Modern Women, Modern Work

Domesticity, Professionalism, and American Writing, 1890-1950

Francesca Sawaya

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812203264
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focusing on literary authors, social reformers, journalists, and anthropologists, Francesca Sawaya demonstrates how women intellectuals in early twentieth-century America combined and criticized ideas from both the Victorian "cult of domesticity" and the modern "culture of professionalism" to shape new kinds of writing and new kinds of work for themselves.Sawaya challenges our long-standing histories of modern professional work by elucidating the multiple ways domestic discourse framed professional culture. Modernist views of professionalism typically told a racialized story of a historical break between the primitive, feminine, and domestic work of the Victorian past and the modern, masculine, professional expertise of the present. Modern Women, Modern Work historicizes this discourse about the primitive labor of women and racial others and demonstrates how it has been adopted uncritically in contemporary accounts of professionalism, modernism, and modernity.Seeking to recuperate black and white women's contestations of the modern professions, Sawaya pairs selected novels with a broad range of nonfiction writings to show how differing narratives about the transition to modernity authorized women's professionalism in a variety of fields. Among the figures considered are Jane Addams, Ruth Benedict, Willa Cather, Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Sarah Orne Jewett, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Ida Tarbell. In mapping out the constraints women faced in their writings and their work, and in tracing the slippery compromises they embraced and the brilliant adaptations they made, Modern Women, Modern Work boldly reenvisions the history of modern professionalism in the United States.

Chapter 1

Domesticity, Cultivation, and Vocation in Jane Addams and Sarah Orne Jewett

In her preface to the 1893 edition of Deephaven, Sarah Orne Jewett describes her call to vocation some twenty years earlier as having arisen out of her “dark fear that townspeople and country people would never understand one another.”¹ She felt as a “young writer” (DH 3) that “the individuality and quaint personal characteristics of rural New England” were being “swept away” (5) by the rise of “fast-growing … cities” (1), which had not only “drawn to themselves … much of the best life of the remotest villages” but also in summer had sent countryward “the summer boarder” (2) or tourist. “[G]rave wrong and misunderstanding” between rich “timid ladies” and laboring “country people” ensued. Jewett attempted to remedy this misunderstanding in her writing: “There is a noble saying of Plato that the best thing that can be done for the people of a state is to make them acquainted with one another.” She tried to offer an “explanation” (3) of the country to the city in order to defuse the tension between the two—a tension so extreme, she suggested, that it threatened to divide the nation.

Three questions arise here about Jewett’s formulation of her call to vocation.² Why does she rewrite the classic pastoral division of city and country as that between tourist and laborer? Further, why does she see the tension between this tourist and laborer as a “misunderstanding” (3), a kind of failed communication rather than a class conflict? And last, why does she imagine herself as a mediator between the two, defusing this grave danger by “introducing” one part of the nation to the other, along the lines Plato suggested?³ In other words, what qualifies her to negotiate this conflict?

Jewett was not alone in envisioning a division in post-Civil War America between city and country. Nor was she alone in seeing this division as a fearful one. Historians and literary scholars have traced how the growth of cities, rise in immigration, and expansion of the country westward made the New England countryside seem increasingly marginal to the nation’s development and identity. Because New England had long functioned as the mythic “seed-bed” of American democracy, anxiety about this region’s displacement manifested itself in a variety of ways.⁴ Rural decline, or rather fears about it, must be (and usually are) recognized as crucial to Jewett’s work and to the literary movement called regionalism more generally, a movement in which she is seen as an exemplary figure. But while regionalism has been a useful way to categorize Jewett’s work within the context of late nineteenth-century rural decline, it has been a difficult term to pin down with any precision. Its malleability is evident in the history of criticism of Jewett.

