The Color of Democracy in Women's Regional Writing

1. Men of the Mob and “Fascinatingly American” Women

1 Men of the Mob and “Fascinatingly American” Women I.THE CROWD On May 5, 1912, ten thousand women marched for suffrage down Fifth Avenue, starting at Washington Square. It was the largest suffrage demonstration in the city to date, as well as the most diverse: society queen Alva Belmont, a prominent figure in the gossip columns, marched in the lead of thousands of female factory workers.The New YorkTimes, which had treated woman suffrage with passing disdain in many previous articles, finally took notice—after all, ten thousand women, with an Alva Belmont to boot, were hard to ignore. In the weeks that followed, the Times printed a number of features debating woman suffrage, and on May 12 ran a piece claiming that the cause “is indeed a great river into which a vast number of small streams flow.”1 This article details the array of women—politician’s wives,upper-class matriarchs such as Belmont, women of the working class, and New Women professionals—who marched that day and, illustrating the regional range of the cause, notes the attendance of a “delegation from Virginia” headed by “two women known all over the country”: Mary Johnston and “Miss Ellen Glasgow, author of ‘The Descendant,’ ‘The Voice of the People,’ and other well-known novels.” Whether or not Glasgow marched down Fifth Avenue with thousands of others in support of woman suffrage that day in May, it is certain that she had ample opportunity throughout her career to observe and to be a part of New York’s bustling street life.Although she continues to be more or less exclusively defined as a Virginian, Glasgow paid extended visits to New York annually before the war, and her experiences there, she tells us in A Certain Measure (1943),were incorporated into much of her fiction.2 And in both her 22 Chapter 1 fiction and nonfiction,she displays a fascination with the dynamic public life of the city, particularly with the crowds. In the 1916 novel Life and Gabriella, for instance, the city’s crowds symbolize the title character’s ambivalence to what Hannah Hayyeh in Yezierska’s “The Lost ‘Beautifulness’” calls a democracy in which Americans will “be with everybody alike.”3 A Virginian lady who has fled the regional stagnation that she fears to be her birthright, Gabriella Fowler nonetheless holds herself “aloof from the masses,” especially the “lethargic foreign faces” that obscure “the finer American type” like herself.4 Throughout the course of the novel, though, and largely in response to her growing love for a self-made Irish American, Daniel O’Hara, Gabriella learns that her despondent Anglocentrism is a remnant of her southern background and that,contrary to her first responses to O’Hara and to the crowds,“there is no hope . . . for America except in the clear vision of the future” (490). The narrator’s approval of Gabriella’s eventual acceptance of O’Hara makes plain that a clear vision of the future requires that she, a “finer American type,”must come to understand herself through her relation to, and not her difference from, other Americans. Glasgow’s use of the city’s crowds serves, then, as a method of foreshadowing Gabriella’s eventual acceptance , in the form of O’Hara, of social mobility. Not surprisingly,one writer not present at the 1912 march for suffrage was Edith Wharton,who not only did not support women’s causes with any special interest but also had little enthusiasm for New York’s street life. Emelyn Washburn,a girlhood friend of Wharton’s,was perhaps the first to note this: “I wish,”she wrote,“Edith had had some street life, and known all sorts and conditions of men as I did—and learned to love New York.”5 Wharton never did, of course, learn to love New York, but despite this, and even despite her decades-long expatriation and her view of herself as a “wretched exotic,”she never stopped thinking, reading, and writing about the city of her birth.6 If Washburn’s comments are correct,Wharton’s ambivalence to New York was related to her limited knowledge of its diversity. In another sense, that attitude can be attributed to what she thought she knew about its diversity; to extend upon Washburn, Wharton failed to appreciate New York because she failed to appreciate the multiplicity of its people. Although Glasgow’s works approach New York life with...