Dreamers of a New Day (22 page)

Some supporters of childcare provision implied that mothers were not up to the task. Children, it was thought, would benefit from seeing less of their biological mothers. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s conviction that isolated individual mothers in the home were so backward and inefficient that they held back their children, led her to argue for collective forms of childcare outside the home. She believed that once small children were in contact with trained and enlightened carers, they would find alternative role models with a wider view of life and society.
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In
Women and Economics
(1898), Gilman criticized the attitude of ‘absolute personal ownership’ towards children, making the rights of children another plank in her platform for change in the home.
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In 1912 the American socialist Georgia Kotsch advocated collective responsibility for childcare on similar grounds, stating that under socialism ‘the rearing of
the children’ would not ‘be left to the haphazard chance of the individual mother’, but be recognized as a specialized activity.
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Kotsch, echoing Gilman, firmly told mothers they had to acknowledge their children’s rights as individuals to the best form of upbringing. This meant accepting that they were not always the best carers. Mothers for their part had a duty to ‘employ time’ hitherto devoted to their babies in other ways. ‘That baby which you call yours is not wholly yours,’
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Kotsch informed them.

In the same year, Ada Nield Chew put the case for nurseries in a less authoritarian style. She proposed ‘beautiful baby gardens, quite near to the homes of the parents’, so babies could get the best of both worlds, adding, ‘A baby loves and thrives on a sunny mother, and the company of other babies is as dear to its baby soul as is the company of other children as they grow older.’
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Chew regarded the nursery as an opportunity for small children to associate, as well as helping mothers. However, leading Labour Party women Marion Phillips and Averil Sanderson Furniss endorsed nurseries in 1919 because they gave ‘children a better training both for mind and body’ than working-class mothers could. In their view, it was ‘not good either for mothers or children that the little ones should always be under the care and within the sight and hearing of their mothers’.
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Women adventurers were divided on how children should be cared for and educated. While one wing emphasized the need for rigid training by applying method and system in raising the perfect offspring, others favoured libertarian approaches which derived from anarchist practice and from progressive educational theory. Louise Michel, the anarchist survivor of the Paris Commune, had established a free school in London when she was released from imprisonment; a teacher there, Agnes Henry, equated kindergarten educational theory with anarchism.
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Learning through observation and ‘doing’, along with the cultivation of the senses, were being advanced by progressive educationalists in many countries as alternatives to training, discipline and rote-learning. Such ideas were influential in both America and Britain. In
Moving the Mountain
(1911), Gilman conceived a utopia of baby gardens and child-centred communities where none of the children wore glasses, because ‘Much of the instruction was oral – much, very much, came through games and exercises; books, I found, were regarded rather as things to consult, like a dictionary, or as instruments of high enjoyment.’
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Margaret McMillan’s centre for children in South London constituted a hybrid, combining Louise Michel’s anarchist ideas of spontaneous development with the educationalist Édouard Seguin’s enthusiasm for garden schools, plus a dash of regulatory social hygiene.
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Her approach influenced both the state nurseries in Britain and the progressive school movement. In 1926 Dora and Bertrand Russell took their children to McMillan’s ‘open-air nursery’, and applied her approach in the school they started. The Russells, who had studied the theories of Pestalozzi, Froebel, Montessori and Piaget, as well as the psychological work of Freud and Adler, thought that children should not become bookish and academic too early. In Dora’s words, ‘There is a period of doing, feeling, observing the world’. They decided the Montessori material was too rigid, preferring ‘the McMillan style of providing the child with all kinds of materials by means of which it would find its own way’.
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Margaret McMillan

In the early years of the twentieth century, progressive theories about child development were part of a wider challenge to educational methods mounted by the American John Dewey. Influenced by Hull House, Dewey linked education to a wider social awareness and stressed
learning through ‘doing’. Charlotte Perkins Gilman gave this approach a gendered slant. In
The Home
(1903), she pointed out that children learn not only through formal teaching but through example. In order to break the pattern by which girls perpetuated the isolation and restricted outlook of the mother, they needed to experience a different upbringing.
⁷⁸
In
Moving the Mountain
(1911) she envisaged that education could minimize gender divisions: ‘from infancy to adolescence – all through these years of happy growing – there was nothing whatever to differentiate the boys from the girls! As a rule, they would not be distinguished!’
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Margaret McMillan Nursery Camp

