Introduction: Making the Modern

A quick count of sessions in the September 2003 Modernist Studies Association Conference in Birmingham, England, noted 261 separate papers, presentations, and seminars, of which 76 (or 29%) were on women writers or gendered topics. If sessions are counted, only 8 of 100 sessions (or 8%) dealt with women or gender. Of the eight session titles, three were on poetry or writing by women, and one session was on a particular woman from Birmingham. Thus, only four had broader modernism themes dealing with gender: "Vision and Gender," "The Gender of Modernism," "Women and Modernism in Berlin," "Women's Friendship Networks." Most of the goodly number of papers on women or gender concerned a particular woman writing during this time period—Barnes, Woolf, Stein, Radclyffe Hall, Dorothy Richardson. The conclusion that one must draw from the conference program is that gender questions have not yet made it to the academic mainstream of modernist studies. It's still the stage of "add women and stir." Gender questions have not yet become central, even though important feminist theorists have published significant works on modernism.

Additionally, what is usually considered to be "modernist," "modernism," "modernity," and "the modern," ¹ omits much discussion of, first, the economic situation in the twenties and thirties (often focusing on the "Roaring Twenties" to the exclusion of the ravages of the Depression of the thirties), and secondly, politics, especially, the rise of socialism among thinking people in the industrial world. Gender, economics, and politics—these three and the interstices between them—need to be further explored, and it is in these three areas that I hope we contribute to the project of "making the modern" with this special issue of the NWSA Journal.

I was made by the modern, the modern of socialist politics and depression economics, the modern of strong women who taught their daughters that there was nothing they could not do, but who nevertheless clung, almost desperately, to traditional gender roles for daughters and sons. My parents came of age in the twenties and thirties while attending college and then graduate school in Indiana, Boston, and New York, influenced by the liberal left, the social gospel, and the idealism fueled by the socialist experiment in the Soviet Union. Their organizations—the student Christian movement and the YMCA; the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friends Service Committee, and other Quaker and pacifist groups; the NAACP and other groups working for racial justice—were rooted in what could be called "modernist theologies" (Kinnahan 2003).

My father, William Allen McFadden (1904-1991), visited the young Soviet Union in 1928 on a European sojourn sponsored by a group from Union Theological Seminary in New York. The idealism fueled by that _trip and his glowing reports of communist life from the Russians with whom he spoke colored the rest of his life and ministry. Marrying my mother in 1933 at the height of the Depression, he must have believed, along with many others, that capitalism wasn't working, and that the system being pioneered in Russia was perhaps the answer. ² Stalin's excesses were not yet generally known, and Hitler and Mussolini were clearly threats to world peace. Both my parents were committed to the "No More War" creed of many, especially women, in the 1930s; these groups passionately believed that the horrors of World War I must not happen again. After my father's death, I found in his library a slim volume with excruciating photos of the dead and dying in World War I (The Horror of It: Camera Records of War's Gruesome Glories by Frederick Barber), with forewords by Carrie Chapman Catt and Harry Emerson Fosdick, published in 1932. Written in my father's hand on the frontispiece were the words "Do Not Take Away." The book was so devastating that he would not loan it even though loaning their books to whomever needed them was one of my parents' standard practices. That book and the horrors it represented were responsible for precipitating the suicidal depressions he went through periodically in...