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

Introduction

1 Q Middle-class, highly educated, and white, the quartet of women profiled in this book are an elite group, but they offer insights into the transformations taking place in the lives of middle-class American women in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. The post–World War I disillusionment, revolution in manners and morals, and changing understanding of love, sex, and commitment are all evidence of the profoundly altered world in which these four American feminists found themselves .1 Still, they experienced and interpreted the vicissitudes wrought by modern culture in different ways. A writer, a historian, an activist, and a psychologist, they devoted their careers to women’s causes while struggling to compose their own lives in a rapidly changing society. This book takes up one central question: how did a small, self-appointed vanguard of “modern” women carry feminism forward in life and work at a point when the organizational center of the movement had shrunk? Through the lives and thought of Inez Haynes Irwin2 (1873–1970), Mary Ritter Beard (1876–1958), Doris Stevens (1888–1963), and Lorine Pruette (1896–1977), Feminism as Life’s Work explores what we can learn from their struggles. In the years after the 1920 suffrage victory, feminists such as these established new sites of experimentation that I will examine in this book. These sites included the National Woman ’s Party, sexuality and relations with men, marriage, and work and financial independence. Being a modern feminist was not easy. Combining marriage and career was difficult, as was conceiving of oneself as a heterosocial feminist, one who devoted her life to the cause of women, while living in the midst of men. Even resolutely modern women like Stevens worried at times that their “detention by the male” would endanger their feminist commitment and that the emancipated man was more myth than reality. Stevens’s, Pruette’s, and Irwin’s unhappy unions showed how difficult “willed equality” could be to realize. Pruette eventually recognized Introduction 2 Feminism as Life’s Work the danger an overemphasis on marriage held for women’s self-realization and for feminism itself. In their utopian efforts to reshape work, sexual relations, and marriage, modern feminists ran headlong into the harsh realities of male power, the double sexual standard, the demands of motherhood, and gendered social structures. As Pruette noted in 1940, “Here in the frosty afternoon,” modern feminists sometimes forget “the bright gay dream of equality, of freedom, of a relation between men and women that should be a little finer than anything the world had known before.”3 The women in this study not only devoted their lives to women’s causes but they also used their lives as laboratories for feminist experimentation. Their feminism was not just political but also intensely personal. Their private experiences fueled their ideas and activism, as the historian Ellen DuBois has noted of other feminists in history. “Feminist theory reaches out to movements for political change, and reaches within, to the inner reality of women’s lives,” DuBois wrote. “Women’s lives, when women strive to understand and change them, have always been the source of feminism’s most profound insights.”4 In mapping the routes these women took as they practiced in their lives, the ideas emerging from a collective women’s movement in a changing society, this book examines the pain, conflicts, and confusion that sometimes resulted from crafting “modern” lives. In addition to exploring these feminists’ lives as wives, lovers, potential or actual mothers, Feminism as Life’s Work also analyzes the changing nature of the women’s movement across three turbulent decades rent by a world war, a revolution in Russia, a global depression, the rise of fascism in Europe, and an impending second world war. It chronicles the shared and conflicting ideas in the long struggle for women’s rights in the United States, a struggle that continues in our own time. Although separated by twenty-three years, Irwin, Beard, Stevens, and Pruette belonged to the same generation, born in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century—a group considered by some historians to constitute the second distinctive generation of American women reformers and activists.5 Three of the four were energetic, leading suffragists who, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, were still young enough to have decades of productive work ahead of them. The book charts the ways these activists moved from the suffrage victory to new goals, as well as the impact their experiences in...