In the early years of the institutionalization of American literary study, regionalism was used not only to analyze but also to dismiss Jewett and other authors who wrote about rural decline. Her writing, literary critics argued in the 1920s and 1930s, represented the death throes of the feminized genteel tradition in New England letters, a tradition characterized by colonial dependence on English cultural forms. Regionalism described an elitist and backward form of literature against which importantly critical and nonelitist American literature was struggling to free itself.⁵ When Jewett was recuperated in the work of feminist critics in the 1980s and 1990s, regionalism was again adopted as a term to discuss her work. This time, however, the term was used in order to highlight and deconstruct the gendered assumptions about literary value that inflected the earlier criticism. Feminists argued that Jewett was a regionalist in the sense that women’s culture was more generally—marginalized by mainstream American culture because it was produced by women and because it promoted a very different vision of the world. Jewett figured prominently in evaluations of how the critical establishment had homogenized American literature and ignored dissenting or minority views.⁶ More recently, the term regionalism has been used yet again to describe writings by women (and minorities) as marginal to the major American literary traditions. In response to feminist criticism, this historicist work has sought to show that in order to succeed, regionalist writers did not dissent from but rather relied on mainstream views about gender and race that constricted them and their work. Regionalism, in these historicist accounts, is a useful term for analyzing how women and minority writers are tragically compelled by the literary market to become complicit in making their work minor, in contrast to that of the “major” American writers who avoid such complicity with the market.⁷

These very different accounts of Jewett’s regionalism show, first of all, that while definitions of form are historically mutable, they are nonetheless real in the sense that they do certain kinds of ideological work for those who use them.⁸ At the same time, these different accounts of regionalism also demonstrate that while definitions of form change over time, what has remained the same are the values that inform those definitions.⁹ Despite the malleability of the term regionalism, and despite the very different accounts of Jewett produced by the use of that term, what is agreed on is that the worth of her writings depends on her being an “idealized agent,” on her “authorial transcendence” of hegemony, as Lora Romero describes this traditional measuring of worth.¹⁰ While there are important differences between old and new historicists, feminists and nonfeminists,¹¹ all have tended to assume that if Jewett’s regionalist fiction has value, it must stand apart from and above mainstream discourses of its period.

As this chapter explores, it is precisely this powerful notion of idealized agency that Jewett herself calls upon, in two different but linked ways, in order to authorize her regionalist writings. On the one hand, she relies on Victorian domestic ideology about woman and the home’s transcendence of market relations, a transcendence that unites the competitive and fragmented nation in an oasis from itself. As Romero has shown, since the nineteenth century, this domestic woman has been crucial to debates over idealized agency because she can be described as embodying either hegemony or resistance.¹² On the other hand, even as Jewett calls upon the idealized agency of domestic woman, she subordinates domestic ideology temporally to, and combines it with, what she figures as newer ideas about woman’s role. In these newer ideas, woman is described as an individual who has “leisure, culture, grace, social instincts, artistic ambitions,” as Henry James described this new woman, or who experiences “vicarious leisure,” as Thorstein Veblen said more sarcastically.¹³ In Jewett’s description of her vocation, woman’s historical ability to unite a divided nation through the home is enhanced by her new-found leisure and educated understanding of the (supposedly) unifying power of culture, of art. Stephanie Foote has recently shown that a double-pronged temporality characterizes regionalist texts of this period. Foote argues that these texts both look away from and look toward the present of U.S. industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and imperialism as they construct their fictions of the nation’s past.¹⁴ Jewett uses a double-pronged progressive temporality, I likewise argue, to construct her mediating authority. Designating touristic cultivation as woman’s civilized modern present, she turns domesticity into the past of nature, instinct, and the body. The modern, cultivated woman tourist subsumes into herself the universality of the body but moves beyond that to the more transcendent universality of high culture.

