Dreamers of a New Day (40 page)

In the 1920s, modern women’s uncertainties about how to balance new gender identities with personal relations led them to grapple with the unconscious, theoretically as well as subjectively. In 1927 Dora Russell argued that women were held back not only by external political, social and economic obstacles, but by unconscious psychological ‘stops and inhibitions planted in childhood’. She related these individual psychological restraints to the broader male-defined culture. ‘It is as if a pianist were trying to perform in gloves or an actor to give an intimate and delicate performance in a mask. Our whole view of woman is still a mask between her and reality.’
⁶³

The hegemonic power of male culture had likewise troubled earlier generations of adventurers. If women were to become active citizens, transforming social relationships in the personal and public spheres and redesigning democracy en route, it was evident that cultural and psychological changes were needed. The problem was that adventurers were unable to decide quite how alternative forms of culture and a new consciousness would come about. One view held that an unperceived
female culture was immanent in the everyday. In 1886 the writer Emma Brooke, a friend of Olive Schreiner and Eleanor Marx, defied Karl Pearson in the Men and Women’s Club with an assertion of women’s tacit awareness. Brooke told the logical Pearson that there were different forms of knowing; one was experiential, ‘founded on stored-up observations . . . and incessant watchfulness’. He needed to learn from women themselves. ‘You must listen to their words, observe their faces in the unconscious moments when nature and feeling speak for themselves’.
⁶⁴

For Brooke, female ways of perceiving were flickering and implicit. However, powerful archetypes crystallized women’s difference as a positive cultural alternative to a male realm of reason and ‘objectivity’: women were invested with qualities of spirituality, of expressive emotion or of psychic insight into the unknown. The woman seer could allegorically show the way, like that ‘radiant creature’ in Winifred Harper Cooley’s 1902 utopian novel,
A Dream of the Twenty-First Century
. A medium-like receptivity also appealed. ‘I am the mirror’, wrote Mabel Dodge Luhan, inspired by Greenwich Village’s elevation of sensibility.
⁶⁵
Marie Stopes would achieve popular success by cleverly spinning her persona as an authoritative woman of science into the visionary purveyor of sensuous dreams.

Alongside attempts to recover alternative sources of woman-power went a contrary conviction that an entirely new culture must be created. For the American anarchist Lizzie Holmes in 1896, this iconoclastic counter-culture was a matter of individual will: ‘We need earnest women; women who feel so deep in their souls the suffering of humanity, so great a desire to speak and work for liberty and justice as to forget completely the false lines, the false modesty, the false ignorance once marked out for us.’
⁶⁶
Emma Goldman also believed that making a new culture for women, and indeed for men, involved direct action in personal life as well as politics.

Living differently was a common theme among a wide cross-section of adventurers and dreamers who saw it both in terms of gender and as a means of envisaging alternative futures. When in 1907 Mary Heaton Vorse joined sixteen other young bohemians, including her husband, in a co-operative housing venture near Washington Square in Greenwich Village, she was bursting with optimism. It seemed as if ‘this business of women’s co-operating in wage-earning was the solution to domestic life’ and that ‘all the things the feminists had promised with the cry of economic independence had come true’.
⁶⁷

Settlement life presented a less extreme means of prefiguring new forms of social relations through personal contact. Jane Addams objected to Hull House being called a ‘sociological laboratory’, asserting it was ‘much more human and spontaneous than such a phrase connotes’.
⁶⁸
At their most democratic, the settlements enabled a cultural exchange between people with very dissimilar backgrounds. Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, having moved from wealthy New England to work with poor tenants in New York’s Lower East Side, was excited and stimulated by settlement life:

It was a new kind of university with the lessons hot from the griddle . . . The East Side raised a thousand questions. It demanded study, understanding, friendship, action. It meant a rapid plunge – first, to learn to read and speak Yiddish, to go to the theaters and restaurants, to participate in the social and political life of the community. In the long period of my education this was the most exciting chapter for here everything was tested.
⁶⁹

She experienced an empathetic cultural immersion. ‘Before any help can be given the situation must be felt, realised and understood at first hand. Only that which is lived can be understood and translated to others.’
⁷⁰
In 1898, the British socialist and feminist Isabella Ford stressed the need for a similar openness: ‘Unless you have lived among oppression and injustice it is most difficult to realise how full of it is our own industrial system, particularly when it touches women.’
⁷¹

While such reformers and radicals sought empathy and learning through doing, a contrary assumption also marked many philanthropic ventures of the late nineteenth century, which simply took the superiority of middle-class know-how about diet, housework, childcare or the right to paid employment for granted. A certain tension existed too between activists and academics. Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, themselves committed to systematic enquiry into conditions, were inclined to be sceptical of the emerging social science at the University of Chicago. Despite close contact with Marion Talbot and Sophonisba Breckinridge, they felt that even sympathetic academics were too removed in their studies of social problems. They believed in learning through practice and a reciprocal exchange with the people they served.
⁷²
However, in the early twentieth century, as a new generation of women graduates acquired professional qualifications as sanitary inspectors or social
workers, their new-found expertise tended to reinforce the view that enlightened, modern attitudes, associated with formal education and academic skills, were necessarily to be preferred. Working-class women were frequently regarded as too enmeshed amidst pots, pans and the proverbial ‘old wives’ tales’ to understand their own interests.

