Though the dreamers started from conflicting vantage points, headed off down contrary tracks and disagreed over solutions, many of their preoccupations overlapped and interacted. This convergence was most evident around the boundaries that marked personal and public identities. In both Britain and the United States, women who braved the public arena found themselves subverting gendered assumptions. The middle-class moral and social reformers, both black and white, who sought to tackle vice or poverty, inadvertently shifted a personal womanly role out into the new habitat of the urban slum. In the process they altered suppositions of what women could do. Along with more radical women who became involved in movements like anarchism, socialism or African-American liberation, they could discover that being active in public spheres raised many personal questions. Some began to wonder why gender issues were deferred into the indefinite future and why men in these movements often considered that the freedoms they sought for themselves were not suitable for women.
Misgivings about the cultural expectations of womanly behaviour in personal relations could also arise as part of a wider rebellion when external forces impinged upon daily life. These could be traumatic. The outer world of big business and modern industry drove through the customary lives of rural and urban women in the home, demolishing the familiar and the known; while violent attacks on African Americans led women from these communities to organize. Those who were provoked into resistance experienced the power of taking part in collective action; some went on to become active in the suffrage cause.
Changes in the position of women themselves created new spaces for heterodoxy. By the early twentieth century, women on the radical fringes of the feminist movement were exploring startling ideas about personal emancipation, and rebellious bohemian women were contesting the bounds of acceptable femininity and staking out alternative sexual identities. The ‘modern’ 1920s women who inherited the consequences of all these revolts along with the shock of World War One, struggled to connect a vision of equality with an affirmation of women’s differing needs, to articulate a new scope for personal feelings and desires, and to translate their experiences as women into a wider democratization of everyday life.
Divisions between groupings and generations were by no means hard and fast. A surprising degree of connection occurred even between women in apparently quite distinct camps, while the strong networks they developed from the late nineteenth century formed a series of remarkable criss-crossing webs that survived over several decades. Though many of the political proposals and social policies they devised were not to be realized during their lifetimes, fragments of their utopias would later percolate into the mainstream. Through their strenuous personal rebellions these dreamers of a new day helped to shift attitudes about how women could be and live. Their galvanizing conviction that things could be better created waves which rippled into every aspect of culture, even if the outcomes were not always what they had envisaged. From amidst their contradictory experiments came new ways of being women.
Though a similar impulse for change appears in both Britain and the United States, the contexts in which they operated differed markedly. In 1880 Britain was the great economic power in the world; but America was zooming rapidly ahead and by the 1920s would be supreme. The American capitalist system, being new and unhampered by aristocratic remnants, was both more innovative and more voracious than its European counterparts. Able to draw on an endless supply of new, young and desperate workers, the unprecedented economic development of the US reinforced values of competition and individual self-help. A degree of mobility of talent was possible which could never occur in Britain. The other side of the coin was that the power of big money was unfettered, labour conflicts more violent and American employers less willing to accommodate to trade unions, while workers in the US were divided by race and ethnicity to a much greater extent than in Britain.6
Contemporary white middle-class observers watched in alarm as wave upon wave of new arrivals poured into America’s big cities. Black migrants fleeing the rise of segregation and persecution in the South found themselves competing for survival with the great hosts of immigrants from Europe, Syria, Japan, and Puerto Rico, who were arriving clutching battered bags, boxes and dreams of the good life in the land of plenty. In the North, African Americans encountered prejudice in an insidious form as evolutionary theories of racial stages and biological arguments of inherent racial characteristics became increasingly popular. Intellectual leaders such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois tried to counter these arguments, though they differed over the strategies to be adopted by African Americans. While the former cautiously sought to improve the skills of black people, Du Bois advocated a broad liberal education and the creation of a black elite of talent to challenge white intellectual hegemony. At the grass-roots, African Americans formed their own movements and devised ingenious self-help projects.
The structure and course of the organizations and movements for change in the two countries developed in somewhat different ways. In Britain, the socialist and anarchist groupings of the 1880s and 1890s were complemented in the early twentieth century by the creation of a Labour Party which crucially entered into an alliance with the trade unions. This combination did not occur in America, though the Socialist Party gained support in the polls between 1901 and 1912. In America it was the Populist Movement rather than explicitly socialist groupings that advocated co-operative alternatives in the late nineteenth century, while from the 1890s dynamic coalitions of ‘Progressives’ were demanding state regulation of work and living conditions. While the social meanings of the Progressive impulse are much contested, broadly speaking its adherents attempted to reform the harsher manifestations of competition, believing that in the long term a regulated capitalism would prove more efficient. Women played an important part in this pressure for moderate change and, despite not being enfranchised, influenced both municipal and state policies from the sidelines.
In Britain comparable ideas were to be found in the radical wing of the Liberal Party, or among the Fabian socialists who believed in gradual reform through the state. As well as campaigning for state legislation, Liberals, radicals, socialists, trade unionists were all lobbying for change locally. Consequently it was possible for women to form broad alliances. Radical middle-class women and working-class men joined forces on the school boards and, from the 1890s, Liberal Party and labour movement women combined on Poor Law reform. From 1907, women served on county and borough councils. Local government provided an entry into practical politics and a means of gaining access to state resources for projects. The Women’s Local Government Society, established in 1888 to encourage the selection of women candidates in local government, disseminated information about demands women were making for municipal reform.7 Working-class labour women were able to secure public amenities such as baths and wash houses through local councils. By the 1920s women were aspiring to pleasure on the rates as well as services for basic needs: in 1926 Mrs Grundy in Shipley, Yorkshire, secured an assurance from the chairman of the local baths committee that women would get Turkish baths at the same price as men.8
Despite the differing institutional forms, in both countries women participated in various types of self-help action in communities. Outside the scope of formal politics, the voluntary sector they helped to create enabled many women to gain an understanding of social problems. Most important were the social settlements which sprang up in many towns and cities from the late 1880s onwards. Growing numbers of middle-class reformers of both sexes were coming round to the view that the stress placed by evangelists and philanthropists on individual moral responsibility alone was unrealistic. Influenced by an emphasis within the Anglican Church on practical social action, and philosophically nurtured by the neo-Hegelian idealism of T. H. Green, they insisted instead on the structural causes of poverty such as low pay and urban slums. Though their goals were secular, they did not abandon the mentality of Christianity. Metaphors of social ‘missionaries’ colonizing poor neighbourhoods were prevalent in Britain when the first settlement of educated middle-class investigators and reformers was built in East London in 1888. Called Toynbee Hall after the reformer Arnold Toynbee,