Dreamers of a New Day (41 page)

If trust in the structural evolution of a better society was reassuring, notions of agency and mission were more psychologically compelling, and even the most scientifically minded adventurers could share with the utopians a chiliastic sense of a dawn of redemption. Sweeping aside all the awkward disagreements about redefining democracy and democratizing daily life, Beatrice Webb perceived the wider movement of women, the labour movement and the rebellion of the colonized as ‘swinging eventually in the same direction . . . the transformation of the ideas, customs and laws accepted by the bulk of apathetic and preoccupied humans’.
⁸¹

‘The Tree of Life’ (National Co-operative Archive)

Not surprisingly, the last thing the adventurers could agree on was what this point of arrival would look like. Some imagined a better regulated, socially minded capitalism; others, following Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward
, a state-led socialism; yet others yearned for a free communal life close to nature. For temperance reformers, utopia was dry; for bohemians it positively brimmed with stimulating sensations; for maternalists it was fecund; and for the independent types, dynamic and free-wheeling. Mary Parker Follett’s City Beautiful was urban living domesticated. She insisted the ‘endeavour’ should not simply be municipal cleanliness, but ‘a true home for the people’, where they could experience ‘recreation, enjoyment, happiness’.
⁸²
In contrast, for the sophisticated and modern Elsie Clews Parsons the attraction of the city lay in its anonymity: ‘In very large communities there is an ignorance of the personal relation to others, an inevitable ignoring which contributes unconsciously to tolerance toward experiment and variation in sex relations.’
⁸³
Nor was it only a matter of differing concepts of the ideal polis; dissension appeared over whether to opt for a new urbanism or for the countryside. The dreamer par excellence, Voltairine de Cleyre, true to her Mid-Western roots, favoured ‘small, independent, self-resourceful, freely co-operating communing’. Her ‘ideal’ was ‘a condition in which all natural resources would be forever free to all and the worker individually able to produce for himself sufficient for all his vital needs’.
⁸⁴

For Voltairine de Cleyre, it was really the quest that mattered. Her anarchism was dynamic and fluid:

It is not an economic system; it does not come to you with detailed plans of how the workers are to conduct industry; nor systemized methods of exchange; nor careful paper organizations of the ‘administration of things’. It simply calls upon the spirit of individuality to rise up from its abasement, and hold itself paramount in no matter what economic reorganization shall come about.
⁸⁵

Her aspirations for the future were transcendent: ‘Aim at the stars, and you may hit the top of the gatepost; but aim at the ground, and you will hit the ground.’
⁸⁶
Others might appear less individualistic and more circumspect, but they, too, caught glimpses of new relationships in the everyday. Deeply moved by the ‘fraternity’ of the Lawrence strikers in 1912, Vida Scudder imagined a just society in which every man and woman received a ‘ ‘‘fair reward’’ for their labour’ and ‘those of differing
races, shall, indeed, be of one heart, one mind, one soul’.
⁸⁷

The adventurous innovators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cannot be characterized as sharing a coherent politics. They evade even the loose definition of a wider ‘movement’ proposed by Beatrice Webb, for they go off in a myriad of directions. Yet the extraordinary ‘awakening’ of women constituted an incontestably creative force for change. A vigorous impulse to reform, and transform, touched every aspect of daily life, from baby clothes to global trade. Jiggling the demarcations between the personal and the public, and upsetting received opinions concerning gender, the dreamers of a new day stimulated far-reaching questions about politics, citizenship, democracy, work, culture and social existence. They might have been at loggerheads over the delineation of policies and utopias, but about the big thing they could agree; life was never to be the same again.

Conclusion

As the years went by, women who had dreamed of a new day were inclined to become a little grumbly. Change proved not to be linear; instead it was patchy and seemed painfully slow. By the early 1930s the British feminist Ray Strachey complained of a hostility among young women to ‘feminism’. She thought this was because they were ignorant ‘of what life was like before the war’.
¹
Even when the American New Deal began to initiate long-awaited social reforms and bring former adventurers in to run them, some veterans remained dissatisfied because radical women in the new generation were apt to focus pragmatically on poverty and unemployment. The progressive reformer Mary Beard and the socialist feminist Harriot Stanton Blatch had held conflicting views on equal rights as a feminist strategy, but both were critical of the New Deal reformers around Eleanor Roosevelt. ‘They believe in seeing and acting on “one thing at a time”’, Beard complained to Blatch in 1933. The adventurous dreamers had been about seeing change in manifold dimensions, envisaging new kinds of human beings and new kinds of social relationships.
²
They had assumed that one thing would lead to another, gradually or rapidly, depending on their political perspective. By the depression years of the 1930s circumstances and attitudes had shifted profoundly.

