Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era

Noralee Frankel, Nancy S. Dye, Noralee Frankel, Nancy S. Dye

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813108414, 9780813117638
• eBook ISBN: 9780813160283
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this collection of informative essays, Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye bring together work by such notable scholars as Ellen Carol DuBois, Alice Kessler-Harris, Barbara Sicherman, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn to illuminate the lives and labor of American women from the late nineteenth century to the early 1920s. Revealing the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class, the authors explore women's accomplishments in changing welfare and labor legislation; early twentieth century feminism and women's suffrage; women in industry and the work force; the relationship between family and community in early twentieth-century America; and the ways in which African American, immigrant, and working-class women contributed to progressive reform. This challenging collection not only displays the dramatic transformations women of all classes experienced, but also helps construct a new scaffolding for progressivism in general.

1

Introduction

NANCY S. DYE

The movement called progressivism flourished in the years between the depression of 1893 and the United States’ entry into World War I, as Americans struggled to come to terms with the profound dislocations wrought by massive industrialization, the rise of the corporation, and rapid urban growth. A complex, sometimes contradictory amalgam of social ctiticism, popular protest, political restructuring, economic regulation, and social welfare legislation, progressive reform embodied a vast array of responses to the changes taking place in American society at the turn of the twentieth century.

Women filled the progressive landscape. Throughout the 1890s, when progressivism consisted in good measure of widespread popular outcry against new corporate order, many women joined in boycotts against local traction company and utilities magnates and in protesting corporate arrogance and political corruption. In towns and cities throughout the nation, women formed their own civic clubs and municipal improvement associations. Pointing to their communities’ needs for “municipal housekeeping” and invoking their maternal duties to protect children and care for the poor, women organized around local issues: the improvement of working conditions, especially for women and child wage earners; maternal and child welfare; clean water; pure food and milk; adequate sanitation; the creation of playgrounds, recreation centers, and parks; and improved housing and schools.¹ “Since men are more or less closely absorbed in business,” one clubwoman declared, “it has come to pass that the initiative in civic matters has developed largely upon women. It is more than a coincidence that the civic awakening that is stirring in our cities . . . has come with the civic activities of women’s clubs. I have yet to hear of a town that is experiencing a civic awakening that has not had an active women’s club.”² Through their clubs and civic organizations, middle-class women explored local social and economic conditions and compiled extensive documentation of the dimensions of poverty in the United States and the specific impact of industralization on American communities.

Women also entered politics. Although largely disfranchised except in school elections, women played active and highly visible roles in municipal and state politics. They claimed credit for a variety of progressive victories: electing women to local school boards; winning appointments for women as sanitation, health, and factory inspectors; marshalling votes for new city charters and for bond issues to fund municipal improvements; helping to oust corrupt officials; and organizing to win the passage of housing, labor, corrections, and health legislation. That settlement houses flourished in American cities in the decades around the turn of the century was also the result of women’s initiative and organization. In these women’s communities, residents explored new alternatives for meaningful work and social service and pioneered new approaches to understanding the causes and ameliorating the conditions of poverty. Women’s grass-roots activisim and their vision of a new civic consciousness lay at the heart of early progressive reform.

By the twentieth century’s second decade, the initial local emphasis of progressivism had given way to a national focus. Women’s clubs, settlement leaders, and women’s organizations such as the Consumer’s League and Women’s Trade Union League forged a national political network and a coherent legislative agenda. After 1910, women turned increasingly to the government, especially at the federal level, to implement their reforms. In doing so, women envisioned a new, humane state, identified with the values of the home rather than those of the marketplace, with expanded powers to protect its powerless and dependent constituencies. This national women’s network was instrumental in creating and supporting the federal Children’s Bureau in the United States’ Department of Labor and in enacting an array of social legislation. Most of the laws that comprised women’s legislative agenda were measures intended to improve the lives of women and children: minimum wage and maximum hours statutes, mother’s pensions, juvenile justice codes, the prohibition of child labor and industrial homework, and compulsory school attendance. The body of state and federal legislation for which women progressive reformers worked provided much of the foundation for American welfare legislation for the remainder of the twentieth century.