Anarchists were especially critical of the authoritarianism in existing schooling. In 1892 Lizzie Holmes described schools as fostering ‘blind obedience’. She wanted an alternative which would encourage ‘the development of the human faculties, the rounding out of individual character . . . [and] the opening of the way to fresh and fullest activities’.
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Anarchists regarded education as a process of drawing out spontaneous capacity, and recognized the value of play and closeness to nature. Voltairine de Cleyre imagined boarding schools in the countryside, linked to farms where children could ‘learn in free contact with nature’.
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In 1909 Goldman echoed Lizzie Holmes’s approach, declaring
that ‘if education should mean anything at all, it must insist on the free growth and development of the innate forces and intelligence of the child’.
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Both anarchists and socialists stressed the need to create a new culture. Annie Davison remembered her non-sectarian father sending her to the Partick Socialist Sunday-school in Glasgow, as well as to the anarchist one where she learned about fellowship, internationalism, the rights of labour, love, truth and justice.
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The American working class created a similar counter-culture which prefigured new relations of fellowship; each wave of radical immigrants brought their own customs. In the Finnish socialist halls, children not only learned formally, they experienced a big alternative family and called all the adults ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’.
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Implicit in the alternative culture of the socialist and cooperative movements was the idea that the upbringing of children was a social responsibility. Though not setting out to change gender roles, this radical culture did imply that both mothering and fathering could change.

‘Modern’ feminists of the 1920s were beginning to argue that new mothering required not simply the practical participation of men, but a new form of fathering. In
The Right to Be Happy
(1927), Dora Russell made the case for a democratic, shared parenting: ‘If we are to admit rights of parents at all, then those rights must be for father and mother, if both desire them.’
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Along with other 1920s modern women, she searched for a cultural solution to fixed gender ideas about women’s peculiar propensity to care for children. ‘What is needed for mutual happiness seems to be not a decline of paternal or a mere intensification of maternal feeling, but the “fusion” of paternal and maternal “feeling”’.
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She would find in her own life with Bertrand Russell that democratic parenting presented problems if a couple separated; power between men and women in society at large was not equally weighted. Moreover, though she wanted to reject the existing confines of the motherly role, Russell also wanted to validate mothers. She sought to overcome the tension by defining a new ‘maternal feeling’ which would be a self-conscious, rather than instinctive, force. ‘Women are rediscovering the life of instinct in the light of scientific knowledge. But when they return to it they do so in a mood quite unlike that which tradition would teach them.’
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For Dora Russell, and for the American ‘moderns’ like Suzanne La Follette and Crystal Eastman, ‘the new motherhood’ required state resources and legislation along with economic independence and changes
in working time. It also involved a new culture of sexual freedom and gender equality. They campaigned for practical reforms while trying to keep the way open for new definitions of mothering and fathering. However, their outlook was precariously situated, for the possibilities of transforming social relations were being assailed economically and politically. The most basic needs of women as mothers would be under threat in the depressed years of the 1930s.

6

New Housework: New Homes

In 1903 a jubilant Charlotte Perkins Gilman hailed two decades of progress in what she called ‘household science’ and ‘home industry’ – a sustained theoretical and practical reassessment of the home and women’s domestic role which was reaching out into society. ‘We are founding chairs of Household Science, we are writing books on Domestic Economics; we are striving mightily to elevate the standard of home industry.’
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This ‘household science’ had been pioneered by Ellen Swallow Richards. A farmer’s daughter and former schoolteacher, Richards became the first woman graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was later to teach. First published in 1882, her book,
The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning
, presented domestic work as a scientific area of study. Along with other inventors of the new academic subject of ‘home economics’, Richards regarded women’s activity in the home as the basis for a much wider social responsibility for the lived environment. The new thinking dissolved the demarcations between the household and life outside the home. The world, she announced, was ‘everybody’s house’ and consequently good housekeeping required a science of the environment. She found a new word for this: ‘oekology’, later simplified into ‘ecology’.
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The inspiration for a science of the household came from direct contact with the broader problems of society. Among the pioneers was Gilman’s mentor Helen Campbell who, along with Richards, founded the National Household Economics Association, which grew out of the Woman’s Congress of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The institutional framework developed from hands-on experience. Her involvement in the Populist movement during the 1880s led Campbell to establish a diet kitchen, then a school, while investigating working-class conditions in Washington DC. In the early 1890s she was in the feminist wing of the Nationalist movement which was inspired by Edward Bellamy’s utopia,
Looking Backward
, before working closely with Gilman in the mid-90s. Campbell’s writing on poverty and housekeeping merged Ruskinian ideas of the social economics of the household with the Progressive reformers’ preoccupation with efficiency and the elimination of waste.
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