THE CONDITION OF AMERICAN WOMEN IN 1907
In the decade preceding the successful drive for suffrage, American women endured systematic political, legal, economic, cultural, and social oppression. Before 1920, not only did most women lack the vote; they were denied the most basic rights of citizens and of persons. Severely discriminated against in all aspects of employment, women earned on average much less than men (usually between one-half and two thirds); they were almost totally excluded from huge sectors of the economy, and worked largely in dangerous and squalid sweatshops or factories which radicals justifiably called "slaughter pens." Others worked in "domestic service," one of the nation's most dangerous and lowest-paid occupations. Sexual harassment on the job was endemic, and its victims had no remedy but quitting. In a society where millions of men received starvation wages, gender discrimination at work meant that few women could survive without attaching themselves to a man. Women who never married were stigmatized as "old maids," and usually existed at the sufferance of family members, who doled out a subsistence "charity" while demanding unlimited servant's work from their wards. A woman (especially a mother) detached from her husband's paycheck by his death, disablement, illness, or desertion, faced outright starvation.
Yet marriage, women's main alternative, was a decidedly mixed blessing. In all states, a married women's body legally belonged to her husband, who could physically abuse and rape her. Indeed, a husband could force sex upon his wife even if it resulted in debilitating injury or death. If a husband's violence exceeded that allowed by law, the wife who prosecuted her tormentor risked starvation when her family's breadwinner was incarcerated, and renewed abuse when he was released. She also confronted an almost exclusively male police force, judiciary, and jury. Women lacked control over their own fertility. Although middle-class women could receive contraceptive information from their doctors, public dissemination of birth control information and devices was severely punished. Abortion was also criminalized, and many women died from botched illegal operations. The combination of forced sex and the lack of birth control reduced many women to mere breeders, dependent on the whims of their husbands.
In most states a wife's children were also the possession of her husband, who could take them from her after a divorce and deed them to a stranger in the event of his death. The law required that a wife reside with her husband: he could unilaterally move wherever he wished, and if she refused to follow she was legally guilty of desertion. In many states a married woman's earnings remained her husband's property, and a wife could not sign a contract. Although the law demanded that a husband provide for his wife, it specified no particular level of material support. Millions of men earned starvation wages woefully inadequate for supporting a family, and others dissipated their earnings on liquor, mistresses, and prostitutes; the legal provision for support, therefore, meant little. The law did compel that a wife provide virtually unlimited free labor for her husband, however; and wives often toiled in tenements which were themselves death traps. Millions of working-class families took in boarders, cramming more than one person per room into their tiny abodes and extracting paid drudgery from married women and converting their own residences into sweatshops in miniature. Divorce, while rising, was obtained only with difficulty, especially for the vast majority of poor women. Any woman who bore a child out of wedlock incurred permanent ostracism for both herself and her child (who was stigmatized as illegitimate, a "bastard.")
Most women, therefore, faced an excruciating choice between hard, dangerous, precarious, and ill-paid work, or a marriage which greatly resembled chattel slavery. (Socialist-Feminist Lida Parce claimed that aside from selling or killing his wife, a husband's power over his wife equalled that of a slaveowner over his slave.)
Despite law and custom, however, women's condition was slowly changing. More and women young unmarried women worked temporarily outside the home--the working class in factories and sweatshops, the middle class in the burgeoning "pink collar" clerical and teaching fields. By the early twentieth century, women had also organized themselves into massive, powerful organizations which demanded a wide variety of social reforms. Thousands of local women's clubs promoted self-cultivation, social uplift, and community betterment. Other organizations were national in scope. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, despite its rather forbidding name, advocated a wide variety of reforms; the Consumer's Union demanded safe working conditions for workers of both sexes; the Women's Trade Union League, composed of women of all classes, worked with the American Federation of Labor in organizing female workers; and overwhelmingly female-staffed settlement houses proliferated in poor, urban immigrant neighborhoods throughout the nation. African American women by the hundreds of thousands joined the National Association of Colored Women and its local affiliates, while the National American Woman Suffrage Association agitated for the vote. Women also participated in many predominately male organizations and causes, including the anarchist movement, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Socialist party (SP). It is upon these Socialist women that this book will focus.