This careful work of combining the “past” of domesticity with the “present” of leisured cultivation, and subordinating the former to the latter, is not unique to Jewett but rather involves her in a larger progressive and professional discourse about woman’s labor at the turn of the century.¹⁵ By reading Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) with Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), we can see how the first generation of aspiring white women professionals used ideas about what they designated as women’s past and present to authorize their intervention in social conflicts within the nation.¹⁶ By embedding outmoded domestic ideas within newer cultivated and leisured ones to shape new kinds of female expertise, they created a powerful version of authority for themselves. At the same time, they implicitly denied that authority to women and men imagined as uncultivated, unleisured, uncivilized. In short, they sought to gain professional work for themselves by turning the educated, middle-class white woman (as opposed to the domestic woman) into an idealized agent of culture.¹⁷

In this chapter, I focus on the ways Addams and Jewett rely on what they themselves describe as an older discourse of woman’s domesticity while very carefully and subtly subordinating it to and combining it with a newer discourse about woman’s leisured cultivation. The classed racialism of their progressive temporality provides the glue that binds together their accession to mainstream ideologies of the time as well as their challenge to those same ideologies.¹⁸ Addams and Jewett, in other words, are particularly appropriate figures with which to begin a book about how women negotiated the relation between domesticity and professionalism in modernity because their work demonstrates powerfully how women used mainstream logic about progressive modernity to change dominant ideologies about woman’s sphere. Their thinking reveals how women usefully created new kinds of authority for themselves as well as the problems that resulted from those new forms of authority.

What is it that led Jane Addams, a college-educated heiress from “the pastoral community”¹⁹ of Cedarville, Illinois, to found Hull-House in the center of one of Chicago’s slums? Further, what is it that Hull-House expressed to women of Addams’s generation so that thousands of them flocked to settlement homes throughout the country?²⁰ While Addams links the founding of Hull-House to her childhood experience with rural democracy and to her education at one of the first women’s colleges, she describes the formative moment as occurring during a visit to Europe. In a continuation of her college education and in “preparation” for a professional career for which she is filled with “enthusiasm” and “driving ambition” (H-H, 52), she travels to Europe “in search of culture” (64). One day, she is taken by a “city missionary” to London’s East End with “a small party of tourists” so she can “witness the Saturday night sale of decaying vegetables and fruit” to the impoverished “masses” (61). Because of the “moral revulsion” (66) she experiences, she becomes afraid of wandering about London, “afraid to look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose again this hideous human need and suffering” (62). She realizes that her desire for education, her search for culture, is indicted by the poverty she sees: “For two years in the midst of my distress over the poverty which, thus suddenly driven into my consciousness, had become to me the ’Weltschmerz,’ there was mingled a sense of futility, of misdirected energy, the belief that the pursuit of cultivation would not in the end bring either solace or relief” (64).

However, Addams does not simply reject her education and cultivation in this formative moment, as one might expect. As it is through her “search [for] culture” that she discovers poverty, so it is only through culture that she can understand poverty. Her “painful” view of the “masses” leads her to remember De Quincey’s “The Vision of Sudden Death,” which shows that “we were … lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes” (63). While her first response to the “unlovely” masses is to avoid seeing them, her second response is to look everywhere for them, to be “irresistably drawn to the poorer quarters of each city” (62) in Europe. She sees poverty through the lens of her education and cultivation and searches for it as “feverishly” (66) as she did for culture.

These two contradictory responses toward urban poverty in this crucial moment of vocation, both centered around “culture,” need to be explained since they become integral to Addams’s vocation and to what she describes as the philosophy behind Hull-House. In the first response, Addams finds the pursuit of cultivation futile. She rejects cultivation as a “snare” (60), especially for women. It is “American mothers and their daughters who cross the seas in search of culture,” not American fathers and sons. While Addams had traveled to Europe because she believed that education would liberate women from their domestic lives, education now becomes that which prevents women’s involvement in the world outside the home. And subsequently, Addams imagines a domestic role for women as the solution: “I gradually reached a conviction that the first generation of college women had taken their learning too quickly, had departed too suddenly from the active, emotional life led by their grandmothers and great-grandmothers[,] that the contemporary education of young women had developed too exclusively the power of acquiring knowledge and of merely receiving impressions; that somewhere in the process of ’being educated’ they had lost that simple and almost automatic response to the human appeal, that old healthful reaction resulting in activity” (64). In this first response to poverty, Addams associates the domestic past with activity, with labor that is natural, nearly instinctual (“that simple and almost automatic response”). The present, by contrast, is associated with passivity, with an experience of reality so mediated that it has become ungrounded and unreal (“merely receiving impressions”). To remedy her alienation in the present, she must return to the past. From education and culture, she must return to domesticity and nature.

