that change had first to come in relationships within the home.27 At the 1898 conference of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Mary Church Terrell was carefully diplomatic in claiming both a shared and a distinct heritage, mentioning the Owenite and women’s rights campaigner Ernestine Rose, along with white anti-slavery and women’s rights stalwarts Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony, as well as the black eighteenth-century poet, Phillis Wheatley.28
Mary Church Terrell (Library of Congress)
The utopian communitarianism of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier was preserved in American schemes for co-operative housekeeping as well as in the British Women’s Co-operative Guild. In 1893, Catherine Webb called on co-operative women ‘to be heralds of the dawn, rousing the world to take notice of the “good time coming”.’ Webb’s cooperative future closely echoed that of the Irish radical William Thompson, who as early as 1825 had made an eloquent plea for women’s social and political rights. Like Thompson, Webb believed that ‘the day of “association and mutual helpfulness” in all stages and phases of life is slowly but surely dawning upon the world, to drive out the black night of individualism’.29
Strong currents within both anarchism and socialism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century shared Catherine Webb’s conviction that individuals must act, while assuming, at the same time, that a utopian future was inevitably unravelling. Charlotte Wilson, who formed an anarchist faction in the Fabian Society, was profoundly influenced by the anarchist-communist Prince Peter Kropotkin, who had spent many years in prison for his beliefs. In 1886 she argued the aim should be ‘by direct personal action to bring about a revolution in every department of human existence, social, political and economic’.30 In a less extreme manner, some socialists were also arguing that individuals should choose alternative ways of living in the here and now. Isabella Ford in Leeds, writers Olive Schreiner and Edith Ellis as well as the Bristol socialists who organized the women cotton workers, Helena Born and Miriam Daniell, were all influenced by the ideas of the ‘new life’ put forward by the British socialist Edward Carpenter. In the 1880s, troubled by social inequality and the parasitical dependence of his own class on working people, Carpenter decided to cut down on his needs and live close to nature. He, in turn, was influenced by the American writers Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, stressing self-realization and harmony with one’s own ‘nature’ as well as with the external world. Like the libertarian socialist William Morris, Carpenter, who wrote on homosexuality and women’s freedom, was an important inspiration for women struggling to balance personal liberation and public commitment.31 So too were the American Transcendentalists and Whitman.
In 1890 Helena Born and Miriam Daniell left Bristol for America. After Daniell’s early death in 1894, Born settled in Boston where she moved in anarchist circles and was a member of the Walt Whitman Society. While making an unsuccessful attempt to live off the land, she told her lover, anarchist William Bailie, ‘I have Morris’ portrait on the wall and Emerson’s and Whitman’s also conspicuous’.32 Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s connection to the Transcendentalists was a personal one: she was friendly with William Ellery Channing’s granddaughter Grace in the 1880s. In 1896, when she visited Britain, she was extremely proud of the sandals Carpenter made for her and was an enthusiastic reader of Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age (1896).33 The British socialist and feminist Mary Gawthorpe remembered how both Carpenter and Whitman were still revered by Leeds working-class socialists in the early twentieth century.34
If Ibsen, Carpenter, Whitman and the Transcendentalists were inspirational sources for individual action and personal inner transformation, some adventurers also drew on John Ruskin’s organic vision of society as an interconnected household. Ignoring Ruskin’s patriarchal views on the role of women, they interpreted his ideas in diverse ways. The British housing reformer Octavia Hill, who believed in the endeavours of individuals rather than state intervention, applied Ruskin in her plans for housing provision and appropriated him for the Charity Organisation Society. On the other hand Ruskin’s critique of laissez-faire and competitive social relations endeared him to the Independent Labour Party member Margaret McMillan, a campaigner for school medical inspections and nurseries, and to Selina Cooper, a socialist working-class activist in Nelson, Lancashire. In 1897 when Selina Cooper named her new baby ‘John’, it was partly after Ruskin. In the US, the anti-poverty campaigner and domestic innovator Helen Campbell was deeply influenced by Ruskin. In 1894 Campbell worked closely with Charlotte Perkins Gilman on a journal called Impress, in which she wrote a column on ‘Household Economics’. Later more imaginatively entitled ‘The Art of Living’, the column was introduced by a quotation from Ruskin and heralded many of the themes Gilman would subsequently develop.35
In the late 1890s the Boston settlement worker Vida Scudder argued that Ruskin’s dismissal of that ‘unreal and unpleasant figment the so-called “economic man”’, in favour of ‘a man complete in all his faculties and desires, including his moral instincts’, accounted for the popularity of his works in reform circles.36 Ruskin promised the reintegration of aspects of life which had fragmented, and his aesthetic critique of capitalist production travelled into the arts and crafts movement via the socialism of William Morris. For many arts and crafts enthusiasts like the Bostonian ‘new woman’, Mary Ware Dennett, art was inseparable from new ways of ethical living.37
Regardless of their strong emphasis on the moral agency of individuals, women adventurers also assimilated more deterministic social theories. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Helen Campbell both admired one of the founders of American sociology, Lester F. Ward. His interpretation of social evolution provided an organic metaphor of the body politic which postulated that change in one part of society necessarily affected others. This integrated perspective was attractive to Gilman because it offered a framework for connecting reform in one area of the social fabric to another. Ward’s view that women were more important to evolutionary survival than men, who were merely the enablers of procreation, also appealed to Gilman and to other feminists.38 Versions of Ward’s concepts of biological necessity lingered on into the early twentieth century because they added weight to arguments that mothers required improved conditions of employment or social welfare provision.
Holding apparently contradictory strands of thought simultaneously was not peculiar to the women adventurers. A deterministic Social Darwinism exercised considerable influence within the emergent social sciences, but was frequently combined with the conviction that enlightened social scientists could sort out the problems of society. From the 1880s, Herbert Spencer’s individualistic ideas of social evolution were being contested by reformers calling for more state regulation, in an effort to curb the worst effects of capitalist greed. The idea that society was evolving towards collectivism was influencing liberals and socialists alike. In differing ways they saw their role as speeding up the process.
The tension between a teleological unfolding of history and human agency was present in Marx’s writings as well, though there was a tendency in the late nineteenth century to focus on the former rather than the latter. While Marx, Engels and the German socialist August Bebel all supported the emancipation of women, only Bebel stressed the importance of women’s conscious agency. In Marxist groupings, primacy was always given to the proletariat as the catalytic anti-capitalist force – a view which contrasted sharply with the emphasis on women’s significance in American reform circles. Personal engagement was also a sticking point. Jane Addams, for instance, was familiar with Marx’s works, but her sensitivity to subjective factors in the relationships between people of differing classes and races was alien to Marx and Engels’s theorizing. It proved difficult for British Marxist women such as Eleanor Marx Aveling, Annie Besant and Dora Montefiore to express discontent about male–female encounters. These remained outside ‘politics’, as did the personal experience of motherhood and child-rearing.39
In dreaming
