Women and Work

Home , Bell hooks

Women and Work

Women and Work: The Labors of Self-Fashioning

Edited by

Christine Leiren Mower and Susanne Weil

Women and Work: The Labors of Self-Fashioning, Edited by Christine Leiren Mower and Susanne Weil

This book first published 2011

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-2422-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2422-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...... viii

Acknowledgments ...... ix

Chapter One...... 1 “Let Us Own Ourselves, Our Earnings, Our Genius”: The Uneasy Marriage of Women and Work Christine Leiren Mower and Susanne Weil

Part I: Redefining the Nature of Women’s Work

Chapter Two ...... 50 Feminine Duty and Desire: Revising the Cultural Narrative in Gissing’s The Odd Women Gretchen Braun

Chapter Three ...... 74 Woman and Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man: Women, Work, and Evolution in the Works of Olive Schreiner Daniel P. Shea

Chapter Four...... 97 Reworking Professionalism: Women Doctors in Creamer and Phelps Kelly Ross

Chapter Five ...... 120 Nature, Domestic Labor, and Moral Community in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours and Elinor Wyllys Richard M. Magee

Chapter Six ...... 140 “Work and Wait”: Louisa May Alcott’s Female Artists Erin Hendel vi Table of Contents

Chapter Seven...... 163 Mixing Business with Pleasure: The Figure of the “Business Girl” in Sinclair Lewis’s The Job and Winston Churchill’s The Dwelling- Place of Light Polina Kroik

Part II: Reading Class Tensions in Constructions of Women’s Work

Chapter Eight...... 188 “To Work Is To Be Socially Alive”: The Failed Promise of Domestic Service in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s What Diantha Did Kellen H. Graham

Chapter Nine...... 206 The New (Working) Woman in Gilman’s Herland Melissa J. Strong

Chapter Ten ...... 227 To Dance with “The Hired Girls”: Love, Labor, and Longing in My Antonia Nancy Von Rosk

Chapter Eleven ...... 243 They Worked Hard For No Money: Women, Labor, and Working- Class Politics in the Writing of Meridel Le Sueur Amy Brady

Chapter Twelve ...... 259 Harvesting Freedom: Women, Work, and Liberation in J. California Cooper’s Family and Octavia Butler’s Kindred Ferentz Lafargue

Part III: The Labor of Self-Making

Chapter Thirteen...... 274 Women in the Public: Society Women in Edith Wharton’s Fiction Li-Wen Chang

Women and Work: The Labors of Self-Fashioning vii

Chapter Fourteen ...... 302 “Following the Fashion”: Women, Work, and Class Construction in East Lynne Annarose Fitzgerald

Chapter Fifteen ...... 319 Conduct Becoming a 1930s Heroine: Middle-Class Ideology and the “Strategic Self” Katherine Rogers-Carpenter

Chapter Sixteen ...... 342 Afterword: The Battle of the Bell(e)s: The Sweet Labor of Working Through It with bell hooks Marie-Antoinette Smith

Bibliography...... 364

Contributors...... 396

Index...... 398

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Women and Work grew from a series of special sessions at the 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2009 annual conferences of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA). We thank PAMLA Executive Directors Salah Khan and Craig Svonkin, as well as Beverly Voloshin and Thierry Boucquey, PAMLA’s special session coordinators, for their support. These sessions sparked an outpouring of creative, thoughtful responses to the topic from many excellent panelists—particularly our contributors here, whose labor, care, and collaboration we appreciate deeply. We also thank Amanda Millar, Carol Koulikourdi, Soucin Yip-Sou, and Dr. Andy Nercessian of Cambridge Scholars Publishers for their interest in and encouragement of this volume.

For the cover photograph of women working in the Chehalis, Washington Boeing plant during World War II, we gratefully acknowledge the help of Debbie Knapp, Director of the Lewis County Historical Museum of Washington State, Kevin Kelly of Boeing Images, and Edna Fund, “History Sleuth” for the Centralia Chronicle, who first located the image for “Real Life Rosie the Riveters,” a Centralia College Lyceum lecture, March 10, 2010.

Susanne thanks the Centralia College Foundation for the 2008 Teaching Excellence Award, funding from which helped her attend “Women and Work” sessions in 2008 and 2009. She is grateful to her late grandmother, Martha Close Greenough, for the inspiration of her stories of life as a working woman, wife, and mother in the years spanning World Wars I and II. Finally, Susanne thanks her husband, Peter Glover, for unflagging love, support, and sandwiches throughout this project.

Christine thanks Priscilla Wald for her generous mentorship over the years and for her encouragement of this project. She is grateful to Jodie O'Brien and successive chairs of the Women Studies Program at Seattle University—Maria Fernandez-Bullon and Mary-Antoinette Smith—for their collective faith in her work as a feminist and scholar with each incoming class of students. Lastly, Christine thanks her mother, Dorin Virginia Anderson Schuler, for her well-told tales of work and x Acknowledgements motherhood and for her laughter which, even now, still makes her daughter sing. CHAPTER ONE