Adventurers were deeply divided over methods of knowing. Some championed reason, the intellect and professional expertise; others endorsed understandings based on observation, lived experience and tacit knowledge. The anarchist Helena Born regretted that most people took their knowledge at second or third hand, rather than using their own eyes: ‘The nature-lover desires his knowledge direct from the source.’
⁷³
In 1913 the American reformer, Clara Cahill Park, invoked the tacit knowledge of ‘the plain mother’ against a male member of the New York Charity Organization Society, who maintained mothers’ pensions would undermine women’s self-respect. ‘You see,’ Park explained, ‘mothers, in spite of the sociologists, feel themselves, for once, on their own ground in this matter; and . . . will continue to think that, as far as children are concerned, not they, but the learned doctors, are in the amateur class.’
⁷⁴

Distrust of removed, intellectual knowing was bound up with an awareness of how it was frequently associated with the powerful and used to stereotype the subordinate. In 1892 Anna Julia Cooper poured scorn on white male writers’ ignorant depiction of black people, ridiculing them for coming up ‘with dissertations on racial traits of the Negro’ based on ‘a few psychological experiments on their cooks and coachmen.’
⁷⁵
Isabella Ford firmly opposed middle-class women determining working-class women’s needs and interests, insisting in her pamphlet
Industrial Women and How to Help Them
(1901) that ‘The industrial woman must work out her freedom for herself. We cannot, we have no right to do it for her. We cannot possibly know her needs so well as she herself can.’
⁷⁶
Such efforts to democratize ways of understanding, perceiving and acting presented a radical critique of cultural dominance.

Yet over the years it would become apparent that there were drawbacks in both approaches to knowledge. Those who backed professional expertises could be insensitive, autocratic and incapable of learning from the received understandings of other groups and cultures; conversely the exponents of experiential knowing could cultivate a complacent anti-intellectualism. The experience of just being the intuitive, expressive one, or just being a mother, could confine rather than liberate. Implicit understanding was liable to get stuck in complaint or erupt in
momentary protest, rather than redesign alternatives. Moreover it could sentimentalize the oppressed, ignoring unpalatable actualities.
⁷⁷

It was evident to some dreamers of a new day that more than immediate experience was required to devise new values and put new strategies into practice. For if ready-made alternative vistas were already there, smouldering in the culture of the present, society would be far quicker to change. Charlotte Perkins Gilman saw how tacit and habitual assumptions contributed to women’s subordination. In
Women and Economics
(1898), she comments on the way living conditions become familiar through use, and how the ‘common sense’ which solidifies around them perpetuates the status quo. She grasped the difficulty of how to make the shift from what was to what might be conceivable.
⁷⁸
Instead of positing an absolute alternative which had to be willed into being, Gilman’s rooted utopias marked out a space in which she could counter the prevailing forms of common sense by transposing existing desires into a new habitat. One of the reasons for the influence she exerted is that she wrestled with that most intractable of questions: how to set store by the existing ways of being a woman, while opening up possibilities for individuals to venture beyond these and come to relate with others differently. In her utopia,
Herland
(1918), motherliness becomes a metaphor for a broader vision of mutuality. It embodies values of nurture, love and cooperation which offer the potential for a new culture.
⁷⁹
Gilman translated the older utopian tradition, in which woman redeems through love, into a concept of how a transitional culture might be conceived.

Tremendous difficulties remained nevertheless unresolved. Even Gilman’s dynamic rendition assumed that all women were, or wanted to be, mothers. Mothering as a metaphor could constrict as well as expand the parameters of social citizenship. The dreamers who sought to make women, as a group, the catalyst for change continually stumbled against the problem of how to devise alternative perspectives without restricting women’s options for autonomous diversity. Again and again, in proposing ways in which women could cohere around their specific interests, dreamers slid into yet more restricting demarcations. Stella Browne made a valiant attempt to introduce a concept of collective agency by making reproductive control for women the equivalent of workers’ control for men. This rephrasing of anarcho-syndicalism in relation to the body did offer a dynamic fusion between the individual and a wider social context; unfortunately it also introduced a theoretical categorization which implicitly excluded women from the workforce and men
from sexual reproduction. What is more, the dreamers found themselves at odds with one another. Awakened they might be; in agreement they were not. The sacrificial redeemer present in both social purity and social mothering jarred with aspirations for assertive cultural transgression and power. The supporters of protective legislation wanted to regulate women’s work; the egalitarians wanted unrestricted equality.

Theoretical and strategic disputes around women’s efforts to democratize everyday life and culture tended to recur with each decade, presenting themselves each time in somewhat differing forms. The translation of the personal into politics, difference and equality, the individual and the social, all caused conflict; so did the role of the state and the manner in which a new culture and consciousness might be created. These circular returns could become discouraging over time, causing even the most enthusiastic dreamers to wonder about their optimistic faith in women as the agents of change. When hopes flagged Gilman, along with other women adventurers, fell back on the reassuring prognosis that change was structurally evolving.

Such an oscillation was not, in fact, peculiar to women. It was equally evident in the wider debates around agency and structure occurring in the same period. Evolutionary ideas and a teleological belief in progress permeated all branches of nineteenth-century progressive thought. Liberals, anarchists, socialists and Marxists were ever on the look-out for signs of a new world growing within the old – especially when prospects for change dimmed. Even the anarchist Lizzie Holmes, who put such an emphasis on willing alternatives, invoked evolutionary change. In 1887, calling for associations to set up ‘labour exchanges’ as a means of swapping goods and services and creating alternative mutual systems of credit, she ruminated, ‘It may be possible that after all a new construction of society may grow up and flourish underneath the old corrupt shell, until when the time comes the old systems will fall away decayed and useless, without commotion or violence.’
⁸⁰