In the years 1907-1928, a brilliant galaxy of world-class intellectual women worked with the Socialist movement for a revolutionary transformation of society which would include both Socialism and Feminism. Both causes, these women believed, were necessary for the destruction of women's double oppression at the workplace and within the patriarchal household. Although all of these women espoused both Socialism and Feminism, the priority which they accorded the two causes (and the relationships they perceived between them) differed substantially. Historians have surprisingly neglected the Socialist women, and at times misrepresented their ideas.[1]
Josephine Conger-Kaneko and the authors who wrote for her publication, The Socialist Woman, were Feminist-Socialists who accorded Feminism an equal or greater importance than Socialism. Although they claimed that they embraced Socialist orthodoxy, they in fact reversed the priorities of most male Socialists. Socialist men often claimed that Socialism necessarily entailed the liberation of women, and that women's issues were therefore properly deferred until after the Revolution. The Socialist Woman, on the contrary, denied that Socialism would automatically free women, but asserted that Feminism would definitely inaugurate Socialism. Gender oppression, they daringly asserted, predated capitalism, and gender trumped class as a category of analysis. Despite (or perhaps because of) their brilliance, however, these Socialist women could not convince their male comrades of the importance or validity of their cause. By 1915, the SP had destroyed the last vestige of a distinctive, organized women's presence within the party.
Another stellar intellectual, Crystal Eastman, championed both Feminism and Socialism, but found no meaningful way of combining the two. Although often considered a Socialist-Feminist, she is more accurately labelled both a Feminist and a Socialist. Publicly advocating revolutionary Socialism and radical Feminism during and after World War I, she found the social milieu in which she operated inhospitable to a combination of her two causes, which were divided within themselves and at loggerheads with each other. Long before her premature death in 1928, both the Socialist and Feminist movements had become mere shadows of their former selves.
Kate Richards O'Hare, "the first lady of American Socialism," was for many years a lecturer whose popularity only widely-beloved SP standard-bearer Eugene Debs surpassed, and an associate editor of a mass-circulation Socialist weekly, The National Rip-Saw.[2] O'Hare professed belief in the orthodox "class first" Socialist credo and was not, therefore, a self-proclaimed Feminist. Yet she commented incisively and bitingly on gender discriminations, and worked within mainstream SP institutions for a modification of Socialist theory and practice in the direction of Feminism. Rather than stressing women's problems as did The Socialist Woman, O'Hare carefully discussed such issues within the context of more traditional Socialist concerns and issues, hoping that she could thereby coax reluctant SP men into acknowledging women's special oppressions. Her philosophy is properly termed Socialist-Feminist, with the emphasis on Socialism. Yet her modulated approach worked no better than the more overt Feminist advocacy of The Socialist Woman and of Crystal Eastman; indeed, the very moderation of her Feminist analysis, and its placement within the context of more customary Socialist philosophy and program, facilitated male neglect of her very real Feminism. Even her biographer underplays O'Hare's Feminism, and the anthology of her writings, divided into five sections, lacks a section for O'Hare's Feminist essays.[3] Long before her death, O'Hare, while remaining a confirmed radical, had abandoned work within a moribund Socialist party and a decrepit women's movement.
All three of these combinations of Socialism and Feminism--the Feminist-Socialism advocated by The Socialist Woman, the equally-accented Feminism and Socialism espoused by Crystal Eastman, and the Socialist-Feminism championed by Kate Richards O'Hare--had virtually disappeared from history and from historical consciousness by the end of the 1920s. Although the Communist party paid lip-service to women's special oppressions, it expended scant energy in ending or even addressing those oppressions. Not until the late 1960s, when a vibrant left women's movement emerged from the ashes of the disintegrating Civil Rights and New Left movements, did female intellectuals seriously discuss the possibilities of an engendered Socialism or a Socialized Feminism. So completely had their predecessors been effaced from the historical record, however, that their 1970s successors addressed many of the perennial concerns of the 1910s in almost complete ignorance of their predecessors' existence.