“L ET US OWN OURSELVES , OUR EARNINGS , OUR GENIUS ”:1 THE UNEASY MARRIAGE OF WOMEN AND WORK

CHRISTINE LEIREN MOWER AND SUSANNE WEIL

I can remember it clearly, the day my mother imparted her womanly wisdom to me. It was 1979. I was nineteen, a college student. Mom was fifty-five and, while a veteran of a long, complicated marriage, recently widowed. “Christine,” she said to me, “Christine . . . never, never marry until you finish school . . . find a career . . . buy a house.” My mother, deeply steeped in her hard-won middle-class values of education and upward mobility, was imparting a “universal” life lesson to me, or so she thought. While she could not quite utter these words, what she was saying to me was—“don’t marry till you become who you are.” For Mom, a plucky woman who grew up poor during the Depression and began her married life in the 50s amidst the bloom of consumerism and domestic product innovation, love, marriage, children, while obviously dear to her, were nonetheless antithetical to becoming a woman. And becoming a woman, for Mom, clearly meant economic self-sufficiency, not dependence on a marriage partner. The only way to resolve this conundrum was to respect priorities—become yourself before you lose yourself through domesticity. Economic survival and fulfillment first, children and marriage later, much later. My mother’s words continued to speak to me, more than thirty years later, as Susanne and I conceived this anthology in the early months of 2009. While my mother was a pro with language, little survives of her words. As her archivist, my repeated searches through her papers have yielded her pay stubs, her bank books, her sketches for award-winning 2 Chapter One advertisements, her commendations from her boss Victor (my mom was a saver)—but none of these reveal how she saw herself as a woman juggling work, children, personal happiness. And so I have speculated: what led Mom to her unrelenting ideas about marriage and family, economics and self-fulfillment? What was it in her experience as a sales clerk and a fashion advertiser for Frederick & Nelson and then, later, as a young married woman with three children, struggling to make ends meet, that led her to conclude that women cannot “have it all,” that there is something corrosive and inherently incompatible between women’s labors of self- fashioning and self-sufficiency, on the one hand, and women’s participation in domestic labors, on the other? My mother’s dire predictions about work and family, of course, reflect women’s history of struggle to reconcile their labors of economic survival, personal fulfillment, and domesticity. With each new quarter of women’s studies students, I look for that same angst my mother experienced, that I too am experiencing, about economic security in our jobs as we age, about fulfillment in our careers, about caring for dependents (in my case, my now-incapacitated mother), about taking on too much of everything to the detriment of self. Have our questions fundamentally changed as young women today are benefited in unprecedented ways by expanding markets and increased economic opportunities, by the effects of globalization (and neo-colonialism) on markets and human rights, by fundamental shifts in the meanings and practices of marriage, work, and reproduction, which offer new ways of thinking about ourselves as women, as human beings? Women and Work: The Labors of Self-Fashioning positions itself within this contested history. While much research has been done concerning the historical meaning and experience of work for women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, less attention has been given to how nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers themselves conceptualized work both as an ideological concept and as a material reality. The timeliness of our subject is highlighted by the outpouring of interest given to the special topic session we chaired in 2005 at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association. 2005’s “Women and Work” was enthusiastically followed by sequel sessions in 2007, 2008 and, in 2009, two concurrent sessions. Growing from those conference sessions, our anthology seeks to contribute new ideas and analysis to a discussion that has gained resonance, even urgency, as questions of how women may balance work and life remain unresolved, by providing an intensive look into how U. S. and British writers of both fiction and nonfiction write about themselves and the work of being women—where the word “work” is defined broadly to encompass the work of performing femininity and

The Uneasy Marriage of Women and Work 3 domesticity as well as the work of paid labor both inside and outside the home. All of these labors inform what we see as the “labors of self- fashioning”—the ways in which women’s work functions both prescriptively and generatively in constituting the lives of women. We have conceptualized Women and Work as addressing three questions. First, how do nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings about women define the concept and meaning of work, and how do these definitions revise then-contemporary social assumptions about who should be performing work and for what purpose? Writers such as George Gissing, Olive Schreiner, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are writing against a backdrop of white supremacy, disguised as furthering the propagation of the “Race.” The articles in our anthology critically engage with this discourse, as well as with the ideology of separate sphere thinking, in order to question how women are seen and represented as workers in U. S. and British literatures. Specifically, the articles anthologized in Women and Work present an argument about how ideas about women’s work evolved over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both in terms of how women themselves perceived their laboring bodies and in terms of what constituted “legitimate” labor for women. While all of the writers discussed in our anthology struggle with the notion that vocation and domesticity are antithetical, they come to different conclusions about how to merge reproduction, domesticity, and work. Second, how do U.S. and British writers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries understand and write about class tension within the work force and the home? How fully do they perceive the class implications of their arguments and representations of work for women of differing classes? The women writers explicated in our anthology are writing in a time period where, as historian Alice Kessler-Harris has noted, the maintenance of class distinctions constrained the range of acceptable employment options for women. Working-class women who worked outside the home for economic necessity, as well as middle-class women who sought to redefine their domestic responsibilities to allow for work they saw as leading to greater self-fulfillment, all faced significant obstacles. In what ways do writers such as Gilman, Willa Cather, and Meridel Le Sueur, for example, understand and anticipate these class obstacles, and in what ways do they perpetuate what theorist Lauren Berlant has termed the ideology of “normal personhood,” where whiteness, middle-class-ness, male-ness and straightness defines who is bodily marked as “normal” and who is marked as “subaltern”?

4 Chapter One

Third, how does work, both inside and outside the home, contribute towards the creation of female identity or, as Katherine Rogers-Carpenter calls this in Chapter Fifteen, the making of the “strategic self”? While men have long since participated in “self-madeism,” women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries began to see various forms of labor as a means of self-making. In what ways is self-making a class-based activity? How did then-contemporary society accept or reject women who perceived their performance of femininity and self as an issue of labor as well as of identity? In what ways do these writers participate in what legal theorist Kenji Yoshino has recently termed the demands of “covering” through which "all outsider groups are systematically asked to assimilate to mainstream norms in ways that burden our equality"? Historically, women have “covered” their identities and strategically fashioned themselves, performed themselves, in manners aimed towards economic success in the marketplace. What do these nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers— not only canonical writers such as Edith Wharton, but popular “middlebrow” writers such as Ellen Wood, Margaret Mitchell, and authors of popular advice manuals for aspiring middle-class women, such as Marjorie Hillis—have to say about this? Articles in this anthology may lead readers to ask what commonalities these writers share with women today, who find themselves still required to “cover” in order to participate successfully in their careers.