A central paradox of Hull-House, then, is that an intentionally reactionary rhetoric, inextricably tied to an imagined biological or natural truth, is used in the service of a progressive political agenda. The lady’s useless and alienated leisure can be remedied only by a return to labor because labor is instinctual. Thus, Addams argues, “young people” (91), especially “young girls” (93), “bear the brunt of being cultivated into unnourished, oversensitive lives” and “have been shut off from the common labor by which they live which is a great source of moral and physical health” (91). “There is something primordial,” Addams says, in the way that these young people “long” to work, a longing that is almost biological: “We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and glimpses of that long life of our ancestors which still goes on among so many of our contemporaries … These … [memories and glimpses] are the physical complement of the ’Intimations of Immortality’ … (92)

In order to share the “life of the race” (92), however, labor needs to be preindustrial. Addams’s plan for Hull-House follows this understanding of the bodily, biological need for preindustrial labor: “I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given over too exclusively to study might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself” (72, emphasis added).

Addams suggests not only that the bodily struggle against “starvation” is “life itself,” and that observing that struggle means a return to life, but also that preindustrial, “traditional” labor returns one to life. By laboring in the house, women will discover their own nature. It is thus that we can understand the significance of Hull-House. The house is a “settlement,” an oasis of civilization in the middle of a territory not yet reached by civilization, but it is also a nostalgic escape from modern civilization, a return to the labor of one’s mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.²¹ Food, child care, facilitation of social events, and recreation are the primary activities at Hull-House in the early years, while the residents of the area are described as neighbors and friends. And importantly, this early reliance on domestic discourse gave the inhabitants of Hull-House leeway to pursue, in later years, activities not traditionally associated with women.²²

Appropriately, Hull-House’s Labor Museum, which depicts preindustrial forms of labor, becomes a crucial means in Twenty Years at Hull-House by which Addams can create relationships with her “neighbors,” particularly her female neighbors. The idea for the Labor Museum arises out of a walk she takes where, “perturbed in spirit, because it seemed so difficult to come into genuine relations with the Italian women “in her neighborhood,” she decides to “devise an educational enterprise” that will provide “a dramatic representation of the inherited resources of … daily occupation” (H-H, 172). Addams specifically emphasizes her “yearning to recover for the household arts something of their early sanctity” (175), to show “the charm of woman’s primitive activities” (176). Around this representation of older forms of labor, women will unite, just as they do around and in Hull-House. Because of the natural instinct to labor, because of the universality of domesticity, the similarities between Addams and her female neighbors will outweigh their differences.

But if labor generally, and preindustrial domestic labor specifically, are to Addams the bodily inheritance of humanity, and thus the great ameliorative force between classes and races, the Labor Museum also reveals Addams’s second response to poverty—a belief in the even greater power of culture and representations to unify disparate groups. In the moment when Addams formulates her desire to recover the sanctity of woman’s “primitive activi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction We Other Victorians: Domesticity and Modern Professionalism
• 1. Domesticity, Cultivation, and Vocation in Jane Addams and Sarah Orne Jewett
• 2. Situated Expertise: Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Pauline Hopkins, and the NACW
• 3. Naturalist Sentimentalism and Cultural Authority in Frank Norris and George Santayana
• 4. “Going over to the Standard”: The Paradoxes of Objectivity in Ida Tarbell and Willa Cather
• 5. Objective Domestic Critique: Anthropology and Social Reform in Ruth Benedict and Zora Neale Hurston
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments