Feminism as Life's Work: Four Modern American Women through Two World Wars

Chapter 7. Feminism as Life’s Work

175 Q Inez Irwin, Mary Beard, Doris Stevens, and Lorine Pruette carried feminism forward in new sites of experimentation in the years after the 1920 suffrage victory. These sites included sexuality and relations with men; marriage; work and financial independence; and the National Woman’s Party. How they did this, and the myriad of challenges they encountered along the way, is the story I have tried to tell in this book. As these four women’s lives vividly illustrate, being“modern”raised new challenges for feminists. These women lived through a time of dramatic transition in the US women’s movement, as it moved from the separatist culture of the nineteenth century to the gender-integrated world of the twentieth. Modern women stressed female incorporation into a male world and optimistically sought parity with men in all the spheres of life. This attitude brought with it new opportunities as well as new hazards. The new point of view toward men, marriage, children , and jobs; the desire for heterosexual love as well as paid work—these were all difficult to realize in light of the realities and stresses of the female life cycle, as well as still-existing patriarchal attitudes. In sexuality and their relations with men, modern feminists sought to create new, transcendent relationships that would symbolize the possibility of partnered , equal human beings. They tried to remake marriage as sexually intimate, companionable, and egalitarian. They strove for gender equality in the workplace and envisioned paid work and financial independence as ways to avoid domesticity and to define the self. They reached into the inner reality of their own lives, and in striving to understand and change them, created feminist theory and inspired feminist activism. They suffered in the process. Like early twentieth-century sex radical ideas, the idea of modern marriage held important implications for American feminism. By glorifying marriage as a mating of equals and comrades, the modern ideal effectively undercut women’s c h a p t e r 7 Feminism as Life’s Work 176 Feminism as Life’s Work resistance to marriage. Ideals of modern marriage actually made it more difficult to balance work with marriage and placed tremendous weight on the marital relationship. Of her generation of women who were young just after World War I, Pruette wrote: “Out of the temper of the times they arrogated to themselves all conceivable roles, wife, mistress, mother, career girl, they were going to give up nothing, to seize all of life in their demanding and competent hands. They often showed a valiant spirit and they took a considerable amount of punishment , carrying their double and triple loads. . . . They had an odd code of gallantry, of being little gentlemen, and freedom was the word which answered every doubt or difficulty.” As these bold free spirits approached middle age, “the time of stock-taking, the period of appeasement of dreams,” Pruette described them as voluble in their discontent.1 Yet despite the difficulties, all four women examined here defended married women’s right to work for wages and proposed innovative strategies to make this possible. Stevens was in the radical minority of 1920s-era feminists who confronted traditional understandings of women’s “instinctive” care-giving skills and temperament and invoked the term “the second shift” as early as 1926. She argued for an egalitarian arrangement in dual-earner families and advocated state payments and wages for wives. She anticipated feminist theorists of the 1960s and late twentieth century who wrote on housework as a political issue as well as the financial vulnerability of wives. The workloads some early twentieth-century women carried as they strove to put their theories into practice made Pruette state, “we cannot hope to have everything, that is the hard and bitter truth at the basis of our discontent.”2 Both she and Stevens ultimately concluded it would be up to a future generation to solve the quandary of career and marriage. Yet their perseverance and courageous defiance of rigid early twentieth-century gendered stereotypes contributed to social change that has trickled down to our own time. Their struggles prefigured the conflicts of a later generation. Highly educated, privileged, and elite, their lives and difficulties captured the conundrum of what “being modern” meant for many white, middle-class, professional women in the early years of the century. The dilemmas they encountered are still with us. As Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote in her controversial 2012 Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All...