I. Redefining the Nature of Women’s Work

The meaning of “women’s work” for U.S. and British women has never been stable, despite prevailing ideologies viewing the gendered division of labor—of women as confined to the home and domestic production and men as working outside the home—as a “natural” or inevitable phenomenon. While women have consistently engaged with the production of the home as well as, to a lesser degree, labor outside the home, their involvement in what Marx conceptualized as the wage-for- labor power exchange did not achieve heightened visibility until the nineteenth century, with the rise of industrialization and U.S. and British women’s avid participation in new opportunities afforded by industry and, later, the professions. As historian Jeannie Boydston argues, prior to industrialization, “material life was fully integrated in the individual household,” meaning that production, distribution, and reproduction were part of one consistent process 2: Richard M. Magee’s analysis of Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours in Chapter Five well illustrates this integrated ideology of women’s work. Women’s domestic labors, such as

The Uneasy Marriage of Women and Work 5 the cultivation of maple sugar in Rural Hours , are integral not only to the community’s economic survival, but also to the women’s advocacy of social justice, as these domestic economies allow the community to boycott imported sugar harvested by slave labor. Cooper’s “ethic of care,” as Magee terms this, contributes both to survival and, importantly, to the “collective good.” This integrative ideology Cooper advocates is affected, however, by industrialization, which separated women’s contribution to the material condition of the family from men’s and, in so doing, began to devalue and make less visible women’s home work; 3 without a market price, women’s unwaged labor incrementally lost significance in relation to the visible “progress” of nations engaged in the workings of industrialization and imperial expansion. As recent critics have noted, however, a clean separation between spheres during the nineteenth century is more an ideological divide than a fact born out by historical record; there is “often no clear demarcation between the male/public realm and the female/private realm.” 4 Instead, separate sphere ideology, with its focus on gender, tended to mask other imperialistic, racist, and capitalistic oppressions at play. 5 In this context, work for women became a collection of differing material activities that occurred both inside and outside the domestic sphere of the home. To examine women’s “work,” 6 as we are using this term, does not simply reference a range of statistics regarding U.S. and British women’s employment in the nation’s market economy. Instead, work (in both a material and symbolic sense) refers to a heterogeneous range of activities and aspirations of particular interest to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: labor in the reproduction and education of children; household labor in converting raw materials brought into the household into products consumable for the family’s support; women’s labor in maintaining the institutions of marriage and heterosexual love; women’s participation in the economic market for wages outside the home; and women’s self-labor via the pursuit of education and a vocation separate from the home. The cultural “legitimacy” accorded these activities is the topic of Part I of our anthology: how U.S. and British writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries defined and redefined the work of women engaged in paid and unpaid labor, and the resultant economic and social values assigned to these labors. While the nineteenth century’s faith in work’s ability to improve and “make” the individual took on the fervor of a religion, women were largely excluded from the efficacy and ideological benefits afforded by this “gospel of work.” 7 Instead, as our contributors to Part I suggest, the legitimacy and relative value of women’s labor outside the home was questioned. Could a woman have a career, a job and still

6 Chapter One participate in the work of love, marriage, reproduction? Or to ask this a different way, is a career or paid labor “legitimate” work for women, particularly if this work has a perceived deleterious effect on domestic labors? Erin Hendel’s examination of what she sees as Louisa May Alcott’s ambivalence on the question of balancing vocation with domestic labor perhaps typifies the unrest accompanying these questions of legitimacy. Alcott’s representations of women artists in her short stories, “A Marble Woman” (1865) and “Psyche’s Art” (1865), as well as in the fragment titled “Diana and Persis” (1879), suggest to Hendel that, while the outcomes for Alcott’s heroines vary significantly, a general dis-ease seems to persist that, as Godey’s Lady’s Book wrote in rejection letters to Alcott herself, women would have to “work and wait”8 before audiences would be ready to consider the creation of art that engaged contentious social concerns as work appropriate for women. The ambivalence Alcott expresses surfaces in other novels of the period. Our contributors Gretchen Braun and Kelly Ross come to similar conclusions in reference to Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) and Phelp’s Doctor Zay (1882): that the competing demands for women’s careers (and/or paid labor) are, in fact, incompatible. In Chapter Two, Braun performs a revisionist reading of Gissing’s novel, arguing that the question raised by the novel is not the efficacy of “companionate marriage,” 9 but, rather, whether the “real” work of women must be restricted to marriage. By vesting the novel’s emotive climax in two women’s renewed commitment to work together for social betterment, Braun suggests, Gissing makes the case that women’s work—and partnership—did constitute a legitimate alternative to domestic labors of marriage and childrearing. In the late Victorian world, where marriage was accepted as “the most respected and economically stable career option” for middle- and upper-class women, Braun highlights Gissing’s subversive suggestion that goal-driven labor can be the “most attractive form of feminine fulfillment.” Ross, in her analysis of Hannah Gardner Creamer’s mid- century novel, Delia’s Doctors (1852), and Phelps’s novel of thirty years later, Doctor Zay , comes to a similar conclusion in Chapter Four, pointing to the differing values required for woman doctoring and domesticity as the reason why a medical career and marriage might not be compatible. In Doctor Zay , Phelps represents a woman doctor who, confronted by a contentious male patient of her own social class, crosses over into the male province of “dominant professionalism,” arrogating for herself the authority of her position as a means of control. Instead of strengthening her hand, by going against her principles, Dr. Zay renders herself vulnerable to absorption into the traditional mold of domesticity. In her

