Dreamers of a New Day (6 page)

In 1890 Helena Born and Miriam Daniell left Bristol for America. After Daniell’s early death in 1894, Born settled in Boston where she moved in anarchist circles and was a member of the Walt Whitman Society. While making an unsuccessful attempt to live off the land, she told her lover, anarchist William Bailie, ‘I have Morris’ portrait on the wall and Emerson’s and Whitman’s also conspicuous’.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s connection to the Transcendentalists was a personal one: she was friendly with William Ellery Channing’s granddaughter Grace in the 1880s. In 1896, when she visited Britain, she was extremely proud of the sandals Carpenter made for her and was an enthusiastic reader of Carpenter’s
Love’s Coming of Age
(1896).
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The British socialist and feminist Mary Gawthorpe remembered how both Carpenter and Whitman were still revered by Leeds working-class socialists in the early twentieth century.
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If Ibsen, Carpenter, Whitman and the Transcendentalists were inspirational sources for individual action and personal inner transformation, some adventurers also drew on John Ruskin’s organic vision of society as an interconnected household. Ignoring Ruskin’s patriarchal views on the role of women, they interpreted his ideas in diverse ways. The
British housing reformer Octavia Hill, who believed in the endeavours of individuals rather than state intervention, applied Ruskin in her plans for housing provision and appropriated him for the Charity Organisation Society. On the other hand Ruskin’s critique of laissez-faire and competitive social relations endeared him to the Independent Labour Party member Margaret McMillan, a campaigner for school medical inspections and nurseries, and to Selina Cooper, a socialist working-class activist in Nelson, Lancashire. In 1897 when Selina Cooper named her new baby ‘John’, it was partly after Ruskin. In the US, the anti-poverty campaigner and domestic innovator Helen Campbell was deeply influenced by Ruskin. In 1894 Campbell worked closely with Charlotte Perkins Gilman on a journal called
Impress
, in which she wrote a column on ‘Household Economics’. Later more imaginatively entitled ‘The Art of Living’, the column was introduced by a quotation from Ruskin and heralded many of the themes Gilman would subsequently develop.
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In the late 1890s the Boston settlement worker Vida Scudder argued that Ruskin’s dismissal of that ‘unreal and unpleasant figment the so-called “economic man”’, in favour of ‘a man complete in all his faculties and desires, including his moral instincts’, accounted for the popularity of his works in reform circles.
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Ruskin promised the reintegration of aspects of life which had fragmented, and his aesthetic critique of capitalist production travelled into the arts and crafts movement via the socialism of William Morris. For many arts and crafts enthusiasts like the Bostonian ‘new woman’, Mary Ware Dennett, art was inseparable from new ways of ethical living.
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Regardless of their strong emphasis on the moral agency of individuals, women adventurers also assimilated more deterministic social theories. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Helen Campbell both admired one of the founders of American sociology, Lester F. Ward. His interpretation of social evolution provided an organic metaphor of the body politic which postulated that change in one part of society necessarily affected others. This integrated perspective was attractive to Gilman because it offered a framework for connecting reform in one area of the social fabric to another. Ward’s view that women were more important to evolutionary survival than men, who were merely the enablers of procreation, also appealed to Gilman and to other feminists.
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Versions of Ward’s concepts of biological necessity lingered on into the early twentieth century because they added weight to arguments that mothers required improved conditions of employment or social welfare provision.

Holding apparently contradictory strands of thought simultaneously was not peculiar to the women adventurers. A deterministic Social Darwinism exercised considerable influence within the emergent social sciences, but was frequently combined with the conviction that enlightened social scientists could sort out the problems of society. From the 1880s, Herbert Spencer’s individualistic ideas of social evolution were being contested by reformers calling for more state regulation, in an effort to curb the worst effects of capitalist greed. The idea that society was evolving towards collectivism was influencing liberals and socialists alike. In differing ways they saw their role as speeding up the process.

