Women’s Social and Political Union, the journal rejected Christabel Pankhurst’s concentration on the vote as a single issue and explored many personal and social aspects of emancipation. Like the New Age, it attracted several Northern, socially ‘in-between’ women. The editor, Dora Marsden, came from a middle-class Yorkshire family which had sunk into poverty when her father deserted them. She had won a scholarship to Owen’s College in Manchester, taught in Leeds and then returned to Manchester in 1905. Another teacher, the working-class, upwardly mobile socialist and feminist Mary Gawthorpe, from Leeds, was briefly involved with the journal, along with a lower-middle-class rebel intellectual, Teresa Billington-Greig, who had left her Blackburn home for Manchester at the age of seventeen and worked in the Ancoats settlement.25
These arriviste intellectuals in Britain and America were energetically reinventing both themselves and the scope of politics, debating trade union organizing, eugenics, reform of the divorce laws, celibacy and masturbation, in clubs as well as in their writing. The Freewoman’s London Discussion Circle marked out a new female-defined space in which women could break taboos. Men might be invited to participate, but the women set the terms. Similarly its American twin, the Heterodoxy Club in Greenwich Village, brought together ‘advanced’ women who were involved in art, intellectual work and radical politics. It included Mabel Dodge Luhan, whose salon was a focus for Greenwich Village socializing; and Elsie Clews Parsons, who wrote on sex and birth control and was to become an anthropologist, along with the anarchosyndicalist and IWW member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.26
Early twentieth-century radical dreamers aimed at root and branch transformation with no stones unturned. In 1912, Storm Jameson, the daughter of a Whitby sea captain, won a research scholarship to University College, London, where she lived in lodgings with two young men from Yorkshire. In her autobiography she describes the irreverent mood of left-wing provincials like herself and her companions. Detesting past dogmas, they were self-consciously breaking with the past and believed themselves to be ‘at the frontier of a new age’.27 The American anarchist Adeline Champney was similarly uncompromising in 1903, insisting that reproduction and culture as well as production would have to be altered: ‘It must be made clear that every institution or custom which is founded upon the present economic system must fall.’ She believed this required revision of ‘our manners and our morals’. Along with ‘the socialization of the economic necessities of life’ must go changes in ‘the production and distribution of the men and women of the new day.’ There were to be no couch potatoes. ‘You and I and all of us must bestir ourselves,’ Champney admonished her readers.28
They did indeed ‘bestir’ themselves: living the new day in aesthetic clothing or tailored jackets, or taking themselves off to live in social settlements or anarchist communes. They joined unions and stood on picket lines. They sat on local government committees, dared the night in bohemian cafés, defied racially segregated train carriages, devised cheap and healthy recipes for the poor, gave birth to children without being married, fell in love with women as well as men, wrote economic tomes, and cut off their hair. They were new, ‘advanced’ and modern, maternal, bossy, charming, diplomatic and angry.
Their optimism was to be tempered but not quenched by World War One. In 1918 the American social reformer Mary Parker Follett observed in The New State: Group Organization, The Solution of Popular Government:
We are now beginning to recognize more and more clearly that the work we do, the conditions of that work, the houses in which we live, the water we drink, the food we eat, the opportunities for bringing up our children, that in fact the whole area of our daily life should constitute politics. There is no line where the life of the home ends and the life of the city begins. There is no wall between my private life and my public life.29
Such grand visions of changing the everyday were not to be, but many of the proposals and attitudes generated by the inchoate adventurers defined modern life, and, less tangibly, impinged on how everyday relationships were seen.
1
Adventurers in the Everyday
What caused so many women from diverse vantage points to set about altering how daily life was lived? Part of the answer lies in force of circumstance. The lives of individual women were caught up in the large-scale economic changes which brought upheaval and suffering in their wake. Powerful vested interests were intruding into daily life, in the countryside as well as the towns and cities. The future American anarchist Kate Austin resisted when she, and the farmer she married, were evicted by the powerful River Company from the Des Moines River Basin. The federal government had granted the company land on the understanding that they would improve it. Instead, the company quickly sold it on to speculators.1 Lizzie Holmes was uprooted from her Ohio home after a violent strike of railroad workers in 1877. In retrospect she reflected:
‘The working classes’ was a term that was just beginning to be heard and I longed to know more of the people set off as belonging to a caste . . . With my sister I went to work in a cloak factory and during the next two years passed through every phase of a struggling sewing woman’s existence . . . I know of all the struggles, the efforts of genteel poverty, the pitiful pride with which working girls hide their destitution and drudgery from the world.2
Arriving in Chicago, she managed to find a small group, the Working Women’s Union, who were struggling to persuade young women workers to organize. In 1881 the Working Women’s Union was recognized by the American trade union organization, the Knights of Labor. The Knights appealed to all the ‘productive’ classes and were nominally committed to equality – including that of women and blacks. On 2 May 1886 Lizzie Holmes, recently married to the anarchist William Holmes, proudly headed a women’s march through the garment district demanding the eight-hour day; the Chicago Tribune reported that despite their ‘worn faces and threadbare clothing’, they ‘shouted and sang and laughed in a whirlwind of exuberance.’3
The mood of carnival release was short-lived. On 3 May, during a rally in Haymarket Square, a bomb was thrown at the police, who opened fire; 200 people were injured and an unknown number killed. The police swooped at random on activists including Lizzie Holmes, though she was later freed. Among those who would later be executed was Albert Parsons, Holmes’s co-editor on a paper called the Alarm, which advocated taking direct action for the eight-hour working day. His wife Lucy Parsons, part African American, part Native American in descent, had also worked with Holmes in the Knights of Labor. Holmes’s bonds with the Parsons meant that the impact of Haymarket was personal as well as political. Impatient for change and dismayed by the lack of revolt, she wrote in the Alarm: ‘The spirit of justice and retribution dwells deep, if it lives at all, for it stirs no ruffles on society’s surface today.’4 Her response was to move towards anarchism, writing regularly in libertarian journals such as the Alarm,Lucifer,Labor Enquirer, Our New Humanity. Haymarket also had a profound impact on others who were not personally involved. Shaken by the news of the executions, an immigrant garment worker, Emma Goldman, who had just arrived from Russia, was also drawn towards anarchism. The Chicago Martyrs troubled the middle-class conscience too; the executions prompted the future Hull House settler and reformer Julia Lathrop to question the social order.5
British labour relations were less violent. Nonetheless, during the late 1880s and early 1890s, militant labour resistance radicalized both middle-and working-class women. ‘New unions’ extended beyond male craft workers, and sought to reach outwards to the unskilled and semi-skilled in the factories, sometimes even trying to organize scattered home-based workers. The social investigator Clementina Black, along with Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, supported the new unionists in London, and when women at the Barton Hill cotton works in Bristol went on strike in October 1889, two local ‘new women’, Helena Born and Miriam Daniell, helped them to set up strike committees. Aided by the London and Liverpool dockers, the strikers won, but it
