hit the mainstream. In 1927 the British journalist Leonora Eyles confessed in Good Housekeeping how becoming a divorcee had led her to question deeply-held assumptions about independence, adding, ‘It is necessary to strike the personal note.’ She told readers she had married ‘a man who was not a very strong character’, and managed everything by doing ‘without him’. But this had left him feeling that he was not needed.64
Problems were evident in the labour movement too. Eyles noted in the left-wing Lansbury’s Labour Weekly how ‘the new woman, the comrade woman’ was ‘tending to admire the weaker, gentler, less active type of man’. They in turn were fastening ‘on to the aggressive woman’. Unforeseen snags were appearing from efforts to reverse gender roles, and Eyles observed the new relations bringing hostility. Men were sore because women seemed to be encroaching on the places they held sacred. Eyles urged women not to inflame sex antagonism by ‘putting on airs of superiority about our earnings and our abilities’.65
In 1925 the African-American social investigator and journalist Elise Johnson McDougald, writing in a special issue of Survey Graphic dedicated to black intellectuals, was also inclined to hold out an olive branch. She noted some conflicts in relationships between ‘the masses of Negro men . . . engaged in menial occupations’, and ‘Negro working women’ who were tasting ‘economic independence’ and rebelling against ‘the domineering family attitude of the cruder working-class Negro man’. But she contrasted these to ‘the wholesome attitude of fellowship and freedom’ evinced by younger, educated ‘Negro men’, advising women to ‘grasp the proffered comradeship with sincerity’.66
The possibilities of new personal relationships interacted with external circumstances. McDougald was writing in a period when hopes of changing race relations were not stirring only among members of the young black intelligentsia like herself in the North. Black and white Southern American women were beginning at last to organize together, and black women were laying out their terms. They were agitating for nurseries, playgrounds and recreation centres along with better education for black children. They also challenged segregated accommodation on public transport and lynchings.
In contrast, among the white metropolitan intelligentsia in the United States, the pull to public engagement was slackening. The suffrage had been won, but World War One had divided radicals; there was a red scare after the Bolshevik revolution, isolating those who joined the Communist Party and making it harder for independent leftists to form coalitions. Radical 1920s women were edgy and undermined; a feeling of exhaustion is evident in the autobiographical essays written by radicals and reformers for the Nation which Freda Kirchwey gathered together in 1926–27. Surrounded by a buoyant consumer culture, several women expressed their longing for a more hedonistic self. Garland Smith, in rebellion against her Southern Presbyterian background, described a love of dancing, early intimations of sexuality, her interest in Freud and Ellis. ‘I am at least free now from the old distortions and repressions.’67 They were beginning to feel that they could no longer find self-realization simply through taking part in movements for external change. Ruth Pickering, a journalist who had been a member of the Heterodoxy Club in Greenwich Village, said she had ‘traded . . . exhilarating defiance . . . for an assurance of free and unimpeded self-expression’.68 The preoccupation with the personal impinged on how feminism was conceptualized. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, writing in Harper’s in 1927, decreed that the ‘Feminist – New Style’ who was ‘truly modern’ no longer felt the need to renounce marriage and children for a career; a ‘full life’ required combining work with emotional and domestic fulfilment.69 Beatrice M. Hinkle internalized the feminist quest for freedom. Women’s struggle against convention was, she wrote, essentially ‘the psychological development of themselves as individuals’.70 Adventuring was being recast as a purely inward affair.
In response, a determined radical minority mounted an effort to reconnect how to ‘be’, personally, with the transformation of society. The faith in self-realization inspired by the American educational philosopher John Dewey persisted into the 1920s, travelling in tandem with a new psychological awareness. In Britain, 1920s feminists such as Dora Russell and Stella Browne, active in campaigning for birth control in the labour movement, explicitly combined economic and social demands with an interest in culture and psychology. In the United States, Crystal Eastman resolutely continued to write about both the inner and outer forms of subordination. In 1920 Eastman defined the ‘problem of women’s freedom’ as being ‘how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways’. This was not ‘the whole of feminism’, she conceded, but ‘enough to begin with’. When some of her friends protested, ‘Oh don’t begin with economics! Woman does not live by bread alone. What she needs first is a free soul,’ Eastman carefully asserted a balance. She agreed it was true:
Women will never be great until they achieve a certain emotional freedom, a strong healthy egotism, and some un-personal sources of joy – that in this inner sense we cannot make woman free by changing her economic status. What we can do, however, is to create conditions of outward freedom in which a free woman’s soul can be born and grow.71
In 1926, in Concerning Women, another radical modern woman, Suzanne La Follette, similarly argued the need to challenge both the economic and psychological aspects of women’s ‘subjection’.72 Emma Goldman too was not prepared to abandon the link between the outer society and her personal experience. When in 1927, aged fifty-eight, she was planning her memoirs, she told the bohemian Hutchins Hapgood: ‘I want the events of my life to stand out in bold relief from the social background in America and the various events that helped to make me what I am: a sort of conjunction between my own inner struggle and the social struggles outside.’73 Yet in using her own life as a document Emma Goldman was aware of how she would be judged. Though she left a trail for posterity through letters documenting her passionate and painful love affair with the hobo philanderer Ben Reitman, Goldman knew that the exposure of her personal vulnerability and her sexuality would not be understood in the America of the late 1920s. Both her politics and her gender laid her open to derision. The woman who had defied so many boundaries was forced to concede that there were some she had to negotiate. Goldman confided to her former lover and companion, the anarchist-communist Alexander Berkman: ‘We all have something to hide. Nor is it cowardice which makes us shrink from turning ourselves inside out. It is more the dread that people do not understand, that what may mean something very vital to you, to them is a thing to be spat upon.’74
The translation of personal intimacy and sexual desire into the public realm of the social and political proved to be one of the most difficult aspects of women’s freedom.
3
The Problem of Sex
Forgotten ‘free lovers’ dreamed up many of the assumptions eventually destined for 1920s modernity. In the late nineteenth century, high-minded clusters of free lovers were bringing individualist ideas of the inviolability of the person to their conceptions of personal relations; Lillian Harman insisted in Lucifer in 1897 that ownership of oneself was integral to women’s inner ‘self-respect’.1 Placing a great emphasis on ‘self-control’, free lovers also believed that a frank and rational approach to love would prevent much unnecessary suffering, and enable people to understand and control their feelings. Sarah Holmes, who became one of Helena Born’s friends in Boston, was, like Born, associated with Benjamin Tucker’s journal Liberty. Writing under the pseudonym ‘Zelm’, she insisted in 1889 that ‘Honesty is the best policy in love, because it is the only policy that ever gets love – love being the sympathy of those who can understand our real selves.’2 Unlike the twentieth-century moderns, however, free lovers did not seek out unconscious motivations. Instead they took as their mentor the Russian writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose novel What Is to Be Done (1863) adopted a highly rationalist stance
