The Rhetorical Vision of Women's Clubs in American
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Digital Repository at the University of Maryland ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: “THE WORLD, OUR HOME”: THE RHETORICAL VISION OF WOMEN’S CLUBS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1870-1920 Amy Laurel Hobbs, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: Professor Martha Nell Smith Department of English Led by journalist J. C. Croly, writer Julia Ward Howe, and settlement house leader Jane Addams, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) encouraged housewives to lobby for local reform, and, ultimately, national suffrage, under the banner of municipal housekeeping. The rhetoric of this all-female organization is an important, yet overlooked, context to what literary critic Elizabeth Ammons has identified as the renaissance of American women’s literature that occurred during the Progressive Era. Ammons names seventeen women, writing between 1870 and 1930, whose work now stands at the heart of the canon of American literature, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and Mary Austin. These five women had an intimate acquaintance with women’s clubs. Placing their writing in the context of club rhetoric demonstrates how women used a particular set of tropes and themes to probe a central political debate of the Progressive Era: the “Woman Question.” The women’s club movement developed a stirring, feminine rhetoric to justify women’s place in public life. Women writers used club discourse as raw material for fashioning their own theories about gender. For the past twenty years, historians and scholars in women’s studies, such as Karen Blair, Anne Firor Scott, and Deborah Gray White, have emphasized the political importance of the women’s club movement. Within the field of rhetoric, Anne Ruggles Gere’s Intimate Practices (1997) thoroughly investigates how the club movement engaged national issues. However, to date, few literary scholars have examined the influence of Anglo-American club rhetoric on women’s literature. Recognizing the political work of the GFWC allows us to read past unfavorable stereotypes about clubs, which formed in the twentieth century. Clubwomen were these writers’ closest friends, their largest audience, and their companions in the struggle for equality. Fully understanding the importance of the women’s club movement in American civic life exposes the tension women writers faced when they picked up the pen. Should they embrace the high-flying rhetoric of this popular movement, criticize it, or ignore it? How should they account for these real-life examples of feminized political work within their own ideas concerning gender? “THE WORLD, OUR HOME”: THE RHETORICAL VISION OF WOMEN’S CLUBS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1870-1920 by Amy Laurel Hobbs Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2005 Advisory Committee: Professor Martha Nell Smith, Chair Professor Jeanne Fahenstock Associate Professor Marilee Lindemann Assistant Professor Peter Mallios Associate Professor Robyn Muncy ©Copyright by Amy Laurel Hobbs 2005 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To my mother, Betty Stevenson, and to my grandmother, Inez Halbert. My memories of my grandmother’s civic involvement in the small town of Steelville, Missouri inspired this project. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction......................................................................................................................... 1 The Political Work of Women’s Clubs........................................................................... 6 The Rhetorical Vision of Clubwomen .......................................................................... 12 Chapter One ...................................................................................................................... 24 Gilman’s Club Life ....................................................................................................... 25 The Clubwomen’s Narrative of Transformation........................................................... 39 Gilman’s Early Utopias: Club Rhetoric on a Grand Scale ........................................... 58 Chapter Two...................................................................................................................... 75 The Wednesday Club.................................................................................................... 76 Clubwomen’s Narrative of “Progress” ......................................................................... 85 Club “Awakenings” in Chopin’s Fiction .................................................................... 103 Chapter Three.................................................................................................................. 118 The Women’s Educational and Industrial Union........................................................ 120 The Rhetorical Vision of Municipal Housekeeping ................................................... 127 Municipal Housekeeping in the work of Diaz, Fields, and Jewett ............................. 136 Chapter Four ................................................................................................................... 163 Club Work Professionalizes........................................................................................ 165 Peattie, Cather, and Austin: The Ambitions of Women Writers ................................ 176 Kate, Thea, and Olivia: Giving Voice to Female Ambition ....................................... 187 Epilogue .......................................................................................................................... 209 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 220 Primary Works............................................................................................................ 220 Secondary Works........................................................................................................ 224 iii Introduction In 1868, “Jennie June” Croly, a prominent New York journalist; her colleague Kate Fields; and poets Phoebe and Alice Cary organized a new club for women only. After the all-male New York Press Club barred Croly from a dinner honoring Charles Dickens, the women decided that they needed their own “women’s club.” While women had long created literary salons and reading societies, Croly’s club soon blossomed into a new political movement, dedicated to self-improvement and reform. Driven by national leaders, including Croly, writer Julia Ward Howe, and settlement house leader Jane Addams, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) encouraged housewives to learn study skills and apply them to political and community reform. Under the banner of “municipal housekeeping,” clubwomen lobbied for local and state reform, and, ultimately, national suffrage. The rhetoric of this all-female organization is an important, yet overlooked, context to what literary critic Elizabeth Ammons has identified as the renaissance of 1 American women’s literature in the Progressive Era1. Ammons names seventeen women, writing between 1870 and 1930, whose work now stands at the heart of the canon of American literature, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and Mary Austin. These five women had an intimate acquaintance with women’s clubs. Placing their writing in the context of club rhetoric demonstrates how women used a particular set of tropes and themes to probe a central political debate of the Progressive Era: the “Woman Question.”2 The women’s club movement developed a stirring, feminine rhetoric to justify women’s place in public life. Women writers used club discourse as raw material for fashioning their own theories about gender. For the past twenty years, historians and scholars in women’s studies, such as Karen Blair, Anne Firor Scott, and Deborah Gray White, have emphasized the political importance of the women’s club movement. Within the field of rhetoric, Anne Ruggles Gere’s Intimate Practices (1997) thoroughly investigates how the club movement conversed with national issues. However, to date, literary scholars have not fully examined the influence of Anglo-American club rhetoric on women’s literature3. 1 Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford UP, 1991). 2 Historian Nancy Cott provides an excellent discussion of Progressive Era feminism in her essay “What’s in a Name? The Limits of ‘Social Feminism’: or, Expanding the Vocabulary of Women’s History.” The Journal of American History 76.3 (1989): 809- 829. 3 Because Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells, and Anna Julia Cooper were all national officers in the black clubs’ organization, the National Association of Colored Women, much literary scholarship accounts for the black women’s club movement. For an overview of the NACW, see Stephanie Shaw, “Black Club Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women,” Journal of Women’s History 3.2 (1991): 10-25; Wilson Jeremiah Moses, “Domestic Feminism, Sex Roles, and Black Women’s Clubs, 1893- 1896,” Journal of Social and Behavioral Studies 24.4 (1987): 166-77; Deborah Gray White, “The Cost of Club Work and the Price of Black Feminism,” Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: