Dreamers of a New Day. Sheila Rowbotham
radicals also networked internationally, informally as well as formally. Stella Browne, a birth control advocate in Britain, met Margaret Sanger after she fled the United States, indicted for giving out information about contraception. After they parted the two women corresponded with one another; in 1916 Browne wrote to the American writer on sex and birth control, Elsie Clews Parsons, urging her to support Sanger.46 Letters complemented direct personal encounters; they were as important as published material in spreading ideas.
Being relatively geographically mobile, middle-class women were able to establish strong direct links, but these personal bonds could also extend to working-class women in socialist and anarchist circles. The ‘Crewe Factory Girl’, Ada Nield Chew, admired the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which were popular in labour and co-operative circles.47 Labour women also exchanged concepts about organizing with one another. The American trade unionist, Fannia Cohn, told the British Labour Party leader Marion Phillips in 1927:
I am extremely interested that wives of trade unionists should have an organization through which they can function just as well as middle-class women, business and professional women function through their organizations. Women of the middle class have excellent organizations in the United States and they are such a power in our social life that no political party or leader can afford to ignore them.48
The adventurers’ inventiveness was sustained by the dynamic networks through which they organized. Ideas passed back and forth between clusters of women, interweaving, conflicting and constantly moving. Not only were they thinking in action amidst flux, but affiliations to radical and reforming organizations or networks could be extremely fluid. Individuals often straddled several causes at once, and women shifted their points of view over a lifetime. Initially anti-suffrage, Beatrice Webb changed her mind in the 1900s. The British anarchist Charlotte Wilson’s trajectory is an extreme example of theoretical and organizational catholicism. In the mid-1880s she took part in the self-consciously ‘advanced’ discussions of the London-based Men and Women’s Club about sex and society, and was a member of a group around the Russian revolutionary émigré Stepniak, the Society of the Friends of Russian Freedom. She quickly gravitated to the Marxist Social Democratic Federation and then to the Fabian Society, where she proceeded to organize her anarchist faction. In 1885 she helped to start the first British anarchist paper, the Anarchist, which was associated with the American Benjamin Tucker’s Boston-based individualist anarchist paper Liberty. The following year she was editing the anarchist-communist journal Freedom with Kropotkin. Withdrawing from politics in the 1890s, Wilson popped up again with a new political persona during the 1900s, joining the Women’s Local Government Society along with a suffrage organization called the Women’s Freedom League, as well as the research group, the Women’s Industrial Council. She was back with the Fabians in 1908 helping to found the Fabian Women’s Group.49
Charlotte Wilson was unusual, but not unique. Other adventurers moved between movements, assimilated apparently contrary influences and shifted their views. Annie Besant was radicalized by free thought, later working with both the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Fabians. In 1893 she converted to the spiritual philosophy of Theosophy, spending many years in India where she supported the Nationalist movement. Another ‘SDFer’ and feminist, Dora Montefiore, was at the same time a Theosophist and a member of the Pioneer Club, the Women’s Local Government Society and the suffrage movement.50
Differing generations of women adventurers were affected by the prevailing preoccupations of their era. In the early 1900s the fascination with surveying and mapping which had emerged in reform circles in the late nineteenth century persisted, but it was accompanied by an intense preoccupation with scrutinizing oneself. Elsie Clews Parsons, who had worked with the settlement leader Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, was also influenced by the anthropologist Franz Boas’s emphasis on ethnography. Observing others with a camera-eye was not such a big step from treating oneself as a document, and this is exactly what Parsons did in a series of intimate journals in which she examined her personal relationships.51 She was indicative of a new impatient mood. In the early twentieth century an advance guard of ‘modern’ women were prepared to defy the sexual taboos which the older generation had, on the whole, negotiated warily.
In 1914 the creator of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy Club, Marie Jenny Howe, writing in the avant-garde journal New Review, sought to accommodate the inner and outer dimensions of women’s experience by linking political, economic, cultural and psychological transformations:
Feminism is woman’s struggle for freedom. Its political phase is women’s wish to vote. Its economic phase is woman’s revaluation of outgrown customs and standards . . . Feminism means more than a changed world. It means a changed psychology, the creation of a new consciousness.52
In the 1880s the members of the London Men and Women’s Club had struggled over how to speak about sexuality.53 While their early twentieth-century counterparts were likely to be more psychologically aware, they too grappled with how to devise a language for women’s sexual desires in all their variability.54 This endeavour was made even harder because many of them also wanted to combine self-exploration and self-expression with external change in society as feminists, socialists or reformers. Even for the most privileged, reconciliation was not always possible. Mabel Dodge Luhan turned her back on her Greenwich Village salon brimming with spiritual gurus, sexual experimenters and revolutionary syndicalists, to head to the Taos desert in New Mexico in 1917, declaring, ‘My life broke in two’.55 Elsie Clews Parsons also began to look to other cultures as sources of wholeness. By 1915 she was applying her interest in ethnography to the new cultural anthropology which was contesting the racial hierarchies embedded within the evolutionary tradition. Parsons argued that cultural anthropology could help an ‘unconventional society’ to develop by questioning accepted systems of classification.56 A new crop of women cultural anthropologists would explore culture in this light during the 1920s. Among them was Zora Neale Hurston, who chronicled the beliefs and customs of black Southerners, and Margaret Mead, whose interest in sexual freedom led her to enthuse about sexual attitudes and practices in Samoa.
In both countries many of the older adventurers were deeply puzzled by the new circumstances of the 1920s. In a sense they were surrounded by their successes. More young women were going into higher education, becoming the first generation among the middle class to assume they would combine work and motherhood. Mobile, short-haired and short-skirted, the new generation were casually open about ideas and behaviour which had required martyrs in the 1880s and 1890s. Sex and birth control were not only discussed, but demanded as rights. A distinct lesbian identity was emerging in defiance of prejudice. The unabashed assertion of sexual experience and the questioning of monogamy – which before the war had marked out a minority of wild bohemians – began to modify the sexual mores of the mainstream. In Britain, labour women could look out at council houses and municipal swimming pools, and occasionally even Turkish baths. In the US, too, ideas of social citizenship were alive and well at a local level, where some of the progressive advocates of city housekeeping had gained municipal influence. But while such changes in everyday social existence were imperceptibly being taken for granted, they did not correspond to the earlier grand dreams of new dawns and new days.
In the immediate post-war era, circumstances and assumptions had shifted fundamentally. Feminism had lost cohesion as a movement, and divisions which had been passed over in the struggle for the vote were beginning to emerge. Attempts were made by the American socialist feminist Crystal Eastman, among others, to draw up a broader feminist programme which could span legal reforms, equal pay, an independent income for mothers from the state, nurseries and birth control. She was trying to give weight to the specific needs of women alongside the claim for equal citizenship, and she still wanted to change personal life.57 However, the efforts of women like Eastman who sought to unite the subjective and the social faced overwhelming political and economic obstacles.
The rifts were not only there among feminists; the women adventurers were at variance more generally. One wing had endorsed efficiency, social regulation, progress through technology; another had adopted Romanticism’s elevation of the natural, the spontaneous and the simple life. Contrary impulses which