Women's Emancipation Writing at the Fin de Siecle

Elena V. Shabliy, Dmitry Kurochkin, O’Donnell Karen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429640292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This work investigates women's emancipation writing in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Many novelists in various national literatures touched upon the theme of an emancipated woman in the long nineteenth century and at the fin de siècle. Philosophers, poets, writers, and journalists were concerned with this problem and began popularizing wholeheartedly the so-called "burning" questions. The new femininity was represented not only in the Christian context; many other traditions and cultures opened the discussion about the women's lot. This volume analyzes women's literary voices from different parts of the world—Turkey, England, the U.S., Italy, Russia, Spain, and others. Imagination, as it is believed, has no borders and is dialogical in its nature.

1Women’s Labor Activism in the Progressive Era and Marie Van Vorst’s Amanda of the Mill as a Social Propaganda Tool

Emıne Gecgıl

Much was written about women’s labor during the Progressive Era, in both nonfiction and fiction, and women novelists worked on the fiction front to persuade their middle-class female audiences to support working women. The mission of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) could be made visible to middle-class women through novels. Emotionally charged quasi-sentimental novels appealed to middle-class female audiences, who would, it was hoped, adopt the plight of working women as a cause and become allies. Such allies would then work hand in hand with their underprivileged sisters, use their influence on their wealthy husbands, brothers, and fathers, and become “Lady Bountifuls” who would enforce upward mobility by teaching girls how to be ladies. Novels could accomplish this agenda without threatening the gender roles of late-Victorian society.

Laura Hapke in Tales of the Working Girl: Wage-Earning Women in American Literature contends that such novels study the relationship between different female social classes through scenes in which ladies (or allies) break class barriers to help their less privileged sisters. After all, a working girl needed to be saved, and women’s literature targeting white Anglo-Saxon Protestant female audiences sought to rescue these girls through upward mobility, which usually involved the working-class protagonist marrying a wealthy gentleman. The young heroine was expected to be a True Woman, even though her actions as a working girl promoted New Womanhood.¹

Many novelists used this formula, as it seemed tactically the most effective way to reach upper-middle-class audiences.² Furthermore, woman writers of the period emphasized the importance of female education.³ Undoubtedly, because of the fluid line between Socialism and Progressivism, which sometimes became quite ambiguous, women writers of the Progressive Era had to deal with the Women’s Labor Movement very carefully. Gertrude Barnum, an upper-class labor organizer and the executive secretary of the WTUL, for instance, tried to delineate this line through her stories in labor newspapers, which sought to differentiate the Progressive women’s labor movement from the more radical Socialist wing. Advocating the conservative end of the WTUL’s ideological spectrum, Barnum depicted characters who revealed her approach to the movement.⁴

The tide of Progressivism paved the way for investigative journalism, which led to the emergence of a new genre—what Eric Schocket in Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature calls “class-transvestite novels.”⁵ During the early 20th century, a number of upper-class female reformers turned their social investigations and reportage into best-selling books, even before the famous muckraking exposés of Upton Sinclair and Jack London, by transgressing their gender roles as “ladies.”⁶ The emergence of this investigative genre enabled undercover female investigators to “temporarily reside in a liberating emptiness which offer[ed] them the opportunity of redefining their own positions and functions.”⁷

Marie Van Vorst (1867–1936), an upper-class female reformer, was just one of those undercover social investigators who dedicated herself to the cause of women’s and children’s labor. Born into a wealthy, elite New York family, she received an education through private tutors⁸ and was quite fond of her parents and two brothers, to whom she dedicated all her books.⁹ At the turn of the 20th century, as a progressive reformer, she took an active part in the movement that overthrew the Tweed Ring of Tammany Hall, which was notorious for vice, corruption, and embezzlement.¹⁰ Moreover, she collaborated with her sister-in-law, Bessie Van Vorst, in her studies of women’s and children’s labor. When her brother John Van Vorst died, she left for France with her sister-in-law, and the two independent women took up writing.¹¹

Influenced by Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Portion of Labor (1901), Marie Van Vorst wrote Philip Longstreth (1902), which was centered on the life of a wealthy male protagonist who dedicates himself to improving labor conditions. Soon after, with her sister-in-law Bessie, Van Vorst posed as a factory worker, with Marie assuming the name “Bell Ballard” and working in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, and the cotton mills of North Carolina. Her sister-in-law became “Esther Kelly” and worked in a pickle factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in a knitting mill in Buffalo, New York.¹² In 1902, they turned their undercover class transvestism into a five-part exposé in Everybody’s Magazine.¹³ The following year, these experiences were published as The Woman Who Toils: Being the Experiences of Two Ladies as Factory Girls (1903), becoming an influential example of social investigation and reportage. Working with Harper’s Monthly, she was sent to Europe and Africa on assignments, where she continued to write fiction as well as articles on art, travel, and social problems.¹⁴ As a cause, Marie Van Vorst adopted the plight of women working in rural mills.

