Emma Goldman, 1885 (Emma Goldman Papers)
Factory worker Ada Nield Chew was propelled into the public eye when, in the summer of 1894, she protested against her working conditions in a series of articles in the Crewe Chronicle. She complained that women could not earn a living wage and described the frustration of women waiting for work all day in the slack times, then fighting to be taken on when there was work. She revealed how women workers in the factory were forced to fund their own materials and even to pay the manufacturers for hot water to make their tea. That August, Chew and Eleanor Marx Aveling addressed a meeting of one of the ‘new unions’ which accepted women as members and was campaigning for the eight-hour day, the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers.6 Chew later joined the Independent Labour Party and became a member of the Nantwich Board of Guardians, which administered poor relief; she supported the suffrage movement and the Freewoman.
Chew’s protest highlighted the problem of women’s low pay in labour-intensive trades which came to be known as ‘sweated’ work. ‘Sweating’ characterized factories and home-work alike, and in both Britain and America women reformers resolutely tramped up and down tenement stairs and braved dark alleys to document its extent. In Chicago, Florence Kelley led a campaign for intervention against sweating, and during the 1900s Clementina Black and Gertrude Tuckwell were able to form a broad alliance in London through the Anti-Sweating League. Along with reformers and trade unionists, the League included liberal employers distressed at the proliferation of labour-intensive work, which they saw as an archaic form of production damaging to the competitive efficiency of the economy.
If anger and guilt led women towards public action, a sense of religious and moral mission also exercised considerable sway, drawing them into movements which tried to foster sexual purity and combat prostitution. In Britain they marched in the Salvation Army and supported the National Vigilance Association, which was formed in 1886 to watch over public morals. Warning of the dangers of pornography and prostitution, women moral reformers urged working girls to join Snowdrop Bands to ‘discourage all wrong conversation, light and immodest conduct and the reading of foolish and bad books’.7 America was particularly prone to militant evangelical crusades to reclaim sinners; women played an energetic part in these, for the call to redeem overrode gender proprieties. Rescue and redemption also suffused organizations such as the women’s club movement and the powerful Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which underscored the links between drink, violence and poverty.
Moral zeal could, in some instances, merge with social and political engagement. Frances Willard steered the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union towards support for suffrage, social welfare and labour organizing, declaring in 1891 that when women and workers acted in combination, ‘the war-dragon shall be slain, the poverty-viper shall be exterminated, the gold-bug transfixed by a silver pin, the saloon drowned out, and the last white slave liberated from the woods of Wisconsin and the bagnios of Chicago and Washington.’8 American women reformers such as Willard not only put women at the forefront of redemption, but envisaged women bringing purer domestic values into culture, work and government. This version of women’s special moral mission exerted a powerful and continuing influence upon both white and black American charitable women and social reformers. By pushing female domestic responsibilities out into the public arena and extending the scope of charitable work, they sought to appropriate motherliness and housekeeping as a source of power.
Black American reformers were inclined, however, to associate the domestic redeemer also with ‘uplifting’ the race. The National Association of Colored Women, formed in 1896 and led by Mary Church Terrell, integrated the concept of a special role for women with racial uplift. At the National Woman Suffrage Association conference of 1898, Terrell articulated this in a moral language both her black and white audience would understand: ‘And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.’9 She equated personal fulfilment with a conscious relationship with other African Americans. Her words were, moreover, rooted in the actual practice of black women reformers. Largely excluded from white charitable projects, Southern black Americans demonstrated considerable ingenuity in devising their own alternatives for survival. A black social settlement, the Locust Street Social Settlement, was founded in 1890 in Hampton, Virginia by Janie Porter Barrett. Like many African-American social welfare projects, it connected self-help with mutual aid. Providing services for everyday needs could be linked to campaigning for change. In 1908 Atlanta’s Neighborhood Union, formed by Lugenia Burns Hope, incorporated educational and health services with investigation and lobbying for better schools and sanitation.10
A broad ethical consciousness could inspire social action among women and men alike, regardless of gender. However, some areas could be more easily justified as ‘womanly’. In Britain, upper-class women’s intervention as Poor Law Guardians in the care of children, the training of girls and the ‘rescue’ of unmarried mothers, as well as the care for the elderly and ‘feeble-minded’, could be presented as an extension of acceptable philanthropy. The pioneering British Poor Law reformer, Louisa Twining, argued in 1886 that since women had ‘come forward to fill these posts of usefulness . . . we can truly say they have made their mark and done good service to the cause of the poor and helpless of whom women and children form so large a proportion’.11
A religious sense of duty and service could also be translated into socialism. Kate Richards O’Hare, who had started as an evangelical Christian in the Florence Crittenton Mission and Home in Kansas City rescuing prostitutes, became an activist in the American Socialist Party. Not only did O’Hare retain the mindset of salvation through service, she gave it a motherly twist. Facing imprisonment in 1919 under the Espionage Act for accusing militarists of reducing women to breeding for the war machine, O’Hare made an impassioned farewell speech:
I gave to the service of the working class all that I had and all that I was, and no one can do more. I gave my girlhood, my young womanhood, my wifehood and my motherhood. I have taken babies unborn into the thick of the class war; I have served in the trenches with a nursing baby at my breast.12
The impetus to serve came also from a personal unease about class division. The Boston reformer Vida Scudder, who worked at the settlement Denison House among the immigrant poor, yearned to overcome the distance between classes through ‘sincere and serious intercourse’.13 The socialist and feminist Isabella Ford came from a progressive Quaker family in Leeds with a strong sense of moral obligation. Her sister Emily believed that a formative influence on Isabella’s future socialism was a class the sisters had run for young women factory workers: ‘This constant intimacy with girls of our own age, but brought up in different circumstances . . . was among the beginnings of her understanding what it was that was wrong with life and . . . a desire to help them to better conditions of life’.14 Personal contact not only assuaged the separation between classes, it was seen as experientially educative.
As questions about the absolute truth of the Christian gospels mounted, partly as a result of Darwin’s findings on evolution, men and women alike translated their besieged religious faith into secular contexts by establishing social settlements in the slums. For women, this social altruism was often combined with a pressing personal need to find more meaningful work. Before starting Hull House in Chicago’s slums, Jane Addams and her companion Ellen Gates Starr had been uncertain what to do with their lives. Starr told her sister that Addams regarded settlement work as ‘more for the benefit of the people who do it’ than for the working class, and Addams was convinced that personal discontent with the narrow destinies available to educated middle-class women brought many of the later recruits to the settlement.15 Social settlements provided half-way houses where women could live outside convention while remaining respectable; Hull House enabled Addams to live with
