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

Chapter 3. Detention by the Male

67 Q Early twentieth-century American feminists were not only interested in gaining their citizenship, they were also concerned about remaking their private relations with men. Sexuality was a central component in that remaking. The vibrant 1910s, which witnessed the triumphant climax of the woman suffrage movement, also fostered a sexual revolution that led to a more open society during the 1920s. By 1920, a consumer society that valued fashion and play had replaced the earlier sober, work ethic–driven culture.1 As one unhappy reformer stated in 1913, “the commercialization of practically every human interest in the past thirty years has completely transformed daily life. . . . Prior to 1880 the . . . main business of life was living . . . the main business of life now is pleasure.”2 New ideas about women’s sexuality emerged from this rapidly changing culture and its post– World War I “live for the day” attitude.3 The lives of Doris Stevens and Lorine Pruette offer a glimpse into the sexual revolution during the period that F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed “the Jazz Age,” the years between World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s.4 They also dramatically illustrate the conundrum modern feminists found themselves facing as they envisioned a dazzling future with eager men at their sides.5 The rise of the sexologists and the popularity of Sigmund Freud fed into this changing cultural landscape. Feminists like Mabel Dodge Luhan and Emma Goldman, who considered sexuality self-defining and a critical part of human experience, claimed Freud as a leading authority on the topic. They were charmed by Freud’s definition of sexuality as a driving instinct in both genders, one linked to pleasure rather than solely to procreation. Feminists appreciated Freud’s uniquely modern assumption that one’s sense of self is linked to sexuality , and were anxious to learn more about female sexuality and to explore their own.As the historian Mari Jo Buhle noted,“feminists, like Freud, were coming to understand sexuality as the leading indicator of selfhood or, as later generations c h a p t e r 3 Detention by the Male 68 Feminism as Life’s Work would put it, subjectivity.”6 Stevens’s almost clinical analysis of her sexual experiences reflects this rising emphasis on the self. As her patient lover and later husband Jonathan Mitchell stated in 1961, “Doris had a feeling that she was pioneering in life, a feeling which overlapped this childish, childlike preoccupation with her own affairs as if no one had ever before existed.”7 This exploration of self was central in the minds of modern early twentiethcentury feminists like Stevens and Pruette, who used their own lives as sites of feminist experimentation. What one historian has described as “the politics of selfhood” was informed by European theories as well as the introspection of psychoanalysis.8 American feminists read widely in the 1910s and 1920s from recently translated essays by European writers on sexuality, including Iwan Block, Emil Lucka, Auguste Rowel, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Edward Carpenter.9 Some of these theorists affirmed women’s desire but also revered their potential motherhood, which they considered the marker of women’s difference from men, one that made them uniquely suited to advance civilization. The Swedish educator Ellen Key took this one step further by sexualizing maternity, arguing that the impulse to become pregnant triggered female sexual desire.10 Sex Radicals Challenge Orthodoxy The women and men who espoused sex radical ideas believed they were remaking the world, throwing aside their parents’ inhibitions to create new relationships that were reciprocal, egalitarian, and superior.11 Advocates of “modern” sexuality endorsed free love, multiple partners, and interracial sex and marriage.12 In urban areas like Greenwich Village and Harlem, radical thinkers viewed erotic experimentation as a key component of revolutionary struggle. Although small in number, their influence was far-reaching. Stevens was friend and neighbor to the Greenwich Village bohemian crowd, many of whom became well-known artists, journalists, suffragists, and cultural critics—Georgia O’Keeffe, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Max Eastman, Ida Rauh, Genevieve Taggard, Ruth Hale, and Sara Bard Field, among others. The Village’s famous monthly The Masses became, under Max Eastman’s editorship, a venue for a new kind of bold writing about topics like birth control, divorce, and prostitution.13 Although reproduction had constrained white middle-class women’s sexuality and defined their social roles in the nineteenth century, twentieth-century sex radicals championed sex without fear of pregnancy...