Yet the precarious nature of many women's lives today, and the recent vast deterioration in the quality of many female lives, indicates that those Feminists who recognized the inadequacy of an exclusively gendered approach to women's oppressions still speak resoundingly to our own plight today. Most of the strictly Feminist goals advocated by women in the years 1848-1920 were achieved during the tumultuous heyday of Second Wave Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s; yet the abysmal condition of millions of American women (and men) in the year 2000 demonstrates the necessity of a class-based transformation of American society as a prerequisite of genuine or enduring liberation for women or men. For these reasons, the struggles, successes, and failures of Conger-Kaneko, Eastman, and O'Hare have striking relevance for us yet today.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] Mari Jo Buhle's pathbreaking Women and American Socialism (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983) does not attempt to systematically reconstruct the philosophies of the Socialist women. Sally Miller, whose books on Socialist attitudes towards race and gender are indispensable for historians, incomprehensibly claimed (in her Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Early American Socialism, Garland, New York, 1996) that "the fundamental question of redesigning the family so that women would not bear full responsibilities for home and childrearing was not really confronted by organized socialist women or their parties." Later in that same book she reasserts that "The vision of socialist women was neither cohesive, incisive, nor innovative... No one designed a new family structure to facilitate full female liberation. A basic social transformation was never conceptualized." (Miller, Race, Ethnicity, 25, 111.) Elsewhere, however, Miller, while vastly underestimating the radicalism of the Socialist women, does admit that some of them questioned the traditional family. Indeed, her assertions are belied by some of the very documents she reprints in her book.
Miller has also written a biography of Kate Richards O'Hare, From Prairie to Prison, and edited, with Philip Foner, an anthology of her writings, Kate Richards O'Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rogue, 1982). Both in her biography and her anthology, however, Miller vastly underestimates the strength of O'Hare's feminism. Her anthology, in fact, has no section for O'Hare's feminist writings.
Blanche Wiesen Cook has collected nearly all of Crystal Eastman's essays and articles in her Crystal Eastman of Women and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1978). However, as I will argue below, Cook exaggerates the extent to which Eastman related her feminism and socialism within a coherent socialist-feminist philosophy.
[2] The term "the first lady of American Socialism" was popularized by Neil K. Bassen, "Kate Richards O'Hare: The 'First Lady' of American Socialism, Labor History, 21, Spring 1980, 165-199.
[3] Sally Miller, From Prairie to Prison; Miller and Foner editors, Kate Richards O'Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches. The anthology has sections for O'Hare's writings about Socialism, war, her prison experiences, and post-prison writings, but none for her feminist writings. Mostly this reflects the reality that O'Hare wrote few articles especially on feminism, but instead included her feminist analysis within writings on other topics; yet, as will I will argue below, O'Hare did write some incendiary feminist pieces.
Yet marriage, women's main alternative, was a decidedly mixed blessing. In all states, a married women's body legally belonged to her husband, who could physically abuse and rape her. Indeed, a husband could force sex upon his wife even if it resulted in debilitating injury or death. If a husband's violence exceeded that allowed by law, the wife who prosecuted her tormentor risked starvation when her family's breadwinner was incarcerated, and renewed abuse when he was released. She also confronted an almost exclusively male police force, judiciary, and jury. Women lacked control over their own fertility. Although middle-class women could receive contraceptive information from their doctors, public dissemination of birth control information and devices was severely punished. Abortion was also criminalized, and many women died from botched illegal operations. The combination of forced sex and the lack of birth control reduced many women to mere breeders, dependent on the whims of their husbands.
In most states a wife's children were also the possession of her husband, who could take them from her after a divorce and deed them to a stranger in the event of his death. The law required that a wife reside with her husband: he could unilaterally move wherever he wished, and if she refused to follow she was legally guilty of desertion. In many states a married woman's earnings remained her husband's property, and a wife could not sign a contract. Although the law demanded that a husband provide for his wife, it specified no particular level of material support. Millions of men earned starvation wages woefully inadequate for supporting a family, and others dissipated their earnings on liquor, mistresses, and prostitutes; the legal provision for support, therefore, meant little. The law did compel that a wife provide virtually unlimited free labor for her husband, however; and wives often toiled in tenements which were themselves death traps. Millions of working-class families took in boarders, cramming more than one person per room into their tiny abodes and extracting paid drudgery from married women and converting their own residences into sweatshops in miniature. Divorce, while rising, was obtained only with difficulty, especially for the vast majority of poor women. Any woman who bore a child out of wedlock incurred permanent ostracism for both herself and her child (who was stigmatized as illegitimate, a "bastard.")
