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Early Feminist Fiction: The Dilemma of Personal Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
It has been noted that the great first wave of feminist fiction and plays appeared in the final decade of the nineteenth century. But because the writers of this fiction were women and feminists, they were not, on the whole, well received. In 1914, for example, G. G. Wyant complained that “indeed novel after novel has appeared dealing with the feminist question, some purely emotional in their appeal, some written obviously as propaganda.” The popular and conservative Ladies Home Journal associated feminist literature with communist propaganda:
The Red element, the Bolshevist party, as it may well be called, in the woman's movement, is sparring to-day as openly for the destruction of womanhood as the Soviet element in industry is shaking the pillars of organized economics.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977
References
NOTES
1. See, for example, Kenton, Edna, “A Study of the Old ‘New Woman’—Part I,” The Bookman, 37 (04 1913), 158.Google Scholar
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Except for Cather, these writers and their fiction are virtually unknown—I included My Antonia because none of the other novels I discuss deals with women on farms. However, the Feminist Press has reprinted Freeman's short stories and Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Yezierska's Bread Givers has recently been reprinted by Braziller.
6. The Beauty and the Bolshevist is the exception. Ben, the Bolshevist, not Crystal, the Beauty, is the focus.
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reaffirmed the general conviction that suffrage politics and radical speculations, particularly those affecting marriage and the family, did not mix. In consequence the movement, although it never disowned the social goals that women's votes were presumably to implement, emphasized the most conservative aspects of the suffrage question. The vote was shown to be compatible with the existing domestic economy, and—at best—with those reforms that would elevate and refine domesticity to the level of perfection for which the society yearned. Suffragists thereafter, vigorously resisting the temptation to think seriously about the domestic institutions that ruled their lives, made sexual orthodoxy their ruling principle (“Feminism as a Radical Ideology,” in Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought, ed. Jean E. Friedman and William G. Shade [Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973], p. 307).
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Socialist novelists in the years before World War I were, as Walter Rideout describes it, no more “‘daring’ in dieir opinions on man-woman relationships than, say the Dreiser of Sister Carrie or the David Graham Phillips of Susan Lenox…. Although willing to attack sex ignorance, prostitution, and venereal disease as aspects of an archaic social system,… they were also unanimously unwilling, at least in their books, to condone a sex relationship outside the marriage bond.” What they did try to do is show how a change in social and economic relationships would change sexual relationships also. The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 73–74.Google Scholar
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23. “The Woman in Love,” Harper's Bazar, May 1910, p. 365.
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I am not a progressive person but a “jazz baby.”
I am not a free and equal partner but a gold digger.
I am not a herald of a new age but a “red hot mamma.”
27. Fuller, Margaret, Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1971), pp. 96, 110, 121.Google Scholar
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30. “The Making of a Militant,” 12 1, 1926, p. 555Google Scholar. Deegan, Dorothy Yost in The Stereotype of the Single Woman in American Novels: A Social Study with Implications for the Education of Women (New York: King's Crown Press, 1951)Google Scholar discovered, not surprisingly, that of the seven major single women characters in the 125 American novels covering the period 1820–1935 “not one of the seven women is successful in an endeavor of her own; not one is widely and wholesomely influential. All are regarded as amusing, queer, or grimly tragic figures” (p. 82). She concludes that neither in fiction nor in life is the thoroughly emancipated woman yet accepted.
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32. Ibid., p. 143. Agnes Smedley's 1929 autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, reprinted by Feminist Press (New York, 1973), presents a strong case against marriage. Like Eni. Marie feels sorry for the abuse her mother takes from her father, not for the unmarried woman everyone seemed to pity: “Strange! She didn't seem at all unhappy that no one would marry her! Her lovely face was dignified and calm. Calmer than my mother's” (p. 36).
33. Cather, Willa, My Antonia, p. 291.Google Scholar
34. Ibid., p. 328.
35. Ruth, Richard, “Gay Woman Adorns Stamp,” New York City Star, November 1973Google Scholar, quoted from Woodress, James, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art, p. 93Google Scholar. It has been suggested that the narrator of My Antonia, a young boy who writes in loving tones about Antonia, was really meant by Cadier to be a woman; however, social pressure forced her to mask this love of one woman for another (“Lesbian Writers Come Together,” Off Our Backs, 11 1975, p. 20).Google Scholar
36. Davis, Allen F., American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 90.Google Scholar
37. Ibid., pp. 90–91.
38. Bernikow, Louise, The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950 (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 15.Google Scholar
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40. Ibid., p. 145.