Working by [their] side day after day, I hoped to be a mirror that should reflect the woman who toils, and later, when once again in my proper sphere of life, to be her expositor in a humble way—to be a mouthpiece for her to those who know little of the realities of everlasting labor.¹⁵

She was determined not to be like upper-class women who disdained their underprivileged sisters,¹⁶ whom she described in The Woman Who Toils as follows:

I belong to the class of women, who one day by chance out of her carriage, did she happen to sit by your side in a cable car, would pull her dress from the contact of your clothes, heavy with tenement odours; draw back as you crushed your huge form down too close to her; turn no look of sisterhood to your face; brow-bound by the beads of sweat, its signet of labour.¹⁷

The Woman Who Toils was praised by Theodore Roosevelt with a prefatory letter, in which he thanked Marie and Bessie Van Vorst for writing the book and for reminding Americans of the unbearable working conditions that could deprive women of their maternal functions:

I must write you a line to say how much I have appreciated your [book], “The Woman Who Toils.” But to me there is a most melancholy side to it, when you touch upon what is fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country—that is, the question of race suicide, complete or partial.

Of course no one quality makes a good citizen, and no one quality will save a nation. But there are certain great qualities for the lack of which no amount of intellectual brilliancy or of material prosperity or of easiness of life can atone, and which show decadence and corruption in the nation just as much if they are produced by selfishness and coldness and ease-loving laziness among comparatively poor people as if they are produced by vicious or frivolous luxury in the rich. If the men of the nation are not anxious to work in many different ways, with all their might and strength, and ready and able to fight at need, and anxious to be fathers of families, and if the women do not recognize that the greatest thing for any woman is to be a good wife and mother, why, that nation has cause to be alarmed about its future.¹⁸

Using the eugenic and prenatal rhetoric of the day, Roosevelt highlighted traditional gender roles—that men are wage earners, while women are nurturers—and argued for the improvement of working conditions for the improvement of the race, which was not the intention of The Woman Who Toils. Moreover, he touched neither upon child labor nor on the economic necessities that made women work in the first place, both of which were the crux of the work.

In an attempt to address middle-class female audiences, Van Vorst turned her experiences in the cotton mills of North Carolina into a novel, Amanda of the Mill (1905). The novel was an accurate depiction of life in the Southern mills and the local dialect, making Marie Van Vorst a well-known writer.¹⁹ Amanda of the Mill so successfully mirrors the labor conditions of women and children in the early 20th-century that one critic in The Spectator commented on April 1, 1905: “The optimist who reads this book will have his faith in the well-being of the world most rudely shaken.”²⁰

The novel centers on Amanda Henchley, a naive, fourteen-year-old child who endures the harshness of life in the mills at a very young age and is saved by a benefactress. The novel begins with the suicide attempt of Henry Euston, a drunken invalid. He is rescued by Amanda and her sister Lily Bud, who live in a shack in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The two girls take Euston home to take care of him. Through flashbacks, the readers learn that Euston was a well-educated gentleman who dropped out of college after the death of his mother. Amanda and Euston have unnamed feelings for each other, and when she learns that Lily Bud and Euston are leaving together to work in the mills, she is devastated. Amanda eventually joins the couple in the mill town, Rexington.

Working for fourteen hours a day under unbearable conditions, Amanda attracts the attention of Mrs. Grismore, the mill owner’s independently wealthy wife. Mrs. Grismore adopts Amanda shortly before she learns that during her marriage, her husband had impregnated and abandoned another woman. She leaves him and goes to Europe, taking Amanda with her. In the following years, Euston, who once was an alcoholic invalid, gives up drinking and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The New, but New with G*d
• 1 Women’s Labor Activism in the Progressive Era and Marie Van Vorst’s Amanda of the Mill as a Social Propaganda Tool
• 2 “I Have Been Wronged, and I Long to Right Myself at Once”: Revenge, Deceit, and Female Power in Louisa May Alcott’s Sensational Short Fiction
• 3 Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers? Redefining Gender, Gaze, and Photography in Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop
• 4 Rediscovering London in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman
• 5 The First “New Woman” in Modern Hebrew Literature: Finalia Adelberg in Love of the Righteous, or, the Persecuted Families by Sarah Feiga Meinkin
• 6 Gendering the Empire: The Discourse on the New Woman and Emergence of Ottoman Feminism, 1860–1918
• 7 Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: A Feminist Life and Its Discourse
• 8 Harriet Beecher Stowe and Two Fin de Siècle Women Writers
• 9 Women’s Roles in Mass Literacy, Production, and Sensation in George Gissing’s New Grub Street
• Conclusion
• Index