They did indeed ‘bestir’ themselves: living the new day in aesthetic clothing or tailored jackets, or taking themselves off to live in social settlements or anarchist communes. They joined unions and stood on picket lines. They sat on local government committees, dared the night in bohemian cafés, defied racially segregated train carriages, devised cheap and healthy recipes for the poor, gave birth to children without being married, fell in love with women as well as men, wrote economic tomes, and cut off their hair. They were new, ‘advanced’ and modern, maternal, bossy, charming, diplomatic and angry.
Their optimism was to be tempered but not quenched by World War One. In 1918 the American social reformer Mary Parker Follett observed in The New State: Group Organization, The Solution of Popular Government:
We are now beginning to recognize more and more clearly that the work we do, the conditions of that work, the houses in which we live, the water we drink, the food we eat, the opportunities for bringing up our children, that in fact the whole area of our daily life should constitute politics. There is no line where the life of the home ends and the life of the city begins. There is no wall between my private life and my public life.29
Such grand visions of changing the everyday were not to be, but many of the proposals and attitudes generated by the inchoate adventurers defined modern life, and, less tangibly, impinged on how everyday relationships were seen.
1
Adventurers in the Everyday
What caused so many women from diverse vantage points to set about altering how daily life was lived? Part of the answer lies in force of circumstance. The lives of individual women were caught up in the large-scale economic changes which brought upheaval and suffering in their wake. Powerful vested interests were intruding into daily life, in the countryside as well as the towns and cities. The future American anarchist Kate Austin resisted when she, and the farmer she married, were evicted by the powerful River Company from the Des Moines River Basin. The federal government had granted the company land on the understanding that they would improve it. Instead, the company quickly sold it on to speculators.1 Lizzie Holmes was uprooted from her Ohio home after a violent strike of railroad workers in 1877. In retrospect she reflected:
‘The working classes’ was a term that was just beginning to be heard and I longed to know more of the people set off as belonging to a caste . . . With my sister I went to work in a cloak factory and during the next two years passed through every phase of a struggling sewing woman’s existence . . . I know of all the struggles, the efforts of genteel poverty, the pitiful pride with which working girls hide their destitution and drudgery from the world.2
Arriving in Chicago, she managed to find a small group, the Working Women’s Union, who were struggling to persuade young women workers to organize. In 1881 the Working Women’s Union was recognized by the American trade union organization, the Knights of Labor. The Knights appealed to all the ‘productive’ classes and were nominally committed to equality – including that of women and blacks. On 2 May 1886 Lizzie Holmes, recently married to the anarchist William Holmes, proudly headed a women’s march through the garment district demanding the eight-hour day; the Chicago Tribune reported that despite their ‘worn faces and threadbare clothing’, they ‘shouted and sang and laughed in a whirlwind of exuberance.’3
The mood of carnival release was short-lived. On 3 May, during a rally in Haymarket Square, a bomb was thrown at the police, who opened fire; 200 people were injured and an unknown number killed. The police swooped at random on activists including Lizzie Holmes, though she was later freed. Among those who would later be executed was Albert Parsons, Holmes’s co-editor on a paper called the Alarm, which advocated taking direct action for the eight-hour working day. His wife Lucy Parsons, part African American, part Native American in descent, had also worked with Holmes in the Knights of Labor. Holmes’s bonds with the Parsons meant that the impact of Haymarket was personal as well as political. Impatient for change and dismayed by the lack of revolt, she wrote in the Alarm: ‘The spirit of justice and retribution dwells deep, if it lives at all, for it stirs no ruffles on society’s surface today.’4 Her response was to move towards anarchism, writing regularly in libertarian journals such as the Alarm,Lucifer,Labor Enquirer, Our New Humanity. Haymarket also had a profound impact on others who were not personally involved. Shaken by the news of the executions, an immigrant garment worker, Emma Goldman, who had just arrived from Russia, was also drawn towards anarchism. The Chicago Martyrs troubled the middle-class conscience too; the executions prompted the future Hull House settler and reformer Julia Lathrop to question the social order.5
British labour relations were less violent. Nonetheless, during the late 1880s and early 1890s, militant labour resistance radicalized both middle-and working-class women. ‘New unions’ extended beyond male craft workers, and sought to reach outwards to the unskilled and semi-skilled in the factories, sometimes even trying to organize scattered home-based workers. The social investigator Clementina Black, along with Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, supported the new unionists in London, and when women at the Barton Hill cotton works in Bristol went on strike in October 1889, two local ‘new women’, Helena Born and Miriam Daniell, helped them to set up strike committees. Aided by the London and Liverpool dockers, the strikers won, but it was hard for many women workers involved in new unions to sustain militancy and unionization.
Emma Goldman, 1885 (Emma Goldman Papers)
Factory worker Ada Nield Chew was propelled into the public eye when, in the summer of 1894, she protested against her working conditions in a series of articles in the Crewe Chronicle. She complained that women could not earn a living wage and described the frustration of women waiting for work all day in the slack times, then fighting to be taken on when there was work. She revealed how women workers in the factory were forced to fund their own materials and even to pay the manufacturers for hot water to make their tea. That August, Chew and Eleanor Marx Aveling addressed a meeting of one of the ‘new unions’ which accepted women as members and was campaigning for the eight-hour day, the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers.6 Chew later joined the Independent Labour Party and became a member of the Nantwich Board of Guardians, which administered poor relief; she supported the suffrage movement and the Freewoman.
Chew’s protest highlighted the problem of women’s low pay in labour-intensive trades which came to be known as ‘sweated’ work. ‘Sweating’ characterized factories and home-work alike, and in both Britain and America women reformers resolutely tramped up and down tenement stairs and braved dark alleys to document its extent. In Chicago, Florence Kelley led a campaign for intervention against sweating, and during the 1900s Clementina Black and Gertrude Tuckwell were able to form a broad alliance in London through the Anti-Sweating League. Along with reformers and trade unionists, the League included liberal employers distressed at the proliferation of labour-intensive work, which they saw as an archaic form of production damaging to the competitive efficiency of the economy.
If anger and guilt led women towards public action, a sense of religious and moral mission also exercised considerable sway, drawing them into movements which tried to foster sexual purity and combat prostitution. In Britain they marched in the Salvation Army and supported the National Vigilance Association, which was formed in 1886 to watch over public morals. Warning of the dangers of pornography and prostitution, women moral reformers urged working girls to join Snowdrop Bands to ‘discourage all wrong conversation, light and immodest conduct and the reading of foolish and bad books’.7 America was particularly prone to militant evangelical