were likely to be more psychologically aware, they too grappled with how to devise a language for women’s sexual desires in all their variability.54 This endeavour was made even harder because many of them also wanted to combine self-exploration and self-expression with external change in society as feminists, socialists or reformers. Even for the most privileged, reconciliation was not always possible. Mabel Dodge Luhan turned her back on her Greenwich Village salon brimming with spiritual gurus, sexual experimenters and revolutionary syndicalists, to head to the Taos desert in New Mexico in 1917, declaring, ‘My life broke in two’.55 Elsie Clews Parsons also began to look to other cultures as sources of wholeness. By 1915 she was applying her interest in ethnography to the new cultural anthropology which was contesting the racial hierarchies embedded within the evolutionary tradition. Parsons argued that cultural anthropology could help an ‘unconventional society’ to develop by questioning accepted systems of classification.56 A new crop of women cultural anthropologists would explore culture in this light during the 1920s. Among them was Zora Neale Hurston, who chronicled the beliefs and customs of black Southerners, and Margaret Mead, whose interest in sexual freedom led her to enthuse about sexual attitudes and practices in Samoa.
In both countries many of the older adventurers were deeply puzzled by the new circumstances of the 1920s. In a sense they were surrounded by their successes. More young women were going into higher education, becoming the first generation among the middle class to assume they would combine work and motherhood. Mobile, short-haired and short-skirted, the new generation were casually open about ideas and behaviour which had required martyrs in the 1880s and 1890s. Sex and birth control were not only discussed, but demanded as rights. A distinct lesbian identity was emerging in defiance of prejudice. The unabashed assertion of sexual experience and the questioning of monogamy – which before the war had marked out a minority of wild bohemians – began to modify the sexual mores of the mainstream. In Britain, labour women could look out at council houses and municipal swimming pools, and occasionally even Turkish baths. In the US, too, ideas of social citizenship were alive and well at a local level, where some of the progressive advocates of city housekeeping had gained municipal influence. But while such changes in everyday social existence were imperceptibly being taken for granted, they did not correspond to the earlier grand dreams of new dawns and new days.
In the immediate post-war era, circumstances and assumptions had shifted fundamentally. Feminism had lost cohesion as a movement, and divisions which had been passed over in the struggle for the vote were beginning to emerge. Attempts were made by the American socialist feminist Crystal Eastman, among others, to draw up a broader feminist programme which could span legal reforms, equal pay, an independent income for mothers from the state, nurseries and birth control. She was trying to give weight to the specific needs of women alongside the claim for equal citizenship, and she still wanted to change personal life.57 However, the efforts of women like Eastman who sought to unite the subjective and the social faced overwhelming political and economic obstacles.
The rifts were not only there among feminists; the women adventurers were at variance more generally. One wing had endorsed efficiency, social regulation, progress through technology; another had adopted Romanticism’s elevation of the natural, the spontaneous and the simple life. Contrary impulses which before the war could ride in tandem were taking separate paths in the 1920s. For some Americans, Henry Ford promised a high-wage economy and the democratization of consumption, while others recoiled from boom-time materialism and headed for rural communes, craft workshops or Paris’s Left Bank. The vibrant market economy absorbed aspects of the adventurers’ faith in self-realization, which, when grafted onto the enterprise culture, stimulated private consumption rather than social transformation. Arts and crafts became a matter of form; neutralized as taste, contributing to 1920s ‘modern’ living in which simplification and lack of clutter were a means of streamlining existence. Similarly, enthusiasm for the ‘natural’ was detaching itself from any social utopia to focus on the bronzed athletic body, revolutionizing fashion and ideals of beauty. Daily life had changed, but not on the terms the innovators had imagined.
The same trends affected British society, but were constrained by long-term economic decline and by a different political context. The existence of the Labour Party, backed by the trade unions and labour women’s organizations as well as Liberals sympathetic to reform, constituted a much stronger lobby for state intervention locally and nationally than in the US. Though suspicion of the state persisted among both Liberals and strands of the libertarian left that had been opposed to the war, the need for state resources seemed self-evident to large swathes of male as well as female reformers. But in the 1920s, a series of bitter industrial disputes and mounting unemployment meant that the earlier glimpses of a new dawn would be tempered by severe hardship. They emerged muffled and modified by party resolutions and local government committees. Amidst the long struggle for small gains against the economic grain, hopes of democratizing relationships at work, in communities and between individuals could seem like idealistic luxuries from an unrealistic past.
Nevertheless hope died hard. In 1927 the British socialist and feminist Dora Russell envisioned a future in which human beings could feel ‘at home in the world, not fearing change but perpetually developing in suppleness and wisdom, perpetually devising new forms and new sources of delight’.58 The dreams of a new day morphed; nonetheless they survived.
2
How to Be
Advanced women’s claims to education, meaningful work and independence presented them with unique choices and decisions about personal behaviour. They questioned not simply how life might be lived but, more existentially, how they might be. Appearance, identity and relationships were disputed, along with the very boundaries of private and public experience. From the early 1890s the dilemmas raised by this re-creation of self, and of self in relation to society, were explored in a slew of articles and books written by women. On the Threshold (1895), a novel by the British socialist and feminist Isabella Ford, depicts a new woman heroine struggling with the claims of family, the decision of whether or not to marry, and her yearning for an active, independent life. The image of the ‘threshold’ is also there in a poem by another socialist and feminist, Dora Montefiore. She described the fin-de-siècle new woman in 1898 as ‘Pausing on the century’s threshold/With her face towards the dawn’.1 The threshold not only marked the advent of a new era in terms of time; it symbolized inchoate aspirations and a powerful sense of unknown possibilities.
Being poised on the edge of the unimaginable encouraged a reliance on inner-directed defiance. The anarchist Lizzie Holmes declared in 1896: ‘No barrier, no code, no superstition should stand in the way of woman working for the best thought within her, with her best strength, according to the brightest light glowing within her breast.’2 When Helena Born died in Boston in 1902, a friend from the Liberty anarchist circle, Emma Heller Schumm, described the journey from respectability Born and Miriam Daniell had made when they left the protection of convention:
Fabian Women’s pamphlet (Fabian Society)
They were serving their apprenticeship in the new life of their choice. There was much enthusiasm for ideas, much storm and stress, much material hardship; but it was all very beautiful. How I longed to shelter them from the world’s rough handling.3
Reflecting on Helena Born’s life, Schumm declared, ‘Hers was certainly the experimental life; there were no rut marks on her.’4
New selves, it seemed, could be made from old if only the will was sufficiently strong. This faith in human beings’ capacity to experiment in personal behaviour simply by asserting individual judgement against established moral codes and conventions, influenced not only anarchist adventurers, but feminist and socialist
