Dreamers of a New Day. Sheila Rowbotham
on the settlement movement in America, leading the reformer Jane Addams to set up a women’s settlement in Chicago, Hull House, in 1889.9 More democratic than its British forerunner, Hull House became the nerve centre for a range of causes, from women’s trade unions to communal kitchens. In both countries social settlements cleared a space for a new public role for women, while stimulating ideas for social policy and legislation around welfare and employment.
Connections grew up between settlements and university social science departments. While women social investigators were marked by the same intellectual influences as their male counterparts, and troubled by the same urban problems, they were also guided by their experiences as women. The University of Chicago produced a formidable network of women who concentrated on sociology, economics and civics and worked closely with Hull House; the group included Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, Alice Hamilton and Sophonisba Breckinridge. These women researchers produced innovative studies of working conditions, child labour, immigration and motherhood. Not only did they relate their findings to proposals for practical action, they also shared the perspective of a social economy which put human needs before profits, a heterodoxy that hung on into the 1920s in some American women’s colleges.10 In Britain similar links developed between some universities and working-class communities. In Liverpool the reformer Eleanor Rathbone was active both in the suffrage movement and in settlement work. Rathbone later fused political and social reform when she became president of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC) after World War One, spearheading the campaign for family allowances.11
The practical issues women encountered through social action inspired not simply policies but new kinds of cultural enquiry. In 1908 the social investigator Maud Pember Reeves established the Fabian Women’s Group to study women’s economic independence and equality in relation to socialism. It included several pioneering economic and social historians associated with the London School of Economics: Barbara Drake, Mabel Atkinson, Bessie Leigh Hutchins and Alice Clark wrote on both the present and the past of women’s work and were among the first to assert professional women’s right to combine work and marriage.12 Because the range of their interests extended over social existence as a whole, they broke through the prevailing divisions of knowledge and their work spanned a range of disciplines. They began to take on not simply the way women lived their actual lives, but the cultural ramifications their challenge raised. By regarding everyday life through a gendered lens, they foregrounded what was distinct in women’s circumstances, interrogating the assumption that men’s experiences were necessarily universal.
Women can also be seen devising visionary alternatives marked by their experiences as a sex. Hence women in the American Populist movement, who formed the National Woman’s Alliance in 1891, declared that the goal of a ‘Co-operative Commonwealth’ required the ‘full political equality of the sexes’, and resolved ‘To study all questions relating to the structure of human society, in the full light of modern invention, discovery and thought’.13 As well as claiming political and social citizenship, Populist women thought in terms of sisterhood and discussed how to change values and daily life through temperance and co-operative households, along with anti-militarism and labour organizing. Though Populism disintegrated as a movement, this gendered ethical radicalism resurfaced in the American Socialist Party in the 1900s.14
In Britain, the Women’s Co-operative Guild and the Labour Party’s Women’s Labour League sought to combine an awareness of class and gender in campaigns that spanned work and community. The United States did not have equivalent political organizations on a national basis, but a similar perspective appears in local labour women’s groups. In both countries women also established their own cross-class organizations for reforming working conditions. In Britain the Women’s Trade Union League was started in 1874 by a middle-class woman, Emma Paterson, who had been inspired by women’s trade union societies in the United States. In a situation where women workers were excluded from many unions, it sought to organize and change laws relating to women’s employment. An activist in the Women’s Trade Union League, the social investigator Clementina Black helped to found the Women’s Industrial Council in 1894. The Council set out to conduct ‘systematic inquiry into the conditions of working women, to provide accurate information concerning those interests, and to promote such action as may seem conducive to their improvement’.15 Christian organizations such as the Mother’s Union combined locally with secular philanthropic projects; in Birmingham, one such coalition – the Birmingham Ladies’ Union of Workers among Women and Children – supported women’s trade unions, recreation clubs, education and temperance. Further to the Left, in the early twentieth century Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Suffrage (later Socialist) Federation created self-help services, while campaigning for policies and laws to improve women’s lives in the community and at work, during and immediately after World War One.16
Birmingham Ladies Union Journal
In the United States, the pattern of white middle-class women’s involvement was likely to be participation in the powerful women’s clubs, or in organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the National Congress of Mothers, which emphasized the maternal aspects of social reform. Temperance was an extremely powerful movement in the US, and the leader of the WCTU, Frances Willard, sought to connect moral reform with social change.17 Several innovative organizations around domestic activity were also set up. The home economics teacher Ellen Swallow Richards and the anti-poverty campaigner Helen Campbell worked in the National Household Economics Association, which arose out of the 1893 Women’s Congress of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Both women campaigned for public kitchens. Richards battled against bacteria with Borax, sunlight and pure water and Campbell for homes designed for children’s needs. Campbell was also active in the movement for ethical consumption, the National Consumers’ League. From the early 1890s the Consumers’ Leagues organized consumer power to improve the circumstances in which goods were produced, with a more radical wing emphasizing women’s working conditions. They combined a strong ethic of personal responsibility with a commitment to social change. Similar values infused the American Women’s Trade Union League. Founded in 1903 and influenced by its British namesake, the League brought together an impressive network of working-class and middle-class women.18 In the US, women’s organizations played an important role in gaining welfare and employment reforms from the state; some pioneer reformers battled on to influence the policies of the New Deal in the 1930s.
Though African-American women worked in organizations like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, white women’s organizations did not automatically express their needs. What is more, white reformers were divided over whether to work with black women; in some cases they refused to admit them into groups. Black women struggled to bring the politics of racial violence onto the agendas of white women’s movements, while at the same time setting up the National Association of Colored Women in 1896. Their activism was steeled by the mounting racism which was part of the experience of African-American women of all classes; one of the founders of the National Association of Colored Women, Mary Church Terrell, highly educated and married to a judge, had a close friend murdered by a lynch mob. From the late nineteenth century, black women like Terrell and the journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett campaigned against racist violence and for the vote. Alongside the movements of protest, African-American women also created their own mutual self-help projects which developed economic skills and provided welfare services.19 From the experience of black American oppression came broader visions of emancipation: at the World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago in 1893, Frances Ellen Harper not only called on women to oppose lynching and defend the right of black children to education, but urged them to help create a society which was not dominated by ‘the greed of gold and the lust for power’.20 A veteran by the 1890s, Harper had been part of both the anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements and had then participated in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, her vision of a moral, non-acquisitive society echoing the utopianism of the Populists.