women also recognized that mutuality could have specific benefits for women and extend into the family. Mutual aid and benevolent associations were particularly strong in the Southern states. Along with black churches they combined practical benefits with a culture of co-operation which included informal neighbourhood networks and formal institutions. In the early 1900s in Richmond, Virginia, inventive African-American women formed a chain of mutual aid groups, which included the Children’s Rosebud Fountains, established by the Grand Fountain United Order of True Reformers to teach the children to ‘bear each other’s burdens . . . to so bind and tie their love and affections together that one’s sorrow may be the other’s sorrow, one’s distress be the other’s distress, one’s penny the other’s penny.’49 Survival and solidarity were irretrievably linked; moreover they intimated a better future.
Glimpses of alternative relations not only nurtured the quest for other kinds of being; they strengthened resistance. The American Women’s Trade Union League member Pauline Newman who, along with many other women from immigrant backgrounds, worked from the age of twelve at the New York Triangle Shirtwaist factory, learned through the friendships she formed at work that ‘you are no longer a stranger and alone’.50 Mary Heaton Vorse was a bohemian radical when in 1912 she went to report on the textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where workers from many different ethnic backgrounds united to confront not only their employers, but police and company guards. The assignment changed the course of her life. Vorse recalled:
Before Lawrence, I had known a good deal about labor, but I had not felt about it. I had not got angry. In Lawrence I got angry . . . Some curious synthesis had taken place between my life and that of the workers, some peculiar change that would never again permit me to look with indifference on the fact that riches for the few were made by the misery of the many.51
Amidst the hurly-burly of strikes, pickets, committees and meetings, radical and reforming movements brought women into new social relationships; they learned through doing of what might be. In turn-of-the-century Tampa, Florida, Italian and Cuban cigar workers who were influenced by anarcho-syndicalism sought to bring together male and female workers of all nationalities and colours in ‘complete moral and material solidarity’.52 Momentarily they were touched by that elusive utopian hope of making the whole world anew, and experienced the joy of boundaries dissolving.
The anarchist Emma Goldman believed autonomy and mutuality were integrally connected. The key problem for women was ‘how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities.’53 She gave equal weight to women’s personal quest for liberation and their relational needs, in social movements as well as in friendship and love. Living the connections was harder than theorizing, as Goldman herself knew all too well. If the pull between a fragile sense of autonomy and wider solidarities caused recurring tension, sexual relationships with men were apt to blow the carefully assembled independence apart. Charlotte Perkins Gilman had hesitated when Walter Stetson proposed in 1882. ‘I like to go about alone independently.’54 Two years later she did marry him, but being a wife and mother provoked a mental breakdown and physical crisis which she documented in The Yellow Wallpaper (1890), a stark, innovative short story chronicling her claustrophobic desperation. In the year that it was published, she wrote to a friend, ‘I haven’t any heart but a scar. . . . Now I guess I will shut the door of my heart again; and hang on it “Positively no Admittance except on Business!”’55
Apart from a small minority of rebels, late nineteenth-century women adventurers tended to navigate carefully around the shoals of love and desire. Many were absorbed like Mary Paley, many more remained celibate and some, like Jane Addams, lived discreetly with other women. Some found a modus vivendi, at a cost. The young Beatrice Webb was shaken by her desire for the sexually attractive and dominating Joseph Chamberlain, opting instead for Sidney Webb. She told her sister Kate Courtney that her marriage would be subordinate to her work. When her sister remonstrated, ‘That is rather a question for your husband,’ Beatrice replied, ‘No: it is the question of the choice of my husband.’56 She wrote in her diary in May 1890:
How absolutely alone and independent my life has become: not lonely, for I have many friends and fellow-workers and do not feel the need for more sympathy than I get; quite the contrary, in most of the relationships I willingly give more than I receive. But that terrible time of agonizing suffering seems to have turned my whole nature into steel – not the steel that kills, but the surgeon’s instrument that would save.57
Action in the external world seemed to require a cauterization of wandering emotions and sexual passion. Later generations were more up-front and combative. ‘Let us turn away from the antiquated advocacy of work in lieu of love, as an alternative to love, and let us look to work for the sake of love, as a means of salvation for love,’ declared an optimistic Elsie Clews Parsons in 1913.58
In 1924 the American Jungian psychologist Beatrice M. Hinkle noted how modern women were not satisfied with rhetorical abstractions about freedom. Instead, they were ‘demanding a reality in their relations with men that heretofore has been lacking’.59 She celebrated the way in which women rather than men were becoming the active agents in altering sexual relationships.
Signs of this new assertive mood had already been evident in the pre-war years, when women had started documenting their responses to sexual partners in terms which would have been inconceivable to the earlier generation. In 1911 Elsie Clews Parsons gave a fictionalized account of her estrangement from Herbert Parsons in The Imaginary Mistress, exploring shifting subterranean emotions:
The old sense of oneness with him which I had ridiculed as a conjugal tradition but which had been a profound and joyful reality for me had disappeared. He became alien and at moments I had the pain of feeling that our physical intimacy might become not merely indifferent but repugnant. This change in me did not affect the surface of our life at all – at least in his eyes. He did not notice. He was quite content.60
In the New Age in 1912 the defiant and beautiful ‘Beatrice Hastings’ described how contempt for a man had destroyed a sexual relationship. ‘He becomes my spaniel.’61 She was soon to be the Parisian correspondent for the New Age, smoking hashish and haunting cafés such as the Dôme and the Rotonde with her lover, the artist Amadeo Modigliani. This time she had not found a spaniel; they fought one another passionately and noisily in the cafés and streets of Montmartre.
Early twentieth-century feminists explored the ambivalence of women’s wants. Two Greenwich Village writers, Susan Glaspell and Neith Boyce, married to men who supported feminist emancipation, examined the gaps between women’s desires to change their lives – including sexual relations – and the contrary feelings such longings engendered.62 Their work was part of a wider questioning about whether psychological shifts in sexual and gender relations could ever be controlled or predicted. In 1913 Elsie Clews Parsons concluded in her Journal of a Feminist that ‘the problem of sex feminists have not faced is primarily a psychological problem’. She had decided that woman’s ‘impulse to subjection . . . self-surrender is one of the dominant characters of her passion’.63
The resolve to reveal what had been concealed by exposing the messy actuality of sexual relationships combined with a new psychological awareness to bring out problems earlier generations could not have envisaged. Confusion erupted over what exactly women wanted in their sexual relationships with men. Early twentieth-century women rebels were beset by a contradictory inheritance. They were at once daughters of reason and daughters of nature, as attached to the primitive as they were to being modern. They wished to use their intellects and to remain open to all those heady romantic feelings of infinite energy and elemental receptivity. They felt a need for the intimacy, mutuality, warmth and sensuousness which seemed to have been excluded in the drive for self-possession. More