41. Ibid., p. 63.
42. Ibid., p. 341.
43. Ibid., p. 351.
44. Freeman, Mary Wilkins, The Portion of Labor, p. 362.Google Scholar
45. Cazden, , chap. 4, ms. p. 23.Google Scholar
46. Goldman, Emma, Living My Life, (1931; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1970) I, p. 157Google Scholar. See also pp. 124, 158, 232. In The Vagabond (1911; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 161Google Scholar, Collette describes the comradeship of two women, Renee and Amalia:
Two women enlaced will never be for him anything but a depraved couple, he will never see in them the melancholy and touching image of two weak creatures who have perhaps sought shelter in each other's arms, there to sleep and weep, safe from man who is so often cruel, and there to taste, better than any pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves akin, frail, and forgotten.
47. Marcus, Jane, Diss. Northwestern Univ. 1973, p. 366.Google Scholar
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49. Beckley, Zoe, A Chance to Live, p. 248.Google Scholar
50. Van Vorst, Marie, Amanda of the Mill, pp. 253–54.Google Scholar
51. “Staying Free,” 124 (03 30, 1927), 340.Google Scholar
52. A Chance to Live, p. 286.Google Scholar
53. The Portion of Labor, p. 10.Google Scholar
54. “The Long Journey,” 124 (04 27, 1927), 472Google Scholar. As a result, Blanchard was soured to marriage:
But the shadow of those early experiences darkened my attitude toward men and marriage long after. I was sure that I should never marry, never give any man an opportunity to ruin my life. My mother upheld me in these views. By the time 1 lost this support through going away to college I had read enough feminist literature and studies on marriage to encourage an opinion which had its origin in my early emotional experiences.
Nevertheless, she did marry, as did at least ten of the seventeen women writing in The Nation, as did many of the women in the novels and many feminists outside the novels who had vowed they would not marry because of their mother's experience. See Richard Jensen, “Family, Career, and Reform: Women Leaders of the Progressive Era,” in The American Family.
55. McGovern, , in Our American Sisters, p. 240.Google Scholar
56. Gale, Zona, A Daughter of the Morning, p. 11.Google Scholar
57. Martin, Helen R., Fanatic or Christian?, p. 18.Google Scholar
58. None of the mothers in the novels was consciously a feminist (except for George Mandeville), of the kind of mother that Crystal Eastman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Mary Austin remember having. Crystal Eastman's mother was among the first generation of women crusaders. She was a preacher who held symposiums at home, where Crystal at the age of fifteen gave a paper on women, and who organized a housekeeping co-op. Thus, Crystal Eastman explains her own lifestyle: “The story of my background is the story of my mother” (“Mother Worship,” The Nation, 03 16, 1927, p. 288).Google Scholar
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who in 1906 at the age of fifteen gave a speech to the Bronx Socialist Forum on “What Socialism Will Do For Women,” had a mother who advocated equal rights for women and who shocked everyone by both continuing to work after she was married and using women doctors to deliver her children in the 1890s (The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography—My First Life, 1906–1926 [1955; rpt. New York: International Publishers, 1973]). Mary Austin, a novelist of the period, although she felt unloved by her mother, described the inevitability of her becoming a “fighting feminist” because of her mother's lifestyle:
I scarcely know why me being a radical should have proved such across to the rest of the family, since they were themselves shouting Methodists, black Abolitionists—my grandfather was known to have entertained Negroes at his table—and my mother was suffragist and an ardent member of the W.C.T.U., which at that time represented the most advanced social thinking among women, saving itself from ostracism only by remaining well within the orthodox religions and confining its activities to moral crusades. There were also “purity leagues” for achieving a single standard of sex behavior, and in connection with the temperance movement, what would now be called “eugenic” propaganda, though that word had not then come into use. My mother saw to it that I read the pamphlets and heard the lectures pertaining to all these matters, without in the least realizing that she was thus preparing me for radical career. I personally “sat under” Anthony, Susan B., Willard, Frances, and Shaw, Anna. (“Woman Alone,” The Nation, 03 2, 1927, p. 228.)Google Scholar