What Diantha Did’, published in the American
Forerunner
in 1909–10 and in the British
Daily Herald
in 1912, depicts the heroine Diantha Bell running a restaurant and food delivery service which takes meals in insulated containers by gasoline-powered motor van to clients who live in kitchen-less homes and an apartment hotel, ‘a pleasure palace’ with swimming pool, billiard and card rooms, tennis courts, dance halls and landscaped gardens.
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Non-domestic women hailed Gilmanism with delight. In the
International Socialist Review
in 1911, the American West Coast socialist Georgia Kotsch agreed ‘with Mrs Gilman . . . that a “family unity” which is only bound together with a tablecloth is of questionable value’.
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Gilman’s proposals were in tune with a wider search for a new life in radical circles. In
Women and Economics
(1898), Gilman was careful to tell her readers: ‘No rigid prescription is needed; no dictum as to whether we shall live in small separate houses, greenly gardened, with closely connected conveniences for service and for education, for work and play; or in towering palaces with shaded flower-bright courts and cloisters.’
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The kind of utopia she theorized did not have to be formulaic or construed as a separate community; it was rather an approach to be acted out in the here and now. Drawing on Ruskin, Morris and Carpenter, radicals devised an alternative aesthetic to reshape daily living. Emma Heller Schumm said of the Whitmanite anarchist Helena Born’s room in Somerville, Massachusetts that it was filled with beautiful ‘objects of daily use’, explaining:

Art was not something to be set apart from life, to be enjoyed only occasionally, but it was a living reality always. She therefore gave her aesthetic nature its fling, and her home became a poem of artistic expression.
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From the early 1890s these ‘arts and crafts’ ideas of simplicity of form and beauty in everyday things exerted an important influence in America, with Boston becoming one of the key centres from which ‘arts and crafts’ were disseminated. Before becoming a birth control advocate, Mary Ware Dennett was part of a reform milieu who saw arts and crafts as a means to a better way of living. After propagating the new aesthetic through her lectures, she married the architect William Hartley Dennett in 1900, and they worked together on designing their home. But their vision was not a private matter; the Dennetts believed in linking the art of living with social change.
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‘Simplification’ and ‘art of living’ ideas affected new approaches to architecture and town and city planning. While the architects and planners were male, women reformers played a key role. Settlement organizer Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch took the chair at the First National Conference on City Planning in New York in 1909. This led to the formation of the first permanent organization for city planning in America.
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The socialist planner Raymond Unwin may have drawn up the plans for London’s Hampstead Garden Suburb, but the initiative came from Henrietta Barnett’s experience at the Toynbee Hall social settlement and from housing reformer Octavia Hill. Started in 1907, Hampstead Garden Suburb – with no pubs but lots of grass, tennis courts and bowling greens – was meant to bring all classes together and combine the best of town and country living. Because the central focus of the garden city was everyday life rather than commercial grandeur it was a model that could be adapted easily to the suburb, while the bowling greens reappeared in the early council estates which Unwin later designed – a curious permutation of the utopian faith in nature.
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The idea of the arts and crafts Garden City, along with the American City Beautiful movement, stirred Sarah Lees and her friend Mary Higgs to found the ‘Beautiful Oldham Society’ in 1903. Sarah Lees was a suffragist and Liberal philanthropist who later became the first woman mayor of Oldham. Mary Higgs had been the first woman to take the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge; married to a Congregational minister, she was a campaigner for provision for the homeless. The Society set about encouraging gardening, tree-planting and flower exhibitions, and campaigned against smoke pollution in the industrial northern town. Patricia Hollis observes wryly how ‘the Beautiful Oldham society was met with much local mirth’, but Sarah Lees’s vision of Oldham ‘devoid of black smoke and smuts’, without slums, with ‘good sanitary conditions’,
opportunities for ‘healthy recreation and pleasure’ and ‘fewer temptations to excessive drinking’, delighted an American journalist who, in a 1912 article for the
Designer
, called it ‘Mothering a Municipality’.
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The woman-inspired city beautiful was big in the US. In 1915 an optimistic Mary Beard declared: ‘There is no doubt that women are the natural leaders for the realization of the city beautiful – beautiful not with a lot of expensive cut stone, formidable fences or marble columns, but beautiful with natural parks, with avenues lined with fine trees and with front yards covered with verdure’.