Most women, therefore, faced an excruciating choice between hard, dangerous, precarious, and ill-paid work, or a marriage which greatly resembled chattel slavery. (Socialist-Feminist Lida Parce claimed that aside from selling or killing his wife, a husband's power over his wife equalled that of a slaveowner over his slave.)
Despite law and custom, however, women's condition was slowly changing. More and women young unmarried women worked temporarily outside the home--the working class in factories and sweatshops, the middle class in the burgeoning "pink collar" clerical and teaching fields. By the early twentieth century, women had also organized themselves into massive, powerful organizations which demanded a wide variety of social reforms. Thousands of local women's clubs promoted self-cultivation, social uplift, and community betterment. Other organizations were national in scope. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, despite its rather forbidding name, advocated a wide variety of reforms; the Consumer's Union demanded safe working conditions for workers of both sexes; the Women's Trade Union League, composed of women of all classes, worked with the American Federation of Labor in organizing female workers; and overwhelmingly female-staffed settlement houses proliferated in poor, urban immigrant neighborhoods throughout the nation. African American women by the hundreds of thousands joined the National Association of Colored Women and its local affiliates, while the National American Woman Suffrage Association agitated for the vote. Women also participated in many predominately male organizations and causes, including the anarchist movement, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Socialist party (SP). It is upon these Socialist women that this book will focus.
In the years 1907-1928, a brilliant galaxy of world-class intellectual women worked with the Socialist movement for a revolutionary transformation of society which would include both Socialism and Feminism. Both causes, these women believed, were necessary for the destruction of women's double oppression at the workplace and within the patriarchal household. Although all of these women espoused both Socialism and Feminism, the priority which they accorded the two causes (and the relationships they perceived between them) differed substantially. Historians have surprisingly neglected the Socialist women, and at times misrepresented their ideas.[1]
Josephine Conger-Kaneko and the authors who wrote for her publication, The Socialist Woman, were Feminist-Socialists who accorded Feminism an equal or greater importance than Socialism. Although they claimed that they embraced Socialist orthodoxy, they in fact reversed the priorities of most male Socialists. Socialist men often claimed that Socialism necessarily entailed the liberation of women, and that women's issues were therefore properly deferred until after the Revolution. The Socialist Woman, on the contrary, denied that Socialism would automatically free women, but asserted that Feminism would definitely inaugurate Socialism. Gender oppression, they daringly asserted, predated capitalism, and gender trumped class as a category of analysis. Despite (or perhaps because of) their brilliance, however, these Socialist women could not convince their male comrades of the importance or validity of their cause. By 1915, the SP had destroyed the last vestige of a distinctive, organized women's presence within the party.
Another stellar intellectual, Crystal Eastman, championed both Feminism and Socialism, but found no meaningful way of combining the two. Although often considered a Socialist-Feminist, she is more accurately labelled both a Feminist and a Socialist. Publicly advocating revolutionary Socialism and radical Feminism during and after World War I, she found the social milieu in which she operated inhospitable to a combination of her two causes, which were divided within themselves and at loggerheads with each other. Long before her premature death in 1928, both the Socialist and Feminist movements had become mere shadows of their former selves.
Kate Richards O'Hare, "the first lady of American Socialism," was for many years a lecturer whose popularity only widely-beloved SP standard-bearer Eugene Debs surpassed, and an associate editor of a mass-circulation Socialist weekly, The National Rip-Saw.[2] O'Hare professed belief in the orthodox "class first" Socialist credo and was not, therefore, a self-proclaimed Feminist. Yet she commented incisively and bitingly on gender discriminations, and worked within mainstream SP institutions for a modification of Socialist theory and practice in the direction of Feminism. Rather than stressing women's problems as did The Socialist Woman, O'Hare carefully discussed such issues within the context of more traditional Socialist concerns and issues, hoping that she could thereby coax reluctant SP men into acknowledging women's special oppressions. Her philosophy is properly termed Socialist-Feminist, with the emphasis on Socialism. Yet her modulated approach worked no better than the more overt Feminist advocacy of The Socialist Woman and of Crystal Eastman; indeed, the very moderation of her Feminist analysis, and its placement within the context of more customary Socialist philosophy and program, facilitated male neglect of her very real Feminism. Even her biographer underplays O'Hare's Feminism, and the anthology of her writings, divided into five sections, lacks a section for O'Hare's Feminist essays.[3] Long before her death, O'Hare, while remaining a confirmed radical, had abandoned work within a moribund Socialist party and a decrepit women's movement.