The Uneasy Marriage of Women and Work 7 revisionist reading of Phelps’s novel, Ross argues that, far from forecasting a companionate marriage in which a professional woman will be treated as an equal, Dr. Zay’s response to her male patient’s behavior augurs how she will ultimately give up her medical practice. In other words, Ross suggests, Phelps’s real message may be that only by avoiding union can a woman pursue her chosen work. While Alcott, Phelps, and Gissing can be read as questioning and exploring the possible incompatibility of domestic labors with paid work and careers, Polina Kroik’s readings of two novels from the Progressive Era in Chapter Seven suggest the unrelenting social critiques awaiting women who attempt to combine these labors. Taking as her topic the “business girl” who works outside the home, Kroik illuminates how Sinclair Lewis’s The Job (1917) and Winston Churchill’s The Dwelling- Place of Light (1917) present the business girl as utilizing her work experience to “train” for domestic work within marriage: in both the novels, the work of the business girl serves as a morality tale about how dangerous it can be for women to work outside the home. Lewis’s The Job shows how business girls’ work in an office make them function as a surrogate wives to their bosses. As Kroik points out, while Lewis was in many ways a Progressive writer, he still “consistently suggests that women must have ‘love’ and a home to be fully human.” Even in the novel’s finale (by which time Una, Lewis’s heroine, has, rather surprisingly, become successful in the real estate business), the heroine’s victory in the field of work is tempered by an ideal romantic union in which desire for a child, rather than desire for work, will be her future focus. Similar to The Job, Churchill’s The Dwelling-Place of Light links its heroine to a man she meets through work, a meeting which leads to an unwanted out-of- wedlock pregnancy, which leads, in turn, to her death. As Kroik argues, the very culture she has access to because of her waged work, in fact, only reinforces her sense that relationships, not work, are the appropriate focus for her desire. Lewis’s and Churchill’s novels reveal that, even by the second decade of the twentieth century, the combination of domestic labor with women’s career and waged work was seen as iconoclastic. Underlying the struggles nineteenth- and twentieth-century heroines such as Una and Dr. Zay faced in legitimating work outside the home are long-standing ideological battles: as scholars have convincingly argued, women’s work also carries important ideological weight. 10 Rather than simply the search for meaningful and self-supporting labor, women’s work—the kind of work she did and where this work was done—was read as having national import: how she labored and where she labored was elevated to a civic duty. Historically, whether or not white women had the

8 Chapter One

“right” to participate directly as citizens, white women’s civic and national obligations have always been owed to the nation. 11 Whether or not women could own property, or vote, or serve on a jury, or retain their earnings as their own separate property, nineteenth-century white women were expected to fulfill their national duties indirectly and less visibly through the functioning of coverture, which recognized married women’s legal status only through their husbands’. Coverture was based on the assumption that husbands had unlimited access to their wives’ property and body and, in so doing, assumed an obligation to protect and shield their wives from any direct political or legal relation with the public and with the nation. 12 Through coverture, the indirect nature of white women’s relation to nation functioned in a circular way. As long as women had no direct relation to nation, they could not overtly claim rights as national subjects; however, as long as white women did not have these rights, they had a more difficult time exercising an independent, direct relation to nation and state. 13 By the end of the nineteenth century, white women’s work had acquired a complicated set of meanings far exceeding the questions of economic subsistence or personal satisfaction. Home labor served a useful function, as it not only symbolically perpetuated U.S. and British women’s indirect and dependent status, but it also fulfilled an evidentiary function: the proof of women’s fulfillment of her national duties lay in the successful and visible corporeal performance of women’s home labors via the safe-keeping of the home and the future reproduction and nurturing of new citizens. 14 At the same time, the definition of work for women appeared to be expanding as some writers and activists had begun, by mid- century, to question whether a woman’s value could be successfully argued based on her exceptional home labor skills and reproductive fecundity. This questioning suggests a shift in the value assigned to waged labor. While antebellum activists in the United States, for example, focused on the passage of joint property laws aimed at valuing women’s household labor as a contribution to the marital community, these efforts were dropped in the 1860s and 70s in favor of the advocacy of earning statutes which gave women the right to own their own wages. 15 These separate property arguments assumed a gendered valuation of labor—that unpaid housework had no economic or psychic value—in order to contest the gendered division of women’s labor; it is only through waged labor, the argument went, that women could achieve economic equality with men. 16 Disputes over the meaning of women’s work and the value to be assigned to home work versus waged work escalated with the rise of

The Uneasy Marriage of Women and Work 9

Darwinism in both the United States and Britain. At stake was the question of women’s racial significance 17 : whether women were a catalyst or a hindrance to the “progress” of the nation. Darwin and, later, Herbert Spencer 18 did not create the idea that women were biologically inferior but, rather, their arguments validated previously existing prejudices by connecting this inferiority “scientifically” to women’s inability to compete in the male struggle for survival. 19 Science made it clear that reproductive work is woman’s by “nature,” and that failure to engage with these domestic labors meant inhibiting the natural evolutionary “progress” of the “Race.” 20 Assisting the rise of Darwinian science in the United States was the perceived crisis of authenticity: of how to keep the “national stock” “pure,” 21 as one writer puts this, in the face of immigration pressures and imperialist expansion both within and outside U.S. borders. 22 Commonly referred to as “race suicide,” this fear was at heart a eugenics argument 23 : the “wrong” socioeconomically classed and raced people (working class people and immigrants from “undesirable” climates and nations) were reproducing too many children and, hence, were degrading the quality of “American” citizenry. White middle-class women, as reproducers of the nation, were uniquely positioned, so the argument went, to ensure there was not a dilution of the “true” American. Essential to this scheme, however, was that white middle-class women actually have children, as many as possible: it was their patriotic duty to be “good mothers,” the Pennsylvania Medical Journal urged women in 1910. 24 Women’s rights activists made frequent use of this same Darwinian perspective, by turning what was originally gender subordination into racial superiority through the advocacy of women as a “civilizing” agent. 25 Gilman, for example, used evolutionary science to advocate for a reformation of the home and of the meaning of women’s work. She argued that women’s preoccupation with housework and the domestic realm had debarred women from human development because, in Gilman’s estimation, the current institution of the “home” accentuated sexual difference rather than women’s human, racial similarity with men. “Home” had become a “primitive” institution evidencing women’s less- than-human status: “the house-life does not bring out our humanness, for all the distinctive lines of human progress lie outside of it.” 26 Crucial to arguments such as Gilman’s, however, is the hierarchy constructed between white middle-class women, on the one hand, and white working class women and women of color, on the other. Two contributors to our anthology address this hierarchy as part of a careful reappraisal of how Gilman’s appropriation of evolutionary and socialist thought complicates her feminism. Analyzing Gilman’s What Diantha Did , Kellen H. Graham