What prompted American middle-class women to become such active proponents of social reform? In good measure, protests over such issues as clean food and pure milk, maternal and infant welfare, industrial pollution, inadequate and highly politicized school systems, and the like were rooted in the realities of middle-class domesticity and motherhood. Never the haven of tranquillity depicted in nineteenth-century domestic literature, the American middle-class household by the latter decades of the century was often the seat of anxiety and uncertainty. Central to the anxiety that women experienced were the contradictions inherent in the ideology of separate spheres that was so pervasive in American culture: women were enjoined to protect their households and their children, but in the new industrial order, the well-being of households and the safety of children seemed increasingly out of individual women’s control. Danger seemed everywhere at hand in the modern industrial city: in the streets, where trolley cars often ran over children; in the markets, where foodstuffs were often adulterated; in the dairies, where milk was liable to be contaminated with the bacillus of tuberculosis or diphtheria. Even the most affluent and knowledgeable of mothers often felt inadequate in confronting the difficulties of modern urban life and powerless to influence the distant, faceless “interests” that had become so powerful.

Early in the Progressive Era, women’s domestic experience served as one justification for their entry into politics and social reform. Increasingly, middle-class women came to the realization that in modern industrial society, the doctrine of separate spheres no longer held: the home and the community were inextricably bound together, and those concerns once defined as the private responsibility of individual housewives and mothers were in actuality public and political. Women argued that their domestic duties compelled their interest in municipal politics. “It is an eminently proper thing for women to interest themselves in the care and destination of garbage, the cleanliness of the streets, the proper killing and handling of meats, the hygienic and sanitary condition of the public schools, the suppression of stable nuisances, the abolishing of the vile practice of expectorating in public conveyances and buildings, the care of milk and Croton water, the public exposure of foods, and in fact everything which constitutes the city’s housekeeping,” the New York Ladies’ Health Protective Association declared in its first annual report. “It is the right of women to undertake these matters as they are brought into constant contact with the results of this housekeeping and will therefore be able to judge how it should properly be carried out.”³

Over the course of the Progressive Era, women reformers constructed a historical interpretation of domestic life that stressed the erosion of female control over the middle-class household. In the not-too-distant past, this interpretation ran, the home had been the hub of economic production. With industrialization, however, women exchanged the role of producer for the less powerful role of consumer. With this shift, they lost control of their households and, as isolated individuals, were left to the mercy of organized capital: the beef and dairy trusts that charged exorbitant prices and the manufacturers and middlemen concerned with profit rather than with human need. As muckraker Louise Eberle concluded succinctly in her 1910 exposé of the food industry. “In these days . . . food is made to sell and not to eat.”⁴

When we view reform through women’s eyes, redefining the relationship between the home and the community—the private sphere and the public—emerges as central to progressivism. The traditional doctrine of spheres posited a clear separation between the home and the public worlds of the workplace, the market, and the polity—a separation that women reformers realized existed no longer. Many of women’s reform efforts were directed at exploring and documenting the connections between the private world of the household and the political and economic institutions of the larger society. By entering politics, women tempted to gain some control over the economic forces that affected their lives and the lives of their children and to protect what they saw as the integrity of the home from the forces of the market. In the early years of progressive reform, women’s efforts centered on improving the quality of life in American towns and cities through providing better city services and more municipal oversight of business practices that affected the health and well-being of individual households. In the later years of the movement, particularly after 1910, women’s attempts at social protection increasingly involved legislative proposals to regulate the labor of women and children.

The involvement of women in progressive reform marks the high-water point of women’s engagement in American politics. But despite the visibility and vitality of women on the progressive scene, we have only just begun to explore the centrality of women to progressivism. Women’s role in shaping the progressive agenda has given rise to many questions. How did women reformers envision American society and women’s role within it? What beliefs about gender, race, class, and ethnicity informed women’s political culture and their reform agenda? How did black, immigrant, and working-class women contribute to and experience progressive reform? What was the relationship between progressivism and feminism? What legacy did progressivism leave for succeeding generations of American women? It is these questions that the essays in Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era address. Taken together, they help us construct a new scaffolding for progressivism that illuminates women’s reform efforts and the impact of reform on women of all classes. Then, too, the historical work on women in the Progressive Era gives us new insights into the phenomenon of progressivism itself.

