Movements involved an interior culture of personal relationships which affected individuals profoundly. Women who participated in the suffrage movement found a transformative affinity with other women which could result in passionate love affairs, lifelong friendships and an overwhelming sense of empowerment. Looking back on the suffrage campaign, the British constitutional suffragist Margery Corbett Ashby recalled how it transformed perceptions. Instead of the assumption that women were necessarily ‘catty and jealous’, seeing ‘other women as poachers on the same ground’, she recalled how ‘we suddenly found we were intensely loyal to other women’. The movement ‘turned all the can’ts into can’, affecting feminists personally and creating a new sense of collective identity.40
Anarchist and socialist movements, too, offered women a greater degree of equality and a broader scope for personal relationships than conventional society. Isabella Ford was drawn to the Yorkshire Independent Labour Party in the early 1890s because the woman question was linked to working-class politics; she was impressed by a visit to a Labour Club in the Colne Valley, where the men had given a tea party for the women, pouring out the tea, cutting the bread and butter, and washing everything up ‘without any feminine help and without any accidents!’41 In 1899 the new ‘Clarion woman’ was being hailed proudly by the Clarion newspaper as being able to ‘look on a man’s face without simpering or blushing’.42 Hitches did occur between promise and actuality. Only a week later the columnist Julia Dawson was berating the ‘miserable misoginists [sic]’ who were trying ‘to oust women from the Manchester Clarion cycling club’.43 As Ada Nield Chew observed dryly in 1912, ‘The task of taking women into account is to some reformers so appallingly difficult that they are inclined to shelve this aspect of the question and to postpone its settlement.’44
Nonetheless women experienced fellowship and comradeship in movements which placed a strong emphasis on creating new values, developing consciousness and making cultural institutions which reached into every aspect of life. A network of mini-utopias in the shape of cafés, clubs, choirs, theatre groups and holiday homes sustained hopes of a new day coming. Even courtships could be conducted within this alternative terrain. In 1896 Ada Nield Chew accompanied her husband-to-be George on a socialist Clarion Van propaganda tour. The van was Julia Dawson’s idea and was kitted out with bunks and cupboards. George slept in a tent and was responsible for the horse who pulled them along.45 In both Britain and the US, anarchists and socialists put great stress on education for young and old. When Annie Davison was growing up in a Glaswegian working-class socialist family before World War One, anarchist, Marxist and socialist Sunday Schools abounded in the city. At her socialist Sunday School she learned to love learning, respect her teachers as well as her parents, and remember ‘that all the good things of the earth are produced by labour’. She was taught the ‘three great principles . . . Love, justice and truth’, along with a ‘history, not of kings and queens, but common people’.46
Socialist Sunday School membership card (Working Class Movement Library)
Women gave the values of mutuality a special twist. The American co-operative women in Seattle believed that in ‘co-operation lies our hope for the future, true co-operation that includes not merely the matters of dollars and cents but extends to the social and home life as well.’47 The utopian faith in the possibility of prefiguring future social relations in the here and now was extended in perceptive and creative ways. Seattle co-operative women of the 1920s imagined a world without wallflowers when they decided to form a social club to enable single girls to go out properly chaperoned. ‘Especially do we desire to reach the lonely ones who dislike to go to the public dance halls and other public places of amusement, and as a result are deprived of the social life which they so much desire.’48
African-American women also recognized that mutuality could have specific benefits for women and extend into the family. Mutual aid and benevolent associations were particularly strong in the Southern states. Along with black churches they combined practical benefits with a culture of co-operation which included informal neighbourhood networks and formal institutions. In the early 1900s in Richmond, Virginia, inventive African-American women formed a chain of mutual aid groups, which included the Children’s Rosebud Fountains, established by the Grand Fountain United Order of True Reformers to teach the children to ‘bear each other’s burdens . . . to so bind and tie their love and affections together that one’s sorrow may be the other’s sorrow, one’s distress be the other’s distress, one’s penny the other’s penny.’49 Survival and solidarity were irretrievably linked; moreover they intimated a better future.
Glimpses of alternative relations not only nurtured the quest for other kinds of being; they strengthened resistance. The American Women’s Trade Union League member Pauline Newman who, along with many other women from immigrant backgrounds, worked from the age of twelve at the New York Triangle Shirtwaist factory, learned through the friendships she formed at work that ‘you are no longer a stranger and alone’.50 Mary Heaton Vorse was a bohemian radical when in 1912 she went to report on the textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where workers from many different ethnic backgrounds united to confront not only their employers, but police and company guards. The assignment changed the course of her life. Vorse recalled:
Before Lawrence, I had known a good deal about labor, but I had not felt about it. I had not got angry. In Lawrence I got angry . . . Some curious synthesis had taken place between my life and that of the workers, some peculiar change that would never again permit me to look with indifference on the fact that riches for the few were made by the misery of the many.51
Amidst the hurly-burly of strikes, pickets, committees and meetings, radical and reforming movements brought women into new social relationships; they learned through doing of what might be. In turn-of-the-century Tampa, Florida, Italian and Cuban cigar workers who were influenced by anarcho-syndicalism sought to bring together male and female workers of all nationalities and colours in ‘complete moral and material solidarity’.52 Momentarily they were touched by that elusive utopian hope of making the whole world anew, and experienced the joy of boundaries dissolving.
The anarchist Emma Goldman believed autonomy and mutuality were integrally connected. The key problem for women was ‘how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities.’53 She gave equal weight to women’s personal quest for liberation and their relational needs, in social movements as well as in friendship and love. Living the connections was harder than theorizing, as Goldman herself knew all too well. If the pull between a fragile sense of autonomy and wider solidarities caused recurring tension, sexual relationships with men were apt to blow the carefully assembled independence apart. Charlotte Perkins Gilman had hesitated when Walter Stetson proposed in 1882. ‘I like to go about alone independently.’54 Two years later she did marry him, but being a wife and mother provoked a mental breakdown and physical crisis which she documented in The Yellow Wallpaper (1890), a stark, innovative short story chronicling her claustrophobic desperation. In the year that it was published, she wrote to a friend, ‘I haven’t any heart but a scar. . . . Now I guess I will shut the door of my heart again; and hang on it “Positively no Admittance except on Business!”’55
Apart from a small minority of rebels, late nineteenth-century women adventurers tended to navigate carefully around the shoals of love and desire. Many were absorbed like Mary Paley, many more remained celibate and some, like Jane Addams, lived discreetly with other women. Some found a modus vivendi, at a cost. The young Beatrice Webb was shaken by her desire for the sexually attractive and dominating Joseph Chamberlain, opting instead for Sidney Webb. She told her sister Kate Courtney that her marriage would be subordinate to her work. When her sister remonstrated, ‘That is rather a question for your husband,’ Beatrice replied, ‘No: it is the question of the choice of my husband.’56 She wrote in her diary in May 1890:
How absolutely alone