Dreamers of a New Day. Sheila Rowbotham
than I get; quite the contrary, in most of the relationships I willingly give more than I receive. But that terrible time of agonizing suffering seems to have turned my whole nature into steel – not the steel that kills, but the surgeon’s instrument that would save.57
Action in the external world seemed to require a cauterization of wandering emotions and sexual passion. Later generations were more up-front and combative. ‘Let us turn away from the antiquated advocacy of work in lieu of love, as an alternative to love, and let us look to work for the sake of love, as a means of salvation for love,’ declared an optimistic Elsie Clews Parsons in 1913.58
In 1924 the American Jungian psychologist Beatrice M. Hinkle noted how modern women were not satisfied with rhetorical abstractions about freedom. Instead, they were ‘demanding a reality in their relations with men that heretofore has been lacking’.59 She celebrated the way in which women rather than men were becoming the active agents in altering sexual relationships.
Signs of this new assertive mood had already been evident in the pre-war years, when women had started documenting their responses to sexual partners in terms which would have been inconceivable to the earlier generation. In 1911 Elsie Clews Parsons gave a fictionalized account of her estrangement from Herbert Parsons in The Imaginary Mistress, exploring shifting subterranean emotions:
The old sense of oneness with him which I had ridiculed as a conjugal tradition but which had been a profound and joyful reality for me had disappeared. He became alien and at moments I had the pain of feeling that our physical intimacy might become not merely indifferent but repugnant. This change in me did not affect the surface of our life at all – at least in his eyes. He did not notice. He was quite content.60
In the New Age in 1912 the defiant and beautiful ‘Beatrice Hastings’ described how contempt for a man had destroyed a sexual relationship. ‘He becomes my spaniel.’61 She was soon to be the Parisian correspondent for the New Age, smoking hashish and haunting cafés such as the Dôme and the Rotonde with her lover, the artist Amadeo Modigliani. This time she had not found a spaniel; they fought one another passionately and noisily in the cafés and streets of Montmartre.
Early twentieth-century feminists explored the ambivalence of women’s wants. Two Greenwich Village writers, Susan Glaspell and Neith Boyce, married to men who supported feminist emancipation, examined the gaps between women’s desires to change their lives – including sexual relations – and the contrary feelings such longings engendered.62 Their work was part of a wider questioning about whether psychological shifts in sexual and gender relations could ever be controlled or predicted. In 1913 Elsie Clews Parsons concluded in her Journal of a Feminist that ‘the problem of sex feminists have not faced is primarily a psychological problem’. She had decided that woman’s ‘impulse to subjection . . . self-surrender is one of the dominant characters of her passion’.63
The resolve to reveal what had been concealed by exposing the messy actuality of sexual relationships combined with a new psychological awareness to bring out problems earlier generations could not have envisaged. Confusion erupted over what exactly women wanted in their sexual relationships with men. Early twentieth-century women rebels were beset by a contradictory inheritance. They were at once daughters of reason and daughters of nature, as attached to the primitive as they were to being modern. They wished to use their intellects and to remain open to all those heady romantic feelings of infinite energy and elemental receptivity. They felt a need for the intimacy, mutuality, warmth and sensuousness which seemed to have been excluded in the drive for self-possession. More and more women found themselves living out the incongruities which were arising from the changing relations between the sexes. By the 1920s the subjective voice had hit the mainstream. In 1927 the British journalist Leonora Eyles confessed in Good Housekeeping how becoming a divorcee had led her to question deeply-held assumptions about independence, adding, ‘It is necessary to strike the personal note.’ She told readers she had married ‘a man who was not a very strong character’, and managed everything by doing ‘without him’. But this had left him feeling that he was not needed.64
Problems were evident in the labour movement too. Eyles noted in the left-wing Lansbury’s Labour Weekly how ‘the new woman, the comrade woman’ was ‘tending to admire the weaker, gentler, less active type of man’. They in turn were fastening ‘on to the aggressive woman’. Unforeseen snags were appearing from efforts to reverse gender roles, and Eyles observed the new relations bringing hostility. Men were sore because women seemed to be encroaching on the places they held sacred. Eyles urged women not to inflame sex antagonism by ‘putting on airs of superiority about our earnings and our abilities’.65
In 1925 the African-American social investigator and journalist Elise Johnson McDougald, writing in a special issue of Survey Graphic dedicated to black intellectuals, was also inclined to hold out an olive branch. She noted some conflicts in relationships between ‘the masses of Negro men . . . engaged in menial occupations’, and ‘Negro working women’ who were tasting ‘economic independence’ and rebelling against ‘the domineering family attitude of the cruder working-class Negro man’. But she contrasted these to ‘the wholesome attitude of fellowship and freedom’ evinced by younger, educated ‘Negro men’, advising women to ‘grasp the proffered comradeship with sincerity’.66
The possibilities of new personal relationships interacted with external circumstances. McDougald was writing in a period when hopes of changing race relations were not stirring only among members of the young black intelligentsia like herself in the North. Black and white Southern American women were beginning at last to organize together, and black women were laying out their terms. They were agitating for nurseries, playgrounds and recreation centres along with better education for black children. They also challenged segregated accommodation on public transport and lynchings.
In contrast, among the white metropolitan intelligentsia in the United States, the pull to public engagement was slackening. The suffrage had been won, but World War One had divided radicals; there was a red scare after the Bolshevik revolution, isolating those who joined the Communist Party and making it harder for independent leftists to form coalitions. Radical 1920s women were edgy and undermined; a feeling of exhaustion is evident in the autobiographical essays written by radicals and reformers for the Nation which Freda Kirchwey gathered together in 1926–27. Surrounded by a buoyant consumer culture, several women expressed their longing for a more hedonistic self. Garland Smith, in rebellion against her Southern Presbyterian background, described a love of dancing, early intimations of sexuality, her interest in Freud and Ellis. ‘I am at least free now from the old distortions and repressions.’67 They were beginning to feel that they could no longer find self-realization simply through taking part in movements for external change. Ruth Pickering, a journalist who had been a member of the Heterodoxy Club in Greenwich Village, said she had ‘traded . . . exhilarating defiance . . . for an assurance of free and unimpeded self-expression’.68 The preoccupation with the personal impinged on how feminism was conceptualized. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, writing in Harper’s in 1927, decreed that the ‘Feminist – New Style’ who was ‘truly modern’ no longer felt the need to renounce marriage and children for a career; a ‘full life’ required combining work with emotional and domestic fulfilment.69 Beatrice M. Hinkle internalized the feminist quest for freedom. Women’s struggle against convention was, she wrote, essentially ‘the psychological development of themselves as individuals’.70 Adventuring was being recast as a purely inward affair.
In response, a determined radical minority mounted an effort to reconnect how to ‘be’, personally, with the transformation of society. The faith in self-realization inspired by the American educational philosopher John Dewey persisted into the 1920s, travelling in tandem with a new psychological awareness. In Britain, 1920s feminists such as Dora Russell and Stella Browne, active in campaigning for birth control in the labour movement, explicitly combined economic and social demands with an interest in culture and psychology. In the United States, Crystal Eastman resolutely continued to write about both the inner and outer forms of subordination. In 1920 Eastman defined the ‘problem of women’s freedom’ as being ‘how