On the other hand, connections appeared in new contexts. In their study of the American suburbs,
Picture Windows
(2000), Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen record how Catherine Wurster Bauer, the executive director of the AFL’s Housing Committee, initiated a community housing project with playgrounds, laundries, tennis courts and swimming pools in Philadelphia, sponsored by the American Federation of Hosiery Workers. They also show how the idea that housing should be an area of
democratic decision-making persisted in the co-operative community of Greenbelt, where individual housing combined with co-operative enterprises. In 1937 an excited resident, Mary E. Van Cleves, was reported in the local newspaper, the
Greenbelt Co-operator
, expressing a sentiment nineteenth-century utopians would have recognized: ‘We are pioneers of a new way of living’.
³

The 1930s also saw new expressions of communal consciousness among both black and white women. Darlene Clark Hine records how the Housewives’ League of Detroit backed black business as part of their effort to ‘Stabilize the economic status of the Negro through directed spending’.
⁴
During the mid-1930s a wave of ‘mass strikes’, in which community action connected with workplace rebellions, provided an extended context for what the
Nation
dubbed ‘consumer consciousness’. In 1936 the
New Republic
, remarking on how ‘the roles of producer and consumer are intimately related’, described the housewives’ action as stretching the theoretical ideas of the labour movement.
⁵
These links between work and community found institutional expression in the new industrial unionism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). From the mid 1930s, the CIO, which included Communists and Trotskyists, was encouraging alliances between workers and the community through the ‘women’s auxiliaries’, leading Mary Heaton Vorse in
Labor’s New Millions
(1938) to hail a unionism that did ‘not stop at the formal lodge meeting’ but ‘saw the union as a way of life’.
⁶

Though the Communist Party leadership was critical of a Party activist in California, Mary Inman, who insisted that housework was as much part of the productive economy as work for wages, she and other women including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the Trinidadian Claudia Jones did influence the CP’s attitudes towards women’s cultural subordination.
⁷
Moreover, protest about housework extended beyond the left. In an article entitled ‘Occupation: Housewife’, the popular journalist Dorothy Thompson related in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
in the late 1930s how a woman of her acquaintance had been annoyed to find herself classed as a ‘housewife’.

‘The trouble with you’, I said, ‘is that you have to find one word to cover a dozen occupations, all of which you follow expertly and more or less simultaneously. You might write: “Business manager, cook, nurse, chauffeur, dress maker, interior decorator, accountant, caterer, teacher, private secretary” – or just put down “philanthropist”’.
⁸

In Britain labour women and social reformers struggled, regardless of the depression, to assert a humane economics based on the needs of women and children. Some of the policies they devised would come into effect during World War Two and influence the post-war welfare state. In the 1930s, many of the dilemmas confronted by the pioneering adventurers in linking the personal to the public world remained. It was still difficult for women to speak about sex in a public context. Stella Browne was quite extraordinary in admitting that she had had an abortion while giving evidence to the Birkett Committee on maternal mortality in 1937.
⁹
Though Browne continued her efforts to extend the scope of democratic control, she and other women sexual radicals were constrained by the prioritizing of production on the left and the conviction that sex and reproduction were peripheral to politics.

Nevertheless, 1930s women were searching for new cultural forms of examining sexual feelings. In 1934, the British novelist Naomi Mitchison argued in
The Home and a Changing Civilisation
that while it was important to work for policies such as Family Endowment, just patching things up through the accretion of reforms was not enough. Arguing that the core of sexual power relations had to be addressed, she pondered the implications of the ‘shadow of ownership’ in sexual relationships. Mitchison observed that ‘intelligent women’ were so determined not to be ‘owned socially’ that they were refusing to be ‘owned personally’, even though it ‘hurts them’, while other middle-class women acquiesced in being owned socially but were grabbing back as much as they could from men in return. Eschewing these options, Mitchison proposed that being owned personally had to be extracted from being owned socially; ‘modern’ women’s quest was for sexual experience, premised on mutual possession.
¹⁰

Nor did women give up on imagining new kinds of femininity and masculinity. Influenced by the women social economists she encountered at university as well as by 1920s Parisian haute couture, Elizabeth Hawes set out to combine elegance and ease in the women’s clothes she designed for mass production, and suggested to men that formal suits might be discarded. What about the sensuous comfort of flowing sheikh-style robes, she asked in her 1939 alternative fashion manifesto,
Men Can Take It
.
¹¹
The robes proved a step too far. Nevertheless, by imagining what might be and living differently the dreamers had indeed helped to shape alternative personal possibilities for women. Free love, openly lived lesbian relationships, new kinds of families, new approaches
to bringing up children, new theories of education, new attitudes to diet and to the body came out of that extraordinary ferment.

They also insinuated their new day by leaving little social utopias scattered in their wake: nurseries, maternity welfare centres, birth control clinics, housing for homeless women, garden cities and council houses with bathrooms and indoor lavatories, electricity and gas. These in turn stimulated other proposals. The socialized municipal wash house gave rise to a more individual utopia – the Women’s Co-operative Guild’s demand in 1946 for a municipally funded washing machine in every council house.
¹²

The dreamers’ social inventiveness crystallized into opposing ideas which lingered obstinately on: that all women of every race and class should have equal rights; that responsibility for welfare and well-being should be shared by the whole society; and that individuals were not entirely to blame for their misfortunes. These modest-sounding proposals contained far-reaching implications, as did the practical ‘schemes of reform’ Beatrice Webb noted in 1913. The very existence of forms of social consumption within the texture of everyday living embodied a critique of the market as the best means of meeting all wants, hinting at a subversive economics structured around human needs. The dreamers’ heroic outbursts, and the values which inspired them, faded from memory; but much of what they achieved persisted within unremarked aspects of modern living.