10 Chapter One argues in Part II (Chapter Eight) that white middle-class women’s escape from home labor to labor assigned greater “dignity” implicitly required that “other” women do the work that white women had abandoned. 27 Addressing Herland in Chapter Nine , Melissa J. Strong makes a case that Gilman’s class-blindness continued into the later part of her career. Even thoughtful writers could remain blinkered to such divisions. The irony is, of course, that while white women continued to engage with home labor, either solely or in conjunction with work outside the home, this labor never achieved the status of “real” labor, labor which garnered the racialized “citizen” status of “normal personhood.” As theorist Lauren Berlant articulates this, normal personhood is the constitution of the “ideal” American citizen, a citizenship status which includes those bodies which fall within the range of what is “typical in public ” as well as what is “personally unique” as “normal” bodies. 28 Within the context of our anthology, normal personhood functions as a symbolic body consolidating two seemingly opposed tensions. On the one hand, white middle-class heterosexual men’s ability to claim membership in a class of “normal” bodies was based on certain shared characteristics as white laboring bodies. On the other hand, membership was also predicated on white men claiming their own particularized individuality as “free” self-made economically independent individuals who ostensibly act independently from the collective of the nation. White women found themselves excluded from this definition of “normality.” While middle- class women shared a certain solidarity of race and class with white middle-class men, their sexual difference (marked as biological weakness), as well as their restricted access to the labor market, prevented their inclusion within the category of normal personhood. This exclusion operated on two levels: white women could neither be included in the range of “typical in public” nor demonstrate their uniqueness in public as self-actualized bodies. Daniel P. Shea’s analysis in Chapter Three regarding Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour (1911) and The Story of an African Farm (1883) illustrates how exclusions instanced by normal personhood were endemic to Victorian womanhood, inscribed as they were on a woman’s reproductive body, and, in this case, Schreiner’s protagonist, Lyndall. Despite desire to exercise her individual “genius”29 and avert the fate of what Schreiner termed the “sex-parasite”—the woman who has no value in and of herself—Lyndall finds herself barred from meaningful work with tragic results. Integral to Schreiner’s argument is her appropriation of (imperialist) evolutionary thought, a topic to be taken up shortly: that women must work outside the home, must develop their capacities, lest their value decay and thus, through their reproductive

The Uneasy Marriage of Women and Work 11 role, undermine “the progress of the race.” Working-class women and women of color were constructed as yet further alienated bodies, sharing what Berlant refers to as a “subaltern personhood” in not bearing the privilege of being unmarked by “race” or class while bearing the burden of sameness, both as examples of national stereotypes of “blackness” and of working-class bodies. 30 As a result, the nineteenth century privileged a very particular kind of “American” identity: the white, economically independent male. White women’s labor in the home, African-American men and women’s labor under slavery (and later under the post-Civil War system of compulsory “free” labor), and women of color’s waged domestic service labor, for example, failed to meet this standard, thereby cementing the presumption of women’s dependent citizen status, African- Americans’ dependent noncitizen status, and immigrant women’s “foreign” status, as well as, for each group, implying that this presumptive status meant exclusion from normal personhood. The growing numbers of white women and women of color entering the workforce around the mid-nineteenth century, as well as the later expanding presence of women at the end of the century in professional vocations previously dominated by men, served as frightening evidence of women’s attempts to redefine and expand the parameters of normal personhood and, hence, to gain a more direct relation to nation. At the same time, women’s labor outside the home provided evidence of women’s presumably irresponsible abandonment of their civic obligations, obligations which had previously been defined solely in relation to home and marriage. The issue of women’s home labor, then, represents a complicated and gradual renegotiation of priorities and values. While for some white middle-class and white working-class women, labor outside the home served a critical economic function, it also simultaneously signaled, in a very visible way, a change in how white women fulfilled their national duties. By claiming ownership of wages and reproductive rights, for example, white women signaled a new “dignity” or status outside of coverture’s protectionism. By the end of the century, middle- class and upper-class white U.S. and British women’s increasing reliance on work outside the home as a means of differentiating themselves as autonomous individuals (the topic explored in Part III)—their visible pursuit of a previously male “right” to the “dignity” acquired through labor—accentuated what was already a presumably dangerous break in patterns of women’s civic obligations. So while more than thirty years separate novels such as Gilman’s What Diantha Did and Lewis’ The Job , the threat of failed duty to the nation continues to retain force in the public eye.

12 Chapter One

For women of color and many white working-class women, however, the pursuit of “dignity” enabled by labor is often transmuted to bodily debility through the discriminatory markings of race and class, as well as through the physical wasting instanced by industrial labor. Representations of laboring bodies, such as Deb’s and Hugh’s in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861), Sips’s in Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871), Frado’s in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black In a Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (1859), or Sui Sin Far’s in her 1909 autobiographical essay, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” suggest that not only are these laboring bodies excluded from normal personhood, but that the work they perform inhabits an entirely different geography within the nation. 31 Nineteenth-century obsessions with separate sphere ideology—clear demarcations in the values assigned to women’s home work versus waged work—had no traction as idealizations of “True Womanhood” proved antithetical to the economic survival of subaltern women. 32 For the “free black” Frado in Wilson’s novel, for example, the value assigned to home labor necessarily differs from the value of home labor assigned to white women such as Christie in Alcott’s Work, A Story of Experience (1873). While Christie has available to her a broad range of work outside the home, work which allows her to “choose” waged labor or a “domestic” profession such as governessing, Frado finds home labor as the only source for her economic survival, a survival which simultaneously enacts her egregious oppression in the hands of a despotic northern housewife: domestic servitude literally subsumes Frado’s health and able-bodied-ness by the end of the novel. Alcott’s biases, as Erin Hendel argues, are revealed in Work via Christie’s (and Alcott’s) dis-ease with women’s waged labor and her recurring references to her own genteel background. Tellingly, Christie can find refuge for her work-debilitated body among her community of women; Frado, on the other hand, has no such escape and is left to vacillate between work that does not pay sufficiently for her survival and the unstable, paternalistic charity of white middle-class women. This is not to say that subaltern women during this time failed to imagine their labors in relation to the nation but, rather, that this imagining bore no relation to the white woman’s nation. A novel such as Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), written nearly forty years after Our Nig , makes this clear with its argument that Iola and her husband Latimer’s “service” for the benefit of “the negro” is simultaneously labor on behalf of what they call “good citizenship” as well as the “community at large.” 33 Harper’s “nation” exists alongside and within the borders of the white nation, but not

