Similarly, Denison House in Boston allowed Vida Scudder to penetrate the city’s deprived South End, putting her privileged Beacon Hill background behind her. Social settlers literally mapped the surrounding slum streets when they did their surveys, but they were metaphorical map-makers too, tracing new outlines for their working lives and their personal relationships.
Jane Addams (Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College)
The ethic of service not only derived from Christianity; it was also a central tenet of the Russian revolutionary tradition which emphasized the sacrifice of individual lives for the ‘Cause’. Emma Goldman struggled with this self-denying creed as a young woman, and in her own life sought to find a balance between personal fulfilment and political commitment. Her dilemma troubled many other women adventurers. Revolutionaries, reformers, feminists and African-American women activists experienced conflict between autonomous needs and the pull of duty towards collective solidarities. This tension helped to shape women’s challenge to everyday life and customs. It was one of the many discrepancies which provoked unease and encouraged questioning.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the campaigns of an earlier generation were bearing fruit in the expansion of women’s higher education. This was particularly marked in the United States, but in Britain too, late nineteenth-century women were prising open the bastions of male privilege at Oxford and Cambridge, attending University Extension lectures and entering provincial universities. As students they experienced evident absurdities: at Owens College, Manchester, in the 1880s and 1890s they were barred from the library and had to send their maids to collect books.16 Once they graduated, some joined the ranks of teachers, clerks, ‘typewriters’, translators, journalists and social investigators in an effort to earn their own living, but many of the better-paid male professions remained closed to them. The incongruities in women’s moves towards autonomy stimulated further revolt, as growing numbers of middle-class women found themselves with one foot in the conventional world and another in the unexplored territory of ‘new womanhood’. The arrival of these ‘odd women’, hovering between the established parameters of class and gender, unsettled the status quo: they did not fit within the established structures of society, and their singularity inclined them to dissent.
In 1889, stirred by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s call for individual revolt, Eleanor Marx Aveling, the novelist Olive Schreiner and Edith Ellis, who would become a new woman writer herself, gathered outside the Novelty Theatre in London after the British premiere of A Doll’s House. Ellis records how she and her friends were ‘breathless with excitement’ about Nora’s defiance of domesticity. ‘We were restive and impetuous and almost savage in our arguments. This was either the end of the world or the beginning of a new world for women’.17 In 1896 the American anarchist Lizzie Holmes appealed to women to brave calumny as defiant individuals: ‘there is a need of women who are past all fear of being called “unwomanly” when a truth presents itself to be told.’18
On the other hand, unconventional behaviour put women in a precarious position: the consequences of deviation were much more severe than for men. Edith Lupton gravitated, via feminism and local municipal politics, to William Morris’s revolutionary Socialist League in which the anarchists were gaining influence by 1890. That August, Lupton was shouted down by her colleagues for expressing a belief in ‘leadership’ – albeit of a spontaneous sort. In September, perhaps keen to prove her mettle as an open-air speaker on women’s position in the battle for free speech, she was arrested on a charge of being drunk and disorderly. When she denied this in court, the policeman opined that if she had not been drunk she must be ‘mad’.19 Absolute defiance consequently appealed only to a minority; others resolved to cut their own pathways more strategically. Inspired by the housing reformer Octavia Hill and the social settlers at Toynbee Hall, the future Fabian socialist, Beatrice Webb, negotiated her autonomy adroitly. In 1885 she described the life she envisaged tactfully to her father: ‘An interesting hard-working life with just a touch of adventure is so delightful, so long as one does not get stamped with that most damaging stamp, “Eccentricity”.’20
Anxiety about reputation was not confined to the upper-middle class. In differing ways, working-class and black women knew the harsh consequences of flouting conventional gendered behaviour. Nevertheless, a desire for self-expression propelled some less privileged women to take remarkable risks. The working-class American immigrant Anzia Yezierska, who longed to become a writer, had to break with her background in a quest for self-realization which would eventually take her to Hollywood. She asked bitterly, ‘Ain’t thoughts useful? . . . Does America only want the work from my body?’21 The African-American writer and campaigner Anna Julia Cooper, whose mother had been a slave, graphically described her yearning for a broader intellectual sphere: ‘I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without’.22
Such feelings led some adventurous women to try and create the conditions for ‘a beckoning from without’, not only through formal educational institutions, but through social action. Jane Edna Hunter formed the Working Girls’ Home Association in Cleveland in 1911 on the basis of small subscriptions from a voluntary association of women. Her parents had been servants, and she became a nurse before gravitating towards law in 1925. Describing her commitment to serve African-American women, she stated:
There was something . . . [that] kept urging and making me less content with what I was doing and calling me into a broader service . . . Then the thought came to me that there were other girls who came to Cleveland, perhaps under similar circumstances as myself and were strangers and alone and were meeting with the same difficulties and hardships in trying to establish themselves in a large city.23
Though this sense of personal reciprocity was particularly characteristic of black women social reformers, it also touched some of the more radical middle-class white women. Florence Kelley, who translated Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Classes in England before working at Hull House, remarked in a letter to him in 1887 that her friend Helen Campbell’s understanding of poverty was typically American, coming from ‘personal contact’ rather than from theory.24 In fact such an approach was not restricted to American reformers. Engels’s own contacts in Manchester had after all been personal ones, while in 1883 the young Beatrice Webb observed somewhat stiffly in her diary, ‘it is distinctly advantageous to us to go amongst the poor’.25 Margaret Llewelyn Davies, the daughter of a Christian Socialist clergyman, who from the late 1880s devoted her life to the predominantly working-class Women’s Co-operative Guild, was convinced of the value of personal interaction. She saw co-operation as a means of combining individual self-development with new relationships of mutuality. When she handed her friend Virginia Woolf a faded bundle of letters by Guild members, she remarked nervously that she hoped that through these accounts of hardship and aspiration, ‘the women would cease to be symbols and become individuals’.26 The co-operative women’s moving life stories were eventually published by the Hogarth Press in 1930, with the title Life as We Have Known It.
Behind many women adventurers’ impulse for a broader service and their efforts to assert their personal autonomy in a wide range of movements, lurked shadowy dreams of a new day. Some of these dreams reached back into the much older heritages of individualist radicalism and co-operative association. The American anarchist Kate Austin was brought up in a family that respected the eighteenth-century radical Tom Paine. Another anarchist and Painite, Voltairine de Cleyre, was literally a child of the Enlightenment – her father had named her after Voltaire. Margaret Sanger, the campaigner for birth control, was the daughter of a stone-cutter of Irish descent whose hero was the American free thinker Robert Ingersoll. In the mid-1880s, the British ‘advanced’ woman Jane Hume Clapperton demonstrated a familiarity with the work of the early nineteenth-century co-operative pioneer Robert Owen, though