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The radical redesign of the lived environment also received a boost from the desire of educated middle-class women, both single and married, to create new forms of domestic life to meet their own specific needs. Jane Hume Clapperton’s idea for a collectivist house in
A Vision of the Future
(1904) was geared to the needs of a woman writer like herself:

The bedrooms are furnished on the continental plan with accommodation for writing, reading, solitary study, or rest by day, and all the latest improvements in lighting, heating and ventilation, etc. . . . Two eating apartments are placed contiguous to the kitchens and by taking advantage of every invention to facilitate cooking and serving, the lady-cooks and attendants may place prepared food on the table and sit down to partake of it with their friends. One wing of the house is set apart for nurseries and nursery training, another for school teaching, inclusive of indoor kindergarten; a music-room well deafened enables the musical to practice many instruments without jarring the nerves of others; a playroom for the young and a recreation-room set apart for whist and chess, etc.; a billiard room, and, if desired, a smoking room.
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Individual privacy was secured by the rules of the house, which prevented anyone from entering the bedrooms ‘uninvited by the inmate’. Nor was any interruption to reading in the ‘library or silent room’ permitted. Clapperton recognized that adults might find it hard to adapt, and, in order to ensure the rules were kept, rather ominously proposed the ‘criticism’ sessions adopted by the autocratic John Humphrey Noyes in the utopian community at Oneida.
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Nevertheless the cheery Clapperton maintained that men and women’s ‘spontaneous impulses are towards an essentially social life’, and believed the reorganization of daily living would eliminate familial problems.
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Clapperton was still thinking within a nineteenth-century associationist framework, but co-operative living gained modern advocates. In 1912 Alice Melvin, a member of the British Society for the Promotion of Co-operative Housekeeping and Household Service, proposed in the
Freewoman
that co-operative housekeeping could take various forms. Either a group could get together and rent adjoining houses, establishing communal kitchens, dining rooms and libraries within them, or garden cities could be built with public services, like Hampstead Garden City. She thought both approaches would particularly benefit mothers and single professional women.
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The New York teacher and Greenwich Villager, Henrietta Rodman, who was influenced by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, conceived a plan for a twelve-storey feminist apartment house. Meals were to be produced by staff in the mechanized basement and sent up in lifts to the residents; children were to be cared for in a Montessori nursery, enabling professional women to be mothers and do paid work.
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In Britain, Clementina Black’s wartime project for a co-operative of federated households had single middle-class working women in mind. Again the arrangements were all very modern: the kitchens full of up-to-date technology, food ordered by telephone, goods delivered in motor cars, and a professional staff instead of old-style servants.
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In 1914 a co-operative housekeeping scheme was devised by the British socialist feminist Sylvia Pankhurst, with working-class as well as middle-class women in mind. She envisaged houses with gardens grouped round a central play area for children, not unlike some council house designs. A ‘Socialist Suffragette’ offered to start a fund to buy land, but the project did not materialize.
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These feminist proposals were marked by a crucial weakness: lack of capital meant they remained pipe dreams. Some women did, however, construct material utopias. Two Letchworth Garden City residents, Ruth I. Pym and S. E. Dewe, established seven cottages with a common dining room and kitchen in 1914; and two more followed in 1916.
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In New York during the early 1900s, a group of enterprising Finnish immigrant women, who worked as domestic servants, contrived to raise their own capital by being prepared to start small. They pooled their wages to rent an apartment to use on their days off. This grew into the Finnish Women’s Co-operative Home – a four-storey building with sleeping accommodation, lounges, club rooms, a library, a restaurant and an employment agency.
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Co-operative housekeeping, however, did not necessarily involve capital expenditure. Crystal Eastman cherished happy memories of childhood holidays in the 1890s, when first the mothers, and then the children as they grew older, took turns to organize the cleaning, shopping, gardening and finances of a large group of holidaymakers. The advocate of co-operative housekeeping Ethel Puffer Howes sought to systemize these informal arrangements of mutual aid, arguing after World War One that co-operative home service clubs would enable women to combine motherhood and careers.
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