The Uneasy Marriage of Women and Work 13 subservient to it. Her labors with domesticity and “service” to her church are specifically aimed towards her “community at large,” but they also seek to transform a “retrograde” (white) nation into a nation whose “example should give light to the world.” 34 For all these reasons, the merits of home labor and the dangers of waged labor, as well as the women who accepted or distanced themselves from these labors, assumed a notoriety and visibility in fiction, journalism, and other writings of the period which, on the surface, seems oddly disproportionate to the issues ostensibly discussed. Rather than an anomaly, however, the notoriety and visibility accorded to the nature of women’s work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a function of hotly contested changes in women’s national obligations which resulted, for some white women, in a new national identification akin to, but not the same as, white heterosexual middle-class men’s normal personhood. So long as the nation could not designate a national usefulness for white women’s work outside the home, this labor would continue to fail in conferring the same “citizenship” rights as men. For subaltern women, on the other hand, this labor afforded no new “citizenship” rights and, while providing economic subsistence for some, also fueled heightened anxieties about race and whiteness and the demise of the (white) nation. When Willa Cather writes of the immigrant “hired girls,” as Nancy Von Rosk points out in Chapter Ten, those “othered” working-class bodies registered a larger social dis-ease with women who exceeded the norming ideology of the domestic white middle-class woman—what, at the turn of the century, came to be known as the “normal woman.” 35 The contributors in Part I of our anthology explore the contested trajectory of the meaning of women’s work, both in Britain and the United States. Beginning in the early years of the nineteenth century with the writings of Susan Fenimore Cooper and continuing up to the 1930s, work emerges as a malleable commodity whose meanings far exceed the definitions assigned by women themselves. At stake are the material experiences of these workers—the daily and often impoverished existences of women working—as well as the ways that their work experiences, in the eyes of their communities, undermine or affirm then- current ideologies about what kind of work women should do and where this work should occur.

14 Chapter One

II. Reading Class Tensions in Constructions of Women’s Work

Representations of women’s work in writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries raise significant class issues for the twenty-first- century reader. While domestic novels, novels of the Progressive Era, and Depression fiction in the United States all reveal, in different ways, clear class tensions, often these tensions remain unacknowledged by the texts themselves. 36 The contributors to Part II identify several such tensions: first, the devaluation and ghettoizing of home labor as work most suitable for the less privileged; second, the dangerous and deleterious effects of industrial, menial, and manual labor on working class bodies, effects which either require the paternalistic “rescue” of the damaged worker (a rescue effectuated by either the benevolent intervention of more privileged women or by the conventions of marriage to an acceptable male suitor) or require the regrettable segregation of “hired girls” to the status of subaltern bodies; and third, the potentially liberatory effects of work for subaltern women and how this “liberation” is significantly circumscribed by the raced and classed identities of the workers. In “bourgeois” 37 novels, such as the ones considered by our contributors in Part II, middle-class audiences necessitated a very specific representation of the working woman, one which struggled with the constraints of middle-class values, but not necessarily one which valorized work as an essential class identity for its heroines. As Laura Hapke argues, the term “woman worker” 38 remained a contradiction in U.S. fiction throughout the nineteenth century: the “ideal” worker was male, one who did no household labor, child care or other family labor, thus leaving little legitimacy for the work of women. 39 As a working class figure, she is required to labor: but at the same time her labor must be made palpable to her middle-class readers, an issue often solved through a bit of “leavening” with “Christian piety and cross-class sorority.” 40 Her labors rarely demonstrate her value as a working body. 41 In contrast, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women workers themselves claimed a form of respectability as workers via what Nan Enstad terms “working ladyhood,” a “wish image” that differed from middle-class ideals in that it challenged the assumption that labor is denigrating to femininity.42 Working ladyhood attempts to reconcile the incongruence between “woman” and “work.” A similar valorization of the working woman’s labors, life style, and values (working ladyhood), however, rarely surfaces in middle-class representations of the working

The Uneasy Marriage of Women and Work 15 woman, revealing one way in which bourgeois novels are unselfconscious of their own classism. The contradictions inherent in the term “woman worker” are borne out in less privileged white women’s working experience in the antebellum period through the Progressive Era, when women faced the real possibility of downward mobility. Even middle-class women learned during the Depression that working ladyhood could indeed be a wish-image, punctured along with the bubble of the depleting economy. As Amy Brady reveals in Chapter Eleven, Meridel Le Sueur documents how women who lost their work—not only those who performed manual labor, but also those in professional vocations like teaching—were subjected to extraordinary scrutiny when they applied for relief: these women had to prove they were “deserving” of help at a time when so many men were out of work, and so they had to lay bare their financial resources in ways that seemed calculated to humiliate them. Women’s participation in the workforce was interpreted as transient, their labor seen as temporary work for “pin money” rather than responding to real economic need, like their male counterparts; after all, the argument went, women could return to their homes at any time to resume their rightful employment. This view of women as marginal to the workforce remained well into the twentieth century as women found themselves pitted against both employers (who saw women as cheap, unskilled labor, easily substitutable, due to Taylorization, for more highly paid male workers) and fellow male workers (who saw women as competitors for jobs and hence persisted in seeing women’s real function as in the home). 43 As such, women were not prime contenders for union organizing and its benefits. 44 As unskilled workers, women had few opportunities for upward mobility, and their work, rendered in the poorest of working conditions, remained substantially underpaid in comparison to male workers. 45 As Polina Kroik notes in Chapter Seven, one of the very developments that offered potential for women entering the workforce—the quasi-professional office job, with its prospects for mobility—in fact reinforced just the opposite: that women who stayed in the workforce too long became disabled for the domestic market, worn down as they were by work and age. Informing these obstacles (and often outright hostilities) to white middle-class and working-class women’s labor were deeply entrenched assumptions about woman’s nature—her morality, her frailty, her presumed incapacity to do the waged work of men. White women workers were often seen as either the soon-to-be victims of moral decay via their dirtying of themselves in the labor market or, by the end of the nineteenth century, as the “agents” of moral lassitude, the “carriers” of sexual temptation