These essays take as their starting point questions about the meaning of gender in turn-of-the-century America. Gender consciousness suffused progressive women’s thinking about themselves and American society and shaped their conception of reform. Consciousness of gender difference, rooted in middle-class women’s belief in the universality of domesticity and maternity as female experiences, initially impelled and justified women’s entry into social reform and politics, gave women reformers a powerful sense of collective identity, and provided the basis for a female critique of modern American social values. Progressive women’s sense of collective female identity and difference enabled them to see the extent of poverty in the United States, particularly the poverty of women and children. It also enabled them to criticize the indifference of American political institutions to social needs. And, as Barbara Sicherman argues in her essay on the career of Alice Hamilton, women’s exclusion from the traditions of American individualism may well have enabled them to envision “collective solutions to the problems of urban and industrial life” more readily than did male reformers.

But even as gender consciousness enabled middle-class women to cast a critical eye on the institutions and values of their own society and to insist upon recognizing the needs of families, women, and children, it limited them as well. Much of the work in this collection documents the ways in which the experiences of American women varied across racial, class, and ethnic lines and explores the frequent inability of middle-class reformers to overcome the barriers of race and class in their attempts to restructure the relationship between the home and the community at large. These essays also document the ways in which women reformers’ belief in gender difference mirrored social attitudes concerning women’s “place” in American society generally at the turn of the twentieth century. By failing to challenge prevailing stereotypes, women reformers helped codify a limited public domain for women, particularly in the workplace.

Women’s understanding of the relationship between family and community and between home and work varied as a function of the social realities they experienced. The work of Eileen Boris, Nancy Hewitt, Ardis Cameron, Sharon Harley, and Jacqueline Rouse illuminates these differences. Unlike white, middle-class women, whose norms for domesticity encompassed nuclear households, economic self-sufficiency, and a clear separation between home and work, black women and white working-class women did not experience domesticity within isolated, nuclear households. Instead, they relied upon collective networks and strategies in their struggle to, in the words of a Lawrence, Massachusetts, millworker, “piece together a livelihood.” Living in collective households, sharing household goods and resources, relying on friends and relatives for child care were all common strategies relied upon by many American women in the early twentieth century—strategies that were largely invisible or incomprehensible to white, middle-class reformers. Nor were the worlds of home and work separate in the lives of immigrant working-class or black women. As Ardis Cameron reveals in her study of New England textile operatives, work merged with home, neighborhood, and community. Writes Cameron, “Mutual dependence and cooperative assistance bound women together in a latticework of reciprocity.” In these respects, the lives of working-class and black women differed dramatically from those of white, middle-class reformers.

These differences in domestic realities affected the impact of progressive reform on women’s lives. Two major goals of women progressives were to eliminate child labor and to abolish industrial homework. To their minds, both were unquestionably inhumane practices that should be outlawed. But as Eileen Boris, Ardis Cameron, and Molly Ladd-Taylor reveal, working-class mothers did not always view the prohibition of child labor in the same light. Given the precarious finances of working-class families and the necessity of pooling the wages of as many family members as possible in order to make ends meet, immigrant, working-class families viewed the passage and enforcement of stringment child labor statutes as a personal economic disaster and made strenuous efforts to circumvent child labor laws. Reformers rarely understood this resistance in terms of the desperate economic situation of working-class families. Instead, most middle-class female reformers interpreted working-class resistance as evidence of poor parenting. The point here is not that child labor was more a social good than the terribly exploitative practice that reformers understood it to be. Rather, the point is that women reformers’ understanding of child labor and their legislative solutions for ending it were limited in that they did not take account of the economic needs of working-class families. As a result, as Molly Ladd-Taylor reveals in her work on the Children’s Bureau, child labor legislation pitted women of different classes against one another instead of enabling them to create cross-class alliances to work to eradicate the economic conditions that led to sending children into the workplace.

