Home/Economics: Enterprise, Property, and Money in Women’S Domestic Fiction, 1860-1930
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2015 HOME/ECONOMICS: ENTERPRISE, PROPERTY, AND MONEY IN WOMEN’S DOMESTIC FICTION, 1860-1930 Julia Poindexter McLeod University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation McLeod, Julia Poindexter, "HOME/ECONOMICS: ENTERPRISE, PROPERTY, AND MONEY IN WOMEN’S DOMESTIC FICTION, 1860-1930. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2015. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3512 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Julia Poindexter McLeod entitled "HOME/ ECONOMICS: ENTERPRISE, PROPERTY, AND MONEY IN WOMEN’S DOMESTIC FICTION, 1860-1930." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Mary E. Papke, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Carolyn R. Hodges, Thomas Haddox, William Hardwig Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) HOME/ECONOMICS: ENTERPRISE, PROPERTY, AND MONEY IN WOMEN’S DOMESTIC FICTION, 1860-1930 A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Julia Poindexter McLeod August 2015 Copyright © by Julia Poindexter McLeod All rights reserved. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation bears my name, but it represents the encouragement and support of many who have helped me on the journey to a PhD. I am grateful for this opportunity to thank those who have helped make this accomplishment possible. Dr. Mary E. Papke, your knowledge and love of women’s literature inspired me before I met you, and I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from you. Your wisdom and guidance have helped me to grow as a scholar and teacher. Dean Carolyn Hodges, thank you for your willingness to share your insights with me. Dr. William Hardwig, your encouragement kept me on the path. Thank you for taking time to listen to my ideas – and for introducing me to the joys of Appalachian literature. Dr. Thomas Haddox, your invaluable feedback and kindness have helped me to do my best. I would also like to thank the University of Tennessee’s English Department for the Durant DaPont scholarship during the 2015 spring academic semester. The women of my family inspired me with their intelligence, independence, and industry and sent me on a journey to find lives such as theirs in literature, and so I thank my great- grandmothers Martha “Miss Matt” Cheek and Mollie Virginia Hilliard, my grandmothers Flossie Hilliard Cheek and Hilda Brandon Poindexter, my mother Sims Cheek Poindexter, my mother- in-law Mary Shuler McLeod, and my sister Jan Poindexter-Cameron. My friends Linda Harris and Kierstyn Lamour, your level heads, timely hugs, and constant encouragement kept me moving forward even when I was not sure I could finish. You were sure of me even when I was not, and I thank you for that. My parents Bill and Sims Poindexter, your support and love provided a firm foundation for my life. Thank you for equipping me to face any challenge with confidence and faith. My children, William and Laura, you are my life’s best work. Thank you for inspiring and encouraging me. My husband Wayne, you are the one who still makes me laugh and helps me chase my dreams. For your hard work and support as a graduate student spouse, this dissertation should have your name on it, too. S.D.G. iii ABSTRACT “Home/Economics: Enterprise, Property, and Money in Women’s Domestic Fiction, 1860-1930” connects American women’s literature to the ideological tensions that affected women’s participation in the development of industrial capitalism in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Working against separate spheres ideologies that largely restricted women’s activities to domestic duties as wives and mothers and discouraged them from working in the public marketplace, American women authors engaged with the contemporary economic theories of John Stuart Mill and Thorstein Veblen and promoted New Woman principles to forge new avenues of fulfilling and productive work for women. In chapters focusing on entrepreneurial work that engages simultaneously in domestic and public spheres – the boarding house, the textile mill, and the farm – I incorporate a comparative study of American literature, economic theory, and historical documentation of women’s work. This examination of the historical network of voices shaping the conditions of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century marketplace in which women writers participated reveals the connections between literary representation and economic change. I argue that, for women writers including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rebecca Harding Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow, literary representation became a form of feminist activism that promoted greater opportunities for women’s economic independence and participated in national conversations about money and resources, capitalism’s effects on the character of individuals, and ways to balance the necessity of money with social needs for promoting human sympathy and social progress. Women’s fiction critiqued prevailing social and economic inequities through portrayals of successful women entrepreneurs, demonstrating that women possessed the capacity to compete with men as successful entrepreneurial capitalists, the desire for productive work that made profitable use of their individual capacities, and the womanly attributes of sympathy and nurture that, when exercised as community-building professionalism, could help to ameliorate the exploitative outcomes of capitalist greed. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Domestic Enterprise: The Case for Traversing Separate Spheres ...................1 Critical Conversations about Domestic Literature: A Literature Review ..............................4 Topic of Inquiry, Methodology, and Contribution to Scholarship....................................... 11 A Test Case in Domestic Enterprise: The Boarding House Owner in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces ............................................................................................................ 13 The Workings of this Study ............................................................................................... 20 Part I: The Woman Mill Owner and Women Workers in Industrial Reform Fiction ....... 21 Part II: Down Home on the Farm: New Agriculture and the Woman Farmer.................. 24 Conclusion: The Woman of Business Creates a Public Life ........................................... 28 PART I “A preference for a business of my own”: The Woman Mill Owner and Women Workers in Industrial Reform Fiction ........................................................................................ 29 John Stuart Mill’s Theories of Progressive Political Economy ........................................... 43 Individuality .................................................................................................................. 44 Intellectual Growth ........................................................................................................ 47 Persons of Genius .......................................................................................................... 48 Technology.................................................................................................................... 49 “Towards what ultimate point is society tending by its industrial progress?”: Early Realist Explorations of Women and the Industrial Setting in Herman Melville and Rebecca Harding Davis ................................................................................................................................. 53 “This young lady’s life had been a peculiar, rather a public one”: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, John Stuart Mill, and the Woman of Business .................................................................... 74 PART II Down Home on the Farm: New Agriculture and the Woman Farmer ........................ 112 Economic Independence and the New Woman ................................................................ 114 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Farm Woman .............................................................. 124 Finding Economic Independence, or Aunt Mary’s Piece of the Pie .............................. 138 Beyond the “Deputy Husband”: Historical Accounts of the Woman Farmer in America .. 150 Forming a Plan: Willa Cather and Ellen Glasgow and Writing Successful Farm Women . 172 Cather’s Alexandra Bergson and the American Dream, Property, and Work ................ 173 Furnishing the Farmhouse with Veblen: The Bergsons’ Workmanship and Predation .. 180 Glasgow’s Dorinda Oakley and Women’s Workmanship ................................................ 196 Women Farmers and the