16 Chapter One and perversion. 46 Middle-class moral reformers and progressivists targeted white working girls as women in need of moral regulation: ironically, as Kroik notes, reformers like those depicted in Churchill’s The Dwelling- Place of Light remove “fallen” working girls from the workplace only to inculcate them in middle-class values of consumption, seemingly oblivious to the fact that working girls need waged labor in order to access that culture. Women of color, and in particular black women and Chinese women workers, were not considered proper subjects for such reform, their presumed hypersexuality rendering them impervious to victimization. 47 Implicit in the dis-ease surrounding the working woman throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the assumption that the relationship between domesticity and middle-class respectability, on the one hand, and waged work on the other, is antithetical: this relationship must be oppositional, the argument went, in order to maintain sexual difference because to think otherwise would be to endanger racial “progress.” 48 Working women hence faced the class disciplining of the middle class for their stepping outside middle-class respectability and the gendered disapproval of fellow male workers. For the working woman’s detractors, the gendered division of women’s labor (women’s relegation to home labor and specifically reproduction) was seen as “natural.” For her supporters, this same gendered division was looked to as the origins of women’s subordination. When Elizabeth Stoddard’s mid-century heroine, Cassy of The Morgesons (1862), exclaims that “a wall has risen up suddenly before me which divided me from my dreams; I was inside it, on a prosaic domain I must henceforth be confined to,” she reflects on this oppositional relationship. 49 For Cassy, there are but two options: find meaningful work, what she terms a “sense of occupation” to nurture her desire for “absolute self-possession,” or wear the “cap” of the housekeeper, who is confined to the “prosaic domain.” 50 Cassy’s middle-class longing for a “sense of occupation” has little to do with the wasting labor of working class women. For Cassy, “occupation” implies “choice”—that she has the economic and social privilege to search for meaningful work. 51 Cassy’s privilege is, in fact, what enables her to so neatly divide the “prosaic domain” from meaningful work, a dissection which manifests a particular class tension found in bourgeois novels over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: that economic and racial privilege inform not only the ability to choose the kind of work heroines perform, but also whether that work is seen as contiguous with, or mutually exclusive from, domestic labors. Arguments such as Cassy’s defy nineteenth-century assumptions about women’s natural predilections for nurturing, reproduction, and household

The Uneasy Marriage of Women and Work 17 work. Is household labor a woman’s “natural” vocation, the fulfillment of which satisfies white women’s “Race” duty, or is it the drudgery which will ultimately bar white women’s self-actualization? Many women activists argued the latter, suggesting, like Antoinette Brown Blackwell, that “evolution has given and is still giving to women an increasing complexity of development which cannot find a legitimate field for the exercise of all her powers within the household.” 52 As Blackwell suggests, the debate regarding women’s “natural” vocation in turn relies upon popular nineteenth-century theories of women’s invariability and the maintenance of sexual difference. If women are by “nature” invariable (biologically incapable of complex and varied enterprises), the argument went, she is destined for but one kind of work—reproduction and preservation of the home and family. To do otherwise would be to dangerously deplete women’s resources. 53 If, however, women’s “nature” is variable, then some women may not be biologically suited, as social scientist Leta Hollingworth argues, for the role of the “normal woman” : “It is most reasonable to assume that [women] should obtain a curve of distribution, varying from an extreme where individuals have a zero or negative interest in caring for infants, through a mode where there is a moderate amount of impulse to such duties, to an extreme where the only vocational or personal interest lies in maternal activities.” 54 These women, Hollingworth urges—women with a “zero or negative interest in caring for infants”—may be suited “naturally” for labor other than reproduction. To do otherwise would be to be victimized by “social control.” 55 Hollingworth’s scientifically grounded theories about women’s capacities evidence changes already occurring by the end of the nineteenth century: women’s demands for not only the opportunity to work when necessity dictates but also, as will be discussed in Part III, the opportunity to choose to work based on their individual desires and abilities. 56 Post-bellum U.S. white women writers, in particular, begin to adopt a new concept of equality based on economic autonomy, an equality which implicitly makes use of the variability Hollingworth advocates. Class tensions instanced by white middle-class women’s pursuit of economic autonomy are what concern many of our contributors in Part II: that the source of middle-class white women’s “power” in the latter half of the nineteenth century, whether through the newly politicized realm of the domestic or through waged labor outside the home, is at the direct expense of other subaltern bodies. Mainstream domestic novels such as Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) well illustrate these class tensions. 57 While ostensibly affirming mid-century domestic values, Warner’s novel reveals that Ellen Montgomery, Warner’s heroine, can