The tension between a teleological unfolding of history and human agency was present in Marx’s writings as well, though there was a tendency in the late nineteenth century to focus on the former rather than the latter. While Marx, Engels and the German socialist August Bebel all supported the emancipation of women, only Bebel stressed the importance of women’s conscious agency. In Marxist groupings, primacy was always given to the proletariat as the catalytic anti-capitalist force – a view which contrasted sharply with the emphasis on women’s significance in American reform circles. Personal engagement was also a sticking point. Jane Addams, for instance, was familiar with Marx’s works, but her sensitivity to subjective factors in the relationships between people of differing classes and races was alien to Marx and Engels’s theorizing. It proved difficult for British Marxist women such as Eleanor Marx Aveling, Annie Besant and Dora Montefiore to express discontent about male–female encounters. These remained outside ‘politics’, as did the personal experience of motherhood and child-rearing.
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In dreaming of a new day, women adventurers looked back to a heritage of radical thinking and selected concepts from their male contemporaries, but they also learned from one another. Jane Addams was reading Beatrice Webb’s
The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain
soon after it was published in 1891, and Webb’s work later influenced the Chicago women social theorists.
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Arts and crafts enthusiast Mary Ware Dennett was a reader of the avant-garde British journal the
Freewoman
.
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Labour women too were aware of books and ideas from other countries. In 1911 American labour women in the Women’s Card and Label Union, which boycotted non–trade union goods in Seattle, were reading the South African socialist and ‘new woman’ Olive Schreiner.
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Women adventurers’ networks extended over a range of issues and could converge in surprising ways. They also crossed boundaries as
individuals took debates across the Atlantic. When Ida Wells-Barnett, the African-American suffragist and anti-lynching campaigner from Mississippi, visited Britain for a lecture tour in 1893, she was hosted by radicals, socialists and feminists. One of her lectures was delivered at the invitation of Annie Besant to the women-only Pioneer Club in London. Wells-Barnett, who was in conflict with Frances Willard because of the latter’s concern to placate white Southern suffrage supporters, found allies in a club which debated feminism, anti-vivisection, anti-vaccination and temperance, and took its name from Whitman’s ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers’. Its members, who included Eleanor Marx Aveling, Dora Montefiore, Olive Schreiner and the ‘new woman’ writer Mona Caird, as well as Besant, assembled in an elegant Mayfair establishment which had formerly been a home of Lord Byron.
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The free thinkers and anarchists were resolutely internationalist. Lillian Harman, the daughter of the editor of
Lucifer
, came to Britain in 1898. Harman addressed a group which supported free love, the Legitimation League, who regarded her as a heroine because she had been imprisoned for living in a free-love union. Emma Goldman visited Britain several times, while Voltairine de Cleyre went to London to meet the French anarchist Louise Michel in 1897. Rose Witcop, a Jewish East End anarchist, wrote articles for Margaret Sanger’s
Woman Rebel
and in 1920 spoke with Sanger on birth control in London.
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Personal connections were vital in communicating ideas. Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of the famous American radical feminist Elizabeth Stanton, lived in Britain during the late nineteenth century and was associated with the Fabians. When she returned to the US in 1902 she kept up her personal links with British social movements. Mary Beard, later a municipal reformer and historian in the US, also encountered the British women’s suffrage movement while living in Oxford where, in 1899, her husband Charles founded the trade union college Ruskin Hall. Sisterhood was practical when it came to travel. Alice Hamilton, a resident at Hull House who investigated lead poisoning in industry, visited Britain in 1919 and was looked after by Margaret Ashton, a local feminist active in the Women’s Local Government Society. Though feminist international networking was aided by formal organizations, such as the International Alliance of Women and the International League for Peace and Freedom which opposed World War One, these links between individuals were vitally important in disseminating ideas and policies.
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Sexual radicals also networked internationally, informally as well as formally. Stella Browne, a birth control advocate in Britain, met Margaret Sanger after she fled the United States, indicted for giving out information about contraception. After they parted the two women corresponded with one another; in 1916 Browne wrote to the American writer on sex and birth control, Elsie Clews Parsons, urging her to support Sanger.
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Letters complemented direct personal encounters; they were as important as published material in spreading ideas.

Being relatively geographically mobile, middle-class women were able to establish strong direct links, but these personal bonds could also extend to working-class women in socialist and anarchist circles. The ‘Crewe Factory Girl’, Ada Nield Chew, admired the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which were popular in labour and co-operative circles.
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Labour women also exchanged concepts about organizing with one another. The American trade unionist, Fannia Cohn, told the British Labour Party leader Marion Phillips in 1927:

I am extremely interested that wives of trade unionists should have an organization through which they can function just as well as middle-class women, business and professional women function through their organizations. Women of the middle class have excellent organizations in the United States and they are such a power in our social life that no political party or leader can afford to ignore them.
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The adventurers’ inventiveness was sustained by the dynamic networks through which they organized. Ideas passed back and forth between clusters of women, interweaving, conflicting and constantly moving. Not only were they thinking in action amidst flux, but affiliations to radical and reforming organizations or networks could be extremely fluid. Individuals often straddled several causes at once, and women shifted their points of view over a lifetime. Initially anti-suffrage, Beatrice Webb changed her mind in the 1900s. The British anarchist Charlotte Wilson’s trajectory is an extreme example of theoretical and organizational catholicism. In the mid-1880s she took part in the self-consciously ‘advanced’ discussions of the London-based Men and Women’s Club about sex and society, and was a member of a group around the Russian revolutionary émigré Stepniak, the Society of the Friends of Russian Freedom. She quickly gravitated to the Marxist Social Democratic Federation and then to the Fabian Society, where she
proceeded to organize her anarchist faction. In 1885 she helped to start the first British anarchist paper, the
Anarchist
, which was associated with the American Benjamin Tucker’s Boston-based individualist anarchist paper
Liberty
. The following year she was editing the anarchist-communist journal
Freedom
with Kropotkin. Withdrawing from politics in the 1890s, Wilson popped up again with a new political persona during the 1900s, joining the Women’s Local Government Society along with a suffrage organization called the Women’s Freedom League, as well as the research group, the Women’s Industrial Council. She was back with the Fabians in 1908 helping to found the Fabian Women’s Group.
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Charlotte Wilson was unusual, but not unique. Other adventurers moved between movements, assimilated apparently contrary influences and shifted their views. Annie Besant was radicalized by free thought, later working with both the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Fabians. In 1893 she converted to the spiritual philosophy of Theosophy, spending many years in India where she supported the Nationalist movement. Another ‘SDFer’ and feminist, Dora Montefiore, was at the same time a Theosophist and a member of the Pioneer Club, the Women’s Local Government Society and the suffrage movement.
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Differing generations of women adventurers were affected by the prevailing preoccupations of their era. In the early 1900s the fascination with surveying and mapping which had emerged in reform circles in the late nineteenth century persisted, but it was accompanied by an intense preoccupation with scrutinizing oneself. Elsie Clews Parsons, who had worked with the settlement leader Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, was also influenced by the anthropologist Franz Boas’s emphasis on ethnography. Observing others with a camera-eye was not such a big step from treating oneself as a document, and this is exactly what Parsons did in a series of intimate journals in which she examined her personal relationships.
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She was indicative of a new impatient mood. In the early twentieth century an advance guard of ‘modern’ women were prepared to defy the sexual taboos which the older generation had, on the whole, negotiated warily.