All three of these combinations of Socialism and Feminism--the Feminist-Socialism advocated by The Socialist Woman, the equally-accented Feminism and Socialism espoused by Crystal Eastman, and the Socialist-Feminism championed by Kate Richards O'Hare--had virtually disappeared from history and from historical consciousness by the end of the 1920s. Although the Communist party paid lip-service to women's special oppressions, it expended scant energy in ending or even addressing those oppressions. Not until the late 1960s, when a vibrant left women's movement emerged from the ashes of the disintegrating Civil Rights and New Left movements, did female intellectuals seriously discuss the possibilities of an engendered Socialism or a Socialized Feminism. So completely had their predecessors been effaced from the historical record, however, that their 1970s successors addressed many of the perennial concerns of the 1910s in almost complete ignorance of their predecessors' existence.
Yet the precarious nature of many women's lives today, and the recent vast deterioration in the quality of many female lives, indicates that those Feminists who recognized the inadequacy of an exclusively gendered approach to women's oppressions still speak resoundingly to our own plight today. Most of the strictly Feminist goals advocated by women in the years 1848-1920 were achieved during the tumultuous heyday of Second Wave Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s; yet the abysmal condition of millions of American women (and men) in the year 2000 demonstrates the necessity of a class-based transformation of American society as a prerequisite of genuine or enduring liberation for women or men. For these reasons, the struggles, successes, and failures of Conger-Kaneko, Eastman, and O'Hare have striking relevance for us yet today.
Next chapter
Notes:
[1] Mari Jo Buhle's pathbreaking Women and American Socialism (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983) does not attempt to systematically reconstruct the philosophies of the Socialist women. Sally Miller, whose books on Socialist attitudes towards race and gender are indispensable for historians, incomprehensibly claimed (in her Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Early American Socialism, Garland, New York, 1996) that "the fundamental question of redesigning the family so that women would not bear full responsibilities for home and childrearing was not really confronted by organized socialist women or their parties." Later in that same book she reasserts that "The vision of socialist women was neither cohesive, incisive, nor innovative... No one designed a new family structure to facilitate full female liberation. A basic social transformation was never conceptualized." (Miller, Race, Ethnicity, 25, 111.) Elsewhere, however, Miller, while vastly underestimating the radicalism of the Socialist women, does admit that some of them questioned the traditional family. Indeed, her assertions are belied by some of the very documents she reprints in her book.
Miller has also written a biography of Kate Richards O'Hare, From Prairie to Prison, and edited, with Philip Foner, an anthology of her writings, Kate Richards O'Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rogue, 1982). Both in her biography and her anthology, however, Miller vastly underestimates the strength of O'Hare's feminism. Her anthology, in fact, has no section for O'Hare's feminist writings.
Blanche Wiesen Cook has collected nearly all of Crystal Eastman's essays and articles in her Crystal Eastman of Women and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1978). However, as I will argue below, Cook exaggerates the extent to which Eastman related her feminism and socialism within a coherent socialist-feminist philosophy.
[2] The term "the first lady of American Socialism" was popularized by Neil K. Bassen, "Kate Richards O'Hare: The 'First Lady' of American Socialism, Labor History, 21, Spring 1980, 165-199.
[3] Sally Miller, From Prairie to Prison; Miller and Foner editors, Kate Richards O'Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches. The anthology has sections for O'Hare's writings about Socialism, war, her prison experiences, and post-prison writings, but none for her feminist writings. Mostly this reflects the reality that O'Hare wrote few articles especially on feminism, but instead included her feminist analysis within writings on other topics; yet, as will I will argue below, O'Hare did write some incendiary feminist pieces.