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65 Chapter Four Community Consciousness They tell us the chief characteristic of women is the instinct of nurture. The whole trend of thought is leading us to apply this instinct to all suffering and neglected people. But by nothing so much as work, is our pity cleansed of sentimentality. We learn to discriminate between the good and the bad in the present social order. We realize, as we never could from the narrower world of home, how the coming of justice depends on an interweaving of the social and the individual, of external structure and of character. —Anna Rochester (SCHC, A Church Yearbook of Social Justice, 339) Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester found each other in the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, but it was the combined influence of the SCHC and the activist Church League for Industrial Democracy that drew them together in a common purpose—and ultimately a partnership—giving their lives a meaning each had been seeking. One December evening in 1920, Hutchins, then 35, and Rochester, 40, had dinner with Horace Fort, a 1919 graduate of the Yale Divinity School and the treasurer of the CLID. According to records kept by Sally Cleghorn, Horace Fort, in the course of conversation about how to live more usefully and beautifully, in the present world, expanded the idea of a Community of men who might follow [with modifications and variations] Mr. Simpson’s propertyless plan of life. After some time spent in this discussion, Grace Hutchins said, “Why not a community of women?” This thought had been in her mind for some time; for four years, indeed. “I’m game,” said Anna Rochester, who had not been thinking of it so long.1 Following their conversation, Horace Fort did not create a men’s community, but Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester immediately set about establishing a women’s collective household in the Chelsea-Lowell district of New York City. Although Hutchins had lived as a missionary in China for four years and had lived at St. Faith’s while teaching at the New York Training School for Deaconesses, this household would be another step toward crafting her own wholistic feminist rhetoric. Taking seriously the Companions’ ethos, Hutchins and Rochester were moving into a world of Christian radicals, among whom was William Simpson, a Franciscan friar, who argued that property is antithetical to love.2 Linking Simpson’s principles to Edward Carpenter’s and Vida Scudder’s calls for 66 PASSIONATE COMMITMENTS simplicity and same-sex engagement in social renewal, Hutchins and Rochester’s vision for the household asked that members engage in productive labor and that each member live on no more than the wages of the average working woman: $18 per week. The household began operations on February 15, 1921. It was an experiment that would teach Hutchins and Rochester much about the processes of capitalism that they had not learned as daughters of privilege and that would challenge them to take their rhetorical feminist principles and their partnership beyond the limits of women-only space. At the Companion Conference the previous summer on “Sacrifice: A Creative Force,” both Hutchins and Rochester had contributed energetically to the discussions, attempting to push the group toward more radical conclusions. During an extended discussion of the Sacrifice of Exclusiveness, a study of the person of Paul, Hutchins had pointed out to the group that Paul had “sacrificed many of the privileges of his citizenship, his conservatism, his wealth.”3 On the following day, Helena Stuart Dudley had explained Jesus’ sacrifice, pointing specifically to the difficulties that stand in the way of fellowship, especially wealth, self-love, egotism, desire for popularity, and fear of life. “Get away from loneliness,” she said, “making it your purpose to be a giver of life.” To this, Rochester, who had struggled so long with loneliness, added: We sacrifice in order to reach a point of good outside of self. We stand as two groups, looking at things, back to back, all looking for the Kingdom on earth. One Group looking for the Kingdom on earth too eagerly, seeing externals; the other dwelling too much on the interior life, contemplative. Can we not turn about, and see the world with each other in the foreground?4 Rochester’s reference to “two groups” points to the crisis that was developing in the SCHC. Father Huntington had stressed to the Companions before the 1920 conference that the society was an organization devoted to prayer rather than...

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