18 Chapter One only arrive at her nirvana of no household toil if working class Margery “agrees” to perform the labor that Ellen refuses. In the final chapter, Mr. John Humphries, Ellen’s newly acquired husband, shows Ellen her new home, replete with every luxury imaginable and emptied of all household labor (for Ellen, that is): “You are to be my steward,” he explains, “in all that concerns the interior arrangements of the household. I will not have your time taken up in petty details—Margery is to keep the house—but you must keep both house and housekeeper.” 58 Not only is Ellen insulated from all those “petty details” which Margery must presumably manage, she is also given the authority to possess the fruits of the household work, not to mention the hired labor who will then perform this work. Warner’s novel reveals the class-specific vision of autonomy informing mid- to late nineteenth-century white women’s valorization of work outside the domestic realm. If Ellen has been freed from the “petty details” of home labor, then someone else is going to have to perform these presumably menial tasks. As Warner’s novel reveals, as do the subsequent bourgeois writings of Sarah Orne Jewett, Alcott, and Gilman, freedom from housework often implies a class-specific superiority demonstrating privileged women’s hierarchical rise above the oppression of household labor. Ellen Montgomery’s reprieve from home labor, in her case via marriage and the resultant economic means to hire help, becomes a familiar way for middle-class and upper-class heroines to escape the presumed perils of household drudgery in order to seek a course promising to engender the “dignity” of the individual. 59 Implicit in this ascension out of the “prosaic domain” is the heroine’s (and the novel’s) blindness to her own classism, all in service of her privileged pursuit of individuation and “dignity.” In a novel such as Gilman’s What Diantha Did (1909-1910), the privileges of whiteness and middle-class-ness subsumed in white woman’s pursuit of “dignity” and successful work are writ large. As Kellen H. Graham argues in Chapter Eight, Gilman’s enthusiasm for the efficiencies of Taylorist time and motion ultimately drains both dignity and pleasure from the work of Diantha’s latter-day Merry Maids—the domestic workers she hires. Further, the fact that these domestic workers are drawn from the ranks of recent immigrants and are essentially rented out by white, middle- class Diantha to ease the home front burdens of other white-middle class women, problematizes Gilman’s socialism even as it highlights her allegiance to eugenics: the more “highly evolved” races were seen as better fitted for more elevated work. While Diantha’s workforce may be marginally better paid than they were before, the repetitive work of cleaning and cooking remains the purview of non-white, lower-class

The Uneasy Marriage of Women and Work 19 bodies whose labor is sold, in effect, by a white female CEO who is then valorized for the forward-thinking efficiency in securing her own, more powerful economic position. So while Gilman’s intent, as evidenced through her treatises Women and Economics (1898) and Human Work (1904), may be to “‘transform domestic service into an honorable profession,’” her classism suggests the difficulties of such a project. As Graham argues, Gilman got her Marx wrong: in Diantha’s company, there is no product for the domestic worker to feel value in producing—nothing lasting—because (let’s face it), housework is never done. Although Gilman sees the order and cleanliness that good housekeeping confers upon a home and a community as intrinsically valuable, it is doubtful that her ten-plus hour a day workforce affords time to appreciate that value, particularly when the value created is to the benefit of others’ homes rather than for their own enjoyment. Mid-to-late-nineteenth-century class tensions uneasily submerged in representations of white women’s work are, by the first decade of the new century, hyperbolized in the popularity of the “New Woman,” a highly contested imagining of white womanhood appearing in U.S. and British fiction and journalism during this time. 60 Introduced via an 1894 article by British journalist and novelist Sarah Grand, the typology of the New Woman drew vitriolic fears from critics of the modern woman who were certain that white middle-class women’s focus on activities outside the home—whether education, employment or entertainment—could only occur at the expense of women’s reproductive duties. 61 Concerns regarding the declining birth rate, white women’s growing reluctance to marry young, the proper uses of college education for women (should colleges offer courses to women in housekeeping or should they continue to offer women a “man’s” education), and, importantly, the presumed deleterious effects on family life brought on by white middle-class women working outside the home all converged in the figure of the New Woman. Steeped in turn-of-the-century preoccupations with categorization and the policing of whiteness, both advocates and detractors of the white New Woman used her potential reproductive capabilities to distinguish their own imagining of “true” citizens—Berlant’s policing of normal personhood—from those subaltern bodies which exceeded the ideal of “authentic” national subject. 62 Despite critics who perceived the New Woman as anti-maternal, many supporters of her virtues, in fact, made use of her reproductive possibilities: she may want a job, an education, and public life, but, eventually, she could marry and produce new and better citizens because of her release from the home and subsequent more public engagement with life. 63 Even Gilman’s advocacy for the modern woman

20 Chapter One saw marriage as woman’s logical (but not sole) goal. In her 1913 article, “The Duty of Surplus Woman,” Gilman points to what she sees as “women’s collective social responsibility” to marry and reproduce rather than “fail the duty” and miss the “experience” of marriage: “It is true that normal women should marry; as they should breathe, walk, eat, being animals; as they should work, being humans.” 64 So while Gilman advocates meaningful work for women, she ultimately sees this work as leading logically to marriage and reproduction in service of a “civilized” society. Gilman’s reliance on maternalism is, in part, the focus of Melissa J. Strong’s critique of Herland (1915) in Chapter Nine. Strong points out that Gilman offers domesticity and motherhood as the “keys to subversion of patriarchy,” keys which might be unwelcome to women “resisting biological essentialism and cultural imperatives in favor of education, careers, and either the single life or relationships on their own terms.” Gilman, as Strong argues, falls back on True Womanhood, hoping that a focus on motherhood and delicacy will avoid any whiff of female sexuality. In fact, the asexuality of Herland may, indeed, have been Gilman’s attempt to prove women’s more highly evolved state of being—a pure parthenogenic maternity as justification for Herlanders’ unsullied hands. As Gilman’s Herland suggests, the uneasy tension between maternalism and the (white) modern woman’s affinity for the “dignity” of work surfaces repeatedly in writings during the early decades of the twentieth century. Historian Nancy Cott argues that the heightened degree of attention directed towards combining work and marriage evidences “how extraordinarily iconoclastic that combination was.”65 As will be explored in Part III, some writers in the first decade of the century continued to see reproduction and domesticity in oppositional alignment with work aimed at women’s self-development. Others did not. Nancy Von Rosk’s analysis of My Antonia (1918) in Chapter Ten illustrates how Cather participates in this same discourse of maternalism through her depiction of Antonia’s childrearing as being as significant as her field work in sustaining her bodily vitality. Despite Cather’s valorization of hard physical work (along with reproductive labors), Von Rosk points out Cather’s ultimate ambivalence about this hard labor for women. In her characterization of the “hired girls”—immigrant women who, as Cather’s narrator, Jim Burden, puts this, are “real women,” marked by their physical vitality and their reproductive capabilities—Cather subsumes these women within their working class origins: the “hired girls” are ultimately inappropriate marriage material for middle-class men like Jim, sullied by not only their