Different social realities also influenced women’s definitions of reform and the ways in which women envisioned the relationship between domesticity and politics. Nancy Hewitt’s work on progressivism in one city is especially illuminating on the ways in which class, race, and ethnicity mediated reform. In early twentieth-century Tampa, black, working-class Latin, and middle-class Anglo women shared the broad progressive goals of “civic improvement, community order, and social justice,” but they differed in their definitions of meaningful and beneficial social change. Anglo women entered politics in the belief that the public sphere desperately needed an infusion of domestic values. Latin women, whose experiences with domesticity were rooted in communal housekeeping and who were often caught up in labor struggles in the city’s cigar industry, came to define domestic politics in more militant, socialist ways.

Black women’s definitions of civic improvement and social justice centered on racial consciousness and were shaped by the Progressive Era realities of segregation and disenfranchisement. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn documents black women’s centrality to the anti-lynching movement. It was black women who first spoke out on the horrors of lynching and who persistently campaigned to bring it to an end. Lynching was one of the primary concerns of the black women’s club movement that began in the 1890s and was often the issue around which black women initially organized. Black women’s reform associations also took up many of the same issues that white women’s clubs addressed: maternal and child health, child care, improved schools, recreation, and public services. Jacqueline Rouse, in her work on black women’s fight against segregation in early twentieth-century Atlanta, traces efforts to compel the segregated city to allocate adequate resources for black schools and neighborhoods. Cut off from the sources of support white women reformers could turn to—leading businessmen, professional associations, reform-minded politicians—black women could not build the reform coalitions that so often accounted for white women’s successes. Nor could Atlanta’s black women count upon like-minded white women for assistance. The black Women’s Civic and Social Improvement Committee received no support from Atlanta white women in its efforts to improve the deplorable conditions in the city’s segregated black schools. Black women learned to use what limited political leverage they had in local and special elections to win concessions from the white city government.

Progressive women’s sense of female difference, then, often could not overcome the boundaries of race and class. Did women reformers’ gender consciousness enable them to understand and restructure women’s relationship to the new industrial order? The evidence is mixed. As Barbara Sicherman argues in her essay, the “gender consciousness of progressive reformers helped them chart their way into new and daring political paths and life choices, but as the ERA debate reveals, it also marked out limits beyond which they would not go.” Sicherman’s division between personal choice and social change is useful. As she argues, many middle- and upper-class women, were personally empowered by their conviction that women had a special role to play in American public life at the turn of the twentieth century. That conviction enabled them to explore new alternatives for meaningful work and social relationships and to envision American society in new ways. But as the work of Alice Kessler-Harris makes clear, women reformers’ efforts to protect women through measures such as the minimum wage reflected, and ultimately reified rather than challenged, dominant societal beliefs in gender difference.

Women progressives’ views on gender difference and their conceptions of the relationship between the home and the polity not only helped shape their perspectives on social and political reform, but also served to define early twentieth-century feminism. Indeed, many of the essays in this volume provide new evidence that progressivism and feminism were intertwined as social movements. To a very significant extent, the concept of a distinctive female political culture grounded in deeply held beliefs about separate private and public sphere has helped historians recognize the ideological and strategic overlap between the two. Historical research on women’s political culture has generally stressed the continuity between nineteenth-century female reform activities and ideology and those of women progressives in the early years of the twentieth century. But as Ellen DuBois points out in her essa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Atlanta’s African-American Women’s Attack on Segregation, 1900-1920
• 3. Politicizing Domesticity: Anglo, Black, and Latin Women in Tampa’s Progressive Movements
• 4. When Your Work Is Not Who You Are: The Development of a Working-Class Consciousness among Afro-American Women
• 5. Landscapes of Subterfuge: Working-Class Neighborhoods and Immigrant Women
• 6. Reconstructing the “Family”: Women, Progressive Reform, and the Problem of Social Control
• 7. Law and a Living: The Gendered Content of “Free Labor”
• 8. Hull House Goes to Washington: Women and the Children’s Bureau
• 9. Working It Out: Gender, Profession, and Reform in the Career of Alice Hamilton
• 10. African-American Women’s Networks in the Anti-Lynching Crusade
• 11. Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Transformation of Class Relations among Woman Suffragists
• 12. Paradigms Gained: Further Readings in the History of Women in the Progressive Era
• Contributors
• Index