At its worst in Work the home is a place of exploitative labor, and at its best, of activism, cooperative labor, and mutual care. At no point, however, does it assume the character of a private retreat, sentimentally available because segmented from the market on the one hand and politics on the other. Nor does it conform to the familiar model of domesticity as an ideology that can deploy its values in a political sphere that remains essentially distinct from it. Domesticity in Work assumes many forms, but each is characterized by its openness to the forces that flow through it. Home in Work looks something like the conception of home that the feminist political theorist Bonnie Honig calls for when she writes, “If home is to be a positive force in politics, it must itself be recast in coalitional terms as the site of necessary, nurturing, but also strategic, conflicted, and temporary alliances.”28 Honig is writing in opposition to a conception of home developed under the separate spheres ideology of the nineteenth century and whose power has been undiminished by the social and economic conditions of postmodernity, a conception of home figured as a stable ground of essential identities and an impenetrable refuge from the traumas of economic and political life. Under this conception of home, power relations are naturalized and thus become unavailable to political transformation. She calls on democratic theory to disrupt this work of naturalization: “To resignify home as a coalitional arrangement and to accept the impossibility of the conventional home’s promised safety from conflict, dilemmas, and difference is not to reject home but to recover it for the sake of an alternative, future practice of politics.”29 The complex network of homes in Work shows how much the home Honig asks us to imagine is not only a potential outcome of future theory and practice but also an object of historical recovery.
The home in Work is poised on the brink of closure when Christie falls in love and considers marriage. Alcott explicitly alludes to separate spheres ideology when Christie starts to think “that home was woman’s sphere after all, and the perfect roasting of beef, brewing of tea, and concocting of delectable puddings, an end worth living for if masculine commendation rewarded the labor” (W, 223). This vision of “woman’s sphere,” however, is a back-formation of heterosexuality in Christie’s mind, and it never takes material shape. Her marriage becomes instead a performance of her public citizenship. When David Sterling, the man she intends to marry, enlists in the Civil War, she enlists as a nurse, and they marry in their uniforms. The legal and public consequences of marriage blend with the sentimental and private dimensions, as David’s pained explanation of his wish to marry shows: “‘As a married woman you will get on better, as my wife you will be allowed to come to me if I need you and as my’—he stopped there, for he could not add—‘as my widow you will have my pension to support you’” (W, 290). They never live together after their marriage—“their honeymoon was spent apart in camp and hospital” (W, 300)—but instead express their citizenship in parallel ways. Even the gendered distinction between her nursing and his fighting breaks down. The narrative emphasizes her unsentimental practical skills and courage in caring for injured bodies, and he receives his mortal wounds while taking on Christie’s feminine role as a nurse for a group of escaped slaves: “He fed and warmed ’em, comforted their poor scared souls, give what clothes we could find, buried the dead baby with his own hands, and nussed the other little creeters as if they were his own” (W, 311), as one of his men explains.
Even if the novel refuses to counterpoise home life to citizenship or woman’s sphere to man’s, Christie’s recourse to the language of separate spheres—her longing to fulfill herself in the home understood as “woman’s sphere”—is still a symptom of something. It is a symptom of the power that liberal culture has to make women’s experiences read as private, a condition that makes it difficult to conceive and bring into being an intelligible public sphere that elevates working women out of their isolated personal and local experiences and into a collective political force. Working women in Work might not be private, but they are not public either. They sometimes work in isolation from each other, and they sometimes collaborate through activist networks that course through the home, but they do not come together to articulate their common interests, conceptualize their shared situation, or advocate for political change. While home might not be impermeable, it also is not fully “resignified,” in Honig’s terms, and perhaps without a collective public to recognize it, it remains incapable of resignification. The fragmentary, protopolitical quality of working women’s lives is mirrored by the highly episodic nature of the narrative, which breaks Christie’s working life across distinct spaces and distinct working identities.30 It is almost impossible to recognize, for instance, Christie’s actress and Christie’s seamstress as the same character. The eruption of Christie’s genius in the novel’s final chapter, however, literally speaks to this situation, exploiting her capacity for self-fracture and creating a self-recognizing public movement from working women’s isolated experiences.
In this moment Christie’s inspirational public speaking coordinates the fragmented experiences of working women into a feminist coalition, and it does so specifically in contrast to other models of public speaking that fail spectacularly. In the last chapter Christie attends the political meeting with which the discussion here began. When she goes, she has no intention of speaking, but plans, rather, to listen to the upper-class, educated women’s rights advocates who hold the platform. She finds, however, that their mode of political address is in a state of dysfunction. The speakers have come to organize and politicize working women, but each fails. These failures expose how the political rhetoric at the center of liberal democracy is inadequate to the task of facilitating the civic incorporation of women across the spectrums of class and race. The first speaker “deliver[s] a charming little essay on the strong-minded women of antiquity” that flies “over the heads of her audience” and “was like telling fairy tales to hungry children” (W, 330). She meets “with little favor from anxious seamstresses, type-setters, and shop girls, who said ungratefully among themselves, ‘That’s all very pretty, but I don’t see how it’s going to better wages among us now’” (W, 330–31). By summoning “antiquity,” the speaker apparently hopes to voice the universal, but what she conjures instead is her own cultural privilege and her auditors’ redoubled awareness of their immediate conditions.
The second speaker produces another kind of problem entirely. Her speech stirs her listeners’ senses, turning them into a voracious mass whose political interpellation has been preempted by their sensory arousal: “Another eloquent sister gave them a political oration which fired the revolutionary blood in their veins, and made them eager to rush to the State-house en masse, and demand the ballot before one-half of them were quite clear what it meant” (W, 331). Alcott here alludes to long-standing debates about qualifications for the franchise. This fear of the moblike, corrupt feminine electorate recalls the conventional vision of the franchise as ideally limited to male citizens qualified to vote because of their ostensibly informed and disinterested mode of participation. Rather, however, than worrying the question of whether, and in what ways, women might meet such a standard, Alcott here posits the ability of a discursive situation to produce incompetent citizens. By activating the women’s embodied passion only, the speech blocks their politicization. They wish to rush bodily into the statehouse and demand the ballot only to gratify their fired blood. They do not yet know “what it means” to vote, although, the narrator implies, they could have this knowledge.
The second speaker’s ill effects do not end there. Alluding again to debates over the cognitive state of the qualified voter, the narrator remarks that “the other half [of the listeners] were as unfit for [the ballot] as any ignorant Patrick bribed with a dollar and a sup of whiskey” (W, 331). Christie’s impressions repeat the anti-Irish position she casually takes at several moments in the novel, but here the Irishman stands for a particular problem of the franchise.31 The women listening to this speech become, that is, like